"The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun Book Review

“The Myths of Innovation” by Scott Berkun

Acquiring the Book

    “The Myths of Innovation” by Scott Berkun was a book that I happened to stumble across while trying to return another book to a mentor.  We will call my mentor Mr. C for referencing purposes.  He had this book and another sitting on his desk.  He had admitted that he hadn’t read it yet and was interested in its contents but offered me the first go.  I took the opportunity of being the first human to read this copy of the book and quickly grabbed it up and made my way back to my office with it.

    You can easily purchase this book from outlets such as Ebay.com, Amazon.com, and Walmart.com for prices ranging between ten and twenty dollars.  I have a few relationships in my workplace where we actively trade books for a prolonged period of time because we spend so much of our time at work that it makes reading and digesting books a costly pastime.

Overview

    Like the book’s title infers, it is written around the subject of innovation.  This writing delivers a lot of facts about historical innovators and the challenges that they faced long before they were known as innovators, inventors, or even successful persons.  The flow of this book started out pretty exciting for me.  I felt its invitational pull that drew me back strongly in the beginning.  This leveled off through the middle portion of the book but then returned as strong as ever towards the end.

    I often found that the book would influence me to want to pursue my dreams as an entrepreneur and inventor.  It had me comparing some of my travels and journeys with those of historically famous innovators that were the subject of the read.  I spent quite a few hours lying on my back on my living room floor looking up at the pages and thinking of how I would apply the knowledge contained in the book to my own life.

     In tandem to reading this, I was also studying business law.  My studies and the contents of the book fit together perfectly.  I have this knack for tying various things going on in my life simultaneously together to provide a good jolt of purpose and drive to whatever it is that I am trying to accomplish.  I will forever remember this book for this chunk of time of my life.

Annotated Bibliography

    The first thing that really surprised me and sold me about this book was that it contained a complete annotated bibliography that covered the entire span of the book.  Literally every page donned reference material to whatever it was that author Scott Berkun was writing about.  This was impressive as I am weak for scholarly articles and citations.   Seeing them at the bottom of every page just made me happy inside.

    Being surrounded by all the reference material gave way to the feeling that what I was reading was true.  I knew with a little bit of further research that I could confirm what it was that the author was saying and follow up on what I was reading.  I embarrassingly admit that I did not do this much, rather, I took the book for face value and absorbed the content within it without using the referencing material more than two or three times.  Upon finishing the book, it had a larger complication of the bibliography’s references.  I didn’t take too much time to look through these as I had already had the book an unwelcome length of time, however, it still made me feel good that the author had taken so much time to provide sources for what he was writing about.

    This was especially helpful in the subject matter.  The author used references to point to the validity of his claims as they pertained to historical innovators, their innovations, and their life stories.  I do wish that it contained more faction research on the process of innovation and invention and followed up by pointing to journals and articles that he based his information on, but nonetheless, any reference is better than no reference at all.  The biggest benefit of the annotated bibliography is the feel of what you were reading.  It did not feel like you were reading some quickly scribbled and pushed self help book, however, it really felt like you were holding a tome of knowledge.

Towards the End

    Things really turned up towards the end of the book.  The author skillfully twists historical inventors, inventions, their strategies, and their stories together for you and allows you to look through their eyes and think how they think for a good bit before giving you some real gems.  Towards the end of the book Scott Berkun delves into very applicable tactics and methods that the modern person can use towards improving their skills as an innovator and as a person.

    The author wrote two excellent chapters on motivation and pitching ideas.  I previously hadn’t realized how important pitching an idea was for an innovator.  I hadn’t tied innovation to salesmanship.  I also hadn’t realized all the little things to keep in mind when bringing an idea to someone else.  I am truly enlightened for having read these two chapters alone.  I admit that I wish that the book was packed full of these gyms, and I imagine how exciting it would be to read had I felt the excitement of reading the entire book as I had felt during reading and digesting these two chapters.

