Soft Management

 
 
I read this article a few months ago about Nick Sarillo’s “Trust and Track” culture which I think is a very healthy way of getting things done through other people - or delegation. This greatly impacted me and more recently I have been working on implementing many of the key points I learned in this Inc.com article in the training of new employees. For a small to midsize organization, it’s all about Culture if you want to get things done.

In order to Ship, complete tasks, without leaving coworkers and customers hanging, I firmly believe one must make a checklist. Nick’s idea is brilliant, he describes, “I built a system to replace me. I put together a checklist of things that had to be done by 4 p.m., so we could handle the volume. It took about four weeks until it could work without me. Now we’re nailing it.”

Nick’s “Trust and Track” culture involves educating employees about what it takes for the company to be successful, then trusting them to act accordingly - the people you hire should want to be successful on an individual basis. People who have what it takes, when educated properly, will shake it up and make positive things happen - even when the boss is gone.

The alternative is command and control, wherein success is the boss’s responsibility and employees do exactly what the boss says (or else!). I’m not saying the Genius with a Thousand Helpers approach doesn’t work, both approaches can work, but they produce very different cultures and long-term outcomes. If managed correctly, trust and track can allow a company to be adroit, resilient, and prolific enough to function at the highest level through booming and even contracting economies.

 
 
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I've been enjoying my free copy of Seth Godin's recent manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams.

He shares the interesting origin of multiple-choice tests in Section 10, Frederick J. Kelly and your nightmares:

In 1914, a professor in Kansas invented the multiple-choice test. Yes, it’s less than a hundred years old.

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots.

In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”

A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lower-order thinking test. Still.

The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward.


Memorizing information is pointless when you have a computer in your pocket with all the world's information just a touch away. Is the only thing we can teach these days is how to get a high test SAT score? 

I find it odd that teachers spend more time teaching youth to memorize trivial information (like "When was the war of 1812?") than they do teaching them to competently search and find it on the Internet. Oh, wait...is that because most teachers are technically illiterate? It's not their fault, I mean the administrators over at the school district won't "let" them stray from the curriculum.

I often hear teachers complain about students attitudes and how flaky they are. Here's an idea, what if we taught youth to make commitments (and keep them), to overcome fear, to deal transparently, to initiate, and to plan a course?

Can adults teach youth (or other adults) to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, and to innovate? I believe it is possible. I believe it is more likely on an outdoor retreat, camp, or field trip than in a classroom via a boring power point presentation.

REAL LEARNING is not done to you. Learning is something you choose to do.

The world has changed and unfortunately the school system is exactly that, a industrialized "system," working on a massive scale, that has significant byproducts, including the destruction of many of the attitudes and emotions we’d like to build our culture around. In the early industrial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries the two biggest challenges were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. School was invented to solve these problems, and it worked.

The 21st century economy needs creative thinkers and problem solvers, not mindless cogs that are obedient, on-time, and work to make widgets cheaper and faster than the day before.

 
 
Today I attended the monthly "Dixie Techs" meeting with like 80 other geeks, freaks and nerd-jocks. It's a luncheon from 12-1pm that takes place every first Friday of the month at Dixie State College of Utah. They always have a great speaker and you get free pizza too!

I found this networking event very intriguing. I noticed that every software, web and mobile app developer was hiring. A friend of mine is a computer science professor at DSC and he had a dozen business owners asking him who he had in his program that was graduating soon. These guys were salivating over computer science talent – they were even interested in kids who still had a year left in their undergrad. As I found out, there were not a lot of students in the computer science program.

Then this evening I came across this article about online ads for computer science jobs in Utah being up more than 15% in January. As I read on I learned that “while there are more than 25 job seekers for every open position in fields like construction, the exact inverse is true in technology, health and science-related jobs.”

My friend and I believe our First Lego League (FLL) program, which is a partnership through the University of Utah, Dixie State College of Utah and Utah State University (my  4-H Robotics Program) is a feeder program to these higher education institutions. The demand is so high right now for tech jobs, if you have a kid that is even moderately interested in techy stuff then I encourage you to help him or her find their inner geek and get them involved in Lego Robotics – it’s a great platform for youth to learn engineering, design, and programming.


 
 
"We each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before." 
- Dieter F. Uchtdorf  

Anyone can create, we're all creative. I encourage everyone to get to work on creating. 

Here I am getting all religious, but I believe if you rely on God you can increase your capacity to create. 

Discover what your interests are, spend time deliberately practicing them and you will become talented. Use your talents to make your community of family, friends and neighbors better. 
 
 
Siri is an "intelligent" software assistant and knowledge navigator. Basically it's your personal assistant.

This video is not only hilarious but very informative as well. Learn all about Apple's Siri application for iOS on the iPhone 4S. 
 
 
You can't watch this video without being totally amazed by this kid. Not only is he an excellent public speaker, but he's literally a genius. Was he born this way? I think not, talent is overrated. People only get this way through 'deliberate practice.'

Viewing this video further motivated me in my 4-H work with technology. I really liked how he started an app club at his school where kids can get together and learn how to create mobile apps. It's what I'm currently working on so we have a community of kids like him in Southern Utah.

I wouldn't be surprised if his club is an actual 4-H club, that's what 4-H is all about - kids learning skills under the guidance of caring adults. It can be after school, at your house or any community center. Adults who have the time and want to share what they know with kids in their neighborhood are encouraged to get involved, consider this your invitation.
 
 
We all struggle through learning curves because they’re really hard at first. In The Dip, Seth Godin will help you determine whether you should keep trudging through the difficult process or quit it altogether.

If you decide to stick with whatever you’re learning, whether it’s a musical instrument, calculus, programming, cooking, chemistry, or baseball,  it’s important to understand that natural genius is a myth.

Recent scientific findings support the notion that success is the product of disciplined practice – not an uncontainable natural genius. I realized this simple principle after reading Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. The examples of the work ethic in Mozart and Michael Jordan were very inspiring. They were not born with their amazing abilities; they were driven to the point where they wanted to practice music and basketball all day long, every single day. It was only after long periods of deliberate practice that they became incredibly skilled.

In his book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell writes about the 10,000 Rule. He explains that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a given field, to actually master the subject.

One of my favorite examples is that of legendary slugger Ted Williams. He is believed to be the most gifted hitter of his era (the last man to hit over .400). Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr said, ”Ted just had that natural ability." It was also said that Ted had laser-like eyesight, which allowed him to decipher the spin of a ball as it left the pitcher's fingers. Ty Cobb once said, "Ted Williams sees more of the ball than any man alive." I even heard Ted Williams could leap tall buildings in a single step! Sounds like some guys are just born with it, right?

Wrong, scientific tests showed Ted’s eyesight to be well within ordinary human range. The true story of Ted Williams’ talent was nothing more than a phantasmagorical work ethic that began when he was five years old and continued until he retired from the game. He grew up poor, yet paid his friends to shag balls. He denied entertainment, social activities, and other sports to focus on baseball. As a rookie, he practiced long after practice was over, he hit balls until they disintegrated, and swung bats until they splintered.

Drive is an acquired trait. Talent is a process, not a natural gift.

What are you passionate about?