Cam Findlay

Archive for the ‘Thinking’ Category

We had (at work) a great core values session with Kendall Langston from the Results Group yesterday to really nail down just what it is that we believe in and want to ingrain in everything we do at RockStar Recipes.

This is what we came up with…

• Curiosity – To learn new things, in the future, in our history, in people and relationship building, teaching methods.
• Embracing technology - Adapting and utilising new tech as it rolls out, being tech savvy and aware of what is new and finding best places to use it (or not use it) to augment our teaching, our delivery, our work flow and our lives.
• The experience to teach – building mentor relationships, being skilled in what we teach, having great communication, producing great content and resources, inspiring students – this is internal as well as external… that is we at RockStar Recipes learn as much as our students.
• Being a musician – Being active in your music community, being creative, expression through music, seeing music as a universal language.
• Being a “tight band” (or band member) - Being a “good dude”, team player, serving the band not just the self, having a friendly vibe, laid back & focused, supportive of the other band members!

Companies don’t have core values… people within them DO and I think we have really nailed what makes us at Rock Star Recipes tick, no marketing or PR bullshit… bottom up not top down,  just real honest values that we live and bring to our work.  It’s just like being part of a band and we all bring our unique style and character.
We hope that our customers, fans and friends can also relate to them and join us in our movement to shape the next generation of musicians!

I finished reading Seth’s book tribes a few weeks back and really enjoy his work… Check out this great video, I will be posting a few other videos and interesting internet/techy/new thinking bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks as there are no journal questions for the next 2 weeks as we are on a break from university.

Lecture 5 last week covered what Joseph Campbell calls in his hero’s journey the “Call to Adventure”.  This call is always a combination of the internal call, (that is those core values, creative images and yearning for something more in life) and the external call (Your purpose in life or your contribution and serving your community).  Crossing the threshold of adventure once these internal and external calls align can exciting but full of fear and your momentum can be crushed before you even get going.
Some classic movie examples that fit this idea are the sci-fi cult film “The Matrix” and “The Lord of the Rings”.

This weeks journal questions:

1. Internal Call
What are you naturally good at?
What talents do you have?
What are the images you associate with you doing work that you love?
Think of the three greatest/most significant experiences/achievements of   your life. What are the images that you associate with them?
If you were to do work in the future that you loved and that was totally aligned with these images what would it look like? How would it feel?

2. External Call
How much attention are you paying to your life?
What invitations are present in your life right now?
What is the unique contribution that you can make?
If you were to write a paragraph describing your calling doing worked you loved & making a contribution what would be in it?

Yesterday was a great lecture, I really enjoyed the concept of flow.  I have definitely found myself in states of flow both in my work as a web developer (with hours of intense coding and creative brainstorming sessions) and in my hobbies of DJ-ing and Iaido.

Flow is that state of mind where time stands still, where you tap into the subconscious in something that your doing but remain in complete control with an intense sense of focus.  This state of mind lets us operate at extraordinary levels of performance where our skills meet the challenge ahead of us.

I found it interesting that many of the people talking about leadership had the same ideas but different ways of saying it.  People like Jim Collins are pushing core values and a sense of purpose, Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “Hero’s Journey” taps into the ideas of an internal and external call to adventure and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about differentiation and integration.  In all cases where our levels of each of the 2 elements intersect we find ourselves in a state of flow or complexity.

It can also be seen as a line in the sand that is our “limits” and by reaching states of flow and pushing past this line in the sand we can draw a new line, this then becomes our new, higher limits.  On a side note a while back while I was at the Canterbury Kendo Dojo for my Iaido session, the Kendo instructor before our class was talking about this very thing.  In Kendo (or to an extent all martial arts) you have a limit of energy, strength or stamina this is your limit, when you are at you most tired and exhausted from training you should push yourself to train that little bit extra. By doing this  you will have pushed past your limit and set a new limit, this is now your limit, which didn’t exist before.  I am thinking there maybe a lot of crossover between ideas of leadership and Japanese Budo ideas, something to explore later I think.

