"Attribute No. 1," In Search of Excellence

Messing around with my favorite topic—the primacy of action over blah blah blah. Put together two attachments. One is a PowerPoint. The other is a set of quotes—the first ten of which are offered up below.

The "Big 10":

"We have a 'strategic plan.' It's called doing things."—Herb Kelleher

"This is so simple it sounds stupid, but it is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil if you drill wells. You may think you're finding it when you're drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill."—John Masters, Canadian oil and gas wildcatter, The Hunters

"Can do!"—Motto, U.S. Navy Seabees (U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalions)

"Execution is the job of the business leader."—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/ Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

"Ready. FIRE! Aim."—H. Ross Perot (versus, he said, the far more common "Aim! Aim! Aim! ...")

"BLAME NO ONE. EXPECT NOTHING. DO SOMETHING."—Locker room sign
posted by NFL football coach Bill Parcells

"Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You simply must ... Do things."—Ray Bradbury

"To Be somebody or to Do something."—John Boyd

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."—Japanese proverb

"You miss 100% of the shots you never take."—Wayne Gretzky

Part 5 advocates practice in the art of listening. Tom states that mastery of this talent is difficult, but the effort pays big dividends. Try it today. Get Tom's three rules to follow and more in Part 5 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations.

When I look back at my engineering days a couple of decades ago, I remember a few teachers that made a huge difference in my life—even today. One of them was the late Dr. Sudhakar Samuel. Dr. Samuel was special. Very special. I still remember the sixth semester where he taught us Digital Electronics. Long story short—every single student in the class became an expert on the topic by the end of the semester.

I had an opportunity to thank Dr. Samuel at the end of the class. I don't know whether I did justice to what he had given to all of us. My appreciation for what and how he taught me in those days grew over these years. A few years ago, I thought I should go back and thank him again for the difference he made in my life. For some or the other reason, that time did not come. One day, all of a sudden, I got an email from an old friend that Dr. Samuel had passed away. There were tears in my eyes instantly, but there was also a feeling of guilt that I had left something incomplete.

Intentions do count. But, not much in such situations. Actions are what matter most.

The other way is true, too. Most people who love and appreciate you don't come out openly and say why they love and appreciate you. There are many reasons for it, but let's just agree that only a small percentage of your fans will openly appreciate you and state the reason why.

If tomorrow all the people who love and appreciate you come out openly and say why they love and appreciate you, your world will instantly change. At the least, you will get an insight about what you should continue doing. You might even be surprised that people care about things that you yourself took for granted.

How about this?

Rather than asking the world to change, how about making a small change in your life? How about making a list of all the people you love and appreciate and going and telling them why you love and appreciate them?

Others are just like you—they want to be loved and appreciated and they want to know why they are loved and appreciated.

Rather than just talking about it, I embarked on a project to help with this. The project is called LoveThiz.com and the goal for the project is to make it easy to share your gratitude, love, and/or appreciation for someone on Twitter.

With LoveThiz, you have only two things to enter:

1. The twitter handle for the person to whom you wish to express your love and appreciation.
2. The reason why you love and appreciate them.

Yes, there is a limit of 140 characters as LoveThiz will post your love and appreciation on Twitter.

You might ask—why add another layer? Why not just post this on Twitter?

Because there are 750 tweets posted per second and sooner or later (sooner, in most cases) what you posted will disappear in the noise. When you post something on LoveThiz, the system instantly creates a page for that person or brand on LoveThiz.
It takes less than ten seconds to post a note of appreciation and love to someone on LoveThiz.com. And, it will stay permanently on that person or brand's page. Soon, that person or brand gets feedback from across the world why they are being loved and appreciated.

Go ahead and share your love and appreciation for someone over there. It will probably take you a few seconds only but it might make someone's day.

You can find the video in the right-hand column of this page or watch it at YouTube (time: 2 minutes 3 seconds). Or, get a PDF transcript of the video's content: Strategy: Measure Innovation.

Part 4 introduces Tom's conviction that encouraging your people to make friends in other functions of the organization should be a top priority. Tom says you should reward such behavior, make it an agenda item. Download Part 4 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations, and learn how and why cross-functional socialization (read, idea-sharing) is essential to business excellence.

This is obviously not the ideal way to cultivate a talented workforce. The education system in the United States still seems to be attempting to churn out well-behaved factory workers. With the enormous pressure placed on teachers to produce sufficient test results, the classroom becomes more about test preparation than exploration and discovery. Albert Einstein, long since deceased, had this to say:

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."

We recently heard from Matt Lintner, a teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia. He sent Tom his reflections on what children are learning, and not learning, in school in a piece he titled "Race to Nowhere." Tom asked Matt if we could share his thoughts with you, and Matt kindly agreed. We urge you to take a moment, read what Matt has to say, and think about what you can do to help our youth learn what truly matters. Please, fan the flames of their curiosity.

Race to Nowhere

Management guru Peter Drucker famously said, "What gets measured gets managed." But what if we're measuring the wrong things? Consider the following: you can graduate from high school with straight A's without ever having:

1. Searched for answers to unknown questions.
2. Budgeted your own time.
3. Discovered what most interests you.
4. Initiated a project requiring sustained commitment.
5. Taken risks or experienced failure.
6. Led a team in the pursuit of a worthy goal.
7. Practiced consensus building or the messiness of compromise.
8. Asserted yourself, even if it meant challenging authority.
9. Built something of value.
10. Created art that speaks to the soul.
11. Explored the natural world.
12. Interacted with people outside your age group.
13. Volunteered substantively in your community.
14. Apprenticed in fields of your choosing.
15. Started a business.
16. Traveled and gathered perspectives outside your comfort zone.
17. Acquired practical skills like saving and investing, handling tools, programming, growing food...

Perhaps most tellingly, you never learned to say "No."

America can continue down the path of national standards, high stakes testing, longer school days, expanded calendar, merit pay, and all the rest—but none of it will cure what ills us if we're not focused on what truly matters.

Matt Lintner

Teacher

Fairfax County, VA

I was asked to contribute (a very few words) to a family page offering words of wisdom to a graduating high school senior. That's a serious challenge—and I literally spent days on the task. Here, for better or for worse, is the result:

Rules For Living Life to the Hilt

Nothing will turn out the way you thought it would.

There is no bigger waste of time than making plans.

Any success you have will be the byproduct of having thrown yourself headlong and without reserve into what you were most passionate about—and then ridden the wave you created wherever and at whatever speed it carries you.

The greatest long term satisfaction comes from having behaved at all times with common decency.

(Above: School starts next week in New Zealand. A bit of holiday cricket on the sandy Tasman Sea beach in front of our cottage.)

Erika Andersen wrote a kind review of the site at Forbes.com that we think you'll enjoy reading. She talks about her first encounter with Tom through In Search of Excellence, and describes him as a "tribal elder." As 2012 marks 30 years since In Search was published, perhaps that moniker is apt.

What's Part 3 all about? Given that worker satisfaction in the job is intricately tied to worker satisfaction with their supervisor, Tom sees selecting, training, and nurturing your first-line supervisors as a mandatory strategic part of business practice. I put it mildly. Download Part 3 of Tom's Mother of All Presentations to get his take—that is, care of first-line supervisors should be an obsession.