    The author breaks down the sales pitch of an idea in one of the later chapters into various components.  He then explains that anyone delivering a sales pitch needs to have the same pitch in various time-length formats.  What I took from this is that anyone pitching an idea needs to have a ten second pitch, a one-minute pitch, and a ten-minute pitch for the same idea.  He then gives strategies for applying each and going from the first to the last in a progressive fashion.

Humor

    I think that it is worth it to mention that a lot of the fluidity and ease of reading this book comes from the passive humor that the author possesses.  He’s able to weave a very natural feeling humor in his writing that leaves you smiling when you come across it.  This is not a forced humor or a book so injected with humor that you have to look for the content, rather, it is genuine and imaginable that this is how you would experience communicating with the author in real life.

    A lot of whether I mesh with these types of non-fiction writings depends on if I find that through reading the book that the author’s personality is compatible with mine.  In this case, it very much was.

Overall Rating

    I feel like a pretty hard critic in giving book a 3.5 out of 5.  This writing really explored historical innovators and their challenges.  I feel like it spent a lot of time pounding on history and not enough time delivering unique technique to overcome.  I do like the level of encouragement to be an inventor, but a lot of it came from pointing to the persistence of other inventors who struggled a lot instead of pointing to ways to overcome these struggles.  Overall, I really enjoyed the book and would recommend others read it if they are interested in business, inventing, innovation, and changing the world.

My Headspace at the Time

    During this time, I had been doing a lot of dreaming in my spare and not-so-spare time.  I had crafted an idea of a licensing business based on research and innovation.  This is a hard sell in real life, because of the inherent risk in hoping that research transforms into profitable substance.  Nevertheless, the book had me thinking and dreaming in ways that I hadn’t thought or dreamt of before.  I think it is these influences in our emotions and thoughts that really make books hang with us over the course of our lifetimes.  I only hope that my next series of reads provides me with the same type of interface to my life as I am currently experiencing it.

Networking Strategies and Theory Vol. 2

Photo by Ani Kolleshi, Unsplash

Networking Strategies Vol. 2

Understanding Networking

    Networking is one of those general terms that may go misunderstood by individuals.  I believe it extends a little further than the definition of just “acquiring contacts”.  If we think of it in this way though, it is far better than thinking that it is something that it is not.  It has been important in my journey to grow my network that I think of the network as being “mutual contacts with purpose”.  I believe this definition could serve everyone better for several reasons.

    Understanding mutual contacts with purpose requires us to avoid mass-friending and following others on social media.  I believe that defining networking in this way gives us substance to what we are looking for when we refer to the purpose, as well as gives a mutually beneficial relationship with the contact by understanding that you cannot be networked with another without them also being networked with you.

Premature Pitching

    A problem that I have encountered enough to define it as a problem is the act of prematurely pitching your idea to a potential network connection.  This almost always fails in successfully securing another member of your larger team or network because, even if they were on your network, they may not vibe with your current idea.  It is important that we don’t go looking for network connections for professional or even personal use by trying to lure them in with a current pitch or idea.  This is exceptionally important from the entrepreneur’s point of view primarily because when you are salivating over an entrepreneurial idea, this is a natural tendency. 

    The network member relationship must mutually exist between two parties before any ideas, pitches, or opportunities can be presented.  This has been a showstopper for me.  I get all wound up about a recent idea that I have been building on, go to grow my network, cant stop thinking about network applications to this idea, and end up just delivering the idea to someone I am trying to add to my professional network.  Chances are the individual that I’m speaking to thinks that I’m a kook and likens me to a door-to-door amateur vacuum salesman or trying to sell him a life insurance policy via a cold call.

    It is important to deliver your interest in creating a network member relationship during that first conversation and avoid discussing business.  I would also argue that it takes some reinforcement of that relationship further before discussing profession business especially as it applies to entrepreneurial ventures or opportunities.  From the receiving point of a view, if you are trying to sell an entrepreneurial journey cold, the individual on the receiving end of this conversation would probably think that you are very desperate and if you indeed have a following that you have acquired through your methods, you are probably created a cult instead of an organization.

