December 15, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Drucker: Making priorities clear

Peter Drucker was a legendary management consultant, professor, and writer who, like quality improvement’s W. Edwards Deming, guided the corporate world for more than 60 years.

As a consultant to corporate managers, Drucker broke down common business habits, myths, and hunches so that managers and their organizations could rightly center people—both employees and clients.

He was also a master of the pithy quote:

Do what you do best and outsource the rest.
The major incentive to productivity and efficiency are social and moral rather than financial.
The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make—for the more new things he will try.

I learned the saying “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all” from Basecamp cofounder Jason Fried. Lately, Fried has been reflecting on the value of “outsourcing the rest”: saying no to tasks that don’t rightly reside with us so that we have energy and attention to devote to tasks that are ours.

Assuming you can put in more hours than someone, or work harder than someone else, is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs.

Hours are never the differentiator — it’s never about working more hours than someone else. It’s about the decisions you make. How you spend your time, what you do and don’t do. Especially what you don’t do.” —Jason Fried

Fried has noticed that strategic effort is much more effective than dogged effort, yet even he finds himself over-eager to shovel show before the snow shower is over. When he does this, his work doesn’t produce the results he wants and he makes extra work for himself: the exact opposite of what he set out to do!

We each get to set our priorities for our time, and if we pay attention, we can recognize that staying later and later doesn’t guarantee us better quality.

Instead, as much as possible, it’s worth assigning our non-renewable time to those activities and people who support our higher goals, not drooling it away on work that doesn’t matter much.

As we start the quick slide toward the end of this year, I’m starting to think about efforts of mine that were worthy and all the dogged trudging that wasn’t. I’ll be setting new targets, and I expect the activities I say Yes and No to will change for January.

What about you? Send me a note on Twitter, and share what you’ve learned about your priorities and time this year.

September 30, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Comparison and benchmarking: related, not identical

Four bright red balloons to the right of the shot. A building name and part of a palm tree trunk to the left. The building is cream/off white. — Photo credit: Tatiana Niño

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” so the proverb tells us.

This saying discourages us from side-eying others’ accomplishments and minimizing our own. It also warns us against envy, the kind of attention to others that corrodes our ability to embrace them and share in their joys without suspicion or spite.

There are great reasons to be careful with comparison: we don’t always see what precipitated the outward advances others make, and as Lisa Nichols says, success often involves incredibly hard, un-glamorous work and a lot of inconvenience.

At the same time, as humans, comparison is one of the basic ways we learn. Small children mirror the expressions, gestures, and language of those around them. They learn from others how to respond to and interact with their environment. And being able to distinguish between this and that, to compare similarities and contrast differences, is a life skill.

Benchmarking, a form of comparison, is a core technique of fact-based management and quality improvement. The Malcolm Baldrige quality improvement community defines benchmarking as “identifying processes and results that represent best practices and performance for similar activities, inside or outside your industry.”

So we search out people and organizations doing similar work to ours, so that we can learn which of their practices, approaches, and outcomes work really well and which we might adapt to our own situation.

We’re looking at others, not from dissociative envy or to minimize our own contributions, but so that we can make more progress more quickly. In short, benchmarking is a way to take the stairs two at a time and rapidly build on others’ success.

Who we compare ourselves to and who we benchmark our work against are important decisions, and neither of them wipes out our need to do our own work!

Apply this to your own situation and see what changes. Do you have colleagues in a similar environment? Competitors to learn from? Does your industry have expectations of or performance standards for your work? If there aren’t industry standards, are there any fair expectations for your geographical region? Use these standards to assess yourself and plan for progress of your own.

September 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Join the Intersections family as executive director

Intersections International is a multi-cultural, multi-faith, permanent initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York, and is hiring a new ED!

One of my partnering organizations, Intersections International, is actively searching for its next executive director.

With a philosophy of recognizing and respecting individual identities and diversity, Intersections brings individuals and communities together to find shared humanity and expand shared interests and understanding. This uniting of those who are parties to a tension or conflict is the connective tissue among all of Intersections’ efforts.

Intersections International envisions a time when our distinct identities no longer incite division, discrimination, destruction and despair. It envisions a just world, united in diversity; a world in which human differences serve to advance connection, equality, respect and abundance for all people.

‘Together, we work toward a just world – united in diversity.'”

Founding ED, Rev. Robert Chase, has led the Intersections team since 2007 and is retiring early next year. Here’s what his successor will do:

The Executive Director will assume primary responsibility for strategic vision, cultural leadership, fiscal sustainability, and operational oversight of Intersections International and all related programs and services. This person will be responsible for staff management, fundraising efforts, program development/management, constituent outreach and development, marketing and communications, and overall organizational development.”

The office is just a few blocks from Penn Station, New York City, and the next ED will hold both a Master of Divinity degree and Protestant ordination.¹

This is an opportunity to help build something that matters. If you know anyone with these credentials, a decade of senior management experience, and eyes that light up when they read an invitation like this, please forward it to them!

While Intersections does interfaith work and includes staff members from several religious backgrounds, the organization is an initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York and, as such, is part of the Reformed Church of America. [Back to text: ◄]

September 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

When good doesn’t want to be great

When I first heard Maya Angelou teaching Oprah Winfrey, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” I said amen with the rest of the viewers.

