Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

1) Be Proactive

As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. We have the independent will to make our own choices and decisions, and the responsibility ("the ability to respond") to make the right choices. You have the freedom to choose your own fate and path, so having the independent will, imagination and self-awareness to make the right move makes you a proactive, and not a reactive, person.

2) Begin With The End In Mind

Mental visualization is extremely important. Covey says that all things are created twice: first, the mental conceptualization and visualization and a second physical, actual creation. Becoming your own creator means to plan and visualize what you're going to do and what you're setting out to accomplish and then go out and creating it. Identifying your personal statement and your principles will help.

3) Put First Things First

With your power of independent will, you can create the ending you want to have. Part of that comes with effective time management, starting with matters of importance. Then tasks should be completed based on urgency after you deal with all the important matters. If you deal with crises, pressing problems and deadline-driven projects first, your life will be a lot easier.

4) Think Win/Win

If you believe in a better way to accomplish goals that's mutually beneficial to all sides, that's a win/win situation. "All parties feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan," Covey wrote. "One person's success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others." If you have integrity and maturity, there's no reason win/win situations can't happen all the time.

5) Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood

If you're a good listener and you take the time to understand a concept, it will help you convey your opinions, plans and goals to others. It starts with communication and strong listening skills, followed by diagnosing the situation and then communicating your solution to others.

6) Synergize

Synergistic communication, according to Covey, is "opening your mind and heart to new possibilities, new alternatives, new options." This applies to the classroom, the business world and wherever you could apply openness and communication. It's all about building cooperation and trust.

7) Sharpen The Saw

Sometimes you're working so hard on the other six habits that you forget about re-energizing and renewing yourself to sharpen yourself for the tasks in front of you. Some sharpening techniques include exercise and nutrition, reading, planning and writing, service and empathy and commitment, study and meditation.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-coveys-7-habits-of-highly-effective-people-2012-7#ixzz216D5A3kw

Define-Collaborate-Measure-Improve

What is not planned cannot be defined
What is not defined cannot be controlled(Collaborate WITHOUT Authority)
What is not controlled cannot be measured
What is not measured cannot be improved

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail

Don't judge people before you truly know them

A 24 year old boy seeing out from the train's window shouted: "Dad, look the trees are going behind!" Dad smiled & a young couple sitting nearby, looked at the 24 year old's childish behavior with pity, suddenly he again exclaimed: "Dad, look the clouds are running with us!" The couple couldn't resist & said to the old man: "Why don't you take your son to a good doctor?" The old man smiled & said: "I did & we are just coming from the hospital, my son was blind from birth, he just got his eyes today." Every single person on the planet has a story. Don't judge people before you truly know them. The truth might surprise you!!

Seven Step Problem Solving

1. Definition
2. Data Collection
3. Cause Analysis
4. Solution Planning and Implementation
5. Evaluation of Effectiveness
6. Standardization
7. Evaluation of Process

A Good One : Empathy and Sympathy

A doctor entered the hospital in hurry after being called in for an urgent surgery. He found the boy’s father pacing anxiously, waiting for him.
Seeing him, the father yelled, “Why did you take so long to get here? Don’t you know that my son’s life is in danger? Don’t you have the sense of responsibility?”

The doctor said calmly with a gentle smile, “I am sorry, I wasn’t in the hospital and I came the fastest I could, after receiving the call.
I know it is tough, but take a deep breath and calm down.”

“Calm down?! What if your son was in this room right now, would you calm down? If you felt that you would lose your son, what would you do?”
said the father angrily.

The doctor smiled again and replied: “I believe that life and death are in the hands of God and we can only do so much.
Go and pray for your son, we will do our best by God’s grace.”

“Sympathy is so much easier than empathy. It is easy to dismiss someone else’s trials because they aren’t your own”, muttered the father.

After a long while, the doctor came out of the operating room. “I’ve got good news! Your son is saved! If you have any questions please ask the nurse.”
And without waiting for the father’s reply, he immediately rushed off.

