VOICES is about listening. It is easy to hear but difficult to acknowledge the voices around us. We can experience the sounds but not always the meanings. This blog hopes to adjust our collective filters, stimulating questions and promoting conversation about ideas both professional and personal.
MacGyver was a Prophet
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. While this statement embodies the ethos of the action/adventure, secret agent/resourceful scientist of television’s MacGyver; the quote is from Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th President. In MacGyver’s hands, a Swiss Army knife, a shoe lace and six inches of duct tape could avert a thermonuclear disaster. Today’s challenges require different tools — patience, ingenuity and tenacity to postpone layoffs, avoid bankruptcy or sustain a community.
Working with what we have right now could stimulate more and better ideas than did the past ten years of success.
Sometimes success is a burden because we don’t always understand how it was achieved. We only try to repeat what we’ve already done. If failure is positioned as a stop along a journey toward inevitable success, each experience becomes an opportunity to refine, refresh and rethink what we want to accomplish.
Working within a tight budget, being short-handed or feeling under the gun are usually seen as negatives. But when survival is at stake, many of us will try new things, take risks, or consider alternatives that weren’t considered options before.
A by-product of doing more with less is the opportunity for collaboration and camaraderie. Peers, associates and clients are all in the same boat. By working together, pooling resources and thinking collectively, everyone benefits. When times are better these shared experiences will build personal as well as professional bonds.
Like MacGyver and Roosevelt, once you beat the clock with the people around you and what you find in your pockets, you’ll realize that almost anything is possible.
Have you recently surprised yourself, reached for more and discovered something unexpected about yourself? Joseph
Missives
Perception of human patterns tells us that over our lifetime we change physically more dramatically than we change emotionally. Observation reinforces the idea that the patterns and choices we make in our younger years stay with us throughout our lives and influence the decisions and choices we make as adults. By recognizing the forces that remind us of our basic wants and needs, we have an opportunity to shape messages that connect us all at a very primal level.
Noted & Notable
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
By Daniel Pink
Daniel Pink, the working man’s Malcolm Gladwell, has written a new book called DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Like his first book A Whole New Mind, Pink points out connections between the obscure and the obvious. His book pits the latest scientific discoveries about the mind against the outmoded wisdom that claims people can only be motivated by the hope of gain and the fear of loss. Pink packages ideas into applications providing employers and employees with the methods and the means to get more of what they want, the way they want it. Don’t let the cover design scare you off. This is career-changing stuff.
Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days
By Dr. Kevin Leman
In Dr. Kevin Leman’s book Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days, he insists that the only way to correct bad behavior in children is to change your reactions to their behavior. Anyone who has dealt with a strong-willed child knows that it is no easy task to turn bad behavior around. Bestselling author and psychologist Dr. Kevin Leman can help to make a difference. With his signature wit and encouragement, Dr. Leman offers hope and real, practical, doable strategies for regaining control and becoming the parents our children need. Not to say that badly behaved adults are like children but the application of Dr. Leman’s ideas to adult relationships with similar issues is a bonus.
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy
By Jane Leavy
You don’t need to be a fan of professional baseball to appreciate to a true professional. Jane Leavy’s book Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy has more to do with the man and his choices that any game. Professional sports are all about the numbers. In his last four seasons Sandy Koufax’s numbers were the best ever. With a career half as long as the average pitcher, Koufax set a standard for performance that was twice as successful as any pitcher of his era. However, Koufax the person transcends the player by keeping the game he loved in perspective with who he was.
One example: In 1965, Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in Game One of the World Series because it was Yom Kippur, a Jewish holy day. Koufax’s decision and his pitching brilliance remain a source of pride among devout American Jews, even those who aren’t baseball fans. Unable to sustain that same level of performance for health reasons, Sandy retired one year later at the peak of his career. He became the youngest player ever to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Sandy Koufax defined success on his own terms, using is own standards.
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
By Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim
Much of what goes on in sports can be explained by incentives, fears and a desire for approval. You just have to know where to look. Scorecasting is the sports equivalent of Freakonomics. Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim have written the most important and fascinating sports book in years. Athletes and coaches are encouraged to challenge conventional strategies with calculated risks, producing unconventional results. Just like in life, a little risk is usually a very worthwhile thing.
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin
Jeffrey Toobin’s book, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, explains for the novice and explores for the devotee the mysteries behind the black robes. It articulates the rise of the conservative movement through the legal world and its acceleration in 2005 with the death of Justice Rehnquist and resignation of Justice O’Connor within a few months of each other. This is a fascinating story about complex and brilliant jurists who are equally spoiled and elevated by the human condition.
All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge
By Kee Malesky
What is plastic soup? How long is a New York minute? What building did Elvis leave last? Who were the Olmecs, and the Eight Immortals? Get the answers to these and many other vexing questions in NPR librarian Kee Malesky’s compendium of fascinating facts on subjects ranging from history to science to the arts. It’s the ideal gift for every inquiring mind that wants to know.
The Art of the Idea: And How it Can Change Your Life.
By John Hunt
John Hunt’s unassuming book is all about how to see, the art of observation and what we gain by taking the time to experience the everyday in new and unexpected ways. This is not a “feel good” book, something left over from the 60s, but a beautifully written and illustrated owner’s manual for our own senses. Instructive? Yes. Inventive and imaginative? For sure. Chapters like Lemmings Have Plans Too and Expediency is Not an Idea are but a few subjects worthy of your time.
A Fine Line: How design strategies are shaping the future of business
By Hartmut Esslinger / founder of Frog Design
After getting past Hartmut Esslinger's (Frog Design) sometimes condescending-sounding manner, he has a great deal to say worth hearing. Filled with process-driven strategies that are almost clairvoyant, reading the book is like hanging on to a bucking bronco. Sony, Apple and Lufthansa did and gained financially and culturally.
Outliers
By Malcolm Gladwell
The latest book from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink is the best of the three. Outliers focuses on identifying success and failure in all of their forms and conditions. His book is smart, fun and disturbing. Readers will discover that the distance between winners and losers is about 10,000 hours of work plus the luck of circumstances and your birthday. There are several Aha! moments that if applied might change your life.
A Whole New Mind
by Daniel H Pink
Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind, Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future is worth your time. Left-brain skills (logical, analytical, sequential), while still necessary, are becoming a commodity, Pink argues, while right-brain talents (artistic, empathic, more about context than content) will be at a premium in the future. Pink writes with charm and humor about subjects that heretofore were rarely, if ever, charming or funny.
1. Rachel July 16, 2009 at 11:59 am
Loved this one. Inspiring.
2. Rebekah July 16, 2009 at 11:56 am
I like this. Timely.