“What we’ve seen through our research is that the number one predictor of executive success is learning agility.  So, we want to get a real line of sight into a person’s thinking style and leadership style… …what you really want to know is how does (the executive) make decisions under pressure.”

–     Gary Burnison, CEO of Korn/Ferry, the world’s largest executive search firm, in a Dec 10th WSJ Interview 

Learning agility.

In these times of rapid change, broad-sweeping disintermediation and exploding technology — it’s less about what you’ve done than it is how you do what you do, or so it would seem.

“Problem solving” is a broad skill or talent — it likely falls in both categories — but it matters.  It literally makes a difference.  The banking industry faces different problems than ever before, but a problem solver will make a difference.  Manufacturing?  Ditto!  Private equity?  You bet.  Services?  Perhaps even more than the others.

What we did got us here.  Now.

How well we’ve learned from the experience, and how creatively we can apply it — in an intensely focused manner — will get us to the next level.

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

–     Peter F. Drucker, Austrian-American Business Advisor and Icon (1909-2005)

What if we decided our only goal was to remove the impediments facing our teams?  If that is all we did, would it make a difference?

Intelligence is a dangerous thing, because it wants to be everywhere, all the time.

We’ve all seen it.  Smart people work so hard to reach a decision point, and then pull the trigger.  Almost immediately, if we’re not careful, the effort turns to trying to get the bullet back in the gun.  We want to keep deciding.  It’s whiplash-inducing good intention run amuck.

The higher up the food chain a leader is, the less often they ought to decide.  (The exception; selecting the people who will decide and who will offer up options when the leader should decide.)

A difference making leader should decide which problems the team will tackle, and at what cost they’re willing to invest in solutions.  And then, they ought to spend their time challenging the deciders to think differently — to seek the truth, not the path of least resistance, or the highway with the most off ramps.  On the big, foundational calls, the leader should be the decision-maker, otherwise, they should create a nimble, high-speed operation where people are challenging and relying on one another — and where the decisions are being made as close to the level they get implemented as possible.

A good model for a leader to consider is the REELAX approach to running a business.

Recruit and Retain the best talent you can afford.

Create an Environment in which success is the most likely outcome.

Put in place Expectations that are so clear a 6th grader can understand them.  (I have a 6th grader.  I’m not kidding.  Seriously…)

Lead.  You lead people.  You manage “things.”

Establish Accountability that is consistent, relentless and that generates useable feedback from the market.

X-ray everything.  If you don’t know “Why?” you don’t know anything.

When we’re evaluating our success as leaders, let’s measure it by considering how infrequently we have to decide.

“Whatever good things we build end up building us.”

–     Jim Rohn (1930-2009), American businessman

Legacies tend to be visualized on a really big canvas.  Legacies tend to be established only near the finish line of life or careers.

In fact, legacies tend to be celebrated as the end of an era — or maybe even the end of a lifetime.

Unless we set out to leave a daily legacy.

As a kid growing up on the farm, I never understood the incredible patience, trust and Faith that it took to put thousands of dollars of seed and fertilizer in the ground and then just drive away on your tractor — hoping to heck it didn’t flood, or burn out or mold in the ground.  Decades later, though, I can literally smell the diesel exhaust and the freshly turned soil.  I can feel the dust in the air and hear the hum of the engine.  And I realize that a farmer’s legacy is the work he put in that day.

Looking forward and trying to imagine a legacy leaves us little time for being here, now, in this day.

Looking back to realize the legacy that we’ve built, one day, one interaction at a time, it is easier to know, definitively, that the good things we’ve built are who we are – and who we are becoming.

When we focus on those good things, and we set out to build anew each day — those who would tear down what we built in the past not only can’t tear down who we are, they can’t even keep us from building a better us, in this day.

“God places the heaviest burden on those who can carry its weight.”

–     Legendary Green Bay Packer (and Philadelphia Eagle) Reggie White (1961-2004)

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.”

–     General George S. Patton, Jr. (1885-1945)

“You’ve got to stand for something, or you’ll fall for anything…”

–     Lyric from Aaron Tippin’s song of the same title

And sometimes, the fight is a real bitch.  Seriously, in a career, heck in a lifetime, we might be called to stand on principle a handful of times — tops.

The effort around it —  the fight — can be brutal, physically and emotionally.

But the simple fact of the matter is that the only way to avoid the fight is to stand for nothing.  If we never draw lines, we never have to worry about crossing them, or having them crossed.  If we stand for nothing, we are empty vessels.

I admire the people who set out to protest peacefully based on their frustrations in Ferguson, MO, in LA and in New York.  I appreciate and empathize with them, because they stand for something, be it justice, equality, their own sense of right and wrong — whatever it is, those who take a stand — appropriately, firmly and, yes, even defiantly, well, they are difference makers.  They stand and fight — for “something.”

At the same time, I abhor the lack of ideals that permit people to use the occasion to burn cars, break windows and loot cell phone stores.  They stand for nothing.

If our own trial or burden — our “something” — runs its course outside the camera range of CNN or FoxNews, it can still feel like we’re the ones on trial.

We’re not.  Our ideals are not.  They’re ours, and they’re the foundations that our difference making is built upon.

