Centrifugal Force, Merry-Go-Rounds, and Slowing Life Down (3-27-19)

Last week was about Newton’s laws of motion and moving people. This week we will stick with motion and reflect on centrifugal force, merry-go-rounds, and slowing life down.

I’m assuming that at one-point in all of our lives we have ridden on a merry-go-round or some kind of ride that spins you around in circles. Before the ride begins, we are stationary. As the ride starts to spin slowly, we initially don’t move too much from the center of the ride. However, as the ride picks up more speed, a force acts on us pushing us away from the center of the merry-go-round/ride and to the edges of the ride. The force that acts on us is centrifugal force. The bottom line is that the faster the thing is spinning the more the force works to push you to the outside, away from the center. If you want to get to the center, you need to find a way to slow things down.

You might be wondering where this is going. In many ways we spend our lives on an invisible merry-go-round balancing work, life, and everything that comes our way. Much like a merry-go-round, we have a center, where we are balanced, focused, and plugged into the things that matter most. The tricky thing is that unlike a merry-go-round, life never stops spinning (while we are living). This means that we always have some force pushing us away from our center. As life spins faster, we get further away from our center and lose focus.

What we often fail to realize is that we have the power to speed life up or slow life down. Have you ever been around a person who took something small and turned it into a huge deal spinning everything out of control? Have you ever been that person? I have. This is an example of taking something and speeding it up, further pushing us away from our center and making life difficult. On the opposite end, there are times when life has been going really fast and I’ve been able to say, “Does all of this actually matter? Is all of this really important?” (The answer is that 95% of things aren’t important.) Pausing to breathe and ask those questions has a powerful impact on slowing life down enough to where you can get closer to your center.

The challenge: On the merry-go-round of life, will you take the time to slow things down to get back to center?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Prioritization Lessons from Market Research (5-23-18)

Last week was about urgency, finding clarity, and prioritization. Tacey also shared some great thoughts about how we are often more accustomed to fighting fires and how preventing fires requires a different set of skills and planning. With that in mind, I want to get a little more tactical this week and dive into lessons I’ve learned from market research regarding prioritization. My hope is you might be able to apply some of this to prevent some fires in your life.

In market research there are always a million questions we could answer, but that does not mean we should answer all of them. Early in my career when people had a request of me, I asked myself two things. First, do I have the ability to do that? Second, do I have the extra time to do that? My answer to both of those questions was always yes. It wasn’t a yes, because it was true. It was often a yes, because I wanted to impress people by being able to do a lot of stuff. Market research has taught me that it’s possible to do stuff and answer a business question that adds NO value to the business. In those cases, doing all the work just results in wasted energy and time.

You might be wondering where this is going. Over time, I learned that I needed to get better at prioritization. In order to do that I needed a system that would help me define the value of the question I needed to answer, because prioritization always starts with understanding what you value. This brings me to the prioritization grid below, which I stole from Challis Imes, who stole it from Karen Wurster, who stole it from a sage spouting ancient wisdom in the Himalayas.

	Confident we already know the answer	Unsure of the answer
High impact to the business	B Don’t do new work. Spend your time and effort synthesizing existing work to find new insights.	A Prioritize this work and try to spend most of your time and effort here.
Lower impact to the business	D Avoid this like the plague.	C Don’t spend much time in this bucket.

I’ve found that putting things into this grid makes me do two things. First, it makes me spend time really thinking about the questions I’m being asked to answer and their potential value. Second, it gives me a framework to have a conversation about prioritizing things with stakeholders. Once I’ve plotted the questions I can go back to the team and say, “Here is how I view the world. Here is where everything fits for X, Y, and Z reasons. Do you feel differently? If so, what is your argument for making something an A priority?” These are great conversations, because it forces us to find alignment. Usually one of two things happens. We either realize we know more than we think we do, so we can deprioritize stuff, or I learn some context I didn’t have before, which gives me a better understanding of why something is important.

As I continue to work on developing my prioritization skills, I’ve taken the grid concept and applied it to other things in life. While the axes on the grid might change, it always gives me the structure I need to clearly define the value of things.

The challenge: How are you going about prioritizing things?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Prioritization and Clarity on what you Value (5-16-18)

Last week was about prioritization, oil changes, and taking care of ourselves. This week is about prioritization and clarity on what we value.

Let’s pretend that you wake up on Saturday morning. You look at your to-do list and you need to mow, get groceries, sort out your finances, hang out with friends, and run other errands. Which thing do you make sure you have to get done? Which things might you let slide? How do you decide which one to do first? Let’s pretend we are in the exact same situation with the exact same

to- do list. Now let’s add a twist. Your house is on fire. What action do you prioritize? I imagine that you grab your family and get out of the house as fast as you can. Having your house on fire, gives you instant clarity on what you need to do.

