In November, I posted about what's been happening with me professionally and with my company, Summersault. I appreciate everyone who has asked for updates since, knowing I haven't always had clear or concise updates to give. In case we haven't talked in person, here are a few of the highlights five months later:
In December 2013, I completed the transitions of staffing that I talked about in the previous post, such that I became the sole remaining person at the company. I was grateful that my now former co-workers were all able to find new job opportunities throughout that transition.
Over the years I've gathered some notes and reminders for myself about what makes a proposal effective, and I thought it might be useful to dump those out here. This info is mostly geared toward business proposals (pitching to a client, convincing a co-worker, justifying an expenditure, etc.) and other professional uses, but it might be useful for other scenarios too.
Plan
Before you start writing, make sure you have a plan for what you're creating:
Approach: is a formal proposal the right approach for this task, or would the people involved benefit more from a more iterative/collaborative/informal approach?
Audience: who are you writing the proposal for? What do they already know about the topic? Are they already "on your side" and just need some details worked out, or are you persuading them to change their minds? What other audiences might also see the proposal?
Goals: the primary purpose of a proposal is to get your audience's approval. Are you clear on what you're trying to get approval for?
Scope: what does your audience need to hear to give their approval? What kinds of information do they NOT need to hear? What will their reaction be?
Not every person can do every job or thrive in every role they end up in.
Sometimes people lose interest in their work, get promoted beyond their capabilities, or didn't have the skills/experience to be a good fit in the first place. That this happens at all may speak to some area for improvement in the way people are hired, trained, reviewed or promoted in a given business or organization, but it's also an inevitable part of how companies and not-for-profits made up of humans change and grow.
When someone isn't a good fit for a role, the important thing is how the organization handles it.
Unfortunately, I've seen all too often that some organizations don't handle it at all. Instead, they leave everyone else to work around the mismatched role or problematic behavior. At best this wastes an opportunity for helping someone improve and rearranging "human resources" to better fit the needs of the business or organization. At worst it saps morale, leads to otherwise high-performing people leaving, costs a lot of money and significantly decreases the effectiveness of the organization overall. Working around someone who isn't right for the job does a disservice to them and can be toxic to the life of a business or organization.
So how can you tell if that's what is happening? Here's a list of signs I've seen in my experiences that might mean you're working around someone:
A week ago I had the opportunity to hear Frances Moore Lappé speak here in Richmond. She's primarily known around the world as author of Diet for a Small Planet, but she's also an Earlham College graduate, so it was great that she came back to her alma mater to give a talk.
Lappé's talk overall was about how we can move from a place of powerlessness to a place of empowerment when it comes to working on addressing various ills that plague the world - from climate change to energy/resource crises to poverty, and all of the other systems and issues that are related.
It's a topic, a question that's been on my mind lately as I think about my own vocation, and where (to borrow from Frederick Buechner) my talents and interests might meet the world's deep needs. The question wasn't answered for me during the talk, but there were a few insights and random bits of wisdom that I want to preserve here:
Is your business or organization leaking institutional knowledge? How much is it costing you every day?
Every kind of business, not-for-profit, government office and other organization has institutional knowledge. It's the information you share with new people joining your staff about how things work. It's the decisions you make at meetings or in conversations with your co-workers or volunteers. It's the bits and pieces of shared understanding that develop through email messages, memos and other printed and electronic material that you create.
But many organizations don't take steps to preserve this institutional knowledge, or to give their staff, volunteers or other stakeholders easy access to it.
I've been thinking about the complex relationship that mainstream U.S. culture has with the notion of revolution.
In the abstract, we seem to celebrate the possibility of wide-reaching changes in some government or other system that affects the lives of many people.
We like things that provide a chance for a clean slate, a fresh start, a putting aside of ways that aren't working well. When we think about other countries that may have been living under oppressive regimes and then hear that they are in the midst of revolution, we probably assume that this change is leaning toward kinds of freedom and opportunities that are good for the people there. We have ourselves spent many billions of dollars on facilitating "regime change" or other dramatic shifts in power around the world. And we know that our own history as a country is full of revolutions - some peaceful, some bloody - and we take it as a given that these kinds of struggles and shifts are milestones to be remembered, if not honored.
When revolution is in the past, or in distant places, it's okay.
But when we think about revolution in the context of our own present, everyday lives, it seems we are much less tolerant of revolution.
Continuing in the theme of last week's post on how I became a computer geek, I thought I'd also share some thoughts on how I learned to run a business.
I get asked now and then what path led me to the world of business ownership/management, and I think the short answer is that I've always just learned what I needed to know to support my other interests and passions, and in one particular long-running case, that meant learning the world of business. I've never set out to run a business for the sake of running a business, and I don't have any formal educational training in that skill set.
I'm not sure that my story should be any kind of model for others; I don't claim that I've always learned to run a business well, and I'm sure that there are many things I could and should have done better over the years. But by at least a few traditional measures of my company Summersault's performance from 1997-2013 - profitability, financial stability and customer satisfaction - I think I can claim some success along the way.
Within any given business or organization, the ideal is (probably) that everyone working or volunteering there will not only take on all of the tasks and projects that are clearly a part of their recognized role, but that they'll also work on things not necessarily assigned to them but that are still useful to the overall goals of that organization.
If everyone shares the same vision and goals, and everyone participating is sufficiently empowered and inspired to work toward those goals, this ideal can be easy to realize. There is almost certainly always something else that can be done to support or further the mission of the places we work and volunteer; if there's someone who regularly ends up having some "down time" with "nothing to do" then there's probably something else wrong - with the person's mindset, the structure they are working within, or the organizational culture overall.
In practice, I've found that people have different personalities and personal/work backgrounds that lead them to respond differently to this idea of "working on things that weren't necessarily assigned to me." For some, it's a no-brainer and they can jump right into that mentality. For others, it represents a threshold of riskiness and potential for failure that they may not be willing to cross: "If it wasn't assigned to me and I do it wrong, I don't want to be responsible for the outcome." For still others, it can just be the challenge of imagining tasks or projects outside their job description or previously assigned duties; the inertia of working within familiar problem spaces is hard to overcome.
It seems that every healthy and thriving community, city, social group or ecosystem remains healthy and thriving because they can handle having a disruptive element with an important role to play.
The disruptors are the people or events that shake up the status quo, question why things are done a certain way, or introduce an element of chaos or discontent into the system and forces it to evolve, change or adapt. They are the people whose survival or well-being is not dependent on the stability of the system; revolutionary new ideas and significant change rarely come from those whose livelihoods and sense of security depend on things going along as they are.
As a young person I was aware of the concept of maturity as something that could be sought, developed, worked on, but I was never quite sure how to measure whether or not someone had achieved maturity.
I've defined maturity in different ways throughout my life, most of them probably flawed.
Recently I've come to see maturity as a measure of someone's ability to understand the motivations of other people, to build for themselves a context about how a given situation or set of decisions has come about, and to have empathy for those motivations and that context.
In November, I posted about what's been happening with me professionally and with my company, Summersault. I appreciate everyone who has asked for updates since, knowing I haven't always had clear or concise updates to give. In case we haven't talked in person, here are a few of the highlights five months later:
