Kill me (no pun intended) if I spent too much time at a two-day meeting sequestered in a windowless casino conference room in VEGAS discussing the topic of Deathcare (how AWESOME is that?!?!?! It makes me sound like a character from some indie film), where part of the conversation included timeless management discussions about the Who (not the band), the What, the Why, etc., etc.
It was a great experience on all fronts and I came back with a mélange (cornucopia? horn o’ plenty? plethora?) of takeaways and DEEP THOUGHTS (not by Jack Handy) – and I serve it up to you here in one cup of blog stew (bisque? chowder? pottage?)
I talk about WHY things are important in the work we do. It could be my Catholic guilt complex that feels the need to explain WHY I’m being demanding OR perhaps it’s just important to understand the WHY – the motivations behind the things we do. The WHY (which I will continue to consistently capitalize and italicize throughout) is important!
It’s most evident when you’re raising kids: They don’t want to do what they’re told and if all they do is what they’re told, they might grow up to be mindless order takers who can’t think for themselves (and where does that leave us)? So the alternative to just saying “do this because I said so,” is to explain WHY to do it.
That’s why I talk about the WHY (plus I like to hear myself talk … and I think that these types of conversations are important in “learning the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderan”).
The WHAT is the end result – whether that be hitting a ridiculously large number of leads, delivering a low SAC (“subscriber acquisition cost” – although it’s fun to say “low sac” – huh, huh), or in more general terms in “gettin’ s*** done!”
WHAT do we want to achieve? Sometimes we focus on the WHY and the HOW so much that we can lose sight of the WHAT, which quickly slips into a different WHAT … the WTF?
Define the WHAT and write it down! Tack it on the wall! Look at it before you go to bed! Make it the first thing you look at when you get up! Ask yourself, am I going to get the WHAT? If yes, continue. If not, get back on course! And in the end, the WHAT gives you something to measure against. Did we achieve WHAT we wanted to?
The HOW is the path to the WHAT. I REALLY like the HOW, because I have done it a lot and think I’m awesome at it. Taking a step back, I recently liked “Working” on Facebook – that’s right, because I have come to accept that I really like to, umm, WORK! I think it has to do with the rigorous housekeeping regime my Dad put us through as kids. Just one example – I had to vacuum the stairs to both the basement and upstairs every weekend. My Dad did the main living and family room carpets, because he was VERY particular about the pattern the vacuum would make in the carpet. It was a PRIVILEGE to vacuum THOSE carpets and something you had to work up to. Luckily, my dear wife Veruska has helped me recover from these excessive, anal-retentive cleaning traits (we have almost NO carpet these days although we have two vacuums and one is a fancy Dyson because I like buying cool things) but I think the theme spilled over into other areas. The HOW can also be driven by each individual’s work ethic, but I won’t talk about that here – save that for another post on the importance of chroming trim on Cadillac Fleetwoods versus taking an internship for winter break. (Good times.)
But getting back to the HOW, I admit – I sometimes like to tell people HOW I would do it. I can’t help it! Going back to parenting, it’s HARD to see your kids facing a problem without telling them how to solve it. We DON’T want to witness FAILURE. When my father-in-law (Big Pete) was a young man (hippie), he wanted to build a geodesic dome. Big Pete’s father-in-law (not a hippie) thought he was nuts and casually hinted at not building the dome, BUT he sat back and let him do it anyways. The only way to learn is to have the experience, which wasn’t all bad by the way – the dome was featured in a magazine. But it was also a terrible waste of square footage for a young family. These kinds of experiences are in part what make Big Pete one of the coolest people I know (because he had opportunities to direct his own HOW).
We all know that that letting people guide their own personal HOW is HOW they learn and grow, but doin’ it and sayin’ it are two different things (James Brown, y’all!).
So anyway (I’m windin’ it up) – what started out as talking about funerals made me reflect on something totally different. The WHY, the WHAT, and the HOW are ALL very important pieces of this game we call work. We (and by that I mean “I”) need to keep talking about the WHY, stay focused on the WHAT, and (as much as possible) let others drive their own HOW. Bear with me on this journey (“the diet starts tomorrow”).
The HOW – it’s yours! I can’t wait to see what happens and in the words of our President and CEO – “Good Luck!”