You might be wondering where this is going. I believe that prioritization challenges arise when we are not clear on what we value. In the above example, you started with a to do list and no sense of what you valued. When your house was on fire it quickly caused you to realize that you value the life of yourself and your family and that everything else is secondary. This is a pretty dramatic example, but it is a way of crystallizing what you value so you can take action.

Think about life for a moment. What do you value? Are you clear on that? Now, here is the hard question. How closely does your life reflect what you claim you value? If you aren’t clear on what you value, then you can’t prioritize things in your life, because you don’t have a starting point. I’ve found that the more my life reflects my priorities, the things I claim to value, the better life is for me.

When it comes to deciding what I value in life, I do it in two ways. First, I think about the roles I play and which ones are the most important. My goal is to be a great person, husband, dad, friend, and employee in that order. The second way I crystallize what I value might sound a little hokey, but it’s something that has had an impact on my life. My senior year of college I had the legendary Professor Skinner and she had us go through an exercise where we wrote our own mission statement. She then laminated these and gave them to us. I’ve kept mine in my wallet ever since. I feel that when I live this life is good. I bring all of this up to say that the exercise has helped me find clarity on my purpose and what is important to me, which has helped me prioritize things in life. If you haven’t ever done anything like this, I’d encourage you to reflect and even put your mission statement on paper. If you want some more food for thought you can check out this website https://www.andyandrews.com/personal-mission-statement/

The challenge: Are you clear on what you value and how that impacts the way you prioritize things?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Prioritization and Oil Changes (5-9-18)

This week I’d like to start a new series that encourages us to think about prioritization in different ways. This week we will start off by thinking about prioritization and oil changes.

What I’m about to tell you is a completely true story. My younger brother’s first car was a mustang convertible. He got an awesome deal on the car, because the guy was in a rush to get rid of it (long story). Now here is where the story goes downhill. My younger brother absolutely ruined his first car. Right about now, you’re probably assuming that he got into some kind of accident. That’s not true. He had the car for over 3 years, drove thousands of miles, and he NEVER changed the oil. NEVER. Eventually the engine just stopped working. Without oil, it basically locked up and couldn’t move. A family friend who has worked on race cards and demolition derby cars said it was the worst engine he had ever seen. My brother had the means and the opportunity to change the oil, but he never made taking care of his car a priority. Tell me this isn’t one of the dumbest things you’ve ever heard in your life.

You’re probably wondering where this is going. Sometimes, I treat myself the same way my brother treated his mustang convertible. Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in work, kids, and life, that I don’t make taking care of myself a priority. During these times I don’t eat well. I don’t exercise. I don’t go to the doctor like I should. I don’t rest and relax. I don’t do the things I need to do to take care of me. Do you ever fall into this trap? Have you ever went a few weeks or a month and looked back to say, “Whoa, I’m not treating myself very well right now”?

Much like my brother, I have the means and the ability to take care of myself, but sometimes I just don’t make myself a priority. Much like a car, my body is the thing that transports me around in this world, so if I don’t take care of it, everything else will suffer including my family, friends, and work. I’ve found that the only way I can truly take care of myself is if I’m extremely deliberate about doing so. For example, in order to take care of myself physically I’ve discovered I need to work toward achieving some kind of goal. Usually, I sign up to run a race, which will put me on a schedule to eat relatively healthy and work out on a scheduled basis. I need to be deliberate about taking care of myself in other ways too. I make a concentrated effort to put away my phone when I’m outside of work, so it’s out of sight and out of mind. I have to create boundaries, so I can put work down in order to enjoy some free time. If I’m not deliberate, I won’t take care of myself and sooner or later I find myself locking up like my brother’s engine.

The challenge: Are you prioritizing the time to take care of yourself?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Prioritization and Trade-Offs (5-30-18)

This is the last in the series about prioritization. We began by thinking about oil changes and prioritizing taking care of ourselves. Then, we reflected on what we truly value, because that is the only way we can prioritize things. Last week I shared what I’ve learned about prioritization from market research. This week we will think about prioritization and trade-offs. Once again, special shout out to Kathleen Pearson for being the inspiration behind this series.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you were planning a house party for about 10 people. You have a budget of $100. Ideally, you want to have invitations, food, drinks, party favors, and decorations. Would you dedicate $20 to each thing I just listed? Probably not. It wouldn’t make any sense for you to treat each of the 5 things like they were completely equal when they have different values. Depending on who you are and how you value those things, you would split up your money accordingly. As you spent your money you’d continue to weigh the trade-offs. As an example, every dollar spent on beverages is a dollar you can’t spend on something else. If the party was for my friends, I could spend most of my money on beverages and food, and it would be an awesome party. If the party was for my daughter’s birthday, I would allocate the money differently, and probably spend more on decorations and party favors.

