“A poorly-planned project takes three times as long as expected.  A well-planned project only takes twice as long”

“On time, cheap, and good.  You can have any two”

The problem for live web seminars?  There is no pushing the date, and there is almost never any extra budget.

Result?

Yawn.  Online slideshow.

They also run a two minute clip each morning of James Dobson. This morning Dobson said something that bears adding to the quip file. To paraphrase…

Those who take eat well. Those who give sleep well.

I like that.

- Mary O’Connor

Learn The Delegation Rule

It’s tough enough for some of us to think of ourselves as ‘delegators.’ For some of us it’s perfectionism, and we have a hard time thinking someone else can do something as well as we can; for some it’s relationship skills…we don’t know how to discuss things that are uncomfortable, such as suggesting how to improve performance.

Harder still, though, is remembering that as we are working for someone else, we become valuable to them when we help them delegate to us. They might equally have difficulty in being a good delegator. In fact, the more difficulty they have, the more they will appreciate you making it easier for them to do so.

A phrase I like to help remember this is “Push up, pull up.” Want a promotion? Help your boss get a promotion. Want to get a promotion while avoiding just doubling up your workload? Help one of your employees or peers prepare to step into your role.

Want the best part of “Push up, pull up?” In so doing, you are pro-acting. You are being a leader. And leaders win.

– Arnold Toynbee

“Learning is that which enables you to participate successfully in life, at work, and in the groups that matter to you.”

Besides being more benefits-oriented than ‘the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, practice, or study, or being taught,’ it implies something I’ve been teaching for years.

“Knowledge is power” is misleading. It’s like storing up money or a pile of building materials. Value isn’t created until you do something with it.

Sell it, share it, trade it, create something with it.

Applied knowledge is power.

Seth Godin just had a reader send him a breakdown of various degrees of apology.

And it makes me think of two recent experiences that I wish had different endings.

Case One – Simon & Schuster: While out Christmas shopping in mid-December I bumped into an book-on-CD by Franklin Covey that I wanted to hear. I learned long ago that even if I don’t have time right then to read/listen, I go ahead and buy the book…it saves a huge amount of time relative to tracking it down later.

Anyway, the production of this resource was, by contemporary standards, fifteen years behind the times. It was a straight reading of the book. No track divisions, chapter titles, or (even slight) adaptation of the content for someone who is listening vs. looking at a printed word. After much trouble, I did find a customer service form on Simon and Schuster’s website that allowed me to submit a query as to where I might send some feedback. I didn’t want to complain so much as tell them how to improve my experience the next time I bought a product from them.

A few days later I get a reply saying ‘send your response to me’ and I’ll forward it to the right person.

I did. And nothing. Nada.

One follow up note: while I know it’s not possible to cover EVERY online base, but you’d hope that S&S, a division of Viacom who claims multi-media expertise would snatch up misspellings of their website name like the one I discovered when I fat-fingered it. The only reason I don’t post it here is because the folk who camp on those don’t deserve any extra traffic.

Case Two – Cafe Press: I bought some fun stuff for my crew for Christmas, and the order showed up wrong. I’ll spare you the whole story here, but should you doubt it, give me a call for all the gory details. In short, a call to the customer service was not only unhelpful, they were rude.

Maybe it was a bad day. Christmas in retail is a tough gig, and e-retail is no diff. But that’s why we hire grownups, not children.

I wrote the CEO a letter. And nada. Nothing.

So what would I have needed? In the first case, I don’t even need an apology! Just a ‘thx for the feedback…we’re always trying to make our products better’ would have sufficed? In case two, would you expect a call from the CEO? No. But even a form letter would acknowledge that someone there gave a rodent’s gluteous maximus.

So the post in Seth’s blog is timely and personal. Check it out. It leads to one of my favorite quips.

“Professionalism isn’t what happens when everything goes right. It’s what happens when something goes wrong.”

The truth is, one of my favorite isms is “Sometimes the enemy of the best is the good.” Story of my life.

Since I didn’t pen it first, I should have given credit to Frank Vandersloot, CEO of Melaleuca, a company whose products Angi and I have loved and used for a long, long time.

Sometimes the enemy of the best is the good

…a keen reminder that we get to choose precious few things to really pursue. And in a world of deafening noise, there is no choice but to focus if there is any choice of cutting through the noise.

What’s keeping you from real value? Real success?

In order to be good at something, you must first be bad at something.

And in order to be bad at something, you must first DO something.