January 2007 Insight News

Newsletters To Become Occasional

After considerable thought, these newsletters will change from monthly to occasional, less frequent issues to facilitate addition of a blog to the www.CrispStrategies.com website at some point. Blogging allows readers to express ideas and ask questions more easily, for more frequent, shorter comments on the changing scene and for broader connections to relevant links.

The blog will focus on key issues related to “complete skills for leadership of the future.” In some sense this narrows the topic focus toward leadership issues, but also broadens it to include developing challenges that affect the way we work to achieve results and indirectly how our lives are lived, since work is such a large part of that.

The newsletter or “push communication” medium is more suited to selling – informing potential clients about upcoming events, offers and programs. This hasn’t evolved as the purpose of Insight News or the business. Fortunately there hasn’t been the need to sell powerfully and most “events” are in-house ones either not open or not applicable to readers. In keeping with the idea that effectiveness is achievable more easily through simplicity, there isn’t the need to flog tons of “product.” A blog is in some sense “self-advertising” because one can sign up for “pull communication” via RSS feeds to stay informed of updates to the extent the reader wishes. As these mechanisms become better known and more widely used, newsletters can become more occasional reminders of what’s available.

Once the blog is well up and running, there will be a newsletter announcement or you could check the web site periodically.

Your continued readership has been much appreciated and comments are always welcome. There is no action required at this point to continue to receive occasional newsletters in future.  

Question On Friends

Last month’s item about how having three or more close friends contributes to happiness drew a reader’s observation that male and female friendship patterns may differ significantly. Research shows this is true, with the caveat that the two patterns overlap. Some women will follow more of a “male” pattern and vice versa with a wide range of intermediate variations. In very general terms the experts tell us men often have more friends in total, possibly in wider-ranging networks, but stay away from intimate or “self-disclosing” conversations to a greater extent, generally preferring to relate on the basis of activities in common like sports, work or hobbies. Women on the other hand may average fewer friends in total, but with a larger proportion falling within close family relationships and more intimate friends with whom they feel they can more thoroughly discuss many more aspects of their lives.

The happy note is that despite these differences and challenges, people of both sexes who can maintain at least three or more positive friendships of the type they define as “close” by their standards are able to remain significantly happier and more stable emotionally at every stage of life. Hermits are generally observed to become increasingly odd, idiosyncratic… and it turns out, unhappy. We are social creatures, though only a relatively small circle of close associates seems to be required to sustain us in good shape.

Book of the Month

Somewhere there had to be one and I ran across it last week: a definitive book on the value and methods of developing habits. Dan Robey’s “The Power of Habit” is a short, easy read on how to chose and build a very useful range of life, health and success habits most quickly and effectively. He makes the point that you can often find the right habit that will solve any particular problem easily and quickly. Then you can begin to benefit from it right away, with further gains accumulating with momentum as you develop and practice it.

I had just concluded that the ultimate core of my 5 “complete skills” for leadership and success is the skill of building positive habits. At least now I don’t have to write the “how to” book. Robey actually provides a list of 81 habits, each set out in a page or two, that he recommends for life and work.

It’s interesting, too, to see the negative comments about the book on Amazon as well as lots of positive ones. The nay-sayers complain the book is too short and offers nothing new. On the contrary, it’s simplicity makes it more usable than more complex works that bury their advice in so many stories and variations that it’s difficult to pick out exactly what you should do in any given situation. Simplicity is crucial if one wants to apply a skill, so that it’s clear what to practice.

I’ve long since stopped worrying that someone has written exactly the book I’d like to have created. Each of us has contributions to make. We learn from the others. When a book comes along that captures so much of what you’d like to say, it becomes a great resource to refer people to for more information in particular areas that you believe are important. This is just such a book. You can read about it HERE. But you’ll notice it’s already out of print though published in 2003. I got a copy from the library and I see you can get the eBook version at http://www.thepowerofpositivehabits.com/. However, please note I haven’t read and I’m not endorsing any of the many other “products” packaged on that site, just this one item.

A Second Book

Another easy read is Zen Golf by Joseph Parent. It’s actually as much about Zen as Golf and makes an great introduction if anyone is interested in either. I no longer golf, but it’s by far the best new Zen book I’ve seen in years. It helps a bit if you’ve tried golf yourself since that makes it easier to see his point – why we have such a difficult time managing ourselves while trying to improve at new activities. However, it’s an easy leap to apply the same ideas to any other behavior you’re trying to master that you’re finding difficult. The same principles apply. There’s great advice on calming your mind, the “chattering monkey” that distracts us, as the Masters say, and an interesting collection of well-known and not so well-known Zen stories applied to real life activity. The Amazon page is HERE. This one is readily available and there’s a web site as well (http://www.zengolf.com/) though that’s really mostly about golf.

Life Balance in Law?

Harry Arthurs’ report was finally published in October and offers some very interesting social reasoning about better principles of life balance at work. He was hired by the Canadian government two years ago to make recommendations to update the federal labour standards for hours of work and has extended this to include human rights issues including bullying, harassment and abuse versus values and respect. These are all notoriously difficult issues to grapple with. Harry does a great job of finding a balance. Nothing, as he points out, will ever produce a perfect set of rules, but understanding why that’s so can take us a long way toward a set of principles for humane management as well as for formal labour law.

The report is available HERE. I found the most interesting parts, especially for casual readers like me, to be in chapters six, seven and ten. It remains to be seen if governments can take the next steps effectively, but the rationale here is outstanding.