You probably see where this is going. We face the above situation in work all the time. Instead of planning a party we are trying to achieve a business objective. Instead of $100 dollars we have finite resources. Instead of food, drinks, etc. we have projects, tactics, etc. to invest in. Unlike the house party situation, I feel we often fall into the trap of trying to do everything at work. As I mentioned last week, I’ve fallen into this trap because I’ve tried to impress people. Sometimes, I also fall into this trap, because I don’t think through the trade-offs we can make.

Usually, there are three main things you trade-off: speed, quality, and cost (time and/or money). It’s extremely rare to be able to have all three. If you have something fast, it’s usually going to be expensive or it’s not going to be perfect quality. If you have something of perfect quality it’s either going to take a long time to create and/or it will cost a lot. I know that we like to pretend that the world doesn’t work this way, but it does. We have to get comfortable that we live in a world of restrictions and as we face these trade-offs we need to do a better job of understanding what we are willing to sacrifice. For example, I know people always want an A+ on quality, but are there times where a B is acceptable? If it is, we can probably move faster and be cheaper. Bottom line, the better I understand the trade-offs I’m making, the more equipped I am to make better prioritization decisions.

The challenge: Do you understand the trade-offs you’re making?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Checkers, Jumps, and Sacrifices (4-1-18)

This week I’d like to start a series inspired by board games. Hopefully it doesn’t leave you bored (<-see what I did there?). We’ll begin by thinking about checkers, jumps, trade-offs, and making sacrifices.

Recently, I taught Alice, who turned 6 yesterday, how to play checkers. It’s a great game, because it has strategy and it’s still fairly simple to play. In case you’ve never played, the objective is to capture all of the other team’s pieces. Essentially, when an opponent’s piece is in front of your piece you make your piece jump over it, and you remove the opponent’s piece from the board. When Alice plays, she loves jumping other pieces, but she HATES having her pieces jumped. She’ll do everything in her power to avoid being jumped, which often leads to her losing games. She loses games, because sometimes the best move on the board is to sacrifice one of her own pieces in order to set herself up in a more powerful position. Slowly, she is learning that sometimes the best move is a sacrifice. Sometimes the best move to make is to allow me to jump one of her pieces, so she can do a double jump and take away two of mine.

You might be wondering where this is going. I would argue that life and work are games of strategy. They are games of moves and countermoves, games about anticipating things and reacting. Much like Alice, it’s easy to become obsessed with jumping, constant activity, conquering, and going after everything that looks like an opportunity. However, sometimes, it doesn’t make sense to do that. Do you ever run yourself ragged trying to make every “jump” only to realize it’s left you in a weaker position? I know I have. Over time I’ve learned that sometimes I need to be willing to give certain things up. Over time, I’ve come to accept that sometimes I need to sacrifice something in order to be in the strongest position.

Now if we look at work, think about marketing as an example. Marketing is a game of strategic trade-offs. Working in research, I have access to reports and things that reveal all kinds of weaknesses and opportunities at any given moment. Essentially, there are always tons of jumps we could make. However, if you try to make every jump you lose. Instead, you have to sacrifice some things. Sometimes, you have to allow your competitors to have certain things, so you can stay focused on your strengths. Sometimes you have to refrain from spending time, energy, and effort in one area, so you can focus all of those things in a another area that will help you be victorious.

The challenge: Are you always going after every opportunity or are you intentionally making trade-offs?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Lessons from being a Dad Part 3 The Darker Side of being a Dad (4-5-17)

Last week was about competing vs. collaborating as it applies to my daughters. This week I want to look at the darker side of being a dad. Of course I’m talking about when parents unnecessarily compete against each other through their kids. As we reflect this week, I want us to ask ourselves, “What really matters?”

I never knew how crazy competitive people could be until I had kids. The very moment we had our first child, people started coming out of the woodwork. The conversation basically starts with “Perfect Parent” saying, “I and/or my kid is doing A, B, and C, and if you aren’t doing those things you are a horrible parent or something is wrong with your kid.” This applies to everything; even things I didn’t realize you could compete on. For example, Perfect Parent would say that if you don’t breast feed you are a horrible mom. Perfect Parent would want you to know that if your children aren’t eating all vegan all the time, then they are less than human. Perfect Parent likes to remind dads that if their kids aren’t in the perfect outfit they are horrible fathers. Perfect Parent wants you to know that their kid is involved in 50 activities and is too busy for non-value add activities like playing. Perfect Parent likes to remind you that their kid is reading novels at age 5, and if your kid isn’t they are doomed to a horrible life. Perfect Parent continues to do this with their child of all ages.

