From 2005-2007, I spent my summers guiding teams into the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. The leadership lessons I learned during that time have been directly applicable to my career in both the private and public sectors.
This article from Harvard Business Review highlights some of the management principles used by mountain guides at Alpine Ascents:
In his book, Jonah Berger writes: “Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires. They can’t happen without hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along. So why did thousands of people transmit these products and ideas?”
Here are his STEPS for making anything go viral:
1. Pick the Right Measures: ”I think a lot of efforts fail because they don’t focus on the right measure or they don’t invest enough in doing it accurately.”
2. Establish Clear and Concrete Goals: “Many people assumed the [Millenium Development Goals] pact would be filed away and forgotten like so many U.N. and government pronouncements. However, since the goals were clear and concrete, they brought focus to the highest priorities.”
3. Learn From Success Cases: “Ethiopia found a successful model for achieving this goal in the Indian state of Kerala, which had lowered its child mortality rate and improved a host of other health indicators, in part through a vast network of community health care posts. This is one of the benefits of measurement — the ability it gives government leaders to make comparisons across countries, find who’s doing well, and then learn from the best.”
4. Maternal Health Has Improved: “According to a long-held Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name their children because disease is rampant, health care is sparse, and children often die in the first weeks of life … But a lot has changed in Ethiopia since the birth of Sebsebila’s first child. This time, with more confidence in her new baby’s chances of survival, Sebsebila didn’t hesitate to name her.”
5. Accurate Measurements Are Crucial: “Setting targets for immunization and other interventions can motivate government health workers, but it can also encourage over-reporting to avoid problems with supervisors.”
6. Every Case Counts: “The number of global polio cases has been under 1,000 cases for the last two years, but getting rid of the very last few cases is the hardest part.”
7. Technology Brings Accountability: “Tracks are downloaded from the phone to a laptop at the end of the day so managers can see the route the vaccinators followed and compare it to the route they were assigned.”
8. Feedback Breeds Success: “The Eagle County system is impressive because it focuses on helping each teacher grow. The evaluations are used to give a teacher not only a score but also specific feedback on areas to improve and ways to build on their strengths.”
9. We Can Only Move Forward: “Once these tools are invented, they are never un-invented — they just improve.”
10. Challenges Are Still Ahead: “Two that worry me the most are the possibility that we won’t be able to raise the funds needed to pay for health and development projects, and that we won’t align around clear goals to help the poorest.”
“Planning to learn” is in. Little bets, experimentation, just start, iteration, rapid prototyping, lean.
“We have what we call rainmakers and implementers. Rainmakers come up with wild ideas, implementers make them real. The two drive each other crazy. If you’re not careful, control will gravitate to the implementers. So we try to protect the rainmakers. That means we have to be comfortable with more chaos.”
“Our organization is used to dealing with chaos, we have a high tolerance for it. We like to respond to crises. When the ship is under attack, the level of ownership is high, culturally. But you don’t want to run an organization that is constantly under attack.”
- From Terry Kelly, CEO of W.L. Gore
Research consultancy Latitude, recently released part one of its study, “The Future of Storytelling,” which identifies trends and audience attitudes about content. The tips Latitude provides on telling stories are the following:
1. IMMERSION—Create an immersive experience through content that is delivered in multi-media and that is multi-sensory;
2. INTERACTIVITY—Allow the consumer to become a part of it;
3. INTEGRATION—Ensure there is coherence across the many touchpoints; and
4. IMPACT—Make it lead to action
Source: Fast Company
Technology changing the world… The Democratization of Knowledge.
“The single thing which makes any man happiest is the realization that he has worked up to the limits of his ability, his capacity. It’s better, of course, if this work has made a contribution to knowledge, or towards moving the human race a little forward.” - Neil Armstrong