Boiling this all down to me it seems that flow exists where we have internal feelings and abilities or talents if you will, and the world/universe has a hole/need/challenge that only our particular talents fit in.  Perhaps where we can create flow in our work or personal life we can find meaning to what we are doing.

This weeks Journal Questions:

1. Sketch a ‘flow’ flowchart, mark on it at least 3 activities in which you experience flow.
2. Analyse those 3 activities, what core values and sense of purpose are present within each of them? and/or as a result of those 3 activities, how have you or how could you become more integrated and differentiated?
4. Draw a time line of your life, on it record times that may reflect what your ‘creative images’ might be. Also reflect and record what ‘invitations’  might have been present.
5. Use your journaling and time line to reflect on what all this might suggest about your future work or calling.

I came across this great article and video through a friend of mine on friendfeed.com and just had to post it up on my blog.  I think any budding entrepreneur or online community should be able to take something from this as it just shows that we have resources greater than we can even imagine just waiting for us to tap into them! I would love some comments and feedback about what you think of the video and article.  What do you think you would do with the $5?…  Enjoy.

I brought up the “5 whys” exercise back in the lecture 2 post last week but to recap the basic idea is to think of an important event that has occurred in your life and ask yourself why that was important.  Then take your answer and again ask yourself why that answer was important.  Repeat 5 times.  The idea being that after digging down to why an event was important to you you should start coming across some ideas or themes that could potentially be your core values or your purpose in your life. On a side note you can also use this technique for finding root causes for problems by digging down through symptoms.

So here is a brief run down of the three events that I chose:

Important Event 1: Winning my Iaido Competition
1. Why was winning this important?
Because it showed that I have a talent or aptitude for my chosen martial art.

2. Why is it important to show your talent?
Because I put a lot of hard work, learning of new skills and mental discipline into practice.

3. Why was it important to do all that hard work and mental discipline?
Because it helped me overcome my nervousness and fears while performing my Iaido Kata in front of an audience.

4. Why was it important to overcome your fears/nerves?
Because I was able to show confidence and believe that what I was doing was bigger than the fear.

5. Why was it important to believe in what you were doing?
Because I want to be more honest with myself and be able to do anything I put my mind to and grow my character.

Important Event 2: Being able to attend the X:Media:Lab Conference Workshops as part of my work at Rock Star Recipes.
1. Why was it important to attend the workshop?
Because I got to network and talk about our companies ideas with some of the worlds best digital media gurus.

2. Why was it important for you to network with these people?
Because I was able to make some great business contacts and mentors and gain insight on our ideas.

3. Why is it important to you to build these relationships?
Because it builds a community of support around the work I am doing and our companies vision.

4. Why is it important to build support in the form of a community?
Because it seems the nature of business is changing and that engaging and building a community around your vision/product/organisation and engaging in real dialogue with those in the community.

5. Why is it important to understand this change in the business environment?
Because I want to help businesses understand how to talk to their community and conduct themselves more openly and honestly.

Important Event 3: Returning to Universit y to study part time
1. Why was it important to return to your study?
Because I want to finished the degree (BCom) that I started several years ago.

2. Why I it important to finish your degree and learn more?
Because I want a greater understanding of my work and the business environment that I operate in and where this environment is going in the future.

3. Why is it important for you to have a greater understanding?
Because I feel by understanding and gaining more knowledge I will find more purpose and meaning in my work.

4. Why do you want more purpose and meaning?
Because I want to enjoy what I am spending a lot of my time doing, I want it to be more that just a job.

5. Why do you want to enjoy and have more than just a job?
So I can share my excitement and enthusiasm with what I do with others.

So what can I take from the above exercise?
1. Being honest and striving for personal growth is a core value for me.

2. I think perhaps my purpose might have something to do with communities (either online or offline) and pushing for this new change in the way we communicate/market/exist in business in the future. I need to explore this more.