If you don’t have kids, you’re probably thinking the above paragraph was really stupid. If you do have kids, you’re probably thinking, “Yep, that’s my experience.” I’ve found that it’s easy to get swept up in all of this and start feeling like a horrible person who is ruining your child’s life because you aren’t doing “the right thing” or are not pushing them to do a million things. Here’s the truth though. 99% of all that stuff, doesn’t matter. If we are honest with ourselves, most of the time it’s parents focusing on stuff that in the grand scheme of things doesn’t matter in order to make themselves feel good. In order to make sure I don’t get lost in this stuff as a dad, I need to start by deciding what’s really important. For me there are 3 things I care about with regards to my kids: their health, them being good strong people (loving, generous, kind, thoughtful, independent, etc.), and them having grit/tenacity. Those are the things I care about and the things I work on with my kids. If your kid is a better reader or is smarter, that’s fine. I’m happy for you and them. At the same time, I’m not competing. I’m not sitting around comparing my kids to yours. I don’t need to get bent out of shape about those things. My thought is that if my girls grow up and all they are is healthy, good strong people, and tenacious they will be pretty good people and I will have done my job as a parent.

Making connections. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ve probably seen this play out in different places. It’s easy at work for “Perfect Employee” to say, “You should be doing X, Y, and Z exactly like me or you’re not good.” It’s easy to look around at others and say, “I need to be just like them and doing their things.” On top of this, there are people throughout this company that are smarter than me, more talented than me, at a higher level than me, etc. I don’t need to drive myself crazy competing with them. Instead, I can be happy for them and focus on me and what I need to do. Similar to being a dad, I’d argue the first thing we need to do is decide what is important, because a lot of that is stuff that just doesn’t matter. What’s important to you depends on what you value and what your goals are.

The challenge: Are you getting lost in a competitive environment or are you focusing on the things that are really important?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Quidditch, Golden Snitches, and Prioritization (3-1-17)

Last week was about Hermione Granger, self-doubt, and running out of magic. This week we are going to turn to quidditch for a lesson in prioritization. In case you’re a muggle, allow me to explain Quidditch. The game consists of two teams of 7 players who fly on brooms and try to score points. There are 4 “balls” that are in play during a match. There is one quaffle (a ball you grab and throw through hoops to earn points), two bludgers (enchanted balls that try to knock people off their brooms), and one golden snitch.

The golden snitch is a small flittery ball that is enchanted to make is extremely elusive. Capturing the ball is worth a lot of points and is the only way to stop the match. Basically, capturing the golden snitch is the most important thing you can do in the game to achieve victory. In order to catch the golden snitch, each team has a player designated as the Seeker. The Seeker is a skilled flyer with a fast broom and their job is to avoid the other team and the bludgers in order to capture the golden snitch. The other players work with the Seeker to help them achieve the goal. You can click HERE to see this in action. So you’re probably wondering what this has to do with prioritization. As the paragraph states above, the golden snitch is the most important thing in the game. This means that each team prioritizes its personnel, effort, skills, and strategies in a way that boosts their ability to capture the golden snitch. If the team doesn’t prioritize golden snitch catching activities, then they will lose.

So what does this have to do with work? In quidditch the golden snitch is clearly identified as the most important thing to achieve. In the real world it doesn’t work like that. Instead, it is up to the team to look at a very complex market in order to decide what is the most important thing the team must achieve in order to be successful. Another connection is that just like quidditch, in the real world you are flying around in a crazy environment where bludgers (external forces) try to knock you off your focus while competitors fly all around you chasing goals. You are forced to navigate an extremely complicated landscape, and it is up to you to prioritize the people, effort, skills, time, and strategies that will enable you to capture your golden snitch. If you asked your team right now what the golden snitch is that your team is trying to capture, could they tell you? If you asked them how their work enabled the team to capture the golden snitch would they know? If I asked you what your golden snitch was, would you have an answer? If you don’t know what your golden snitch is you can’t figure out how to catch it, which just leaves you fly around fast in circles. Sure it might look impressive, but it’s not really getting anything done. I’m sure we all have had that experience, right? I know that I’m currently in the stage of messy confusion where I’m spending time trying to figure out what my golden snitch is so I can best catch it, so if you’re there too then you aren’t alone.

