Scott Belsky on “The Love Conundrum”

In Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision & Reality published by Portfolio/Penguin (2010), Scott Belsky introduces what he calls the Action Method and urges his reader to use it to “question many of the traditional practices of project management.” For example, near the end of the book, he discusses Jason Randal, a multi-talented person: a Ph.D. in social psychology, stunt double work, a board-certified master hypnotist, NAUI master scuba instructor, instructor at Chuck Norris karate school. Randal suggests that there are three components to mastery of almost anything: (1) a deep desire and interest, (2) the ability to learn all about it, and (3) the capacity to enlist support.

“As Randal describes his approach to many interests, the common theme is a deep and authentic love for every skill he has developed and his experiences using them. Randal has an insatiable desire to become better, but not out of ambition or competitiveness. Randal is driven by love. Love keeps him engaged long enough to learn, experiment, and take bold risks.”

But according to Belsky, there is a conundrum: love can also disappoint us because we tend to idealize what we love most and seldom (if ever) attain the vision we have of it. “The feeling of it is so pure that you can’t make the real thing that has that feeling and so you’re inevitably going to be disappointed by it. And in some way, the depth of that disappointment is in direct correlation to how beautiful the vision was to begin with.”

“Your challenge is to maintain an organic relationship with the craft that you love…constantly finding new ways to reengage, keeping the love affair alive despite the suite of pressures that come between our visions and reality.”

I agree with Belsky that our love of chess or playing the cello, for example, may be “pure” but we must accept the fact that our performance is seldom (if ever) perfect. It is reassuring to know, however, that the same love that inspires our effort will also sustain us during our inevitable disappointment with the results of that effort.

As Helen Keller observed, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Scott Belsky on meetings that really matter

In Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming Obstacles Between Vision & Reality published by Portfolio/Penguin (2010), Scott Belsky introduces what he calls the Action Method and urges his reader to use it to “question many of the traditional practices of project management.” For example, he notes that it is typical, in creative environments, that “spontaneous idea generation gets in the way of following through on s particular idea. The wise creative leader understands that idea generation is a wild animal that requires a stolid trainer to tame excitement with a healthy dose of skepticism. You need to say ‘no’ more than you say ‘yes,’ and you need to build a team and culture that helps kill ideas when necessary.”

In the Organization and Execution section, he offers these guidelines to ensure that meetings produce desirable and measurable results.

1. Don’t meet just because it’s Monday. Abolish all automatic meetings without an actionable agenda. Only meet to discuss what to do, not what to discuss.

2. End each meeting with a review of Actions captured. Who will do what by when? Why?

3. Call out nonactionable meetings. “When meetings end without any specific Action Steps, it is your responsibility to speak up and question the value of the meeting.”

4. Conduct standing meetings. “Lengthy, pointless meetings are less likely to happen when everyone is standing – and gradually getting weak in the knees.”

5. Don’t call meetings out of your own insecurity. The meeting is not about you. “Great leaders candidly ask themselves why they are calling a meeting and they are fiercely protective of their team’s time.”

6. Don’t stick to round numbers. Most impromptu meetings that have a specific purpose (e.g. update on a project or problem) should be concluded in ten minutes or less. Beware of scheduled meetings that tend to have a default setting of 30 or 60 minutes.

7. Always measure with Action Steps…or something else. Sometimes it is necessary to meet for a concrete but nonactionable objective (e.g. to align goals, explain a new development, address a cultural concern) but a meeting that has neither a concrete objective nor an actionable outcome should never occur. Period.