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I rode up to Twin Peaks this afternoon, after going through Land's End, out to Ocean Beach and down the path that parallels the Great Highway. It was one of those days when I feel so lucky to live here.
The view above is from Twin Peaks Boulevard--I love how the Transamerica pyramid and the new One Rincon Hill bookend the downtown skyline. And if you look carefully, you can see the Ferry Building gleaming at the end of Market Street.
Today was an astoundingly beautiful day in San Francisco, and I spent a portion of it on one of my favorite rides around the City, a route that winds for just over 13 miles through Golden Gate Park, the Panhandle, the Wiggle, the Duboce Bikeway (above), Market Street, the Embarcadero, Fort Mason, Crissy Field, and the Presidio before returning to the Richmond.
I've ridden through the Duboce Bikeway literally thousands of times--I worked in downtown SF for a total of 8 years, and I commuted by bike for most of that time--but not once have I ever stopped to take a photo of the mural there, even though it happens to be my favorite piece of public art evah.
But for some reason today I stopped and snapped the pic above. And looking at it now I want to ride out to Ocean Beach immediately.
Today we decided to simply hang out and enjoy a day in San Francisco, which included:
In my last post on my Twitter exchange with Tom Peters I used the phrase "infectious agents of enthusiasm," a concept that has continued to resonate with me and has inspired some practical questions:
What does it mean to be an infectious agent of enthusiasm?
What does it look like in practice?
And what results can we expect?
It occurred to me that one surefire way to spread enthusiasm--an infectious vector, if you will--is a simple expression of gratitude, and that led to the following exchange with a vendor whose services I use:
April 22, 2010 9:27 AM:
I know that people who staff help desks are like cops and lawyers--no one calls you unless there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.
So I opened this help ticket to tell y'all that...
1) I've really embraced the new [feature], even though I bitched and moaned about it (a lot.)
2) I'm really grateful for (and feel well-supported by) your service.
3) You are teh awesome. Really.
Thanks.
Ed Batista
April 22, 2010 11:02 AM:
Hi Ed,
Thank you so much for taking the time to reach out and share these kind words with us. We've had sort of a tough week here in Support (full moon? Who knows.) and this really made our day brighter. We wanted to thank you with a 20% off discount on your account, so I've gone ahead and applied that. Thanks again and let us know if there's anything you need help with.
[Awesome user support person]
April 22, 2010 11:18 AM:
Wow--I certainly had no expectation of a discount, and I'm very grateful. Thank you! Teh awesome, indeed. I'm glad I could brighten your day--you and your colleagues brighten mine all the time. Thanks again.
Ed
So, what does it mean to be an infectious agent of enthusiasm? Among other things, it means creating opportunities to focus on the many positive experiences we often take for granted.
What does it look like in practice? It's pretty simple--a heartfelt (and unexpected) "Thank you!" can go a long way.
And what results can we expect? Brightening someone else's day can brighten yours in turn.
My former Stanford colleague Andy Chan (now Vice President for Career Development at Wake Forest) has a great question that he uses to help someone determine where they are in a given journey or experience:
Are you in the first half or the second half?
It's applicable in any context--a job, a career, a lifetime--and its simplicity cuts through the distractions that can cloud our perspective on the future. And because we often don't (and can't) know the answer with any certainty, the real value comes from the feelings and intuitions that emerge as we reflect on the question and their implications for choices we face going forward. For example:
This question--Are you in the first half or the second half?-- is also a nice complement to my Time Horizons framework. Asking ourselves where we are in the time horizons that matter most to us is a useful way to get even more specific about our feelings and how they impact the choices we face within that horizon.
Continued thanks to Andy Chan for his great work and thought-provoking insights.
Photo by MPD01605. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
(Hey, that's me!)
Jurgen Appelo, a Dutch technology manager and software developer, has devised a method for compiling "top blog lists," relying on Google PageRank, Alexa traffic rankings, Technorati Authority, other search engine links and numbers of comments. (You can read about the process in detail.)
Earlier this month Appelo compiled a list of the Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs, and I was surprised and gratified to see my own site listed at # 48 (two spots below Stephen Covey, of all people.)
Appelo's method seems reasonably defensible, although I'm certainly in no position to validate it (and it's worth noting that Appelo's own blog comes in at # 16 on the list. That may be perfectly legit--I'm just sayin'.)
In any case, I'm honored to join several people on the list whose work I read regularly and respect immensely:
While the list's uppermost spots are occupied by high-profile types like Tony Robbins, Guy Kawasaki, and Daniel Pink, many are occupied by ordinary people like me, an executive coach in San Francisco and a Leadership Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; Bret Simmons, a professor at the College of Business of the University of Nevada, Reno; Pam Fox Rollin, a coach and consultant in here the San Francisco Bay Area; and Tim Milburn, Director of Campus Life at a university.