The challenge: What is your team’s golden snitch? How are you prioritizing your efforts to ensure that everything is aligned to catching that golden snitch? (If only it were as easy as “accio what should be my top priority.”)

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Olympic Lessons Part 4 Are we doing the right things to achieve success? (8-24-16)

This will be the final entry in the series on the Olympics. We’ve looked at leadership and alignment (rowing), gymnastics and finding your purpose, and trust and teamwork (soccer). I’d like us to finish this series by asking ourselves one question. “Am I doing the right things to achieve success?”

Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time. In order to become one of the best swimmers of all time, he spent hours on the uneven bars and doing floor routines. Wait. That’s not right. That’s gymnastics. He spent hours working on his foot speed and agility. That’s not right. That’s the soccer players. Michael Phelps understood that he was competing in swimming events, so he spent time doing drills and building muscles that would enable him to become a great swimmer. In order to achieve success, he had to focus on doing the right things. If he would have focused on doing gymnastics workouts he probably wouldn’t be a great swimmer and I’m guessing he wouldn’t have been great at gymnastics either 😉

How does this connect to work? We are focused on winning a gold medal with HCPs, payers, and patients. As our world changes, do we know what event we are actually competing in? Are we swimming? Are we playing soccer? Are we performing gymnastics routines? Depending on the customer we are supporting individuals might be competing in different events, so we might need different skillsets. That’s okay, because we are all on the same team. After we know what event we are competing in, are we focused on doing the right things that will build our skills to help us win? How often do we waste time on things that won’t make us better and won’t help us win in life? As leaders, what are we doing to make sure we stay focused on doing the right things?

Besides our day to day work, the she same thought process can be applied to developing in our career and building our culture. When it comes to our career, do we know what game we are playing? Do we know what game we want to play in the future? Are we working on developing the skills we need, so we can be successful in our current and future areas? As leaders, are we giving people the feedback they need so they know where and how to grow? When it comes to building a culture, do we know what kind of culture we are trying to build? Are we building the culture that will help us win where we want to win? As a leader, are we making sure we focus on rewarding and recognizing the right behaviors to build this culture?

The challenge: Are you doing the right thing to achieve success? Are you ensuring others do the right things to achieve success?

Have a jolly good day and congrats team USA,

Andrew Embry

Prioritization and Dishwashers Part 5: Clarity’s Kryptonite (6-22-16)

This will be the last in the series on prioritization. We’ve talked about dishwashers in regards to capacity, process, learning, and being intentional with people. Bottom line is prioritization is all about clarity. If you have clarity then you can appropriately prioritize. This week we are going to look at clarity’s kryptonite, an interesting conundrum of a lifeform called people.

Imagine for a moment that you had all of the dishes in the dishwasher and you were getting ready to start the cycle. Right before you did I ran up and started throwing stuff in there, which completely jacked everything up. What would you do? Would you run the dishwasher as is? Would you attempt to rearrange the dishes? Would you remove some dishes? This would never happen at work, right? Imagine you have your projects you are working on, and then someone starts throwing new projects (dishes) at you, because they are clearly priorities. What would you do? I know this never happens, but what if it did? How would you feel? It would be frustrating, right? What would you do?

Why does this happen? This happens because people are beautiful, emotional, flawed, and limited creatures as opposed to purely calculating robots. I love people and find myself frustrated by them at the same time. The thing is that we live in a world that is evolving rapidly and since people aren’t robots with amazing terabyte processing power the answers and insights we are looking for are never clean. For all of these reasons, what I’ve come to realize is that people (myself included) are NOT particularly good when it comes to clarity and truly understanding what they want.

So how does this understanding connect with our work? It changes the way we can approach people when they want to change our priorities. In the past, I would assume that the person asking me to change priorities was purely rational and knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and the outcome that would occur. Therefore, I would agree and do what they said without asking any questions. This always led to problems and complications, because I’d do work that really wasn’t that important or I’d do work where I didn’t understand the end game. Not good.

I’ve realized people are not robots and expecting them to have everything figured out when they don’t live in my world is a poor expectation to have. Instead of instantly agreeing to requests, I seek clarity before I do anything. First, I talk to them and reinforce what my current priorities are and why. Second, I ask questions to figure out what the person wants to change, why, and what impact that will have on the other work going on. Depending on the outcome of that conversation one of two things happens. The person realizes that what they want me to do isn’t as important as other things, so we drop it or I gain a new understanding of how and why my priorities are evolving, why this new project is important, and we figure out how to rebalance things. I can’t come to this place without having the conversation to gain clarity.

The challenge: Are you asking the questions to find the clarity you need before you accept projects and change priorities?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry