I Hate It When Someone Tells Me What To Do.

Good Ideas Often Find Their Beginning In The Minds Of Others!

One of the children playing next door uses her age to manipulate her two older sisters.  I can see them playing down the hill about a tenth of the mile away.  One thing cool about being uphill is that noise travels uphill very well and very clear.  The wavelengths of sound have no interferences to break them up.  They arrive to my yard in clear tones.  I hear just about everything those children say when they are outside playing in the yard.  For the most part it is a very cool discovery.  They are pretty good kids.

One of the more fascinating parts of listening in on the volley of conversations between these three sisters is to hear how they use their words to 'work' on each other.  They play with a good deal of creative manipulation.  It gets real clever, even at this young age.  The youngest one has learned the art of manipulating her young age very well.  She plays out to be very innocent in her acquisition process.  She usually wins.  She has become very good at her skills.  The two older siblings get taken for a ride more than half of the time.  What's more, the baby has figured out how to manage the parents in a dispute.  It is clever stuff.

There is another factor I find interesting about this unprotected lesson I receive from these three children.  I am also able to get a good sense for how their parents say and do the things they practice, as well.  I hear how the parents think and how they use speech to manage conflict and cooperation.  It simply comes from the children's mouths and actions.  The children only practice what they have witnessed.  If the parents are abusive, so will the children behave.  If the parents use foul language, the children will also.  If the parents use divide and conquer techniques in their leadership patterns, so will the children.  It is simple to detect.  It is simple to see.

My parents, for example, hate it when someone tells them what to do.  They have always hosted that kind of slant in what they do all through their lives.  It has become a lot of who they are.  This characteristic is certainly not a flaw of life that many others have somehow missed.  In fact, it is quite common.  Millions of people hate to be told what to do.  Millions of those people are parents like mine.  I am a parent.  I hate to be told what to do.  We pass this stuff on.  We are not any different than that small family down the hill.  All of us are prone to behave the same way our parents taught us to behave.  Those three little girls downhill of my home play and do the very exact same stuff their parents do.  We are all by-products of our social heredity.  That little sister has learned the art of doing what her parents allow her to do.  It is not bad parenting.  It is life and human beings.

When a business leader hires the next employee to do a job that needs to be done, early life patterns become part of what that leader has agreed to manage when they hire who they hire.  We all bring our past experiences forward when we go where we go, when we do what we do.  That becomes how we manage where we are.  It is not rocket science.  It is not a flaw of society.  It is exactly the very thing that makes humans become humans.  Some day a business leader will need to hire that little girl who has learned the art of clever manipulation.  When she becomes of age to work, she will be seasoned very well at what she does to win her ways.

Page two.

Business Repair, Not As Pragmatic As First Thought!

Sometimes It Becomes All About Me!

How is your family doing?  Communicating well?  Is everyone respectful with each others dreams, work, lifestyle and choices?  Families can be a bit funny.  They can subvertly demolish one of their members dreams and never notice it.  It can happen in a silent process.  It can become unnoticed to the one who delivers the crushing blows and as a result, the structure begins to deteriorate on the corners and around the edges of the family bond.  How is your family doing?  Are the dreams being supported and nourished?  Or are those dreams swept under the rug and walked on?

That line of questioning seems to be a bit personal.  Most of us are offended by stuff like that.  We would prefer to keep our private stuff, private.  We especially do not want to talk about this kind of tough stuff.  This is not the kind of business talk we prefer to support.  That stuff is private.  Family junk is private stuff.  Business junk is private stuff.  Only the troubled people of the world wear this kind of stuff on their sleeves.  The wise ones suppress it well.  Right?  Or at least we think this is how it is done.  Wisdom tends to work in peculiar ways.

Junkie stuff comes with all relationships.  We know and accept this truth.  Even families wear uncomfortable personality stuff.  We all get that.  We all deal with junkie stuff in our personal lives.  We have brothers and sisters who do not understand us, respect us or communicate well with us.  Some of our parents ignore who we have become.  They do not want us to be who we have become.  In some quirky sense, some of our best days with our families are days we spent apart.  Many families live in this kind of reality.  They conjure up images about how the other members live that are untrue, inaccurate and disrespectful.  This is how many families coexist in their growing up worlds.  They spin out incorrect images about the relationships they have and do not have with the other members in the family and in the end, those images become misaligned to the point that they hold very little accuracy about how this family is actually structured.  The family unit grows up surrounding incorrect images about who they really are.  Many families live in a world with this kind of breakdown.  They begin to live in a world of illusions.

Guess what?  This is exactly how a business leader develops a leadership role that produces terrible long term results.  The leader becomes inoculated with the process of supporting wrong images about what should be done.  Bad habits occur.  Bad habits become the rule of operations.  Eventually that business leader functions their business lives completely immersed into a series of patterns that are completely incorrect and ineffective, but yet, are very complicated to identify.  They operate their business style in such a complicated set of emotional surges that even the best counsellor can become terribly confused about where to begin.  This is exactly how many families live out their related lives.  Mixed up and mixed out.

Business repair is not as pragmatic as one might first suspect.  In fact, it is very complicated stuff.  What needs to be done is usually one of the most obvious things to see.  Getting to doing that obvious stuff is where the business gets lost.  Between the obvious stuff that needs to be done and the work that supports seeing it gets done is a bunch of wrong images about how to accomplish that stuff.  Those wrong images are deeply real.  They are dominating the decisions that must be altered.  They are surrounding the wrongs with so much protection that even the Indians can no longer be mentioned when they are attacking the cowboys in the wagon because the cowboys ought not to be there in the first place.  It all becomes so intertwined within the political messes we produce that thwarts us away from doing better work.  This is how a business goes astray and why it remains steadfastly determined to fail day after day.  It has nothing to do with not knowing what must be done.  It has all to do with protecting our egos.  Business acts a lot like families sometimes act.  Incorrectly.

Page two.