What Do You Expect?
Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, expected that Sony would grow into the company it is today. Notice that I used the word “expected.” This thought of expecting something really jumped at me when reading Bargaining For Advantage: Negotiation Strategies For Reasonable People by G. Richard Shell. Morita’s childhood story is interesting and after being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy he would meet the man who would help him change the world of electronics, Masura Ibuka. Of his childhood, Morita said, “When I was in high school my father bought me an electronic phonograph. The sound was fantastic. I was so impressed, I started to wonder how and why such sound came out. That’s when my interest in electronics began.” He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics from Osaka Imperial University.
Long story short, Morita and Ibuka invented a small transistor radio for Americans who loved taking music with them, but only had big bulky units to take to parks and beaches. Their first big breakthrough was an offer from Bulova to buy 10,000 of the transistor radios and sell under the Bulova brand. Morita had an expectation to sell under the Sony name and in a surprise move, turned the offer down. This same insight and empathy of customer needs led to the later development of the hugely successful Sony Walkman. Morita’s story shows us that it’s best to enter into negotiations with an optimistic expectation rather than a goal. The difference? A goal is a more abstract ambition, while an expectation is something that we think we can reasonably accomplish.
Morita had done his homework and showing great insight, realized that to sell effectively to the American market he needed to ‘get into the mind’ of the American people. He had to learn how they lived and more about how they ticked. Akio’s research and preparation made his expectations justifiable and legitimate. As I said at the beginning of this post, Akio Morita expected that Sony would grow into the company it is today.
In his book, Shell taught us that expectations give conviction to our statements. Believing that what we’re asking for is reasonable, given the facts at hand, is a powerful motivating force that makes us much more likely to succeed. Actually, I did a post back in 2012 entitled “Own Your Own Expectations.” In fact if you go to twitter and search the hashtag #OwnYourOwnExpectations you can check out some blasts from the past. And yes, I had #OwnYourOwnExpectations bracelets made. How about you? What do you expect?
Don’t Overlook The Brilliance Of Our Students
I’m still getting caught up on my reflection of the lessons from Kevin Eikenberry’s Virtual LeaderCon last week. This post is about Chip Bell’s response to my question about where education and the students we serve fall into the realm of the work he has put together in his latest book, Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets For Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions. The first thing he said was, “We must treat students like customers, not consumers.” There is brilliance in our students that so many times gets overlooked.
I asked Chip to go into a little more detail about treating students like customers and not consumers. To this he stated that we have board meetings and where are the students (I’m excited that many states have put students on their state boards of education – I’m still working on Indiana)? But, local school boards should think about student members in some capacity, too. He also asked us to think about where the student was when we were having planning meetings. Chip explained that everything we do should “have our customer’s fingerprints all over it.” He used the example of when we coach little league baseball we tell the kids to “be the ball.” We need to be telling our students to “be the customer.” And, then letting them be the customer. Chip believes our students should be partners along with our students’ families. He promotes student-staff partnership initiatives.
Chip Bell reminds us that customers can give us our best next idea. We should be asking the question, “What is something no-one else has ever thought of?” This discussion reminded me that the words “customer” and “consumers” are often interchangeably used and are easily confused with one another. While students are consumers and the ultimate user of the product, we need to treat them like customers – the person buying the product. We need to think of our students as a final customer– these are the customers who buy the product for their own need or desire. This kind of thinking will help us to better individualize education for every student.
We must innovate. Listening to our students will help us to do this. We can’t keep offering the same thing over and over and over again. We owe it to our students to be authentic. As Chip told us during Virtual LeaderCon, “Authenticity wins every time.”
Precisely What Students Need
Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend the morning at Heartland Career Center with the Mark Hobbs, Director; Lori Dubois, Precision Agriculture Specialist; and, most importantly, students of the new Precision Agriculture Program at Heartland Career Center. I say I was at Heartland Career Center, but actually the bulk of our time was spent 15 minutes from the school in the field.
