Corporate Idealist

photo credit: quinn.anya

As I mentioned on Mother’s Day, I grew up in a household where both parents were business people. (My mother, as I said in that post, spent years as a chamber of commerce executive and is now an elected official in my hometown.) My father spent 30-some years in industrial sales and sales management, and he worked out of our house when he wasn’t on the road, so I saw him in work mode a great deal of the time.

Both my parents were role models for me in many ways to become the Corporate Idealist I am today. Below are a few lessons I learned from my father, and which I hope are similar to lessons other people have learned from their own fathers about business.

Act sensibly, but be passionate about what you do.

My father was a likable, friendly guy but he had a short fuse and I sometimes heard him getting angry on the phone with suppliers, colleagues, and probably even customers. I know that what set him off the most was when people didn’t match his expectations of quality and service.

While I don’t think yelling at people on the phone is necessarily the best way to conduct ourselves in business, it shows passion. If you’re passionate about what you do, the challenge is to use your zeal to fuel others’ enthusiasm, and to spark your own creativity and innovation. Even slightly hot-headed dads would probably agree.

Don’t start fights, but stand up for yourself if you’re bullied.

This lesson comes not so much from the workplace as from the playground, but it applies everywhere. Unfortunately, even in the most mundane office environments, there are often still playground bullies. Sometimes they’re the CEO; sometimes they’re just at the next desk. Fortunately, Cy Wakeman recently posted an entry over at Fast Company about dealing with office bullies.

Invent and innovate.

My dad and I were on the front porch swing one time, and he started talking about inventions, and how much money there was in inventing something, and how I should try to think of something I could invent. I remember describing a concept I had for a typewriter that would type down onto paper underneath of it so it could work on odd size pages and bound paper. I don’t think he was very impressed, and I chuckle when I think of it.

Still, while I have not invented something in a classic sense, I have certainly tried to apply a philosophy of innovation to my work and other areas of my life.

In the end, your relationships matter.

When my dad was dying from cancer in 2005, he asked me to help him write some letters to some of his friends. He had a very difficult time finding a way to express what he wanted to say, so we came up with something that said “thank you for everything – your support, your kindness, your prayers, and most of all, your love.” Several of his friends approached me at his funeral to tell me how much they cherished that letter. Many of us may not suffer long enough to get the bittersweet chance to write those kinds of letters, so it’s important to express our love and gratitude to each other as often as we can.

The corollary to that lesson is that life is too short to spend your time with people you don’t care about, or who don’t share your values.

How about you? What did you learn from your father about business, or about life in general? Leave your lessons and stories in the comments.

And Happy Father’s Day to all fathers and children of fathers!

photo credit: Orin Optiglot

One of the defining characteristics of work/life balance revolves around the issue of choice. We all really want the choice to work when we want, where we want and how we want. Or we want the choice to vacation as we wish, go to events that are appealing, or meet up with friends we love.

And, if our life is balanced enough between what we do to make money and then what we do when we spend that money, we feel free. We feel like we’re in control of our lives and careers and that we’re able to do better work and maybe even be better people.

Of course, when we don’t feel like we’re maintaining a healthy work/life balance, we can feel helpless. Out of whack. Frantic. And then we may not be able to do our best work or even live our best life.

There’s a growing body of research that says too many choices are bad for us. Too many choices can be paralyzing, confusing and may actually mean that we make a worse choice. Does this then mean that in order to have a proper work/life balance we should actually not seek to have more choices about how we spend our time? Should I erase the first two paragraphs of this post?

No. Instead, we need to best navigate between the choices that matter and the choices that don’t.

Maybe I think I want a gig that allows me to work from wherever I want. Maybe I like to be able to choose to work from home, a cubicle, a coffeehouse or a moving train. Or maybe that decision doesn’t mean that much to me. After all, no matter what, I’ll still be working. Sure – our environment can have a direct effect on our productivity, but maybe it’s not that big of a deal.

Maybe instead I’d like to be able to choose the kind of work I get to do. Maybe I’d rather be able to choose the clients I get to work with, the kind of marketing campaigns I put together or the kinds of products I sell. Because those choices deal directly with the kind of work I’m doing, they may make the work part of my work/life balance a little better, which could allow me to spend my life time at places I enjoy (like my home, a cubicle, a coffeehouse or a moving train).

As you reflect on your own balance this weekend, think about which choices are most important. Then, begin to build your work around those choices. Take a deep breath when you feel like you don’t have any freedom in certain choices and if possible, dismiss them as unimportant. Or at least let them be sacrificed on the altar of choices that matter.

photo credit: Elsie esq.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that posts on this blog have been more sparse this week than in previous weeks. It’s because I’m still doing most of the blogging myself, and I have a lot of irons in the fire.

I’m mentioning this for two reasons:

1. I’m still seeking contributors. If you or someone you know writes regularly, is passionate about meaningful work, and would be interested in writing for this blog, check out the contributor guidelines.
2. My struggles this week are relevant to business overall, because getting distracted is about as common as coffee in most businesses.

One of the first lessons in branding is to focus. Know your positioning, know your differentiaton, and shun that which does not fit. It works for branding, but it also works for product development, and service delivery, and just about any aspect of business.

It’s important to focus. And what’s necessary to staying focused is the ability to say no.

I’m clearly not saying no to enough possibilities in my personal and professional life right now, and it’s partly because the state of the economy and friends losing jobs (another of my friends lost his job just today, for example) leads to a feeling that we can’t afford to turn anything away.

But it isn’t until we start saying no to what doesn’t truly fit that we can become better at what does. It’s true for people, and it’s true for businesses.

What can you say “no” to today that will free you up to be better at what you do?

photo credit: PinkMoose

You connect with CorporateIdealist.com because you believe there is more to life than making money. You believe that how a person generates money matters, and that how they make a life through the fruits of their labor matters even more.

These facts lead me to believe you can help me process the attitudes and actions of an “executive magazine” in my local community.

We may be able to start with the problem that there is no competition at present. The publisher has a stranglehold on the market and has positioned itself via political maneuvers as the sole source of business executive networking and resources. Not surprisingly, part of their success thus far has been the lure of a perceived power advantage for people personally and professionally if they come inside the magazine’s corporate environment.

There is nothing about their success that is illegal (to my knowledge). And in the world of business, if you are not breaking the law then no one can say you haven’t earned your success through shrewdness and smarts. But what we can say is no thank you, I don’t find value in your product and I prefer not to be a part of what you are doing.

I recently requested to be removed from the magazine’s subscription list because I was tired of its hypocritical approach to women in business. The highlight (lowlight?) for me was the magazine’s decision to accept advertising revenue from a strip club in their annual “women in business” issue. There have been several similar images and services advertised in the magazine over the years, and I no longer held the belief that this magazine had a true interest in advancing women as executives, and that in fact their publication was contributing to a culture that demeaned women as leaders and equals in the work place.

I want to emphasize, this operation is free to do as they choose. But so am I. After extensive emailing with the editor (who fought me tooth and nail over how “wrong” I was), she agreed to remove my name from the data base.

The magazine showed up in my mailbox 3 months after our agreement. Perhaps I should not be surprised that this operation is unable or unwilling to manage my straightforward disinterest; losing me would hurt their claim to be “read” by a certain number of people/women.

The title of this essay comes from the response I received from an associate on Twitter as we debated the issue: “Business is business.” She followed it up with a ;) winking smiley face. I’m still not sure about her mindset when she wrote this, but I’m very interested in yours.