The Blind Men and the Elephant

Three blind men came across an elephant one day.  Each one of them encountered a different part of the animal: one the trunk, one a leg and one the tail.  Upon inspecting the animal from their individual vantage points, each came to a very different conclusion about what they were up against.

Said the one at the trunk, “My friends, this is obviously a large and powerful snake.”

Said the one at a leg, “No, no!  It can’t be a snake.  It must be a tree.”

Said the one at the tail, “I honestly can’t figure how you’ve come to your conclusions!  It most definitely is a lion we’ve run into.  I suggest we move along quickly!”

And so it is with many of the things we come up against.  With limited information, we rush to a conclusion.  We are so convinced of our point of view that we won’t listen to the perspective of others.  Very few of us take the time to inspect “the elephant” from every angle, and so what we believe to be true is only part of the truth.

If, on the other hand, we took the time to get to know why those with different opinions hold the opinions they do, we might learn a little more about “the animal.”  If we sought first to understand before we tried to be understood, we might get enough information to make a more correct judgment.  Most people are willing to listen to your point of view if you’ve first heard them out sincerely.  In the transfer of information and ideas about the problem, you might both come away with a broader and more accurate perspective.

Recognize that we all have a bit of blindness on any issue in which we come into disagreement.  We know our perspective, but we shouldn’t hold that we have a lock on the truth until we have seen the issue from the perspective of the other person.  In the end, none are so blind as those who choose not to see.

 

The Orange War

The story was once told of Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, neighbors who shared an orange tree.  The orange tree actually belonged to Mr. Smith (it grew on his side of the property line), but Mr. Jones would frequently help himself to the oranges that hung over on his side of the fence.  This irritated Mr. Smith to no end, and the two men had frequent arguments about who had rights to the oranges that overhung Mr. Jones’ yard.

The feud continued for years until both men had had enough.  Mr. Smith filed suit in small claims court, and Mr. Jones counter-sued.  The judge listened to both sides of their argument and swiftly proclaimed his judgment.  If the men couldn’t agree about the ownership of the oranges, the tree was to be cut down.  His judgment was promptly executed, and the two men soon found themselves without oranges altogether.  In the place of the beautiful orange tree, they now had an ugly stump to remind them of the bitterness of their feud.

Years passed before the men spoke again.  But, as the saying goes, time heals all wounds.  One afternoon, Mr. Jones saw Mr. Smith watering his yard and approached him.  Right then and there, they buried the hatchet and agreed to let go of their resentment.  Over time, they even became good friends.

When it felt safe enough, Mr. Smith asked why they never were able to get along about that old orange tree.  That opened the discussion, and the two men started talking – not about who had rights to the oranges, but about what they wanted them for in the first place.  What they learned was that Mr. Smith loved his oranges for freshly-squeezed orange juice, while Mr. Jones loved them for making potpourri out of the rinds.  Both men could have had what they wanted from the oranges if they had only been willing to let go of their positions and talk about their needs.

Initially, both Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith were only interested in winning the fight about the oranges.  They were going for win-lose, which seemed to them as the only possibility – “if he gets the oranges, then I don’t.”  But if they had been willing to look for a win-win solution, they would have started thinking creatively about how both their needs could have been met.  This would have inevitably led them to the discussion of why they wanted the oranges, and a better solution would have emerged.  As it happened, they both had to settle for lose-lose when the judge ordered the tree cut down.

Instead of focusing on who’s right and who’s wrong when you encounter conflict, try telling the other person that you want to work toward win-win and ask,

• “Why is it important to you to have this particular solution?”
• “What happens if you don’t get it?”
• “Are there any alternatives that would be a good substitute?”

When you start talking about your needs instead of your positions, you identify things the two of you have in common.  It takes commitment and vulnerability, but it might save the orange tree you’ve been fighting over.

Fire Fighting

If you were to analyze what firemen do during the course of the year, what percentage of their time do you suppose would be devoted to actually fighting fires?  Would you believe me if I told you that it’s actually only 2% of their time?