We were out on McKillip AgVenture land learning about seed genetics and the start to finish process of their seed corn operation. Last week the students had sorted seed corn as it was being harvested. This is just one of many partnerships that has been formed so that students can get real world and relevant content for learning.
This all took me back to my days as an Agriculture Science Teacher and our partnerships with AgReliant Genetics and our students doing real research for the company in our school greenhouse alongside geneticists. As I always say, “School work must look like real work.” I talk about that a lot in my book, The Hand In The Back Of The Room.
I am passionate about this program and have had the opportunity to be part of many of the planning meetings, served as a champion, have helped remove obstacles along the way, and helped make connections where I could. One of the many things I love most about this program is that it was developed shoulder to shoulder with business and industry. The very businesses that will be hiring students from this program, helped design the program. Novel idea I know, but you’d be surprised how often this does not happen. Students are able to leave this two year program with an Unmanned Part 107 Drone Certification, Chemical Applicator License, and a Class A Commercial Drivers License (CDL).
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to experience drone flying first hand. In fact this was the very first time I had ever flown a drone. We’re not talking some toy drone, but a commercial drone like would be used in precision agriculture businesses. I was shocked at how quickly I was able to learn to fly the drone. The students did an incredible job of teaching me. Here are two videos of me piloting the drone:
This two year program of study prepares students for careers that bridge the gaps between agronomy, agriculture, machinery management, and data analytic sciences caused by the rapid evolution of high-speed sensor agricultural technology. This is all stuff that fascinated me. We even got into a discussion about artificial intelligence, which is an area I have been exploring with some of the work I have been doing with SMART Factory League, globally.
This program is truly making school work look like real work! Well done!
Salient Issues From The Field Of Personalized, Competency-Based Education
I had the opportunity to be a part of what I would call a silver lining of the COVID-19 Pandemic situation. Aurora Institute had to pivot to their annual symposium being virtual so took that opportunity to develop a virtual pre-symposium webinar series of over 20 webinars leading up to the Aurora Institute Virtual Symposium being held October 26-28, 2020. Click here to see past webinars and click here to see webinars yet to happen. The webinar series has been incredible and I had the opportunity to present with Lauren Bailey from the Middlebury School Corporation and Sarah Koontz of Horizon Education Alliance. I have had the opportunity to work a great deal with both of these great individuals when providing professional development on project-based learning for the school corporations in Elkhart County, Indiana and then when we (Noble Education Initiative) partnered with them on our free webinars last spring. Click here to read about this.
Yesterday, Lauren, Sarah, and I presented on Integrating Project-Based Learning in Online and Blended Courses in Indiana for the Aurora Institute Pre-Symposium Webinar Series. This was such an awesome experience and I have had so many participants reach out afterward wanting further information and wanting to stay in touch. I also love the fact that the Aurora Institute has made the recordings of these webinars open access. Its great that that these webinars are available for educators, education leaders, and policymakers for high quality learning.
For this post I am going to let our webinar recording and the quote banners that the Aurora Institute did do the talking. Here is our webinar:
Here are some quotes from the webinar:
Impossibility To Possibility Thinking
This week’s lesson in Mindset Mondays With DTK was entitled “Challenge What’s Impossible.” I loved David Taylor-Klaus‘ story of early in life deciding he would not become a father because he had come to believe in his high school Human Physiology and Anatomy class (with his favorite teacher, Mrs. Southworth, by the way) that there were just too many things that could go wrong in human development – it was just too high a risk. Bottom-line, he got past this “impossibility thinking” and has three healthy children who completely changed his life. David told us this is proof that the impossible is possible.
As I read this my mind went to how everyone, 192 days ago when the World Health Organization declared us in a Global Pandemic, went “owe my gosh, there is no way we will be able to read facial expressions, body language, or build relationships using virtual options for connecting. In the book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives, author Shankar Vedantam taught us that when people lose the ability to read facial expressions, they also lose the ability to make quick, unconscious judgements about people and scenarios. Vedantam also discussed research from Rick van Baaran done in an Applebee’s in the Dutch town of Heerlen that showed a statistical significance in size of tip if the server repeated the order back exes actly as ordered. This research showed how people respond positively when they feel in sync with each other.