Network Member Relationship Theory

    I like this idea just because it so very well meshes with principles of leadership and team building.  The meat of this meal hovers around individual relationships with members of your network.  It is the difference between a cold call and a warm call from a salesman’s perspective.  This is a theory that describes the process of initially contact a potential future contact, gaining rapport by building a simple relationship, growing that relationship, and then having an integrated network-member that is more likely to actually hear any ideas that you have.  This is important in professional networks because you want as much honest feedback as you can get.  The better you develop relationships with members of your network, the more fine tuned your feedback machine is.

    The powerful application of this is that you can dial in exactly how much effort you plan on putting into various network members before you intend to ask for feedback on an idea or problem.  On giant platforms like LinkedIn, you may find that you must put a good deal of effort to build the relationship of your various connections before you are able to extract any honest feedback.  I have found that smaller forums and message boards of entrepreneurs and professionals usually are more willing to engage you on the short term just because of the common ground of being a part of a smaller community.  I have been capitalizing on this a lot and plan to do so much especially with the number of growing small community forums that exist.

Network Member Roles

    Having a network of contacts is an important part of developing professionally in the world.  We all communicate and exist in and through relationships.  Without doing this would make life a very lonely experience.  As we study building networks for professional purposes, we need to keep some attention on who our network members are and what roles do they fit for us.  When we dive deeper into the realm of building a very large multi-functional professional network, we are going to encounter many different types of contacts and network members.  It will be clear that some members may seem to be better at giving advice and consultation while others tend to be more available to give feedback.  You may find that some are interested in current projects that you are working on and are eager to learn about them.  Some may just be there for the drama, and some may be present to provide negativity or nothing at all.

    The key point in mentioning roles is that while we are focused in growing our network, we should be growing it in the direction that we want to use it.  Over the course of the past year I had read a couple books that mentioned networking, so I sought to network, and network I did.  I was so willing to have followers, network connections, and friends on Facebook and Instagram that I was literally connecting with anyone willing to click the accept button.  The point here is that many of the people who I connected with filled the role of nothing, ergo I never really created a network, rather I created a few internet accounts that had a high number of connections.

    The solution to my problem here was to identify a few roles of network members that I wanted to create and then actively look for network members that could specifically fill that role.  There is still a lot of filtering through people through various attempted connections and contacts, however, it becomes clear when you find someone that can provide at least one aspect of the things that you are looking for.

    It is important to not be too restrictive in this area.  Chances are if we are honest with ourselves and set out to connect only with those who could help push our current entrepreneurial venture forward, we would all end up with a very small list of connections.  I think diversity here is important.  We need to properly identify various areas that can be occupied by networking members.  I think it is important to create an email or contact list and list them individually by their potential roles to be served in your network.  I think that if you are properly developing a network member relationship then you could even discuss this with them, as well as ask them what roles that they are wanting you to fill as a member of their professional network.

    When thinking of specific roles, I like to broadly define many categories.  Mentors, mentees, those that provide consultation and advice, those that provide feedback, those that are able to help promote a venture, those that may be directly interested in helping a venture succeed, potential partners, other dreamers, general colleagues, and even unknown are all roles that I consider when I initially meet someone new.

Conclusion

    Even if we are going nowhere and doing nothing, I think it is obvious that human beings are social creatures.  Having a network of contacts is essential even in the dull activity of nothingness.  If we escalate this thought to the next level of having goals and working towards them, it becomes even more clear that networking is necessary.  Our success depends on the success of our ability to effectively network.  I think focusing on the effectiveness of network should precede focus towards an efficient system of networking.  I do not believe that we should do one and completely avoid the other, however, I believe that one should come before the other.

    I believe that once we are effective at building our network, we need to continue this into a more efficient vehicle for networking.  Efficiency in networking will be a topic of a future content submission.

