Definition of an A Player: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

Who cares if somebody has 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that anybody could accomplish? You don't want to be good. You want to be great.

Im reading a book for my Masters Program called "Who" by Geoff Smart & Randy Street. This is definitely impacting my decisions on who my next hire will be.

Reading an article by Steve Errey:  Lack of motivation isn’t normal. When your motivation starts to slip, you need to address it immediately. It’s telling you something is wrong with the way you’re thinking about your work. Let it slide and your declining motivation will strip your confidence until you forget why you ever wanted to write in the first place.

How big is your swimming pool?

You could have all the motivation in the world to build your business, but if you have a belief that says you “can’t” or that you’re “not good enough,” then guess what? You’ve just built a wall that stops that motivation in its tracks, or at the very least turns it into one hell of a struggle.

You’re more than a match for any challenge:

Your capability is bigger than any problem your business can throw at you. You are designed to take on meaningful challenges and learn what’s necessary to succeed.

Here’s a link to the entire article: http://www.copyblogger.com/motivation-and-beliefs/

I’m watching a video of Jennifer Walzer, CEO of Backup My Info!  Jennifer is in the Entrepreneur Organization in New York and in the Entrepreneurial Masters Program at MIT.  Jennifer participated in this New York Enterprise Report roundtable event, which brought together over 60 area business owners to discuss strategies for success in a new business environment. Jennifer led a discussion on upgrading your staff, in which she talked about retaining top employees and attracting high-quality job seekers.

In the video she brought up two quotes that I thought were interesting:

"People don't do what counts, they do what you count"

“People do what you inspect, not what you expect”

I think it’s all about setting your expectations and frequently reviewing those expectations. This is kind of similar to the last quote where “People do what you inspect”.  If you don’t revisit those expectations from time to time then a person is probably not going to do what you feel is most important. 

http://www.backupmyinfo.com/about/news.php

Getting the work done on time means your personal brand is “you can count on me to get the work done” rather than “never does anything on time so build in an extra week if you don’t want to go crazy.”

http://ow.ly/1wLf5

"But as he now says himself, he forgot in the process to remember that with fame and fortune comes responsibility, not invisibility. It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here; it is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids. ... But certainly his future will never again be measured only by his performance against par; but measured by the sincerity of his efforts to change." - Augusta National chairman Billy Payne

Liked this article...

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/

 

http://www.innovationlabs.com/2010/03/babies-and-creativity/

“An animal that depends on the accumulated knowledge of past generations has to have some time to acquire that knowledge.  An animal that depends on imagination has to have some time to exercise it.  Childhood is that time.  Children are protected from the usual exigencies of adult life; they don’t need to hunt deer or ward off saber-tooted tigers, let alone write grant proposals or teach classes–all of that is done for them.  All they need to do is learn.  When we’re children we’re devoted to learning about our world and imagining all the other ways that the world could be.  When we become adults we put all that we’ve learned and imagined to use.  There’s a kind of evolutionary division of labor between children and adults.  Children are the R&D department of the human species–the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers.  Adults are production and marketing.  They make the discoveries, we implement them.  They think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good ones and make them real.”

The role of innovation management, of course, is to foster the synthesis of these two – the creativity and imagination of the child, who sees things for the first time and understands them in ways that someone who has seen them a million times cannot; and the systemic, rational thinking of adulthood, which knows how to transform a good idea into a truly valuable product or service or process.

(Click the link at the top and read the whole thing! It's good a good read and there's a reference to the book which is quoted here.)

From an employee perspective, you want to know the business you work for best exemplifies the values by which you guide your own life; you want to trust a guarantee of fair treatment, respect, and personal growth, in return, you genuinely want to put forward your best effort. Page 27 - Ride Like a Penguin: Nicole Donnelly
www.ridelikeapenguin.com

I probably drive my team crazy with this kind of thought process, but, I truly believe that if you're going to make something remarkable and build an amazing business you have to push yourself all the time. Getting comfortable is a sign of getting complacent and lazy....

 

http://artpetty.com/2010/03/21/leadership-caffeine-7-odd-ideas-to-help-you-get-unstuck/

Top Performers Fight the Routine:

High performance individuals in all areas of life, from leaders to athletes to great individual contributors work hard everyday to fight the gravitational pull of getting stuck in the proverbial rut.

High performance teams and organizations find their comfort not in sameness or routine, but in embracing the ambiguity of the world and the constancy of change and the constant need to change.

Many of the best leaders that I’ve known, worked for or worked with go out of their way to push themselves and their teams to constantly do things different to keep their senses sharp, their individual and collective minds expanding and their ideas fresh.  They work hard at getting and staying unstuck!

Take comfort in being uncomfortable about being comfortable. If you followed that, you get my point in this post.  We talk endlessly about the accelerating pace of change in our world and we see it in play daily.  And then many of us go back to our usual routine.  It’s time for you to recognize the need for change in yourself, and as a leader, for you to find ways to stimulate new thinking, promote different approaches and make the existence of change part of the excitement of working in this world.

Brambleberry (aka Ann-Marie) and I are reading this book and thought it would be fun if we got a bunch of EO entrepreneurs and local Seattle peeps together and bookclub Linchpin.  We're going to do this in Bellevue at the Hyatt Seafood Grill, over lunch, on March 9th. Come join us for some good food and good discussion.

Peter