Saying Goodbye To My Blog of 8 Years

It’s been coming for a while now.
Toyed with the idea. Mulled over it.

Given my love for quotes and my evolving writing style,
it was only a matter of time.

Thus, I would be migrating to…

http://thedreamist.tumblr.com

People Are Not Used To Greatness

People are not used to greatness.

They are unfamiliar with it.
They abhor it and they avoid it.
They like people the way they like their things; normalized, predictable.
Safe and stable, stale and stagnant.

Greatness is uncomfortable. It is an anomaly.
Society does not know how to accommodate it.
People do not know how to react to it.
Friends do not know how to embrace it.

People are not used to greatness.

Tell Me One Thing About The World…

Tell me one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, and that most people think is not true.

I’m very interested to hear your comments on this one.

Chivalry Is Dead

Chivalry is dead.

I’m not sure when it exactly happened, but I know where. It died in the hands of boys, who were mistakenly entrusted with the responsibilities of men and the hearts of women. There was a time when men had a higher calling. A place where being a man, just a man was not enough to cut it – You had to be a gentleman.

Nowadays, even the very notion of a man is in doubt.

I could not help but noticed that the ladies of this present age react with much surprise and wariness when treated properly by a man. I cannot blame them. The concept of chivalry has been as foreign to them as it is for the men of this age. Somewhere along the line, trading downwards has occurred. Men were traded for immature boys; knights were traded for insecure jerks; gentlemen traded for emotional wusses. Our sisters have been so accustomed to inferior men that they cannot help but sense deceit when someone decides to treat them rightly.

Thus, the guardians of purity became the violators themselves.

This has to stop. Becoming a gentleman can no longer be seen as one of the highest virtues of a man. It must take its place amongst the lowest; the very basic of which we ought to obtain. Am I an idealist campaigning for a utopian movement, or just an old fashioned man restoring things to what they were before?

I sincerely hope it is the latter.

10 Sentences to Inception.

10 sentences to inception.

Leaders are decision makers. Period.

Every action come with a cost, at times, they come at the expense of others.

Now, are you comfortable with making decisions?

Given the degree of interdependence in this world, every decision we make will always be at the expense of someone else.

The only question is whether we realized it, or not.

With this understanding, it is not surprising to find people experiencing decision paralysis on a very frequent basis.

What if there’s another side of the coin that we have failed to consider, a cost we failed to measure?

There is a cost to inaction, there is a price for the invisible.

Just think about Hiroshima.

Are You a Rebel or a Leader?

Credits: Harvard Business Review, Nilofer Merchant

Everyone was being so agreeable. The CEO nodded, the VPs agreed, the Directors were polished in their reviews. All the content was “good,” the timelines “reasonable,” the budgets “sufficient.”

We were in a meeting to review the roadmap for the company’s new product. And it had all the hallmarks of a Potemkin village.

I wanted to accept the consensus as a sign that the company had rounded the corner on its 3-year slog to be more relevant in their market. I knew that the new head of engineering and the head of product management had worked through a ton of issues to get to this review meeting prepared. Maybe the company was (ahem) finally going to make products that were competitive.

But just then, the CEO interrupted and asked the product managers in the back row of seats, “What are the weaknesses with this roadmap?”

Some long seconds passed. The product managers looked at each other, then at their VP, and then, finally, to the CEO.

And then this small voice, untraceable for a moment because it was so small, started to explain how this plan would put the company in 2nd place in almost every aspect of innovation or time to market. The voice grew in clarity and volume. Then the person associated with the voice stood up and started to point out other areas where the plan was lacking, and where it would lead the company to miss the market. Underlining specifics, the tone of the voice implied these points were well known within the group working most closely on it, but dismissed by others.

You might think that the room celebrated this passionate voice.

But they didn’t. At least, not yet. You see, the person with the voice came off as a rebel. By my estimate, at least half the room was judging the person as being indelicate and the other half was judging the head of product management for not controlling his ranks. No one seemed grateful that an important issue was being raised.

Perhaps you can think back to your own “rebel” situation in your organization. Such moments are rarely hailed, at least as they’re happening. And yet any of us could see ourselves as rebels, heretics, or misfits who are challenging the customs and norms of our group. American culture certainly celebrates this idea of challenging the status quo — we tend to think of ourselves as a nation of minutemen, pioneers, and entrepreneurs.

There is a fine line between a rebel and a leader, though we tend to conflate the two. A rebel resists conformity. Sometimes the rebel’s challenging voice helps an organization to discover a gap, push themselves to innovate, and ultimately to thrive. So the challenging, dissenting voice can, at times, be tied to leadership. But to be effective, we need to understand key distinctions:

• To rebel is to push against something. To lead is to advocate for an idea.
• To rebel is to say “heck no.” To lead is to say “we will.”
• To rebel is to deny the authority of others. To lead is to invoke your own authority.

Most leaders we celebrate today didn’t start out perceived as such. For years, Martin Luther King, Jr. was viewed as a heretic before being recognized as an icon for heralding a new age of civil rights. Apple’s Steve Jobs was once viewed as an ideologue for design and is now acknowledged as the premier technology visionary.

Sometimes whether you view someone as a rebel or a leader depends on your vantage point. Take Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington DC’s public school system. The recent founder of the organization Students First, Rhee is widely viewed as a pioneer of educational reform by parents — but as “conflict oriented” by the labor unions influencing today’s educational institutions. History will tell the rest of her story as rebel or leader.

Yet it is certainly not comfortable to be the gadfly — and a lot of careers have ended over “not fitting in.”

So perhaps we could use a more neutral word: protagonist. A protagonist is a principal champion of a cause or program or action. The protagonist does not wait for permission to lead, innovate, or strategize. They do what is right for the firm, without regard to status. Their goal is to do what’s good for the whole.

Protagonists help organizations become more competitive. After all, the word compete comes from the Latin com petire, which means “to seek together.” Their intent is to not to antagonize, but to drive towards something. Protagonists are willing to name things others don’t yet see; they point to new horizons. Without them, the storyline never changes.

Let’s go back to our product manager with the disruptive voice. She was not shunned or dismissed for having the courage to raise tough issues in front of the CEO. She was told to join in the effort. The CEO asked the heads of engineering and product management to circle back once they had a chance to work through the details of the issues she raised. And a much different roadmap developed, through many pizza-filled evenings, and some new demands requiring reallocation of resources. The systems and rewards inside this organization allowed them to not reject the rebel, but to demand her leadership.

Maybe we can resolve the conflict this way: You can be a rebel without being a leader, but you can rarely be an effective leader without also having a little bit of rebel in you.

Flirting/Traveling

Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’
- Lisa St. Aubin de Terán