“What a cold and unfeeling man!” exclaimed the man, “He couldn’t even wait a few minutes so that I could ask him about my son.”

Hearing him, the nurse replied, “The doctor’s son has been extremely ill for many weeks, but as soon as he received the call about your son,
he immediately rushed to the hospital. Now that he is confident that your son is safe, the doctor's hurrying back to be with his son.”

How many times do we make wrong assumptions, when we only look at things from our own point of view?
Just as we expect empathy from others, it would fare us even better if we can empathise with others as well.
Let’s make it a point to give others the benefit of doubt and…

14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated

Here are 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated:

1. Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.

2. Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action. Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.

Read More: Why You're Still Overweight
3. Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.

5. Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.

6. Act with a higher purpose. Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is wasted effort--and should be avoided.

7. Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

8. Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

9. Don't wait for perfection; do it now! Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life. Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.

10. Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don't achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.

11. Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow's failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.

12. Avoid weak goals. Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with "I'll try ..." Always start with "I will" or "I must."

13. Treat inaction as the only real failure. If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can't even learn from the experience.

14. Think before you speak. Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.

The above is based on a conversation with Omar Periu, one of the world’s best (and best known) motivational speakers.

Good Note

The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything.

Live simply.
Love unconditionally.
Give generously.
Care deeply.
Share heartily.
Speak kindly.
Work sincerely, Play cheerfully.
Laugh openly and leave the rest to Almighty.

Good Quotes

Without Your love I can do nothing, with Your love there is nothing I cannot do.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
-Swami Sivananda


If you work just for money, you'll never make it, but if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success
will be yours."
-Ray Kroc

"When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward
your coveted goal."
-Napoleon Hill

"We are what we think".
-Buddha

"Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve"
-Napoleon Hill, motivator

"No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent"
-Eleanor Roosavelt

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
- Thomas Edison, inventor

Google engineer Steve Yegge’s - On Platform

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It’s pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn’t let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon’s recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they’ve made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don’t really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding – though again this varies by group, so it’s luck of the draw. They don’t give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don’t have any of our perks or extras — they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that’s the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.

To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn’t take most of it even if it were free.

I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.

I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it’s given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it’s created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.

But there’s one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Micro-managing isn’t that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn’t list it as a strength or anything. I’m just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We’re talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people “who runs the company” when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular… well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion — back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year — he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ten Tips On How To Work With Your Board Of Directors

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/16/ten-tips-on-how-to-work-with-your-board-of-directors/
Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Len Jordan, who is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and currently holds board seats at companies like Cedexis, MaxPoint Interactive, Zapd, Control4, DSIQ, Medio and Wetpaint.
Whenever I invest in a new company, I send the CEO my customary email with advice on how to work with his or her new board. I’ve spent 24 years in the software industry—including holding operating roles at three early-stage software companies and board seats at 12 startups—so I thought my “Top 10″ list on the care and feeding of board members might be helpful to other CEOs and executive as well.
So, without further ado, here it is:

