“To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self…And to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of one’s self.” -Søren Kierkegaard
If you are pretty set on holding on to your flip phone, and you are not going to improve your efforts at work because the tools you used in the past did the job just fine, this blog post is probably not for you.
I love the world we are living in. It is fast-moving and it seems like every day offers a new app or a software function you can’t picture living without. It’s change, and though change is good, many times it also can be overwhelming and a little frightening. Design and manufacturing companies are reinventing themselves every day. They are trying to be faster and more efficient; simply, to do more with less. This means that everything around us is changing faster than it ever has, and it has a cost: lots of information, choices and eventually pressure. Even the guy on the factory line is expected to reinvent and streamline processes in today’s world. How are we supposed to handle all this stress and responsibility? We know that the company we work for has to use the latest software programs and machines. We understand that it has to adapt and move forward. The company has to follow that mission statement and fight for the vision to stay in business. But it is also time for us to change; the times where the boss told us to push the green button and end our shift at 5pm is gone. But it’s not just because we need to hold onto our jobs that we need to change; the human thought pattern has changed. As the companies we are working for are changing to streamline, working smarter and faster, we also have to reprogram ourselves, if not for anything else, to stay sane. The answer is to give ourselves a promotion. We need to “level up”, be welcome to management and leadership: management and leadership of ourselves.
In the book The E-Myth Manager: Why Management Doesn’t Work, and What to Do About It, Michael Gerber shares many tips and tricks, not just how to manage a business, but also how we can manage ourselves through change. See, the two entities have to follow one another; a business cannot change without the people changing.
The Problem: Why management doesn’t work, and what to do about it The fact is that regular, good old management methods do not work in our fast moving world. There are some new twists: one is the technological revolution, which is forcing us all to do more, faster; the other is the aftermath of reengineering, which is forcing us to do more with fewer people. Our problem is that we are still focused on the old ways where we believe we work for a boss (or we might even call him an Emperor), instead of realizing we are working for ourselves. Lead yourself, manage yourself. This will make you a better and happier employee, and function better as a person.
Via The E-Myth Manager: Why Management Doesn’t Work, and What to Do About It: Recognizing the myth of management, and the motivation of most managers, is a healthy step toward applying the entrepreneurial mindset to your job, that is: becoming an e-myth manager. But taking action and beginning to reinvent the work that you do is often the hardest step to take. The following rules will guide you in your quest to give up the drug of Emperor dependence. These are the rules that shape your life as an e-myth manager, and consequently, influence your relationship with everyone around you. I call them the Seven Rules of Management Independence. They are:
Know what you want.
Know you have the power to get it.
There can be no causes other than your own.
If you cannot manage yourself you cannot manage anything.
There are no simple answers, only complex questions.
Before it gets better it is going to get worse.
These rules must become the defining principles of your life.
In the book, Michael Gerber (The Emperor) is having a number of meetings with one of his employees. Jack is hard at work for Michael’s company, doing what is asked of him. As many of us, he has pushed limits of his personal life to accomplish tasks that were beyond the duty of his job responsibilities. He gave up his time, often studying into the night and working long hours every day. But with an ever fast-moving world, full of changes, even the smallest bump in the road can turn to total unhappiness. When productivity is down in our department, profits are low, and the joy in our work is gone, it can hit us like a ton of bricks. Change becomes scary. The problem is that we many times have lost our way; we are living someone else’s vision. Let us explore a few of Michael Gerber’s “Seven Rules of Independence”.
Rule 1: Know what you want… Start to dream; the truth is that we all get so easily caught up in our daily routines. We need to start dreaming about what we want, dream about what our job should look like, how our family should be; dream about who we want to be as individuals. Then, write it down on paper. Writing it down makes it a vision; this vision is our honest desire. Our new vision does not mean that we have to quit our jobs. (It might make us do just that; but if it does, everyone is better off anyway.) Our vision is what is going make us jump out of bed in the morning. And our vision can most certainly go hand in hand with the vision of the company we work for. In my company, Autodesk, vision is to be a leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software. If my vision was to spend as much time as possible outside in nature and I hated interacting with computers, that would not align very well with Autodesk’s vision, would it? But I love design and engineering; I am like a kid in a candy store when I get to play with the latest and greatest design software. My vision and Autodesk’s vision align. I know what I want, and Autodesk is the perfect partner in my vision.
You may be put off by the idea of having to know what you want, and it may take some a while to figure it out. But until you do, you will be no closer to owning your job, to managing your organization, or to increasing your enjoyment of what you do. To fulfill your potential, to be more than a mere reflection of someone else’s vision, it is absolutely essential for you to learn how to match the boss’ intensity, rather than reflect it. And the only way you can honestly do that is through the pursuit of your own vision.
Rule 2: Know you have the power to get it… People hunger for purpose. Without our own, we are immediately distracted into the misguided belief that anyone’s purpose will do. We do not want to wake up one day and say to ourselves, “Who am I? Where am I? What happened?” This does not mean that we should totally disregard our company’s strategies or goals; if we are going to keep working for our company, we should work on aligning our vision with our company’s vision. If we are willing to change, we have an incredible power to also change things around us.
Via The E-Myth Manager: Why Management Doesn’t Work, and What to Do About It: Not only must you be certain of what you want for yourself, you must also be certain that you understand the importance of this statement: “Once you know what you want, only you can get it. You can’t delegate the responsibility for inventing your own life.”
Rule 3: There can be no causes other than your own. [You have to read the book for this one]
Rule 4: If you cannot manage yourself, you cannot manage anything. We have to start with ourselves. We have to create a relationship with ourselves as individuals; look at ourselves from above and change to who we want to be. We cannot control everything, but we can engage, connect and change our behavior.
So to manage oneself, it is necessary to think in terms of standards, and before you can think of standards you must first have a Vision for yourself. This Vision should encompass who you wish to become–Not who you are. But understand, if the person you see in your Vision is the same as the person you are, only doing something different, it is not a Vision, it is a dream. Bill Gates doesn’t dream about Microsoft, he envisions it. He envisions a Microsoft universe. Understand, I’m not talking about the content of Bill Gates’ Vision here; I’m talking about the scale of it. It’s the scale of one’s Vision that shapes one’s life. And so I bring you the idea that there are no small people, only small visions.
Conclusion… The task can seem overwhelming. We get another design change thrown at our already overflowing calendar, or our boss asks us to solve a problem with the new piece of equipment. But if we are on the edge, and things are piling up a little too fast in our world, it might be a good time to take a break for a few hours and find a quiet place to dream; to create a vision and make the right things happen in our own world.