I can't speak for the others, but my site is a strictly personal project that I support entirely with my own resources. To the extent that we can rely on the validity of Appelo's method, it would seem that the web is doing its usual effective job of breaking down hierarchies and promoting conversations on the margins.
That said, it's also worth noting that despite this technology-enabled democratization, the list is thoroughly dominated by white men, primarily Americans. So some hierarchies remain firmly in place.
Thanks to Jurgen for his efforts--his list is both a great collection of valuable management and leadership resources and an inspiration to further diversify this conversation.
As executive coaching continues to gain acceptance in a wider range of professions and organizations, I find that more people are aware of coaching as a discipline and readily understand that I help my clients be more fulfilled and effective in their work.
But my role as a "Leadership Coach" at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) takes a little more effort to explain, primarily because it's such a unusual job title and (as far as I'm aware) no other business schools have a similar team of practitioners like me and my colleagues on staff to help MBA students develop their leadership and interpersonal skills.
In February GSB Dean Garth Saloner was interviewed by McKinsey on "Building the next-generation business leader," and his response to the interview's first question--"Has the economic crisis changed what employers are looking for in MBA graduates?"--provides some context for why the GSB first hired me and my colleagues back in 2007 and starts to explain the role of a Leadership Coach at the school:
What [employers] really tell us they need are leadership skills. It's what you might think of as the softer skills, or the people skills. Those are the things that are in short supply in managers who they want to rise to the most important and significant ranks in their companies.
The harder skills of finance and supply chain management and accounting and so on, I think those have become more standardized in management education, have become kind of what you think of as a hygiene factor: everybody ought to know this. That skillset is pretty widely available. To be perfectly honest, there's not a ton of differentiation in those [skills] across a number of providers.
But the softer skill sets, the real leadership, the ability to work with others and through others, to execute, that is still in very scarce supply.
I think that has not been lost, in the aggregate, on firms who are hiring this kind of talent. And the implication is that they're looking for judgment, and they're looking for the ability to really do critical thinking, which is one of the reasons we have emphasized critical analytical thinking in our own curriculum...
There are a set of leadership skills that can be taught. They have to be taught experientially. This is not something you can lecture about.
You have to put people in small groups, give them leadership tasks, and have them work them through. So what we'll do is we'll put them in a group, we'll give them a difficult assignment--maybe it's a difficult conversation, maybe it's feedback, maybe it's execution--and we will videotape what they're doing in these sessions. And these small teams will have coaches, leadership coaches.
So this is very different from the way management education looked 15 or 20 years ago.
And it's different from the management education of just 10 years ago. I graduated from the GSB in 2000, and today the school offers a much wider range of classes and activities that emphasize experiential learning and critical thinking, and those disciplines now form two cornerstones of the school's new curriculum.
Almost every class I and my colleagues support at the GSB involves the process that Garth described of putting people in small groups, giving them some difficult interpersonal work to do (ranging from solving business scenario "cases" to understanding how to communicate with each other more effectively), and letting them figure out how to get it done (with plenty of support, guidance and coaching along the way.)
Much of the work that I and my colleagues do employs what you might call a "train the trainer" model. We Leadership Coaches often work with groups of Second Year students who in turn work with groups of First Year students on a wide range of issues. Not only is this model more scalable and efficient, allowing seven Leadership Coaches to support dozens of Second Years, who in turn support hundreds of First Years, but it also creates very real, hands-on leadership opportunities for those Second Year students, who are then that much more experienced upon graduation.
And despite the semantic difference over whether leadership is "taught" or "learned," I'd say that Garth's comments are very much in line with those expressed by Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and currently professor of management practice at Harvard Business School:
[Leadership can be] learned. I teach now, and I don't think you can teach leadership, I think you can learn about it. I think you can learn about yourself. It comes from within, from who are you inside and what makes you tick, and what are those tapes playing in your head about what you want to be and what your limitations are.
What we can do [in leadership development classes] is cause people to come together and learn about themselves through dialogue... You learn about who you are, and if you go inside yourself, you find out, "What are my passions?"...
I do think the GSB has a competitive advantage in this area over other business schools, due to the high-touch, labor-intensive nature of this work that is hard to replicate in larger programs, but in both Garth's comments and Bill's I hear a shared philosophy and commitment to students' personal development as leaders.