5 Ways to Continue Learning in Leadership

5 Ways to Continue Learning in Leadership

Why Learning is Important as a Leader

    In leadership often the key to our success is our ability to learn, adapt, and apply.  We must be able to learn new information and drive change by disseminating that information.  Being able to do the latter is a bit useless without the former.  A foundational skill that leaders must master is learning, and believe it or not, it is often trickier than it sounds.

    It is kind of silly that in our public-school system we devote a lot of time and resources on learning very specific topics, however, very little time and resources teaching students how to learn.  We encounter several situations where individuals struggle with learning and as a society, we are quick to label them as having a learning disability, when in all reality the case too often is that the individual has never been taught how to learn.

    I believe that with enough time, effort, and self-understanding that anyone can learn anything.  I don’t believe there are learning constraints that prevent certain individuals from learning certain topics.  I would encourage every individual to discover how they learn best and how to apply various techniques to improve their ability to learn.  I would strongly suggest that individuals interested in leadership take a much more aggressive stance at understanding how they learn best to maximize their chances of success as a leader.  A leader who is able to learn any topic before adapting and applying it to their specific situation or organization is unparalleled by an individual who is trapped within a set of learning constraints.

 

What I mean when I say “Learn how to Learn”

    When an individual who understands how they learn best is introduced to new material that may be foreign to them, they begin a set of practices that includes determining whether they should learn this new material or whether they should discard it as unnecessary for them to learn.  If they determine that they want to learn it, they actively use techniques that they know will allow them to absorb and retain information.  When an individual engages learning in this manner, it could be said that they know how to learn.

    Understanding how our body and brain learns best is a skill that can be acquired.  This may seem like an oxymoron, because if we innately knew how to learn, then we would just learn how to learn, right?  If we didn’t than we never would.  It may be confusing if you look too deeply into it, but I suggest that we think about it more broadly.  Like many things, some people naturally take to them.  It seems common-sensical to some people that if they wanted to pick something up that they knew nothing about that they would focus on that topic, use their inner dialogue to talk to themselves about it, take notes on it, and immerse their lives in and around it.

    When I say, “Learn how to Learn”, I am talking about acquiring an inner self confidence that one can learn and apply any topic to ones life or organization regardless of the complexity of the topic or the public opinion regarding how “difficult” the topic is.  While attending college I remember of the horror stories of learning calculus, and how it was a deal breaker for many college students trying to obtain a degree.  Often times, many students would change their majors to an “easier” one that did not require this course, when in reality, the approach required to learn this topic is much like the approach required to learn any topic.

    Let’s explore some techniques in learning how to learn, as well as techniques for the actual learning itself.

1. Recognize that learning is a skill

    The key word here is self-confidence.  We need to studying learning as a topic and identify it as an actual skill that we can possess much like tying a shoe.  Once you learn how to tie a shoe, you don’t worry about whether you will be able to tie a different shoe.  When you stumble upon a different pair of shoes to tie, you approach it in the same way to tie the very first shoestring that you encountered.  We need to look at learning exactly like this.

   This involves identifying some techniques that mesh well with our mind, and then when challenged with retaining new information, begin applying them until an adequate amount of information on the topic has been retained.  Once we have adopted this way of thinking about learning, we are empowered to desire to learn things that we would have previously dismissed as un-learnable.  Also key here is simply the realization that retention of information is just that, and successfully mastering this step has to do with perception more than practice.  If we allow a small paradigm shift here in order to view learning a bit differently then we will have already begun the transformation.

    This applies directly to leadership because often we are challenged to learn things that may not particularly interest us, or that would otherwise seem too tall of a task.  As leaders we will encounter many situations where we are tasked to learn something new and then regurgitate this information to others.  We do not want to be the leaders that are the last to learn a new topic, after all, that would aggravate the very definition of leadership.

2. Taking Notes

    It is no coincidence that some of the best learners are also the best note takers.  It is widely accepted that taking hand-written notes is a highly effective way to retain information.  I feel that it is almost a negative stigma to be “that person with a notebook” in a non-classroom environment.  The truth is, if you want to be prepared to learn anything on short notice, you would be wise to carry around a notebook and a pen.

