Fishing for Tuna or Scooping Up Krill?

 Juliet Funt, author of "A Minute to Think," described how she sometimes likes to go for tuna, and often really likes scooping up the krill when trying to create space and focus on the big things. She suggests you can go for the big wins, the tuna, if you do the "easy" work of generating and evaluating your work processes & schedules, such as canceling big events or unnecessary projects. Or keep picking up small wins, the krill, if you just go about your normal routines and a different perspective on everyday tasks--e.g. cutting 5+ minutes from meetings, shifting work/changing the battle rhythm from daily to weekly, weekly to monthly, etc. to dig deep. Scooping up the krill can also starve other time-wasting tuna, and reduces energy sharks. (My analogy)

Her Spin Launcher describes a team process to:

• Generate a bunch of ideas, brainstorming, no good or bad ideas (but as Craig Groeschel might suggest every small good/bad decision does matter).
• Separate into categories: types, schedules, etc.; Can and Can't Control
• Evaluate and determine if it's necessary or just wanted by someone. How much "mission proximity"does it have? I've known many research queries and issued reports "just in case" the question comes up or needs to be referenced but most of the time, they're don't.
• Eliminate
• Repeat (because this is like having a haircut; waste, blurred scope, etc. tend to grow back)
• Liberate, capturing the extra time for more productive, profitable efforts. I once eliminated a Perfect Attendance award (half-day PTO each quarter), by replacing it with two personal holidays, because it was causing supervisors to spend 40% of their time on attendance issues instead of personnel development and process improvements.

Krill scooping can be as simple as making sure you have "only" the right people in a meeting that lasts "only" as long as needed to share information and assign tasks. Funt also suggests subtask reduction, such as often design engineers do to reduce number of parts in an assembly. And conducting a survey which you can turn into a Hate Map with most intense RED color meaning the most hated activities or aspects of corporate life.

To help she asserts 4 R's of High-Value work: Revenue, Reputation, Reward, Readiness. (Maybe these are legitimate foci, but sometimes they are outcomes of other high-value work.) Most of the time we find ourselves, according to Juliet Funt, in the 4 P's: panicking, pandering, procedure and padding.

Global Leadership Conundrums

 Recently attending the Global Leadership Summit, I was wishing for a big of debate or rebuttal talks. Sometimes speakers gave us a formula for leadership success that contradicts others' talks in previous years or were counter to other good advice.

Craig Groeschel started out with a leadership formula: (Consistency + Faithfulness)xTime = Lasting Impact. And his talk mostly focused on some "atomic habits" (James Clear's work). In 2023, Groeschel gave us Consistency + Empathy + Transparency = Trust. That's a lot of work for consistency. However, in business, while consistency is good, it's in danger of keeping us in an unsuccessful rut. What if innovation is needed? What if breaking a routine leads to new insights, new efficiencies, captures new markets? We shouldn't rest on our laurels--as some other speakers this year also encouraged--and we should: 

  • Evaluate whether some practices are “waste” (Lean/Six Sigma)

 • Evaluate whether some practices are medium gear performance [James Hewitt categorized some practices as low gear (rest, recuperate), medium gear (emails, mtgs) or high gear (deliberate focus, productivity)]

• Strategize reduction of extraneous efforts, instead of prioritizing or improving non-mission-critical efforts. For example, move daily actions to weekly/weekly to monthly and so on for "nice" but not necessary efforts to create space for focusing on the important things. One well-known company has 184 items on a "dashboard" including how many people interact with the dashboard! Too many! (Juliet Funt's Reductive Mindset)
• Ensure that we are really helping team members make progress on a project/performance improvement, or creating "busy work". High motivation happens when people are making forward progress, while managers fail to recognize this aspect (Teresa Amabile's "Progress Principle")

Similarly, Groeschel asserted that consistency keeps the heat going till 210 deg turns into 212 and boiling point success. But what if your efforts remain at "simmer." How do you determine a necessary ending (Dr. Henry Cloud)? There are times to quit when the rut is only getting deeper. 

Tasha Eurich talked about going beyond resilience and what factors take us forward, and not stopping at "bouncing back." Most people bounce back. Only a few get better after a disaster. We have a resilience ceiling. But we can call on confidence, making choices and strong connections to thrive. She mentioned how there's so much "grit gaslighting" and I wanted to have Angela Duckworth (author of "Grit") come out in rebuttal. 

John Maxwell was touted as doing a multitude of great things. My rebuttal is that if we change the vector of someone's life, we have done a great thing for that person and the generations to follow. And we won't know the total impact of one word of encouragement, one challenge, one hand-up, one promotion, one bit of support in one person's life until we get to heaven.

We are all capable of great leadership things if we serve and love one another.