Finally, while I very much appreciate Garth's strong support for this work, I do wish we'd all stop using the word "soft" to describe leadership and interpersonal skills. As Tom Peters has said:
Hard is soft. Soft is hard. The readily-manipulable numbers are the true "soft stuff." The relationships-leadership-"culture"...are the true "hard stuff."
Amen.
While I'll be the first to admit that working in academia can be uniquely challenging at times, it's also uniquely rewarding to be able to play a meaningful role in the development and growth of our students, who are some of the most talented and conscientious people I've ever met. And I'm hopeful that their experiences at the GSB will allow them to enter the next phase of their careers with a stronger set of leadership and interpersonal skills and a deeper understanding of themselves than I had when I graduated.
As I wrote over the weekend, Roanak Desai, a student I worked with for the past few months and felt quite close to, passed away on Saturday after contracting cerebral malaria. It's been a difficult couple of days, not only because Roanak was such a special person, but also because this loss comes so soon after the loss of my father-in-law in February. I've been coping, at various times, by appreciating life, by searching for meaning, and, today, by thinking in metaphors.
The metaphor I've found most comforting is of Roanak on a journey, one that obviously began long before I met him, and one that, in some sense, continues. He's on a boat, a choice inspired both by the literal image of his Facebook photo and by the symbolic idea that at sea you don't follow a predetermined route but must make your own way, an apt description of Roanak's path in life.
Roanak was such a humble and gracious person that when I first joined him on this journey, I didn't even realize that it was his boat--I thought we were both fellow passengers on a craft thoughtfully provided by the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the institution that brought us together. And at times, because of the nature of our work together in a coaching relationship, I even thought it was my boat, and I was guiding Roanak to his next destination. Of course, that's a trap that any coach can fall into in a relationship where the client or coachee is exploring important issues and finding meaning in the experience.
But while I'm often temporarily blinded by ego, it hasn't yet become a permanent condition, and in hindsight I can easily see the truth: it was Roanak's boat all along, and he had invited me to join him for this particular leg of his journey (which is actually a metaphor for any coaching relationship.) I expected my time with Roanak to last much longer, and I was shocked to find myself back on shore while he continued along without me. It didn't seem fair, and I felt abandoned.
I'm not a person of faith, so I don't have a sense of Roanak as I knew him continuing into an afterlife. But Roanak had a strong spiritual side and felt a connection with his culture's religious traditions, which makes it easier to extend the metaphor beyond this existence, in a way. I still see Roanak on his boat, receding into the distance. I have no idea where he's going--it's not possible for me to know--but I understand that our paths must diverge now.
And as I look around me, I realize that I haven't been abandoned at all--I'm actually surrounded by people who were also on board for various portions of Roanak's journey, including some who didn't even know it. There are dozens of people I recognize from Stanford, many of whom I know well and care for deeply, but with whom I now feel an even closer connection, because we realize that we've been traveling together. There are others I'm meeting for the first time, such as:
Roanak found us all, at some point, and, whether we realized it or not, invited us to join him for a while.
Looking further, I see that in addition to all the new and deeper connections that have been established as a result of my time with Roanak, I've learned a great deal along the way. Far from abandoning me, Roanak carried me further along my own path, and left me in a better place than when I met him. I'm a better coach; I'm open to a wider range of experiences; I see more possibilities in others and in myself. Perhaps the greatest lesson I've learned is that while Roanak was an easy person to coach and to love and to learn from, as a result of our relationship I now feel more capable of coaching and loving and learning from everyone.
While I've found it incredibly helpful to reflect on my relationship with Roanak and write about him here, I know I'll be returning to other topics again soon--regular writing is as much a part of my coping process as my daily workouts. But I'll bear in mind an email I received yesterday from a student I worked with a few years ago and whose father had passed away:
I read somewhere that you mourn right after someone dies, but you will always be grieving. There was something about that distinction that was comforting for me. When I'm having a happy memory of my dad or feeling sad because I miss him, I'm reminded that I'm still allowed to grieve for as long as I would like.
That's deeply comforting to me as well. This experience of mourning for Roanak will end--it must, in order to my life to continue. And yet by allowing myself to continue to grieve, I can hold on to my happy memories of Roanak, and to the sadness of losing him, without being consumed by mourning. So again, good-bye, Roanak. It was a privilege to know you, to be your coach, to accompany you on your journey for a little while. I miss you. Thank you.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent the years 1942-45 in four different Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. By the end of the war his pregnant wife, his parents and his brother had been murdered; among his immediate family, only he and his sister survived. After the war he published Man's Search for Meaning, a book inspired by his experiences in the camps, and one in which I've found wisdom and comfort during times of difficulty.