1. Have a plan, and get your entire company and board to understand and support it.
A company’s business plan and strategy is the map of where we are going. The plan almost certainly will change, but the best CEOs keep everyone informed about where we said we are going, where we are currently going, and why we changed plans if we did.
The plan should not be that complicated. Too many business plans use multisyllabic adjectives and adverbs—the plan should be simple even if the products are complicated. The essence of the business plan should be simple enough for a six year-old to read and understand.
We should agree on a plan that describes our target customer; the company’s product; and competition. This plan informs the product roadmap (including timeline and hiring requirements, such as how many people you need to build, market and sell the product) and P&L (revenue, expense and net income) broken out by month and quarter and by R&D, sales and marketing and general-and-administrative expenses. The sales and marketing plan goes with this, including a product and pricing model.
The preference is to approve the above and then stay out of the CEO’s way—the opportunity
cost of your time is incredibly high.
2. Tell us if the plan changes for “small reasons”.Most plans change for tactical reasons — e.g., the product is earlier/later than expected. Or customers are adopting/buying earlier/later than planned. I like a process in which, if the plan shifts, the CEO pre-emptively throttles the investment/spending without being asked. For example: tell us what level of business progress/metrics (e.g. downloads, installs, usage, trials, bookings, contracts closed, etc.) you want to see to feel good about spending to the plan (or below it if necessary), even if we are not yet certain about exceeding revenue during the current period.
Conversely, what level of progress above plan would make you want to invest more aggressively and what key investments (products, sales and marketing hires) would you make? Having the entire plan and contingencies agreed to ahead of time makes it a lot easier for you to do your job and for us to stay out of the way. Plans don’t have to be perfect, and they change, especially at startups.
3. Tell us if the plan is changing a lot for “big reasons”.Sometimes plans need to change for strategic reasons. The best CEOs are continually testing and retesting their basic hypothesis. Is there still a fundamental problem we are solving, or market opportunity we are addressing? Are we still pursuing the right product? Are we selling to the right customers? Are the ways we are selling and marketing right for the market and product? Are we as competitive as we thought? Is our team as good as we had hoped?
Being a CEO is hard because you need to have conviction and commitment to a specific strategy, but you need to continuously challenge the assumptions underpinning it without whipsawing your team, customers and board. The best CEOs stay on-strategy, but are very deliberate when making strategic changes.
4. Strategy mistakes are harder to admit than execution mistakes.It’s hard to admit when a strategy is flawed. It’s very easy, on the other hand, to decide that the market, customer and product thesis is correct but sales-and-marketing execution is weak. I’ve seen too many companies delay making a tough strategy choice by first trying to fix the flaw through a change in execution. If execution is flawed, fix it, but look beneath the veneer to make sure the substance underneath is sound.
5. The average of two strategies is usually not a strategy.Whether you have a board or not, you have to commit to a cohesive strategy. In tennis you can play at the net or the baseline, and both can be great strategies, depending on the circumstances. The average of the two — playing in the middle of the court (commonly referred to as ‘no- man’s-land’) — is the worst place to play and is never a good strategy. Too many startups split the difference: They continue with the old strategy, add a new strategy (like a new product), under-resource both and fail at each.
Good strategy starts this way: Assess the company’s essential attributes—market, team, product, customers, competition–and develop a simple one page SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. Frame alternatives, discuss tradeoffs with the board and make hard choices. The classic startup mistakes often consist of giving up on the right strategy too early, choosing the wrong new strategy, assuming the old strategy provides more benefit to the new strategy than it does or choosing, instead, to focus on both an old and new strategy out of fear of making the wrong choice. It is scary to have both feet and hands off the rock at the same time.
6. Email is good for delivering straightforward information; board meetings are good for explaining complicated information and discussing alternatives.I love short (above the fold) weekly email updates from CEOs on key progress points (product development, hiring, revenue, key partnerships, etc.), but it’s OK if they are less frequent (coming every other week, or once a month). But bad news should travel fast—this includes losing a key customer, a key engineer quitting, etc. The road has bumps; I’d rather know about it when it happens than after it leads to some other issue (like a product delay or a revenue miss). Also, I’d prefer that problems/opportunities not only get communicated, but that options be developed to address the problem or opportunity. Frame the situation and assess the pros and cons of a few choices—it makes it easier to help come up with a reasonable solution.
7. Board meetings are not pitches. You have our money, so let’s figure out what to do with it.The best way to earn trust from your board is not to tell us what’s going well; it’s to tell us what’s not going well. Better yet, make everything run well but tell us the things you want to focus on that could become problems if not addressed. If you do #6 , the board meetings can be less about updating the board and more about discussing key strategic choices/decisions and ways we can better tune our execution. A basic review of financials, customer progress, product development, partnerships, hiring, etc. would be great, but we’d also like you to expose key strategy elements (SWOT) and get us to discuss and react.
Receiving board decks two days ahead of time means we can add more value in the board meeting. Also: The best companies can get the board deck down to 10-15 slides, max, especially if #6 is happening. Allocate time for strategic topics at key board meetings and from time to time, invite an outside/expert that can challenge the group at key strategic inflection points. Finally, as with any meeting, don’t unveil controversial topics at board meetings for the first time. Give people a heads up ahead of time so they discuss the topic at an average blood pressure.
8. Ask for help — we work for you. Really.We like helping recruit employees and partners (customers). Put us to work, let us brag about you to potential employees and provide context and support. We can assist with strategy questions. You should know more about the business than we do, but our distance can provide perspective. And perhaps we have seen patterns that can be applied from other experiences. This can be incredibly valuable as long as we don’t over or mis-apply the patterns in the wrong instances based on the wrong attributes.
We are OK if you seldom call and are also OK if you call every day when we are working on something that requires it. We do appreciate just getting a check-in call from time to time. A little like calling your mom in college, sort of. If you only call to ask for money she will know something is up.
9. Involve your exec team with the board.It’s good practice to have at least one board member interview all exec hires; different perspectives can be good. Having the exec team in the board meetings can be great, especially if they present the area of their responsibility (product development, sales, marketing, finance). That said, it’s also important to have a closed session of the board that is just the board plus counsel, to discuss board-only matters.
10. Tell us how we are doing.We hope to add value but will make mistakes and can often manage things better. Tell us about these areas and we will try to get better. We will do the same with you. And tell us when we should stay out of the way — you run the company, and sometimes the best thing we can do to help is let you do that.
The average early stage company takes nine to 10 years before it will exit. So we likely are going to work together a long time. Let’s make it productive, rewarding and fun.