3. I want to enjoy my work and share what I am passionate about with others.

Last thursdays lecture covered a lot of ground in terms of what it is a “leader” actually does either in a position of leadership in an organisation or more importantly I think personally.

Those 4 main tasks being

1. Envisioning
2. Engaging
3. Enacting
4. Creating a Hi-Performance Context or Environment

I hope to write more about these point individually in a later post.

We ran through a very interesting exercise during the lecture called the “five whys” exercise.  Basically you pick an important event in your life (Or for an organisation a statement about what the organisation does).  You then ask “why is this important” 5 times each time asking why the the answer to the previous “why” is important.  Eventually you will get down to what is really important or a core value and purpose for that event or statement you stated with. For example, the important event that popped into my head when asked was winning my Iaido competiton a few weeks back.  I was asked by another student “why was that important” and the flow went as such:

I won my Iaido Competition > Important because: I was able to successfully apply some skills I had learnt > Important because: I enjoy learning new skills and knowledge > Important because: I have a thirst for new knowedege > Important because: Learning is most likely a core value for me etc etc

The plan is to try this exercise on serveral import moments in life so far and try an boil down those core values that have threaded their way throughout my life and whether what I am doing now aligns with them or whether I need to start making a move to something different.

Development questions for this week were:

How clear is your strategic intent/BHAG at present?

How clear is your strategy?

To what extent does your vision translated into SMART short-term goals and how clear, relevant are they?

What are your values?

What are you passionate about?

Five whys exercise, do the whats important questioning with at lest three ‘important’ events, what purpose or values come from this exercise?

What is your purpose & what do you hope to contribute?

How much alignment is there between your values/purpose and your current direction?

I sense I have a lot of writing and blog posts to get done.

On a side note: I had a really good training tonight at Iaido still working on my Seitei Iaido Kata but coming along nicely.

Righto here are the questions Tom Matthews proposed last week:

1. Name one thing/activity you could do that would make a difference to your management/leadership ratio?
2. How self-responsible are you in your life?
3. To be 20% more self-responsible, what would you have to change?
4. Complete the ‘survey packet’ (handed out at the lecture) and record your reflections on your present levels of engagement and service.

Will need to have a quick refresh through the notes from that lecture which was talking about differences in historical views of leadership to new ideas and theories of what a leader is.

Most importantly it seems that personal leadership is most important…as how can one lead others if one cannot even lead oneself properly.

The ideas of the 3 stages of “Waking up”, “Standing Up”, “Making Choices” and “Self-Responsibility” i think really resonated with me… I feel I have always had a great deal of self awareness and if I want to get something done I put things in motion and do it. Deciding to head back to university after 7 years of doing other things and working was one of these personal leadership moments.

Anyway… class tomorrow I need to get some reading done!  Tom seems to have posted up a personal values questionnaire on the university intranet which looks like it could be something interesting to fill out and see what the tests say I value…

I will attempt to blog post on the above questions over the weekend, hopefully after Iaido training when I am always at my most relaxed and focused… perhaps I will attain some secret enlightenment of Ki Ken Tai no Ichi… then again… I think I need a lifetime of practice before that kicks in.

Yeah so I managed to pick up my name as a domain name… reason…

Long term hopefully i will post alot of interesting case studies and information about what i do for a living, perhaps i might write an ebook or something like that I haven’t decided yet.

For now though the main reason I decided to get this site up and go is that I have just started another paper at the university of Canterbury called “The Principles of Leadership” MGMT208 for those of you course code inclined.

The course so far looks very interesting (all be it that there has only been one lecture so far).  Each week our lecturer, Tom Matthews is proposing a series of developmental questions for which we are all to write in his words our “musings” about the questions.

What better way to keep track of these questions and share a bit of knowledge than to blog my thoughts on each question.  I guess that also gives others a chance to comment or add to the thoughts and conversation around the question and for us all to learn a bit more.

That’s all for now… i will post more ideas as the course progresses and start a new blog entry for each of the development questions hopefully within the next week.

Thanks

Cam