This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
Year End Thoughts - Changing the Future --
"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't." -- A. A. Milne
[Via Clarke Ching's reference to Winnie the Pooh.]
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." -- Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980)
Changing the future involves changing behaviors. Traditionally, year-end is a time of looking at one's behaviors and of making resolutions to add to, delete, or modify them. I've never been a big one for the tradition, preferring to address change efforts on an as-identified and/or needed basis rather than batch them in such artificial efforts that result in a daunting list. However, blog buddy Esther Derby, writing in a ComputerWorld column, offers up some suggestions that managers could consider for their list of resolutions. They include...
1. Define daily goals...
2. Undertake a personal measurement program...
3. Invest in you...
4. Create time for reflection...
5. Revitalize your support network...
If these sound good to you, making new behaviors like them stick is helped if you can turn them into habits. Another blogosphere friend, Jack Vinson, points to and comments on a quote from another thinker you might have heard of...
"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions." -- Aristotle
On the other hand the first step into a new habit is to take the action. With respect to personal effectiveness, this is a beautiful quote. It is difficult to form the habit, as I have discovered over and over. But I have to at least act like the good thing is already a habit, even if it isn't.
And to toss in one more from my circle of on-line friends, Hal Macomber pointed out a while ago that...
"In a nutshell, what we think is what we see. If we want to see something else or something new, then we must adopt a different mental model."
So...You are what you do, you do what you think, and you think what you see. In that vein, my wish for you is to see happy, think happy, act happy and be happy in the new year.
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