The Must-Have Leadership Skill

listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: Selected Writings.

"We hired a new CEO, but had to let him go after just seven months," the chairman of an East Coast think tank complained to me recently. "His resume looked spectacular, he did splendidly in all the interviews. But within a week or two we were hearing pushback from the staff. They were telling us, 'You hired a first-rate economist with zero social intelligence.' He was pure command and control."
The think tank's work centers on interlocking networks of relationships with the board, staff, donors, and a wide variety of academics and policy experts. The CEO urgently needed to manage those relationships, but lacked the interpersonal skills that organizations increasingly need in their leaders. A CEO who fails to navigate those relationships artfully, the think tank's board saw, could torpedo the organization.
Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.
As I've written with my colleague Richard Boyatzis, technical skills and self-mastery alone allow you to be an outstanding individual contributor. But to lead, you need an additional interpersonal skill set: you've got to listen, communicate, persuade, collaborate.
That was brought home to me yet again reading "Making Yourself Indispensable," by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott E. Edinger, which makes the strong point that a leader's competencies are synergistic. The more different competencies a leader displays at strength, the greater her business results.
But there's another critically important rule-of-thumb: some competencies matter more than others, particularly at the higher levels of leadership. For C-level executives, for example, technical expertise matters far less than the art of influence: you can hire people with great technical skills, but then you've got to motivate, guide and inspire them.
While Zenger, Folkman, and Edinger make a strong empirical case that competencies matter, it overlooks a crucial point: some competencies matter more than others. Specifically, there are threshold competencies, the abilities every leader needs to some degree, and then there are distinguishing competencies, the abilities you find only in the stars.
You can be the most brilliant innovator, problem-solver or strategic thinker, but if you can't inspire and motivate, build relationships or communicate powerfully, those talents will get you nowhere. What Zenger and colleagues call the "interpersonal skills" — and what I call social intelligence — are the secret sauce in top-performing leadership.
Lacking social intelligence, no other combination of competences is likely to get much traction. Along with whatever other strengths they may have, the must-have is social intelligence.
So how do you spot this skill set? An executive with a long track record of satisfactory hires told me how his organization assessed social intelligence in a prospect during the round of interviews, group sessions, meals, and parties that candidates there routinely went through.
"We'd watch carefully to see if she talks to everyone at the party or a dinner, not just the people who might be helpful to her," he said. One of the social intelligence indicators: during a getting-to-know you conversation, does the candidate ask about the other person or engage in a self-centered monologue? At the same time, does she talk about herself in a natural way? At the end of the conversation, you should feel you know the person, not just the social self she tries to project.
I wouldn't use such subjective measures alone — you're better off to combine them with best practices on hiring without firing. But don't ignore your gut.

