Issue No. 381 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting suggests you buy this gorgeous children’s book about mistake-making—and change your culture in one quick read. Really! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and on this page, check out my Top 10 Book Recommendations of 2017, and my Book-of-the-Year pick.
The Book of Mistakes
At first, I thought The Book of Mistakes was a biography of my life because I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. Whopper mistakes!
Example: At a robust planning session years ago in Colorado Springs, the idea team had brainstormed over 100 workshop titles and presenters for a regional conference. Scribbled flipchart pages lined the walls of our meeting room—so we called it a day and went out for dinner.
The next morning—gulp! Our flipchart notes were missing-in-action. Bare wells greeted our shocked team. I had failed to delegate the note-taking chore. Those were our only notes.
But amazingly, that well-managed hotel staff sprang into action—and an hour later, the general manager burst into our meeting room with a dozen flipchart pages. “I found them in the dumpster,” he shouted!
“But the flipchart pages are hardly even wrinkled,” a team member questioned.
“I know,” the GM smiled, “we just ironed them.”
LOL! Thus one of my favorite management axioms was birthed that morning: “It’s not if you make mistakes (you will)…it’s how you recover from your mistakes that differentiate leaders from losers.”
So when The Book of Mistakes, by first-time author/illustrator Corinna Luyken, landed on The Wall Street Journal business book bestseller list last month, I was intrigued and immediately ordered the book.
It’s not what you’d expect—it’s better. This gorgeously-illustrated coffee table-perfect children’s book is big on white space, and short on pages (just 56). And this caution—display it on the coffee table in your reception area and someone will “borrow” it within an hour. (Better buy two!)
I’m guessing millennial team members in the coolest companies in North America are using The Book of Mistakes in team-building exercises, at professional development days, and perhaps in the boardroom—as department heads and CEOs are inspiring the crew with the power and the efficacy of mistake-making.
My gut: our organizational cultures are way too timid about the risky business of mistake-making. But the business literature preaches the opposite:
Johnson & Johnson’s Robert Wood "General" Johnson II proclaimed, “If I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t making decisions.” Tom Peters highlights another mistake-tolerant company that fired a cannon to celebrate (not condemn) whopper mistakes. Read more - In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
In the book, What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management, Jeffrey Pfeffer champions IDEO’s belief that “failing early and failing often is better than failing once, failing at the end, and failing big.”
And Jim Collins reminded us about “First Bullets, Then Cannonballs.” He says that discipline and creativity will push you to test, test, test—with low risk bullets, then re-calibrate, fire another low risk bullet, more re-calibration—then when the empirical side of creativity has honed in on the target—let the cannonball rip! Collins has six bullet points (sorry) on “The Dangerous Lure of Uncalibrated Cannonballs.” Brilliant. Read more: Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.
And speaking of little bets, giving freedom for mistake-making is a 180 plunge from what the profs taught us. Peter Sims quotes Sir Ken Robinson, “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Most management approaches are all about reducing errors and risk—not giving license to having a good whack at a half-baked idea. “Goodness, this is God’s money we’re wasting!” Read more: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, by Peter Sims.
Left to right: Anderson, Zuzana, and Emelia Pearson
This week I asked our triplet grandchildren (9th grade, 15-years-old) about their thoughts on mistake-making (the good, the bad, and the ugly!). Their thoughts (according to birth-order, “as it should be,” says Emelia):
Emelia: “This is funny! I was walking down the paper towel aisle at our grocery store, but I didn’t see a big puddle of water. Bang! I slipped and fell! Imagine—a puddle of water in the paper towel aisle! I don’t know how the store recovered from that mistake, but I recovered by just laughing about it. How ironic!”
Zuzana: “Just last Sunday at youth group, I was asked to create a large graphic on butcher paper for our leader’s talk. Based on the theme, I included a large compass with North, South, East, and West headings. My mistake: I mixed up East and West! Thankfully, the speaker made a joke on himself about being ‘directionally challenged’ and didn’t embarrass me.”
Anderson: “Grandpa John, I remember the story from Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck (which you reviewed). The Walkman radio and cassette player started out as a mistake. Sony engineers tried to create a small, portable stereo tape recorder. It’s only when Masura Ibuka, honorary chairman of Sony, combined a new concept with the device—headphones—and dropped the recording idea, that the Walkman became Sony’s bestselling electronic product of all time! And chocolate chip cookies, popsicles, raisins and ice cream cones were all invented by mistake. Honest! Google it, Grandpa!”
So…order The Book of Mistakes and you’ll be mega-phoning to your team that you want to celebrate both mistakes and great recoveries from mistakes. Unleash the creativity and watch for dumpster divers near you as you inspire your people and your family members to take thoughtful risks.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Book of Mistakes, by Corinna Luyken.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) In The Power of Moments (my 2017 book-of-the-year), Chip Heath and Dan Heath noted the dinner table question from Spanx founder Sara Blakely’s dad: “What did you guys fail at this week?” So here’s our staff meeting question of-the-day: What did you fail at last week? (Present prizes!)
2) The layout and art for The Book of Mistakes surprises. So today, let’s look at our website, our bread-and-butter brochure, our newsletters, donor letters, and more—with this question. “When is less, more?”
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I Survived Another Meeting That Should Have Been an Email
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
Raise your hand if this week you “survived another meeting that should have been an email.” I thought so.
Thanks to son, Jason, we’ve created an entire product line of coffee mugs, t-shirts, travel mugs, mouse pads, coasters, and more with this eye-catching and very convicting catchphrase:
“I Survived Another Meeting
That Should Have Been an Email”
Order today from Café Press. Click here.
For more resources from the Meetings Bucket, order Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates, and Tips From John Pearson (a CrossSection Resource) and visit the Results Bucket webpage.
For more resources in all 20 buckets, click here. And to order the original book for a new team member, click here: Mastering the Management Buckets
P.S. Read John's latest board governance blog, "Succession Planning: 'One Size Fits All' Is Bad Counsel."
Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers, the frequency of which is based on an algorithm of book length, frequent flyer miles, and client deadlines. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As a board member and raving fan of Christian Community Credit Union (a non-profit), we proudly list the credit union as a sponsor at no charge.
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