Ever since reading Good to Great by Jim Collins I have been fascinated by the concept of the flywheel. Working hard on the right things consistently over time and then having your efforts compound for massive impact over time. I have touched on the idea here and here.
Leadership is a difficult topic to create a flywheel around because there is not a shared definition of leadership in the community. The definition I choose to use is:
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Recently I finished Tribes by Seth Godin. His books are always interesting and insightful. In Tribes he had a point that hit home for me. The point went something like this.
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Recently I had the sad and beautiful privilege of attending a funeral for a little baby boy that lived for eight days.
I cannot even begin to fathom the depth of pain and sorrow that would be associated with losing a child.
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Amazon, Netflix, Disney+, Google, and many others make their money by providing content that is personalized on their platform.
When you log into Amazon.com the entire canvas is tailored to your shopping and search history. It is all very personalized to every individual.
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Recently I attended a Summit where all the individuals in our organization got together (many of us in-person) to connect and learn.
An observation I had while talking to several different colleagues is that there is an almost natural or default behavior to return to the way things used to be before COVID. What was “muscle memory” is coming back to all of us as we come back to the office. The challenge that this presents is that our default behavior completely disregards everything we have learned from our COVID experience.
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Several years ago I was in Copenhagen Denmark with my wife, and we were going through a Danish furniture museum. The Dutch (and Scandinavian’s) are famous for their timeless furniture designs. There is a decent chance you have some type of furniture in your home right now that was inspired by designs from these Scandinavian designers.
I was particularly curious about how one could be so consistent in a design and have the design resonate with people for decades to come. There was a plaque that I read that contained an idea that has stuck with me ever since I read it.
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Behavior change is hard. This month I read in a book called The Joy of Leadership about a tactic that can help us with the changes we want to make in our lives.
There are moments in each one of our lives where we feel particularly inspired to change something. Several years back, as I have written before my wife and I wanted to have a family motto and incorporated deep meaning for us. That motto became “Nicholls Climb Mountains”. Our kids were quite young at the time, and I wanted this to stick so I created a logo / image / icon to help us all remember our family motto and to act accordingly.
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For the last several years I have been running leadership development programs and a core component of those programs has always been a variation on a “learning group”. A group of learners going through a shared experience and learning from each other while they progress.
Historically about 80% of learning groups that I have looked after have been miserable failures. The leaders do not take the time to meet with each other and when they do, they do not have anything meaningful to say to each other so little value is produced.
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There is learning from others and learning from your own experiences. I learned from my own experiences the hard way about recovery and stress recently despite knowing it intellectually.
The months of January and February felt non-stop at work, and this increased all levels of stress in my life. I tried to be proactive and take a 4-day weekend to attempt to properly recover and reset.
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Seven months ago, I wrote about compounding the right things, I want to build on the idea as it relates exponential growth.
There are small practices or habits, that when performed with consistency, will build and compound over time. Find the right set of practices and growth becomes exponential.
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I teach and invite people to act. Proud husband, father and amateur pizzaiolo