Well, let me tell you, believe we have made the impossible possible using virtual technology to connect. I’m not so sure I am not better and reading faces on Zoom than I was in person. In fact, I stopped a professional development I was doing to ask two participants if they were texting each other. They said “yes” and wanted to know how I knew that (it freaked them out a little). I explained that I was watching there expressions and could tell when one got the text from the other and smiled/laughed and then the other reacted to that reaction. It was not a problem that they were texting because actually they were talking about the content of the webinar, but I needed to see if my skills on reading people had improved that much. Additionally, I believe I am able to uses names (because they are attached to the video of the person on most all virtual connection platforms. So, while being in-person is still my preferred way to connect, at least for now, I, for one, and I know others who would agree, we can make the impossibility of building relationships, reading people, and getting in sync with each other using virtual technology to connect possible.
The lesson here: Way too often we quickly decide something is impossible and then live as if it is absolutely true. David Taylor-Klaus taught us in this fourth chapter that “Labeling something as ‘impossible’ is a close cousin to giving up all together” (p. 60). By believing we can make the seemingly impossible possible, we can create a completely different future for ourselves and those we serve.
Leading With Global Reach
This post continues my reflection on this past week’s Virtual LeaderCon put on by Kevin Eikenberry. We had the opportunity to learn from bestselling author and authority on leadership methodologies, Keith Ferrazzi. His great book Leading Without Authority is a must read. Right out of the gate Keith taught us that to reach abundance we must do three things as leaders and that by doing so we will achieve these three things in our organizational communities. Here they are:
- Serve
- Share
- Care
Leadership, according to Keith, is about the management of relationships. It’s about being committed to “going higher together.” It’s the proven methodology he calls Co-Elevation®️. It’s about getting rid of something I talk about a lot: turf. He described it as holding space for the team to cross the finish line and share the win together.
Keith certainly believes, as do I, that everyone is a leader, Recognizing we have made progress in education in the advancement of developing teacher leaders, I asked him how we could get this non-hierarchical thinking even more universally embedded in education. He told us we need to become movement leaders. Get small groups to discuss and work on issues like this. Then get others involved. This would allow us to become exponential leaders by co-creating together. I loved the idea of making our impact exponential.
This would allow for global reach. Think about what changes we could make in the world if we all committed to going higher together by being leaders who served, shared, and cared.
Don’t Get Naked At 8:00 AM
I’ll bet I got your attention with the title of this post. I’ll even bet you might be reading now just to find out what the heck I’m writing about. Well keep reading and you’ll find out. Bob Tiede is one a kind! And, I mean that as the highest of compliments. We had the chance to learn from Bob on Kevin Eikenberry’s Virtual LeaderCon on Wednesday. I have been a big time fan of Bob’s for a long time and I had chance for some personal messaging with him at the end of the day on Wednesday. PRICELESS! Bob Tiede has been helping leaders be their best for a lot of years and I have learned and grown a lot from following his work and reading his books.
His latest work is Now That’s A Great Question. Why am I such a fan? Well, if you know me, you know I love to ask questions. Bob taught us that, “Leadership is not as much about knowing the right answers as it is about asking the right questions.” Brilliant, right? See, there I go asking a question.
“Leadership is not as much about knowing the right answers as it is about asking the right questions.” ~ Bob Tiede
Two Powerful Sets of Questions
During Virtual LeaderCon he reminded us that some of the best questions are the simplest. For example, here are three simple questions leaders can ask:
- What do you like best?
- What do you like least?
- What would you change?
After asking those three questions, Bob will tell you the most important thing to do is – LISTEN! Listening is the most important part. We must be listening to both understand and interpret. Then, we also must do something about what we have been told. Otherwise everyone will lose trust in us.
Here are four more great questions from Bob:
- What’s going well?
- What’s not going well?
- Where are you stuck?
- What needs to change?
