Hop On The Bus, Gus

On my trip to Chicago last weekend, I decided to try something different for transportation. I'm not a fan of air travel for shorter distances, and driving seemed a ridiculous option since parking my car would have cost a prohibitive amount just to let it sit there for three days. My wife suggested I try the Megabus, and since the tickets were pretty inexpensive and it had free Wifi, I figured, "Why not?"

Because I could access my online community during the ride, I decided to have a little fun with the whole experiment, so I began a "log" of my travels on Facebook:

Hour one of my captivity on the Megabus. My captor is friendly enough and the other prisoners are empathetic. The cabin vibrates like a cheap motel room bed with a roll of quarters at the ready. Slow going. Must stay strong.

Hour three of captivity on the Megabus. Stopped in Iowa City to take on more prisoners... er... passengers. Now a VERY FULL bus.

Hour four on the Megabus: instead of taking the more streamlined I88 toll road, they are prolonging the experience for us. The college girl in front of me burst into unexplained maniacal laughter. The pressure must be getting to her, poor thing. They won't crack me that easily.

Hour five in my Megabus Purgatory: for the first time I truly feared for my life. I used the "facilities" in an experience best described as imagining one's toilet mounted on the chassis of a 72 Chevelle going 70 MPH with no shock absorbers There were illegible etchings on the mirror, no doubt the warnings of terror scrawled by the weak.

Entering hour #7 and the prisoners are restless. We've hit the snail traffic on I55 which plagues all equally. It is a cruel Chicago trick to be this close and yet so far. Must hang on to the end of my sentence... trip, I mean.

At first blush, someone from Megabus would probably cringe over this commentary; however, the discussion generated from my friends and colleagues was priceless. For some, they had never heard of the Megabus. For others, they knew my penchant for overexaggeration in these circumstances and enjoyed the humor.

The bottom line: I got people to START TALKING about the Megabus. Some even told me they'd never considered it before, and said they'd be willing to try it. Overall, the experience was pretty simple (especially compared to air travel) and, while a bit slower than driving, allowed me to get a lot of things done in six hours I couldn't have completed with both hands on the wheel.

My question to you in your quest to accomplish great things: what are YOU doing to compel people to START TALKING about your accomplishments? Positive or negative, the communication is important... to you and to them. But the trick is to motivate people to START TALKING. From there, you can manage the conversation, but there's nothing to manage if they don't start.

(On a very positive note about the customer service of Megabus, they responded to my Tweets very promptly. I was highly impressed, and I even downloaded the Megabus app to my mobile. I will definitely consider it for further Chicago travel.)

And for the record, my Facebook post on the way home:

I will behave on the Megabus. 
I will behave on the Megabus. 
I will behave on the Megabus. 
I will behave on the Megabus. 
I will behave on the Megabus.

Two Four Six Hate

"I may not have the capacity to love everyone, but I do have the capacity to act as if I do and run my business accordingly..." -Agnes Golden (character in The Radical Leap Re-Energized)

For once, I really wasn't trying to be difficult or contrarian. Really. But nonetheless, I caught the workshop leader off-guard.

I just recently became certified in Steve Farber's Extreme Leadership Institute. So now I am able to deliver his content to my clients, and it's a very exciting prospect. I've been a huge fan for years. But more on that to come in a near-future blog post. While we were going through the certification process, we were spending a great amount of time talking about the first cornerstone of Farber's tenets: Love (the 'L' in LEAP). The love thing is important. It's in the Extreme Leader's Credo: "Do what you love in the service of those who love what you do." It permeates everything an extreme leader is about.

So when I brought up the topic of hate, it sort of shocked our facilitator. But then I explained myself a little. The extreme leader isn't out to specifically make somebody else hate them. We want to love our work, love our coworkers, love our customers, love our projects. But in the process of cultivating love and acting audaciously as we pursue the OS!M, one can't help but have hate as a natural by-product.

Huh? Love produces hate? Absolutely. A few years ago, I used Kathy Sierra's branding graphic to talk about personal branding as it applied to gender in the work place, but her model applies universally. If we're going to love, and if we're going to seek to be passionately loved by others, then "hate" will be a natural consequence from the people who not only don't "love what you do"; they're dead-set against it. But the key point is: they've noticed you and what you're doing. You registered with them. You got their attention by being an extreme leader.

But here's where some people break-down in their attempts to be extreme leaders; they aren't comfortable being hated. They want to be liked. By everybody. So they don't act audaciously. They don't prove themselves. And they cop out on love for a mild form of "like" that has all the energetic impact of warm milk.

But in listening to the stories shared by other workshop attendees over the two-day period, and especially hearing the inspiring story from Simon Billsberry, formerly of Kineticom, it became evident that an extreme leader can't love passionately WITHOUT allowing hate to be a natural by-product, either expressing hate for the non-leadership behaviors and values, or inspiring hate from others who don't embrace extreme leader values and behaviors.

I've experienced it more than once on a client site. I bring my own unique (ahem) brand of project management to the table, but I do so to get results and jar my clients from their old habits. But in so doing, I've turned off more traditionally-minded champions of the status quo... some of whom I've won over, but some of whom end up passionately hating my approach... and sometimes me personally. And I've learned to be OK with it. Why? Because there are others who love the results and accomplishment I bring to the table. And then I get to do what I love in the service of those who love what I do... in spite of those who hate what I do.

In your quest to be loved, are you comfortable being hated? I hope so.

A Head of the Game

I admit it. I got up early a couple of weeks ago to watch the Royal Wedding of William and Kate. Before you make me turn in my "man card," in my defense, I live with a complete Anglophile whose mother made her get up to watch Charles and Diana 30 years ago, and who turned our London get-away into the British vacation death march. There wasn't much choice. But personally, I have an appreciation for snarky, biting British commentary, so waking up at 4 in the morning is alright.

I hear that Princess Beatrice is now auctioning for charity the artifact of the day... the one article of clothing that was talked about almost as much as the wedding gown itself: her hat. It was so fun to hear the comments about that hat, ranging from "we found the 5th Teletubby" to "is she going to set it on fire at the reception and have tiny tigers jump through it for entertainment?" Let's face it: Beatrice got noticed. And from what we heard, she WANTED to get noticed. And now she's getting noticed again for selling the beast.

Sometimes getting noticed is hard. You're jostling for position amid a sea of others who also want to get noticed. And sometimes we want to get noticed... but ONLY if getting noticed is all positive, raving praise, happy thoughts of puppies and butterflies and unicorns. Trust me, if your accomplishments get noticed, SOMEBODY will have less than favorable things to say about them as well.

And when you're jostling for position, it can be hard to accomplish what you set out to do. Take for example, my own brush with British royalty five years ago. The Queen was leaving St. James and there was a pressing crowd. My wife gave me her camera because I'm taller than she, thinking it would give us a better vantage for a shot at QE2. Well, the locals had other ideas about my goals for accomplishment. I got the shot of the Queen, but it really wasn't her best side. But I was just another face in a very big crowd, so my desire for accomplishment was compromised (unless the goal was "The Queen Bum" or "A Royal Pain in the Backside").

Bottom line: what are YOU actively doing to get your accomplishments noticed? Are you willing to have some observers NOT love you in order to do something different enough to get the important ones to love you?