Making Yourself Indispensable

Making Yourself Indispensable
by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, and Scott K. Edinger
A manager we’ll call Tom was a midlevel sales executive at a Fortune 500 company. After a dozen or so years there, he was thriving—he made his numbers, he was well liked, he got consistently positive reviews. He applied for a promotion that would put him in charge of a high-profile worldwide product-alignment initiative, confident that he was the top candidate and that this was the logical next move for him, a seemingly perfect fit for his skills and ambitions. His track record was solid. He’d made no stupid mistakes or career-limiting moves, and he’d had no run-ins with upper management. He was stunned, then, when a colleague with less experience got the job. What was the matter?
As far as Tom could tell, nothing. Everyone was happy with his work, his manager assured him, and a recent 360-degree assessment confirmed her view. Tom was at or above the norm in every area, strong not only in delivering results but also in problem solving, strategic thinking, and inspiring others to top performance. “No need to reinvent yourself,” she said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Go with your strengths.”
But how? Tom was at a loss. Should he think more strategically? Become even more inspiring? Practice problem solving more intently?
Learn more about developing your strengths with this slideshow.
It’s pretty easy and straightforward to improve on a weakness; you can get steady, measurable results through linear development—that is, by learning and practicing basic techniques. But the data from our decades of work with tens of thousands of executives all over the world has shown us that developing strengths is very different. Doing more of what you already do well yields only incremental improvement. To get appreciably better at it, you have to work on complementary skills—what we call nonlinear development. This has long been familiar to athletes as cross-training. A novice runner, for example, benefits from doing stretching exercises and running a few times a week, gradually increasing mileage to build up endurance and muscle memory. But an experienced marathoner won’t get significantly faster merely by running ever longer distances. To reach the next level, he needs to supplement that regimen by building up complementary skills through weight training, swimming, bicycling, interval training, yoga, and the like.
So it is with leadership competencies. To move from good to much better, you need to engage in the business equivalent of cross-training. If you’re technically adept, for instance, delving even more deeply into technical manuals won’t get you nearly as far as honing a complementary skill such as communication, which will make your expertise more apparent and accessible to your coworkers.
In this article we provide a simple guide to becoming a far more effective leader. We will see how Tom identified his strengths, decided which one to focus on and which complementary skill to develop, and what the results were. The process is straightforward, but complements are not always obvious. So first we’ll take a closer look at the leadership equivalent of cross-training. The Interaction Effect
In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own. There’s nothing mysterious here. Combining diet with exercise, for example, has long been known to be substantially more effective in losing weight than either diet or exercise alone.
In our previous research we found 16 differentiating leadership competencies that correlate strongly with positive business outcomes such as increased profitability, employee engagement, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Among those 16, we wondered, could we find pairs that would produce significant interaction effects?

Golden Anniversaries

1. I and Me to WE

2. There are no sacred cows (talk about anything and everything)

3. No matter what treat eachother with respect. Treat the other person the way you would like to be treated

4. Take care of your body. Present yourself best to your partner. Take care of eachother (annual physicals)

5. Find the joy of return. Our resources, not mine or yours.

6. LOVING TOUCH. Frequent touches ...pats.... Being in love in more than saying

7. Onboarding. Doing and finding things are different and interesting. Passion/hobby/pranks/jokes

Simple Things Matter: 50 Simple Things You Can do to Enhance Your Relationship

From http://www.simplethingsmatter.com :