“…no leader wants to get naked at 8:00 AM!” ~ Bob Tiede
Don’t forget. What’s your job while asking these questions? LISTEN During Virtual LeaderCon Bob explained to always start with “what was liked best” and “what was going well.” Otherwise you are just starting with the potential for the conversation to become a “gripe-fest” and we have all been there before. Nothing productive ever comes out of a “gripe-fest.” Then Bob gave what I awarded as the best quote of the day on Wednesday: “Start with what’s going well, because no leader wants to get naked at 8:00 AM!” I loved it! His point was for us to start with the good things because that will put us in a much better frame of mind for truly listening to the things that need improvement. Isn’t he awesome at putting things in a way we can understand?
Bob, if you’re reading this, I’ll ask you a couple of questions (would love for you to leave a comment):
- What did I get right in this post?
- What would you like to add that I left out?
Gift Yourself Being Present For Your Own Personal Time
What a great week it has been. I have been working with schools, starting the fall gatherings of 3D Leadership, recording teacher webinars for the National FFA Organization for their virtual National FFA Convention and many other things. One of those many other things was having the opportunity to participate in and speak during the “Daily Debrief” of Kevin Eikenberry’s Virtual LeaderCon. What an incredible program and experience. It went on all five days this week with over 30 individuals with world-class expertise. I have an entire notepad filled with notes. I certainly will be using posts in this blog to process my learning. Additionally, I have already used things I learned from Virtual LeaderCon in the other work I have been doing this week.
There were so many great pieces of advice said that I wrote down, but on Wednesday, Sara Canaday, was great. I’ve know Sara for a while and she is the author of Leadership Unchained. At the end of her discussion with Kevin Eikenberry, he asked her one last question. He asked, “What’s the one piece of advice you want to give to the leaders here at Virtual LeaderCon?” Without hesitation, Sara answered, “Gift yourself with being present for your own personal time.” Huge! That his me like a ton of bricks. But…how to really do that, right?
“Gift yourself with being present for your own personal time.” ~ Sara Canaday
Well, we actually learned some things earlier in the conversation between Sara and Kevin that are useful in answering the question of “How?”. While Sara tells us we should calendar at least one hour, and really try for two, for personal time to marinate the happenings and learning from the week, the Virtual LeaderCon conversation taught us we probably are already doing some this. For example, my taking time to write this blog post represents taking time to marinate and process learning. Sara talked about how we always take the things people write way to literal. Its why we have trouble making changes in our lives, which as we learned from Rumi in the 13th Century when he said, “…Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” I’m sure you have experienced the person who when they finish a book becomes obsessed with everything in the book – quoting it constantly, trying to implement every single thing in the book, actually trying to shape-shift into the author, et cetera, et cetera. Really, it’s impossible to do that and frustrating to everyone around that person. We need to take what we read and learn and apply it where applicable and needed.
The point here, specifically, is to find the things that work specifically for you, and don’t forget the things you are already doing. For me, for example, my blog is very important and personal for me to marinate the happening and learning of my life.
Yesterday I tried to also put into practice Sara’s suggestion of the the one hour of marinating personal time by using something I already had to do – an hour drive to a school I am supporting. Usually I would be listening to a book or podcast, but yesterday morning I decided to just enjoy the morning – no sound at all. I left home in the dark and was headed east at exactly the correct angle to watch the sun come up (the sunrise in the photo featured in this post was of that very sunrise). I noticed so many things. I noticed the soybeans at different stages of maturity. Some were ready to be harvested (in fact I saw some being cut on my drive home); some were still a beautiful deep green; and many others were somewhere in-between. I also noticed the fresh cut sorghum-sudangrass on both sides of the road near a large dairy farm. I had noticed these sorghum-sudangrass fields on previous trips to this school and had noted this this farm was on the same cutting schedule as my own sorghum-sudangrass crop.
There were so many other things I saw. But, here’s the deal: My mind became so clear I was able to come up with a great new idea that I can’t wait to implement. Because I drive a lot, it will be very easy to gift myself a little more personal down time – a present to myself. Where can you gift yourself being present for your own personal time?
