Advice for Future Leaders

Below were some comments and advice from  Dr. David Jemison at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.  He left us with this as part of the final course session of his career.  Great guy and great advice.

1.  Maintain personal integrity.
2.  Seek accomplishments and not excuses.  Accept responsibility for issues and defer kudos to your team.
3.  Make a commitment to someone bigger than yourself.  Be willing to make counter-intuitive decisions, and encourage risk taking in the context of the higher calling.
4.  Eliminate mediocrity by example.  Excellence comes from standards and self-discipline.  There are 100,000 new MBAs each year - how many are leaders?
5.  Do a superb job in your current position, and the future will take care of itself.
6.  Focus on the critical elements of success.  Know what you do to create value, and know how your firm creates value.  Communicate that to your team.
7.  Develop your people.  Have a critical but compassionate mind.  Encourage your people to grow and learn for a lifetime.
8.  Make change effectively and with consideration.  Understand that there's a cost associated with change, and compensate the people who need to change.  Think of ways to reduce certainty - your team will step up to solve challenges.
9.  Listen to the organizationally mute.  Know what the front line is going through.
10.  Surround yourself with challenging people.
11.  Be aware of the world and encourage your people to do the same.  Increase the variation in the inputs you get.
12.  Covet your time, and learn to say no.  Delegation is just fine.

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The SetPoint: Noble But Unappreciated | Automation World

As an industry, we have become too conservative, preferring to coax more years out of an automation system that is already 20 years old rather than take advantage of today’s technology.

Careful - extreme conservatism with something as expensive as process automation systems leaves you ripe for disruption.

Overall spot-on column from John Berra.

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Why Can't Big Companies Solve Big Problems? | Co.Design

It turns out that while large companies and organizations are phenomenally good at managing complexity, they're actually quite bad at tackling ambiguity. A complicated problem is like playing a game of chess, an ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time. In the latter situation, it's not the number of variables that kills you. It's what you don't know that you don't know.

Fortunately, there is an answer, and that answer is hybrid thinking. It turns out that the antidote to ambiguity is hybridity. Take healthcare for example. Is fixing the American healthcare system a medical problem, a political problem, an economic problem, a social problem, a religious problem, or a technological problem? The answer is "yes." It's all of the above.

However, the solution isn't just gathering together different disciplines. I've attended several conferences on healthcare that tried to get a doctor, an economist and a priest to walk into a room. That's the start of a great joke, but not an answer to the problem. Getting these folks together just results in having them talk past each other.

Hybrid thinking is more than just having multidisciplinary teams. It's about having multidisciplinary people -- folks who are one-part humanist, one-part technologist and one-part capitalist. When multiple disciplines inhabit the same brain, something magical starts to happen. The disciplines themselves start to mutate. They hybridize. We start practicing business like a designer -- think Mark Parker at Nike. We shape technology like a culturalist -- think Steve Jobs at Apple. And we start thinking about the most complex problems that plague our societies like an entrepreneur.

In a "startup culture," everyone does lots of different things because they *have* to, and amazing things get done and big problems get solved. In a "corporate culture," we specialize and compartmentalize to get scale, which lets us manufacture solutions but makes it hard to solve problems.

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Scaling Up

In WNYC's latest Radiolab podcast they discuss how the larger an organism is, the less energy is consumed per cell. The trade off is that those cells operate more slowly than they do in the small organism. Cities, however, don't follow the same model. As a city gets big, activity of its citizens increases because of human friction. Ideas start exchanging, culture grows, and activity speeds up.

So how does your company behave? More like an animal - slow but efficient? Or more like a city - fast and innovative at a cost? Which is the ideal?

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Five tips for leading creative teams

Generally, you should only need three.

1. Zero in on what really, totally, absolutely sucks.

2. Ask yourself why, why, why, why it sucks until you reach the root cause.

3. Now come up with at least ten ridiculously, hopelessly utopian, childish ways to make it totally, unstoppably awesome. The dumber in yesterday’s terms, the better.

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About

I’m a control systems engineer, a husband, and a dad to twin boys primarily.

I’m really interested in applying design principles to business processes and in trying to make work better and more fun.

I spend my spare time drawing, taking pictures, messing around with computers, following Texas A&M sports, and doing projects with my wife.

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