1. Take long walks together.
2. Snuggle in the morning before you get out of bed.
3. Recognize kindness with a thank you.
4. Call when you are going to be late.
5. Share a good bottle of wine while watching a sunset.
6. Be generous with your time for each other.
7. Compliment your lover about something they did today that made them special.
8. Hold hands often.
9. Bring home flowers when it is not a special occasion.
10. Leave a sticky note on your lover’s wallet or purse telling them to come home safely to you because you love them so much.
11. Ask your spouse about their dreams and their dreams for your future together.
12. Open doors for each other.
13. Take a bike ride together, bringing a picnic lunch for a secluded spot along the way.
14. Walk your dog together.
15. Fix your lover breakfast in bed for no special reason.
16. Say “I love you” several times during each day.
17. Treat your lover with courtesy at all times.
18. Help clean off the table and do the dishes after dinner.
19. Compliment your lover’s cooking.
20. Tell one reason why your lover means so much to you.
21. Take your spouse to their favorite restaurant in the middle of the week.
22. Touch your mate 100 times a day.
23. Surprise your lover by bringing lunch when they least expects it.
24. Prepare meals together as often as you can.
25. Spend an evening listening to music and making a CD of your favorite songs together.
26. Never let things get stale. Upend expectancies and delight your lover.
27. Always point out the positive attributes of your lover, both at home and in public.
28. Give your spouse a massage or a back rub.
29. Look directly into your lover’s eye when you are having a conversation.
30. Be your lover’s best cheerleader for their accomplishments.
31. Plan a bubble bath together and see where it leads.
32. Go dancing together.
33. Talk about everything. No topic is too small or too big. There are no sacred cows.
34. Always demonstrate respect for each other in your words and in your actions.
35. Schedule your annual physicals on the same day.
36. Plan a week of healthy meals together with foods that you both enjoy.
37. Write your husband a love letter and leave it for him to find in his underwear drawer.
38. Sit down and go over the finances together before you pay the bills for the month.
39. Take your lover to a movie, putting your arm around them like you used to when you were dating.
40. Go for a boat ride, car ride or train ride that isn’t planned and doesn’t have an itinerary.
41. Write personal Valentine’s Day cards today even though it's not Valentine's Day.
42. Turn off the television and talk to each other.
43. Sing a song together and to each other.
44. Go to Disneyland—just the two of you.
45. Plant flowers together.
46. Share a tuna melt.
47. Kiss each other passionately.
48. Go to the zoo together.
49. Share a shower.
50. Sit in your porch swing and gaze at the stars.

Good One

Except GOD, everyone brings data to the table.

Four Ways to Lead a Successful Transformation - HBR

From HBR : Managing an organizational transformation, executives tell us, is like trying to change the wheels on a bike while you're riding it. You have to take your organization apart and put it back together in a new way, but you have to keep the business running at the same time. It's a lot to ask, and the senior leader bears much of the burden.

Being at the top of an organization makes you uniquely visible: consciously or not, you provide cues about what matters that everyone else will follow. When we were researching Beyond Performance, we found that little had been written about this crucial responsibility during a transformation. So we drew on our own involvement in scores of major change programs to identify the roles that only senior leaders can perform.

1. Make the transformation meaningful

Whether employees buy into a change effort can spell the difference between success and failure. Senior leaders tap into employees' energy by making the transformation personal and openly engaging them.

Successful leaders often allude to formative events in their own life to show their determination to overcome obstacles. When Andy Grove was CEO of Intel, he used his personal story of escaping Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 to push the company to make bold decisions as they transformed into a giant in the semiconductor industry.

Connecting with people takes time and effort. Corrado Passera, CEO of Banca Intesa, traveled all of Italy to spread the bank's transformation story to its 60,000 employees. He told us, "You have to put your face in front of people if you want them to follow you."

2. Be the change you want to see the mindsets and behavior you want to see

When you're asking others to transform how they get work done, it's incredibly powerful for you to transform how you get work done as well.

After John Akehurst tackled underperformance at Woodside Petroleum, he admitted to us that "It took a lot of effort for me to recognize that I am responsible for the culture of the organization, and how dysfunctional my behavior was and what an impact it had on other people." Learning to be humble, to listen, and to trust intuition as well as analysis helped Akehurst and his team turn the business around.

