Tag: Change

  • A Little Guide to making Big Changes

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    Seth Godin's new book, Poke the Box, is a passionate manifesto to begin something and carry it through. It builds on his earlier work Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?–his guide to committing to making a difference–and the The ShipIt Journal–a workbook for getting a team to committing to completing a project.

    As with all of Seth's recent writings, it is really a collection of short essays on why we need to continually try, embracing failure when it comes, and fighting to completion as often as possible.

    Seth has given me the courage to continually fight for change–to be willing to openly question what others accepted and embrace the role of being a change agent or linchpin. My favorite quote from his earlier book was one from Steve Jobs, "Real Artists Ship." My favorite quote from this book is actually from his twitter feed, "If you don’t finish, it doesn’t really count as starting, and if you don’t start, you’re not poking."

    Seth is a fascinating person to follow because he practices what he preaches. Although he has a string of bestselling books, he turned his back on the publishing business and developed his own publishing company through Amazon. He boldly writes his own rules, tries different strategies ("pokes") to see what works and embraces the risk of failure. He even openly gives away the core story of the book through a free workbook. 

    This is a great book for anyone looking to be the change that they want to see in the world.

  • It all changed in an instant

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    Last Monday, my job was to run a small cross-border conflict program. Today, I am running a relief program for the largest disaster to hit the Americas. Last week, I was actively looking for a non-profit that I could direct.  Now I don't know what I want to do. It is hard to remember life before the earthquake.

    I have worked a number of disasters, but mainly floods and hurricanes. Earthquakes are much harder. They come without warning and change everything. I'm not ready to write about the impact on people. It is just amazing that everyone's life was changed in an instant.

    I don't know where we will go from here. I don't know how Haiti will change. I don't know what will happen next. I do know that everything can change in an instant.

     

  • Seth’s mad at the “non-profits” and the situation is worse than he thinks

    Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are
    failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of
    change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I
    almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in
    international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear
    all change.

    I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts
    was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's
    excellent online document depository to foster learning.

    I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the
    status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

    The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started–not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

    What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?