Belief Is The Price Of Admission
I love baseball. Something exciting happens every day and this past week was a great week for the game of baseball. Albert Pujols hit is 660th career home run this past Sunday, September 13th. This tied him with Willie Mays. That same day, Alec Mills threw a no-hitter for the Chicago Cubs. That was the first of his career. Monday, in Lesson 3 of the great book Mindset Mondays With DTK, by David Taylor-Klaus, which contains 52 weekly chapters designed to be done on Mondays, the lesson was entitled “Believe in the Impossible.” The lesson was about Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile in 1954. Everyone told him the four-minute mark could not be broken, but this did not stop him. He believed it could be done and that he was the person to do it. Bannister even broke the traditional way of training (how it’s always been done) and came up with his own, unconventional, way of training.
“Just because they say it’s impossible doesn’t mean you can’t do it.” ~ Roger Bannister
This made me think about professional baseball players and how impossible being good enough to break records or pitch no-hitters must feel at times. After hitting his 660th home run Pujols said, “To be able to have my name in the sentence with Willie Mays is unbelievable,” Pujols said. “I’m really humbled.” But really, Albert Pujols does believe he can do it. He tells us, “There is no time to fool around when you practice. Every drill must have a purpose. I try to never get away from that, habits are important.” This tells us, just as David Taylor-Klaus pointed out, that our belief in our ability to do something matters greatly. If we don’t believe something is possible, nothing else really matters.
I’m a really smart player. If you tell me something, I get it quickly. If there is something wrong with my hitting, tell me what’s wrong and I’ll pick it up right away. That’s the best thing I have going for me, my ability to listen to a coach and fix what I’m doing wrong. ~ Albert Pujols
Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is about heroes. Albert Pujols certainly has a hero’s story. That hero’s story starts like every other baseball hero story; with the player believing in himself – really believing in himself. This is why all of us imagine ourselves as pro baseball players, but only a few actually make it happen. It is important for us to recognize our ability to achieve goals. How we view ourselves, how we measure our value, how we assess our potential, and how we determine our worth all combine to create the life we will live. Are you paying the price for admission? Belief.
Leading Like Elastigirl-Hulk
So, if you could combine two superheroes into one, which ones would you bring together? During our Georgia 3D Leadership gathering this past weekend I had a participant that did just that. One of our activities had attendees pick or create a superhero that best described themselves. One of our participants blew me away with a combination of She-Hulk and Elastigirl (Mrs Incredible). I have included a picture of her creation with this post.
This sort of thing has already been done. In the late 1990s Marvel and DC tried a big crossover event in which their superheroes met, fought, and came out friends. Thus was born the Amalgam Universe. Put simply, two super-cosmic beings arranged to have the Marvel and DC Universes merge with one another, such that their finest heroes also merged to become amalgams of each other (hence the name). Some were merged because they were similar in powers or purpose, some because their names sounded alike. In like fashion, our participant created “Elastigirl-Hulk.”
Jennifer Walters, an attorney, who is the She-Hulk got her powers after being shot and needing a blood transfusion. Her cousin Bruce Banner (Hulk) gave his blood for the transfusion and the rest is history. Jennifer got a mild version of the radioactive powers. She-Hulk taught us to never accept more than we deserve. Because of her ability to self-transform between Jennifer Walters and She-Hulk, she taught us that work-life balance is achieved by recognizing that work and life are both important. Finally, she taught us to have a sense of humor.
Now let’s take a look at Elastigirl (Mrs. Incredible). Her superpower is elasticity, allowing her stretch, shape-shift, and be flexible. Elastigirl understood the importance of developing teams to be capable of becoming a strong support system for all members to achieve their own goals and the goals of the organization.
Therefore, combine the flexibility and community building abilities of Elastigirl with the strength, intelligence, and the ability to control between being tough and being gentle and we’ve got quite an incredible (pun intended) woman. What superheroes would you combine?
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