    The benefits of taking hand-written notes are multiple.  Just by having recorded something down for later review is a benefit.  I would also count the slow inner dialogue that happens when we write something down as a direct benefit due to the familiarity we gain by consciously talking to ourselves regarding the information that we are recording.  I also believe that something magical happens when we craft the wording for our notes that doesn’t necessarily happen when we just unconsciously copy something down.  I was given the opportunity to attend a broadcast by Jim Kwik, who is a trainer of learning and speed reading.  Mr. Kwik advises that we should take notes directly by copying them down, and then take our own notes of our notes where we further explore what we recorded to ourselves.  You can find more information from Mr. Jim Kwik below as well as some books related to the topic.

http://kwikbrain.com/recall-masterclass?gclid=Cj0KCQiA_rfvBRCPARIsANlV66PwDaZ2pyRC6w2itbZBn_0fB4oP-vFmuAuu-QdF27T-G7keTHwPyQwaAtn9EALw_wcB

    Just about everywhere I go I will have some sort of media to record information.  Not only is this beneficial to learning new things, but we often overlook retaining information about meetings, people, and events.  We can use the power of retention and note-taking to maximize our effectiveness as leaders by using this technique in various situations for reinforcing retention of various things.

3. Consistent Exposure

    I believe in consistent exposure to media that we wish to learn.  I believe that if we want a more thorough understanding of a topic, then we should seek to immerse ourselves in that topic in as many ways as possible.  I spend a lot of my time on the road commuting to and from work, and I do not like to think that I just waste this time in travel.  Aside from time reflecting and listening to current news, I listen to a lot of books on Audible.  Audible has a wonderful credits program where you are able to purchase books for bargain prices as well as a wonderful software implemented to read these books to you.

Jim Kwik also said that the benefits to having a book is that an author is able to condense ten years of experience into a few hours of reading.  If our goal is to compound the information that we have as individuals, we should be spending a lot of our time learning the amassed information of others.  For this reason, I recommend books as a source of information on just about any topic that exists.

    Audible isn’t just something that I blindly market.  While I am an affiliate marketer of audible and its products, I regularly use this as a core tool to reinforcing my learning.  The amount of information that I have extracted from audible during my commutes is immeasurable.  While it may not be for everyone, I highly recommend it for anyone seeking to collect information from reading books, but due to circumstances listening to the books is the most feasible way to digest them.

4. Continuing Formal Education

    Now more than ever it is possible to continue your formal education with smaller investments of time.  With the proliferation of online courses, it is possible to integrate obtaining a formal education in just about any instance of life or living arrangement.  I do not recommend over-booking yourself and stretching yourself so thin that you live in a world of stress, however, I encourage everyone to constantly be actively learning.  Taking one course or so at a time is relatively inexpensive and provides direction to your life as well as keeping the blade of your mind sharp.

    There are so many topics that you can pick up on that aren’t taught formally in grade school.  I look at all of the instances of finance and money as they relate to life, and how ill prepared high school graduates are to actually enter and succeed in the real world of money, bills, and finances.  While I don’t discredit being goal focused toward a degree while obtaining a formal education, spot educating and taking only courses that you are interested in for the knowledge that they can provide is also very beneficial.  Regardless of your path, something here is better than stagnation and nothing.  I think it is also important to mention that if you are degree motivated to not be dissuaded by the amount of time it will take to accomplish this goal if you only have the time available for taking one course at a time.

5. Becoming Emotionally Invested

    I recommend that anything it is that you seek to learn that you become emotionally invested in that topic.  This can be tricky to do depending on our personal interest in the subject matter, but with practice we can learn to manipulate our emotions for our benefit.  When we begin the journey of learning something new, we need to tie this to our emotions.  The best way to do this for me is to allow the knowledge of the subject matter to excite me.  As I was learning topics such as organic chemistry, I envisioned myself being able to start entrepreneurial journeys related to chemistry and felt the emotions related to success in the area.  I believe that using our imagination here is the key to unlocking our ability to manipulate our emotions.