As I wrote yesterday, I have been appreciating life while hoping for the recovery of Roanak Desai, a student I've worked with for the past few months who contracted cerebral malaria and was hospitalized last week. I learned last night that Roanak had passed away, and after a good cry with my wife, I turned to Frankl, seeking to make some sense of this meaningless tragedy. Frankl writes:
[pp 111-115] We can discover this meaning of life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The first, by way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration.
The Meaning of Love
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the essence of another human being unless he loves him. by his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features of the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true...
The third way of finding a meaning in life is by suffering.
The Meaning of Suffering
We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed. For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into triumph, to turn one's predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation--just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer--we are challenged to change ourselves...
But let me make it perfectly clear that in no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering--provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political...
There are situations in which one is cut off from the opportunity to do one's work or enjoy one's life; but what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end. In other words, life's meaning is an unconditional one, for it even includes the potential meaning of unavoidable suffering...
[In Auschwitz] the question that beset me was, "Has all this suffering, all this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends on such a happenstance--as whether one escapes or not--ultimately would not be worth living at all."
What I find comforting in Frankl's perspective is that he's not denying the grief and rage that spring from suffering and tragedy. He's not "making the best of things." And he's not blithely suggesting that "everything happens for a reason" (which I find a particularly unhelpful expression of condolence.)
What Frankl is doing is encouraging us to acknowledge our grief and rage, and also to see our suffering as an experience in which it is possible to find meaning. The nature of that meaning will be different for all of us, of course, even in response to the same tragedy. There's no one-size-fits-all meaning-of-life. And discovering that meaning will be hard work, made even harder by our grief and rage.
In the case of Roanak's passing, I'm finding meaning in the realization that, although I knew Roanak for just a few months, the nature of our work together gave me an opportunity to know him well, to talk at length about our hopes and aspirations, and, indeed, to love him. Roanak was an easy person to love, with a warm heart, a ready smile and an inspiring approach to life that had an impact on many people around him. None of this diminishes my grief, and knowing how hard I'm taking this loss, I'm heartbroken at the thought of how hard it must be for Roanak's parents, his close friends and other loved ones. And, of course, I'm reminded of the recent death of Richard Wright, my father-in-law, another man whose passing left a large hole in a community and a family, and the cumulative impact of these losses is making them harder to bear.
And yet there's something in Frankl's words, something about the search for meaning, that makes it easier. The nature of that meaning is not at all clear to me now, and perhaps it never will be. Perhaps this search for meaning is in fact the purpose of life. I don't know, but thank you, Viktor. And good-bye, Roanak. You are missed.
While thinking about a student who's seriously ill and sending good thoughts his way, I'm finding it comforting to recall a trip Amy and I took up to Pt. Reyes this past December, during the week between Christmas and New Year's. Amy's dad Rich had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and Amy had spent the two weeks prior to Christmas back in New Jersey, helping her parents navigate the medical system and begin his treatment.
Amy was glad she could be there for her parents, but it was a stressful time for everyone, and we knew that her ability to be a source of support depended on both of us taking some time out along the way. So she came home to San Francisco for the holidays, and we put up a Christmas tree for a few days before heading up to Marin.
On our first hike that week we took Sky Trail to Woodward Valley, and then we wound our way down to the coast. Fog was creeping up from Bear Valley, but the coast was clear enough to see the Farallons.
We made our usual trek out to Tomales Point, and the tule elk were incredibly active. One male chased another for several hundred yards, just off the trail, stirring the rest of the herd into movement. (No, not here, but trust me, they were running wild.)
I took a solo hike up to the top of Point Reyes Hill, down to the coast via the Bucklin Trail, and back up via the Bayview. The view of Point Reyes from the summit was spectacular:
I'd never been down Bucklin before, and it was so isolated it was spooky. I came across a relatively recent deer skeleton right on the trail, as well as an endless variety of mushrooms:
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A challenging day, as these "Half-Way" and "Almost Done" shots make clear:
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Our last day we went to Kehoe Beach for the first time. I love the pastures that roll right up to the dunes:
There was a minus tide that day, making the beach hundreds of yards wider than usual and exposing huge rock formations that are usually covered in surf. A stunning way to end our trip:
The reality of Rich's illness was always on our minds, and we knew that Amy would be returning to New Jersey shortly, but it was helpful to spend just a little time in this most beautiful place, not to shut out the reality of death, but to appreciate life even more. So as my student R. is locked in a tough battle with cerebral malaria, I'm not surprised to feel a keen sense of appreciation for every aspect of life, particularly as it's expressed in a place like Pt. Reyes.
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