Dale Sackrider II

This is a difficult post to write. Since I was 15 years old, I’ve been employed. I’ve had big milestones in my career – my first career job, making six figures, first time as a people manager, first time managing managers, and well… first time getting laid off.

I’ve never been a big fan of valentine’s day – so pointing out that my company broke up with me on Feb 14th isn’t significant to me, but I’ve seen others mention it. The truth is, I’m not sure how to process this yet.

I won’t say I didn’t see it coming – shortly after my company announced layoffs, citing strategic locations as one of the criteria for the lay off, I knew there was a chance me and my team could be impacted, since we are not located in a strategic location. I prepared mentally as much as one can for these things over the last couple of weeks. Still when I got the dreading meeting request, I felt the weight of it.

I’ve given the speech many times over my career – “you’ll land something quickly. This will end up being a good thing. You are talented and smart, don’t beat yourself up – you got this.”

Today is the first time I’ve had to give the speech while looking into the mirror. I’m going to take the next couple of days to process what these means and what I should do next.

Its that time of year. Halloween is over, Thanksgiving on the horizon and Christmas countdowns have started. Eggnog is one of my favorite guilty pleasures (one I can’t indulge in due to my type 2 diabetes). Every year, at office Christmas parties, you’ll find co-workers talking over a drink of some sort talking about the year they’ve had.

A few years ago, I was having that exact experience; trading stories with a coworker about our successes and failures over the last year; what we were able to learn and what we actually delivered, when it hit me. Why not have next years conversation right now.

Its always good to reflect on the past year but what if we also imagine ourselves one year into the future, having this eggnog conversation? What would be brag about? What accomplishments would we be excited to share with each other? Lets have that conversation right now, and spend the next year driving to make that conversation real.

This mental time travel grants us the ability to be intentional. Nobody ever gets to the Superbowl on accident, and accomplishing big goals will not happen unintentionally either. So ask yourself, what do you want to brag about next year? Write that down, read it every month, or week, or even every day until you’ve made it true.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

Peter Drucker

Friday morning thoughts – we have all heard Peter Drucker’s (in)famous quote but what does that mean in practice?

My take, strategy is the plan but culture is how we feel about it. Culture is how the group acts, reacts, and interacts. Culture conforms the individual to the group. Culture is our intuition; our ‘gut feeling’.

But Intuition can be wrong. In science, when our results do not match our expectations, we say the results are not ‘intuitive’. The path to becoming an expert is experience and over time, experience corrects our intuition.

This is why “culture eats strategy for lunch” – and the path to change the culture is similar to how our intuition is trained; by results, consistently and persistently reproduced. Your team’s culture is a reflection of the results they have observed over and over regarding how you act, react, and interact.

We reduce this concept to “culture is modeled from the top down” which is a true but shallow statement.

Do you agree?

I was watching a science video in class as a kid (maybe 25 yrs ago now) when the interviewer asked the scientist how he felt about his experiment proving he was wrong. I remember he said “I LOVE IT”.

One of the things I enjoyed about science experiments growing up was non-intuitive findings. This is when you form a hypothesis based on our perception of the world today but the results are radically different than that expectation.

When that happens, of course the first thing you do is validate you did the experiment correctly, but when the results are confirmed, you’re left questioning your assumptions; your likely incorrect assumptions.

The reason the scientist in that middle school video loved being proven wrong was that he understood it was a chance to move to more correct thinking. He learned to become comfortable with being wrong. He learned to embrace that feeling as progress.

That is not a natural state; evolution rewards correct intuitions and ignores or fatally punishes incorrect ones. Think about it. When you are right about danger, you lived. When you were wrong, you died. The result, our ancestors learned to trust their intuition, not because its infallible but because we survived. Challenging your intuition historically was dangerous. But we live in an age where we can safely experiment without being eaten by lions, tigers, and bears.

I don’t think human nature has changed in 25 years, but I do think the internet has given us the ability to find our echo chambers instead of forcing us to entertain alternative ideas, assumptions, and interpretations. What makes me a little sad is that this information age gives us the ability to increase our access to alternative ideas, assumptions, and interpretations but not the ability to appreciate how uncomfortable being wrong feels. That must be a learned behavior.

Everyday we see people trying to make sense of the world around them asking questions that challenge someone’s narrative. Its easy to challenge someone elses narrative, but I encourage you to find the narrative you subscribe to and challenge it.