Well-chosen symbolic actions can have an impact out of all proportion to their size. At Infosys, chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy habitually pays the difference between a single and a double hotel room when he takes his wife on business trips. He explained to us, "Credibility comes from eating one's own food before recommending it to others," an attitude that helped Murthy transform a company started with $250 in seed capital into a global leader in consulting and information technology.

3. Build a strong and committed top team

It's likely that not everyone on your team wants — or is able — to change. Ask yourself about each one: Does this individual know what they must do to make the transformation succeed? Is it clear what will happen if they don't get on board? Have I given them a chance to build the skills they need? Have I been modeling the target mindsets and behavior? If the answers are yes, swift action is warranted.

That's what happened at Seagate, the world's largest manufacturer of hard drives, during its transformation led by Steve Luczo: "We said, we will work as a team. So we needed to find out who was on the bus and who was not and to do it fast. I got rid of two top people in the first three to four months."

Taking tough decisions can have a surprisingly positive impact on the rest of the organization. High performers become more motivated, low performers opt out, and those in the middle realize they need to raise their game.

4. Relentlessly pursue impact

In a change effort where real value is at stake, there's no substitute for simply getting involved in the details. Kicking off a transformation is one thing, but sticking with it is what really counts.

Larry Bossidy, reflecting on leading a transformation of AlliedSignal, wrote, "Many people regard execution as detail work that's beneath the dignity of a business leader. That's wrong ... it's a leader's most important job." This means getting involved in the problem-solving on high value initiatives, making quick decisions when barriers appear, and staying on top of the numbers. We've learned that the adage "In God we trust, everyone else brings data to the table" fully applies during a transformation.

By playing these four roles, the most senior leader can greatly improve the odds of success for any organizational transformation.

Greatest Value

The ONLY ONE that i VALUE the most is LOYALTY. Without that a you are NOTHING.

Steve Job's Best Quotes - WSJ

By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, the company he founded and turned into the largest technology company in the world. Although his tenure as CEO will be remembered for ushering in fundamental changes in the way people interact with technology, he has also been known for his salesmanship, his ability to turn a phrase – and a knack for taking complicated ideas and making them easy to understand. Below, a compendium of some of the best Steve Jobs quotes.

On Technology

“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—‘Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.

“I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.

“These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

“But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” [Wired, February 1996]

***

“I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television — but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.” [Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003]

On Design

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. [Wired, February 1996]

***

“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

“That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998, in a profile that also included the following gem: "Steve clearly has done an incredible job," says former Apple Chief Financial Officer Joseph Graziano. "But the $64,000 question is: Will Apple ever resume growth?"]

***

“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’” [Fortune, January 24 2000]

***

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” [MSNBC and Newsweek interview, Oct. 14, 2006]

On His Products

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore. When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

Playboy: We were warned about you: Before this Interview began, someone said we were “about to be snowed by the best.”

[Smiling] “We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” [On Mac OS X, Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000]

***

“It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it!” [On the iTunes Music Store, Fortune, May 12, 2003]

***

“Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. … One is very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate it’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.” [Announcement of the iPhone, Jan. 9, 2007]

On Business

“You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]

***

Q: There’s a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?

“You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]

***

“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” [Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998]

***

“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” [Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]

***

“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it. That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.

“So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.” [Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000]

***

“The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that’s not what it’s about. Process makes you more efficient.

“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

“And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. [BusinessWeek, Oct. 12, 2004]

On His Competitors

Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?

“If they did, they wouldn’t have made the PCjr.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are the “slash q-zs” and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel––one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

“I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success — I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.” [Triumph of the Nerds, 1996]

***

“I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” [On Bill Gates, The New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997]

On Predicting the Future

“I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people––as remarkable as the telephone.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]

***

“The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

“It’s like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there’s some fundamental technology shift, it’s just over.” [Wired, February 1996]

***

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long. [Wired, February 1996]

On Life

“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” [1982, quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987]

***

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.” [Wired, February 1996]

***

“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.” [Wired, February 1996]

***

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

***

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

***

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

***

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.” [NBC Nightly News, May 2006]

***

And One More Thing

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]