Perfection

by Charles Plant | Apr 4, 2014 | Leadership Development

I’ve had a debate recently about the true meaning of perfection and I thought that derivation week would be a good time to explore this on the web. The surprising thing is that people have a different understanding of what it means than the meaning that was originally intended.

Perfection comes from the Latin ‘Perfectus’ which itself comes from ‘Perficio’ which means to finish or bring to an end. (I’ve borrowed from Wikipedia for much of this analysis by the way.) Aristotle described three shades of meaning to the term. Something is perfect:

• which is complete — which contains all the requisite parts;
• which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better; or
• which has attained its purpose.

Unfortunately, perfectionists nowadays ascribe the second meaning to the term and never bring something to an end because it can always be made better. This is particularly problematic in the knowledge economy.

Take this blog for instance. When is it perfect?

• How do I know when it contains all the requisite parts?
• I could write on this topic forever as I’ll never achieve something that could not be made better.
• But I could call it perfect when I think I’ve conveyed my point.

I read recently that the federal Department of Transportation took over three weeks, many people and countless hours just to write one tweet. This is perfection run amok and the problem with the second definition of perfection. In the knowledge economy, nothing ever achieves perfection in a way that it could not be made better.

In the manufacturing economy you can almost achieve the second meaning of perfection but in the knowledge economy, you have to stop at being satisfied when something has attained its purpose.

That’s why when I do something I always ask myself how little I can do to meet my objective. That for me is attaining perfection. And that’s why there are ofetn speling, grammarical, and compositionel errors in this blog.

Executive

by Charles Plant | Apr 1, 2014 | Leadership Development

While we’re having Fun with Words Week here at Material Minds headquarters, I think we should look at the term ‘Executive.’ Much attention is paid to what the difference is between management and leadership. And in company ranks we have managers and leaders.

Fortunately, there is no confusion as to what we should call the people who manage as they are called management. But the leadership of an organization isn’t called that, they’re called Executives.

Frequently you hear an executive saying that their job is to lead and not manage as management is the purview of managers. But then if an executives job is leadership, what is leadership exactly?

That’s where I come down to the meaning of the word Executive. Look at it carefully and it comes from the word Execute. Yes, a CEO’s role is as the Chief Execute-ive Officer. It can’t be any clearer than that. An executive’s prime responsibility is to execute.

That’s why leadership is about setting strategy, inspiring people and executing. An executive who thinks the job ends at setting strategy and who leaves execution to management is not doing his job because the foundation of this job is to execute.

Decide

by Charles Plant | Mar 31, 2014 | Leadership Development

Have you noticed that there are a lot of words with similar endings? Suicide, homicide, genocide, pesticide etc. They all end with the suffix ‘cide’ but perhaps you didn’t notice that there meanings are all similar. They all refer to death, destruction and killing.

That’s because their ending is from the Latin ‘caedere’ which means to kill. (Now you can impress people in conversation with your obvious erudition.)

Funny thing is that the word ‘decide’ has the same ending and the same meaning. When you decide something it means that you have to kill something else. And this is why it is so hard for people to decide: they have to kill something.

And they get stuck in the Six Stages of Change and can’t break loose. If you want to help people decide, you must help them through those six stages of change until they reach acceptance and are able to kill whatever they can’t stand to lose.

Or when that doesn’t work, you have to decide, which is all right for many people as they would rather someone else do the killing.

The Six Stages of Change

by Charles Plant | Mar 18, 2014 | Leadership Development

I was talking with Mike Tobias of Mercanix fame the other day and he related a good story about a bit of systems implementation work he was doing. He was training users at a client’s location and had a really varied set of reactions amongst employees.

Some of them loved the new software, others were skeptical, and others were vehemently adamant that it would never work.

Mike suddenly realized that this group he was dealing with were in fact grieving for the loss of their old way of doing things and that he had to take many of them through the Six Stages of Grief before they could all be onboard.

In case you forget, the six stages are:

1. Shock
2. Denial
3. Anger
4. Bargaining
5. Depression
6. Acceptance

I had never thought of people reacting to Organizational Change projects in the same albeit smaller way that they react to a death in the family but it really is the same thing.

Some people hate change and you have to drag them kicking and screaming from their old way of doing things. You have to help them grieve. Other people are more open to change and you don’t need to babysit them as much as they move quickly through the six stages of change.