So what do they do with all their time?  True, a good deal of their time is spent sitting around the fire station, but that’s necessary so that they can be available in the event of an emergency.  The rest of their time is spent in fire prevention.  I found a fireman’s job description on the web.  Here are some of their typical responsibilities:

• Cleaning, preparing and testing hoses, fire trucks and other equipment
• Testing water flow on fire hydrants
• Determining what caused fires that couldn’t be prevented
• Holding fire prevention workshops
• Inspecting buildings, sprinkler systems and extinguishers
• Speaking to children about fire prevention
• Participating in fire drills
• Attending training classes in fire fighting, first-aid, and related subjects

Spending all that time on prevention helps reduce the number of fires they are called to put out.  Plus, lives and property are saved.  No matter how much time or money they have to invest in fire prevention, it has to be cheaper than the cost of the fire fighting and destruction that occurs when fires aren’t prevented.

Many of us spend a greater percentage of our time and efforts putting out fires than the typical fireman.  Could it be that many of the fires that erupt in our schedules are a result of poor fire prevention?  Maybe we are not spending enough time in planning and preparation.  Maybe we’ve allowed key relationships to suffer from lack of attention.  Maybe we’re so tired from fighting those fires that we don’t feel we have anything left to invest in learning how to prevent them.  Maybe we’ve just resigned ourselves to the fact that we will always have to spend most of our time fighting fires.

The truth is that most of our fires are preventable.  But like the firemen, we have to get ahead of them.  We have to learn the most common sources of our fires and put plans in place to prevent them.  We have to educate ourselves about how much the fires are costing us in emotional and physical stress, missed opportunities, unfulfilled commitments and quality.  It’s time to stop playing productivity pyromania.  As Benjamin Franklin (the founder of the first volunteer fire department, inventor of the lighting rod and fire insurance) once said,  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Crazy Maisie

Maisie DeVore had a vision.  She wanted to build a community pool for children to enjoy.  She was worried that there weren’t enough positive and healthy activities for kids in her hometown of Eskridge, Kansas, and she felt that the pool was just the thing they needed.

But she had a problem.  Money.  Maisie decided the best way to earn the money was by collecting aluminum cans and turning them in for recycling.  She began searching for them all around town – in trash cans, behind bushes, along roadsides.  When that didn’t net enough cash, she began collecting scrap metal, then making and raffling quilts, then picking wild berries to sell as homemade jellies.

Her neighbors thought she was crazy.  “Hide the toaster!  Maisie’s looking for scrap metal again.”

Her family thought she was crazy.  Said one, “I never came right out and told her I thought she was nuts, but I said, ‘You know Maisie, are you gonna be okay with this if it doesn’t happen?’”

In truth, no one but Maisie thought she would ever see ground broken on the pool.  But that was all the belief she needed.  She collected cans, scrap metal and berries until she had earned $100,000 ($83,000 from the 90 tons of aluminum cans she found).  When the state of Kansas got wind of what she had done, they kicked in a grant of $73,000 to make up the difference.  It wasn’t long before the pool was going in right across the street from Maisie’s home.

As you may have guessed, Maisie didn’t raise that much money overnight.  It took her 30 years!  During that time, Maisie kept her focus on her ultimate goal.  She withstood the teasing and the gossip and put in the incredibly hard work required to see it through.  Now, her neighbors don’t call her “Crazy Maisie” anymore.  As dozens of kids enjoy playing in “Maisie’s Community Pool” each day, all the neighbors call her “Amazing Maisie!”

(S – “Making a Splash,” CBSNews.com, 7/14/02)

Do What You Do Best

A colleague once asked Albert Einstein for his telephone number and was surprised to see Einstein reach for the phone directory.  “You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked.  To which Einstein replied, “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?”

Einstein may owe some of his genius to his ability to prioritize.  While he certainly had the capacity to memorize large amounts of trivia, he knew that this wasn’t the best use of his talents.  He reserved his brain power for solving complex problems and used other resources to help him with the less complex.

I’ve found that great managers do the same with their time.  While they are certainly capable of making copies, shuffling paper or solving routine problems, they recognize these tasks for the traps that they are.  Less-discriminating managers become entangled in a web of administrivia and find that they have no time left to work on more important priorities. Often in an attempt to appear like a “team player” to their direct reports, these managers waste their hard-earned experience, knowledge and training on tasks that could be handled more effectively (and less expensively) at a lower level.

