Bubbilicious

I've been eating honey-roasted sesame sticks, and thinking about organizations.

The hrss's come from the farm stand we went to this afternoon, to pick up those really good looking apples. (It really is a farm stand, and not just a table by the side of the road --the orchard's right behind it!) They make a fair amount of stuff themselves, jams and jellies and pie fillings and whatnot, and along with that, bags and cartons of munchies like the sesame sticks, not to mention some locally manufactured sodas. I don't get them too often, mostly because the opportunity to go to the farm stand doesn't usually present itself.

The bubbles come from a web site called Slow Leadership. I've only looked at it a couple of times, because, to be honest, it doesn't have a lot of new content. But what it does do, and pretty well, is repackage older content -- things that were fresh once, and deserve to be heard again. In this case, they're talking about effort versus results. The story he tells is about realizing that the reason he couldn't produce a decent bubble, while at the park with his son, was much the same as the reason he couldn't get an organization to gel and produce a viable product. I think that it's also the reason that we frequently lose track of what we're trying to do in the midst of the flurry of the things that we have to do. We push harder and harder, but we don't push smarter and smarter.

Now, I happen to hate the phrase 'work smarter, not harder' -- but only because its a hackneyed phrase that's usually a code for being asked to do more with less, faster and cheaper. And sometimes, you do have to work harder -- but the key here is to understand what 'harder' means. Its like when I'm on the exercise bike, and I have ten minutes to go -- I can peddle just as fast as I can possibly can, and I still have ten minutes to go. Because the goal isn't to work harder -- to get to the ten minute mark -- its to work smarter -- to get the exercise I need at a rate that will be achievable by me. Gets me results without burning me out. How I do that is up to me. Focusing on the ten minutes drains me. Focusing on the gains in strength and endurance energizes me.

It's a little too New Age for me to say that management of goals is like blowing a bubble -- but you know what? Sometimes, it is.