    I recall back to the near distant past where I was challenged to thoroughly learn the topic of calculus.  I wasn’t really interested in this topic and did not particularly care for its complexity, however, I began to manipulate my emotions in order to become emotionally invested in understanding calculus by looking back into what some famous physicists were able to prove by knowing calculus.  I imagined what it must have been like to use calculus to postulate theories and understand some hidden meanings of our universe and then I used these emotions to drive the learning process.  I allowed the emotions to flow through me as I would engage new sections and topics of calculus, and allowed those emotions to drive me forward as I was taking notes and reading content.

The Take Away

    As leaders, we need to be well versed in learning.  We need to understand how our brain works and use it in order to retain new information as well as sort through and analyze various bits of information from many sources.  I believe this is a facet of our mental health that goes largely ignored.  I believe this is a cultural problem.  As a society we are so focused on so many specifics that we forget some very key general points to life.  We need to keep the blade of our mind sharp, and to do that requires constant work.

    I believe that it is very easy to recognize a leader who isn’t opposed to learning.  I believe that these leaders give the greatest contribution to their organizations and have many opportunities that others do not.  I would encourage every leader to become a beacon of learning and drive the passion of learning and brain health into others with passion.  I believe that by applying these techniques will give us a good framework for learning and retaining information that will help us along the way.  Feel free to comment, email, or reach out to me on any one of my various social media platforms if you would like to discuss this further.

  

2 Key Questions a Leader Should Ask Themselves Before Leading

2 Key Questions a Leader Should Ask Themselves Before Leading

    Sometimes we reach a point in our group, team, or organization where we want to identify an opportunity to step up and lead.  Sometimes it may not be formal or permanent.  It may be a passing thought, or a notion to help the current situation progress along for a short time.  In any case, potential leadership is very thought provoking.  Earlier in my career I would say that it reminds me of going out on a date for the first time, awkward and forced.  As time has passed, I would say that it becomes natural and easy, sometimes making what would be an awkward situation one more bearable for all involved.

    I joined a collegiate organization some time ago where I was required to complete multiple steps before induction.  There were maybe a dozen steps to complete.  Towards the end of this period of induction, I was randomly paired with a group of people.  Among ourselves we had to develop a team complete with assigned jobs and self-prepared meetings.  I feel that this was in a lot of ways a test, because in our first scheduled meeting, we all showed up having no idea what to do.  While my group members and I sat around a table staring at each other and talking it became clear that there was a lack of leadership.  A few members had left early, some other broke off and began talking about life in general, and some were scoffing about how poorly ran the organization was.

     We were all in the dark.  We had no clue what to do or what we were even meeting for aside from us understanding that it was a requirement for induction.  Through this first painful meeting, I had gotten only one thing, someone had to make the next one less painful, assuming anyone even returned.  I decided to take the position of facilitator and prepare for the next meeting, hoping that if nothing else we would have something to do besides gossip about politics.

     Sometimes it takes being placed in an awkward situation with others before it is clear who the leader may be, and sometimes it will be surprising to see who that person is.  Whether it is a blindly assembled group, or a department in an organization, there should be only a few unorganized gatherings before it becomes clear who the leader is.  Here we look at some key questions to ask ourselves to determine if we have identified an opportunity to lead.

    

1.  Do we have the functional or technical knowledge required to lead?

    Having the functional knowledge to lead a group is a key question to ask yourself.  It is not a black and white barrier that should direct whether you pursue a leadership role.  It should, however, give you the direction that you should take if you do decide to pursue that leadership role.  If you conclude that you do not have a lot of functional knowledge of the group that you want to lead, then we must understand this if we decide to push forward.