Don’t sell what you’ve worked so hard to gain so cheaply.  The most effective are not always the most popular, but they spend their time like they spend their money – where it will bring them the greatest return on their investment.

Spud-tacular and A-mash-ing!

The next time your team is faced with an “impossible” goal, try using this visual object lesson to help challenge their disbelief.  You will need a large potato (raw) and a sturdy straw (not the bendable kind) for every person on your team.  Once everyone has a potato and a straw, go through the following steps to impress and amaze:

• Tell your team that not everything that looks impossible really is.  For example, you hold that it is possible for every one of them to put a straw through a potato (gasps indicating shock and awe!).
• Ask each team member to stand and hold the potato at naval (that’s your bellybutton) level with their non-dominant hand.  (Fingers should go on the sides of the potato and not on the top or the bottom.  Neglecting this detail could result in an equally neat but somewhat messier object lesson.)
• Have them hold the straw with their dominant hand.
• Ask them to put their thumb over the top opening of the straw.
• Have them visualize the straw going through the potato in their mind’s eye.  (They may need to do this several times in order to squash all unbelief.)
• When they are ready, have them quickly thrust the straw through the potato.  It should go through cleanly.  (More gasps and some fainting.)
• Point out that just like they put the straw through the potato, they can accomplish the “impossible” goal.  However, it won’t work unless they believe they can do it and fully commit to making it happen.

I could explain the complex physics behind the demonstration, but why?  Isn’t it enough that it works and has the power to elevate you to legendary status among the dynamic leaders of the world?

 

The Waffle Innovation

Bill Bowerman was a legendary track and field coach at the University of Oregon.  He coached 24 NCAA individual champions, four NCAA championship teams, 64 All-Americans and the 1972 U.S. Olympic track and field team.  But what he’s most famous for wasn’t accomplished on the track.  It was accomplished in his garage.

Bowerman was an innovator.  He was always trying to protect his team members from injuries and make them faster.  He encouraged them to wear the lightest clothing possible.  He filmed top athletes and looped the tape so that he and his team could study the athletes’ techniques over and over.  He photographed close finishes and developed the pictures in a dark room he created at the field.  He helped develop the rubberized asphalt material used for track fields, because it was safer than grass, particularly when it rained.

But more than all these things, Bowerman was interested in improvements that could be made in an athlete’s running shoes.  Poorly designed shoes accounted for shin splints, foot sores, leg cramps and aching backs.  In the 1950s, he developed a shoe with a heel wedge, better support and lighter sole, but he couldn’t find a company to make it.  So, he began making shoes in his garage.  When he came up with a new design, he would try it out on his team members.  He experimented with different materials in order to lighten the shoe.  By his own calculations, every ounce of weight removed from the shoe was equal to removing 200 pounds of weight from a runner during a one-mile race.

In 1962, Bowerman started Blue Ribbon Sports with Phil Knight, one of his athletes.  Originally, they imported high-tech, low-cost shoes from Japan, but Bowerman quickly became dissatisfied with their design.  He continued to improve shoe designs in his garage.  Then, one morning in 1971, as his wife cooked waffles for breakfast, Bowerman had a mental breakthrough.  He could pour a combination of latex, leather and glue on the waffle iron, let it cool and create a running shoe much lighter than any other on the market.  Even better, the waffle pattern on the sole would allow for better traction.  It took some work (and forgiveness from his wife, no doubt), but he soon had the prototype worked up.  He showed it to Knight, and within a few years, the “waffle shoe” from their upstart company (now named “Nike”) revolutionized the athletic shoe industry.  A few well-placed marketing dollars later, and Nike is now the largest sports and fitness company in the world.

You might think you aren’t creative – that you can’t innovate like a Bill Bowerman or a Thomas Edison or a Bill Gates – but you can!  Innovation begins with a passion for what you do.  Creativity is important, but passion is essential.  Passion keeps you engaged after frustrating failures and costly setbacks.  Passion keeps you thinking over possibilities even after you’ve set the work down.  Passion keeps the door open for creativity to enter in at the most unexpected moments (like when your wife is making waffles).

You ARE creative!  You are made in the image of a Creator God, and He has put His creative spark in you.  All you have to do is find something you love and concentrate on it long enough for that creativity to emerge.