Believe them! They know themselves much better than you do.” —Maya Angelou

Just as Winfrey said, though, it’s a lesson that can be easy to affirm and challenging to apply.

People and organizations set the level they’re willing to operate at. And in both subtle and unsubtle ways, we all let others know what our level is.

A corollary to this principle is that sometimes what’s good doesn’t want to become great, and we don’t necessarily gain by trying to cajole it into wanting to.

Jim Collins‘ From Good to Great was one of the standout business management books of the mid-2000s. It highlighted eleven companies that had by then significantly outperformed their competitors for a decade and a half. Collins argued that they achieved this success metric by focusing on their most profitable skills, ensuring that their team included the right people playing the right roles, and facing up to “the brutal facts of [their] current reality, whatever they might be.”

Whether we’re in the personal sphere or doing business, we have to allow facts to supersede our preconceptions and shape the decisions we make. We can’t approach our own greatness, whatever that means for us, unless we allow that.

And that means “confronting the facts” and believing others when they declare who and what they are, even and especially if the facts are unpleasant.

June 25, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Investing in imagination

Whatever our philosophy on money, however much we give or save, and regardless of how we rationalize, we’re still left with some basic practical realities.

No matter how lofty your spiritual ideals may be, no matter how many powerful affirmations you can speak by rote, you still have to pay your bills.” —Eric Butterworth, Spiritual Economics

We still have obligations. We still benefit from others’ talents and resources. They need to be paid. We need to be paid. In a world where currency is the language of trade, we eat, drink, clothe ourselves, and shelter ourselves by getting paid.

These facts don’t change for people in the social sector, people who spend their prime waking hours and some nights too helping, teaching, guiding, or counseling others.

Our beliefs about sharing resources don’t change those facts. Beliefs about tithing or donating to good causes and other people in need don’t change the facts.

Wherever we draw benefits from other people, and we all do, there’s that rule: we still have to pay our bills.

Don’t worry (be happy)

A short teaching on worrying about life’s necessities is tucked into the middle of the Sermon on the Mount:

So I tell you, don’t worry about the food or drink you need to live, or about the clothes you need for your body. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes.” —Matthew 6:25

Food, drink, and clothes are really great things. I love them all! I don’t seek out involuntary hunger, thirst, or nakedness for myself and don’t wish it on others close or distant. That anyone in our world doesn’t have these basics of life is a testimony against us all.

In Matthew, I don’t see Jesus arguing that people should seek out experiences of lack. But I believe he was right to caution us on worry.

Worry shows up in my life as a creativity vampire. When I think of all of the times during grad school when I stalled on my art or struggled to deliver work I knew I was capable of, I can map those periods to straightforward survival insecurity: health concerns, for instance, or having to trade-off groceries and mandatory federal fees.

Beyond those kinds of binds, worry drew my attention away not only from my routine work but also from the vision and energy that I might otherwise have devoted to co-building a world where no one need be hungry, thirsty, naked, isolated, or purposeless.

Many people don’t even believe such a world is possible: we do have 7.125 billion people to care for. But I think this sense of futility undermines our imaginations and, combined with the low hum of worry, discourages us from taking action.

When we believe there is not enough, that resources are scarce, then we accept that some will have what they need and some will not. We rationalize that someone is destined to end up with the short end of the stick.

When we believe that more is better, and equate having more with being more…then people on the short end of that resource stick are assumed to be less smart, less able, even less valuable, as human beings. We feel we have permission to discount them.

When we believe that’s just the way things are, then we assume a posture of helplessness. We believe that a problem is unsolvable. We accept that in our human family neither the resource-rich members nor the resource-poor members have enough money, enough food, or enough intelligence or resourcefulness to generate lasting solutions.” —Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money

Investing in imagination

People of faith and ethical philosophy have a responsibility to set the mental and material stage for people living and choosing every day: we need worlds of experience where people don’t feel so powerless and aren’t so under-resourced that worrying makes sense for them, for us.

We need to live. We need the basics to live well. And we need them as a baseline for building thriving lives of trust, hope, and constructive action.

There are enough resources on Earth to feed, water, and clothe everyone here. We don’t lack because there isn’t enough. People lack because we don’t care for each other enough to distribute what we have effectively.

We can change those realities because we created them. We can change them and replace them with a world of enough. And we can change and challenge the circumstances and doctrines that got us living in futility and learned helplessness; we can change them one conscious gift at a time.

Support people and organizations whose contributions nourish you and build the world you plan to live in.

Divest from people and organizations whose contributions shore up fear or futility, or teach you that what is is all that can be.

Give your time and skills, networks and attention to the work and world you’re drawn to, because only through our imaginations and investment will that world ever bloom.

February 15, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Systems and Sustainability

Classic passage from W. Edwards Deming, the management consultant whose knowledge model inspired the total quality management movement.

What is a system? A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment. (We are of course talking here about a man-made system.)…

A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system. . . . The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition. — W. Edwards Deming (emphasis mine)

If a system requires management, does this mean that systems, unlike organic ecosystems, aren’t inherently sustainable and don’t negotiate their own balance?

What are the implications of viewing a man-made system as something that’ll fall apart without deliberate attention?