    Function or technical knowledge is the boots-on-the-floor know how of getting a job done and demonstrating successful action against the task.  A leader that has a load of technical knowledge and the skills related to successfully obtaining the goals will approach leading a team a bit differently than one who has little technical knowledge.  To this leader I would suggest a teaching and mentoring strategy.  A lot can be gained, and relationships can be developed by a leader who has knowledge to distribute among a group of peers.

    A lack of functional or technical knowledge does not mean that we should avoid pursuing leadership.  It should be a factor in your decision though, as opting to lead without having a broad span of knowledge of the tasks at hand does make the job more difficult.  To the leader without technical knowledge, I would advise taking a learn together approach, and never shy away from the opportunity to learn from a team member.  There is great value in allowing a team member the opportunity to teach you something.

    In my case, I chose the latter approach.  I knew that I had the ability to publicly speak, as well as research and present information that I had acquired, so I contacted my group and let them know as long as no one opposed it that I would have something prepared for us to review at our next meeting.  After scheduling the day with everyone, I was nervous about what may happen.

   

   

2.  Do we have proper relationships established with our team?

    One of the most difficult situations that a leader can face is being thrust into a new team with the expectation of leading them.  Success isn’t guaranteed, goals are not understood, and the people can sometimes be strangers.  It is much more favorable to lead a team that you have already had the opportunity to develop relationships with.  Developing relationships is one of the key tools of a leader.  It is arguably one of the most important things that a leader can do, and the flavor of these relationships will often determine the level of success that a leader will experience.

    To a leader that has had the opportunity to develop proper relationships with his team, I would suggest that he search those relationships and make certain that they are facilitating good communication as well as mutual respect.  If these two qualities of a relationship aren’t present, then the leader should be doing things to foster the growth of them.  Without these qualities in the relationships, success will be very difficult.  If good communication and mutual respect are present, the ability to lead will be readily available and from here it is simply undertaking the task.

    After being thrust into an environment with strangers, and attending a dry pointless meeting, I knew that we had to turn it around.  It seemed clear that we were all good communicators that had adequate mutual respect; however, our little organization just required some leadership.  In this informal situation, it was as simple as standing up and doing it.  I didn’t believe it should be a forceful or delegatory thing, rather, I first communicated that I had done some research on how our group should be put together and suggested that if no one else had any material, that I be allowed to present what I had learned.

     After playing a presentation that I had found on my chapter’s website, I outlined what I thought the meeting should include and led the discussion.  I asked questions and listened to answers.  As we continued and time passed, we all became more familiar with each other and felt exactly what it was that this challenge was about.  This wasn’t some formal take-charge-and-conquer test, rather, it was a test of our ability to come together as a team and hold each other accountable to being team members.

 
The Take Away

    I believe these are two key questions we should ask ourselves before we decide to venture into the idea of leadership in any situation.  Regardless of our direction of thought, or where we end up after pondering all the information, I believe that the task of asking ourselves the questions better prepares us to lead.  We can further analyze and break this down, however the idea itself is intended to spark the thinking that a potential leader should be doing before undertaking the task.

    In some instances, we may decide that leadership in the current situation isn’t for us, or that there is someone better suited.  To that I would say, even a leader knows when to follow.  A good leader knows when to be led.  It should not be taken as a failure when it becomes apparent that there is someone more qualified to lead a team than ourselves, rather, we should still fulfill our obligation to be team members and continue to strive to achieve the organizations goals, however big or small.

    It is important as leaders that we continue to think about these things as we travel through life and come across different situations that require different things of us.  It is important that leaders identify situations where we believe that our service as a leader will affect the outcome of the group for the better, and to allow ourselves to be a special part of the group, for the better of the group.  There is no more fulfilling thing to be than a servant leader, and that will be a topic of future discussion.

   

Group Decision Making

Group Decision Making

    As leaders and managers, we frequently encounter problems that may be bigger than us and require more than us as individuals to solve.  We must look forward and determine if these situations would be better to call in a team of people to attempt to solve the problem.  While this is more common at certain levels of management than others, these strategies can be applied in many different areas with as large or as small of a team as you wish to use to conduct them.