They’re worth fighting for, or finding a place where the ideals are shared and the fight unnecessary.

“Do not mix the galloping of your horse, my knight, with the beating of your heart.”

–     Attributed as a Chinese proverb

Passion in our work is a good thing.  Except for when it’s not.

And, when it’s not, we ought to manage the galloping of our horse to a different tempo.

Taking time to reflect on one’s initial, instinctive “call to action,” is powerful, and when time permits, it creates one of two outcomes.

On the one hand, proactive, deep, thoughtful reflection can make us realize that our initial reaction was driven too much by passion — and not enough by pragmatism.

On the other, when the reflection cements the initial thought process — when it synchs up perfectly with the gut, instinctive call — that is where differences get made.

When the passion and the reflection synch up — when the horse gallops in perfect meter with the heartbeat, towards a righteous and true destination — well, there’s precious little that compares.

“Tell me and I forget.  Teach me and I remember.  Involve me and I learn.”

–     Benjamin Franklin

A colleague of mine, a talented, creative, smart CMO — jokes that we ought to “draw him a picture,” when we’re on opposite sides of an idea…

Our kids, when they’re little, often say, “Draw me a picture,” when they don’t understand something.

We ought to.

When we draw pictures, we involve the other party.  Herb Kelliher famously drew out the business plan and routing for Southwest Airlines on a bar napkin for his skeptical business partners.

They’ve done pretty well, right?

Corey Sommers and David Jenkins authored a book a couple years ago called “Whiteboard Selling.”  It’s powerful stuff and it really does work.

Lose the Power Point.  No, better yet, lose the computer.

Grab a marker and draw out the concept, idea or solution.  Heck, just draw a picture of the problem — and it will seem much more solvable.

People love to learn, and they love to do business with people that teach them valuable lessons.  Draw them a danged picture.

It’s not “too informal,” it’s “real informative,” and it sticks in the mind.

Draw a picture.  It will make a difference.

“Change will only occur when the fear of change is overcome by the pain of remaining the same.”

–     Dr. Tom Graf, PhD

What is it that makes us fear change?  The unknown?  The known?  Experience or inexperience?

What is it that causes us pain?

Understanding the source of the pain prompts more productive, more proactive change.

There is great peace in knowing, and choosing a different, and ideally better way forward.

“Hell, it’s right THERE, as plain as the nose on your FACE!”

–     Dick Heston, on one of the several thousand occasions that I didn’t “get it” as a kid

What’s really weird is that more often than not, “it” really is right THERE.

Ever wonder why we spend so much time and energy looking around, behind or through “it?”

Earlier this week, a colleague and I were discussing a situation that called for us to agree; “if it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide.”

And then there are the times when it is, in fact, necessary to decide.  When “it” is right there, plain as the noses on our faces.

In those cases, difference makers pull the trigger.

“It was a tough game.  We got out-recruited, out-planned, out-coached, out-funded, out-smarted, out-hustled and out-played.”

–     Said no coach, ever

I just wish there was more candor in the world.

My favorite college football team had another mediocre football season, and as I read the coach’s comments after Friday’s final loss of the regular season, I couldn’t help but wonder if things might be different if he’d work as hard at saying something as he does at saying nothing.

It happens in business, too.  There are winners and losers, and the reasons they win or lose are usually pretty apparent to an educated observer — which makes the excuses and cliches even harder to swallow.  In short, it’s hard not to struggle with folks that always want credit for the wins, but that revert to cliches and excuses when the outcomes goes the other way.

Sometimes, we win when we’re not as good, and sometimes we lose when we’re better.  Sometimes, buyers make irrational choices and sometimes, those irrational choices land in our favor.

Sometimes we get out-planned.  Sometimes we get out-executed, and regardless of the sometimes’s and the outcomes’s (yes, I know outcomes’s is not a word…) we ought to just look at the “why’s?” and learn.  Then move on.

But enough with the cliches!  In sports.  In business.  In life.

The time savings alone will make a difference!

“We cannot control what emotions or circumstances we will experience next, but we can choose how we will respond to them.”

–     Gary Zukav, American author and spiritual teacher

Reacting is good if someone chucks a baseball at your melon.  Reacting is good if you step off the curb and see a truck hurtling in your direction.  Reacting is good if we are in immediate danger.

Otherwise, difference makers don’t react.  They respond.

So, a theory:  reacting = bad when compared to responding, which = good always.

How can we tell the difference?

If we’re e-mailing in real time with someone, one of us — or BOTH of us — are reacting.     Pick.  Up.  The.  Phone.  If we’re second guessing someone that knows what they’re doing, we’re probably reacting to some fear or issue of ours that might not have any meaning to or impact on them.  As a leader, trust the people around you, or get better people around you.  Step up to your own fears, but at all cost, get to the point that Monday Morning Quarterbacking is not a part of a Difference Maker’s repertoire.

There is one primary difference between reacting and responding.

Thinking.  Contemplating and dealing with facts.  Instincts play, certainly, but not the fight-or-flight kind that beg for reaction.

When we think, we respond.  When we respond, we typically make a difference.  When we react, all we usually do is wreck someone else’s day.

Choose to think.  Choose to respond.