    There are some intrinsic benefits as well as disadvantages to using groups to approach problem solving and decision making.  We need to keep in mind some generalizations about employing a group to tackle issues.

Pros and Cons to Using a Group

    A group may be great in that it allows us a larger amount of knowledge overall.  We can tap into multiple different perspectives on issues, stimulate one another, and engage in meaningful discussion while building relationships.  Using a group usually gives us better understanding of the decision in the end because of the exploratory process during the exchange of communication during the group meeting.  I would agree that there is also a deeper commitment to the solution of the problem so long as a real consensus results from the conclusion.  For the members of a group working on the problem, there usually exists a feeling of one-ness or belonging that brings members of the group together.

    On the opposite side of the coin, there are some disadvantages to using a group to problem solve or make decisions.  Groups take time to put together, and even more time to come to an agreement.  The time it takes for a group to come to a conclusion is usually exponentially longer than it would take an individual to make a decision.  For this reason, we need to make sure that we select the correct situation to employ a group.  Groupthink is a term we use to describe when all members of a group agree with each other regardless of their personal beliefs.  Groupthink can undermine the ability of a group to do what it set out to do.  Another common disadvantage of employing a group is that a few tend to frequently dominate or intimidate the discussion which prevents others from really being heard.

    We should also explore the tendency for a group to engage in goal displacement, where the initial goal of the group meeting is replaced by another goal, which may be as simple as winning an argument that arose during the meeting between two coworkers.  We need to avoid such things as this as well as satisficing, or, settling for a sub-optimal decision and not allowing the group to produce the most optimum result.

Analyzing the Cons

    As we can see there are a lot of cons to creating a group forum to take on a problem or issue.  What this means is that when we decide to employ a group to engage a problem, we need to do so strategically and take advantage of possible benefits.  The benefits listed above for using a group need to be maximized, and the group chosen needs to be chosen with exploiting those benefits in mind.  We must exploit the benefit of having a larger pool of knowledge by choosing group members that each contribute something unique to the group.

    We must minimize the cons when we begin our journey into using a group by 

understanding that groups can be less efficient because they take more time to come to a decision than a single person would.  We need to realize that the size of the group will play a direct role in the quality of the decisions made by the group, as well as the communication contributed by each member.  We cannot allow overconfidence to appear as a burden on our group, with the members going into the meeting thinking that they need to contribute less because, after all, a group is working on it that could afford them an opportunity to slack.

Considering the Group Approach

    A group approach should be considered when it can clearly increase the quality of the outcome or decision.  We must honestly ask ourselves when we encounter a decision, “are we able to make a quality decision without the help of others?”  If there is no quality perk, then why wouldn’t we just make the decision ourselves?  We also need to take acceptance of the decision into consideration.  Often a decision is more widely accepted if more than one person is involved in its conception, and people may feel like jumping on board if they know that a group of people took time to come together to reach it.

    There is also a developmental factor that should be considered when we are thinking about applying a group approach to solving a problem or making a decision.  We need to ask ourselves if there is opportunity for the development of the organization or the individuals of the group.  We should take some time on this part of considering the group approach, because often the development of the leaders of an organization may be more of a benefit of the group forums than the conclusion or the reason for meeting in the first place.  This affords us a multi-shot strategy for organizational improvement in a lot of cases.

The Take Away

    I really enjoy the discussion and comradery involved in a group setting, and I enjoy being a part of group meetings.  I think it is beneficial to team members and leaders alike to feel like they are considered when an important decision is being made.  I think too little focus is put on the development of the team, organization, and individuals when we allow a foster of group thinking to be created.  Too often we focus on the cons to using a group and for that reason we avoid using one.  While I think it may be silly to employ a group to make every little decision, we need to have a consistent group dialogue tackling some important decisions along many different fronts.  There should be common forums where groups meet to make decisions that may be outside of the box, and that is fine, because this still takes advantage of the developmental benefits of allowing a group to engage in the decision making and problem-solving process.