I’m in the middle of reading Good to Great by Jim Collins and have just finished a great chapter on confronting the harsh realities that people love to sweep under the proverbial rug. This paragraph really struck me:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do you motivate people with brutal facts? Doesn’t motivation flow chiefly from a compelling vision?” The answer, surprisingly, is, “No.” Not because vision is unimportant, but because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.

Acting with reality versus talking about dreams. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

The sprout of an idea occurred to be a couple of years ago while watching Bill Gates give his keynote at CES. He was doing his kitchen-of-the-future thing. Your kitchen worktop, he predicted, was going to be a touch screen monitor that showed you recipes. He followed this with his bedroom-of-the-future, where the walls were covered with monitors and you decorated your walls with the wallpaper of the operating system. Putting aside the nightmare of sleeping in a room surrounded by the Windows desktop, something else was bothering me: I knew this was never going to happen how he imagined it. And even if it did, it would be too many years away and pointless enough that it was not worth caring about.

The same month Steve Jobs got on stage at MacWorld and introduced the iPhone. He said:

When’s it going to be available? We’re shipping them in June — we’re announcing it today because we have to go get FCC approval… we thought it’d be better to introduce this today rather than let the FCC introduce this.

It struck me then why I had started to enjoy these Apple keynotes; every announcement came with a shipping date. They didn’t say anything until they’d built it. They weren’t talking about their plans; they were talking about what they had already done. They waited until they were forced to announce it to start talking.

Since then I’ve noticed this quality in others (though very much in the minority). I have grown to admire it. It’s far more interesting to hear what people have accomplished already, rather than what their goals are. Most people plan, dream and set goals, but how many of these actually get accomplished? I’d prefer someone to tell me they got up early this morning and ran a mile, than to hear them dream of running an ultra-marathon. Reality always trumps the dream.

But I had always thought that telling people your goals was a good thing. Tell a friend or publicly announce your goals and you will be held to account if you fail, right? Well I’ve tried this strategy and it has a fatal flaw: people don’t hold you to account. It is not embarrassing to give up; it just means you are like everyone else.

I started to try the opposite strategy: don’t announce what you are doing until you’ve achieved it. Planning to run that marathon? A week after training you can tell people you’ve been running every morning, but don’t mention the marathon you signed up for until you absolutely need to. This strategy, to my surprise, doesn’t just make you look like someone who gets stuff done rather than breaking promises, it is also motivating in itself. There is something far more motivating about telling people your accomplishments than your plans. It becomes something to look forward to. It’s frustrating to stay in stealth mode because you are excited about your plans, so you make sure you get stuff done so you can talk about it.

This strategy also stops you wasting time. I remember an evening many years ago when my dad couldn’t stop chatting away about a leaking tap in the bathroom. It sticks in my mind because he really didn’t have anything to say, but he kept on and on and I grew very bored. Actually fixing the tap took about five minutes. When you’re bored, you really notice how time consuming talking can be. Well that time stacks up whether you are being boring or not.

A year’s worth of gradual understanding recently got summed up by Mike Cane on Twitter:

A lesson I have learned the Hard Way: Those who talk about doing, NEVER DO. Those who STFU and show what they’ve DONE, win.

Shut the Fuck Up and DO IT.

STFU.

Yesterday this was running through my head while I was writing an email meant to motivate someone into getting some work done.

STFU, I thought.

And I did.

If my own motivation gets derailed by talking too much, maybe trying to motivate others by communicating a bold vision is actually destructive too. Maybe the way to motivate someone is not to express a compelling vision of what we can create. Maybe it’s just to start setting tasks and getting something done. To celebrate the achievement; not the vision. To let the motivation build itself.

Having goals, dreams and being visionary are all important. But I’m no longer convinced talking about them is a good idea. Not if you want your ideas to feed reality.

Of course no politician ever got elected by shutting up; so there’s already one case where STFU is bad advice. But then again, how much of what any given politician says actually gets done?

Well, I should probably STFU now.

I watched the launch presentation of the new Windows Vista yesterday. Mostly I was bored by what they had to offer, but one thing stood out.

Parental controls.

To many parents this seems like a great idea (a reason to buy) but I’m a little concerned.

When the Internet was first starting to become popular, I was in my mid-teens. Just the kind of period where the lure of pornography is rather strong. I didn’t have a computer in my bedroom, so that provided its own controls. If I wanted to look at pornography I had to go on late at night when everyone else was in bed, or wait until I had the house to myself. Then I’d make sure there was time to delete my Internet history and temporary files. I was careful, not because I wasn’t allowed to look at this stuff, but because I would have been embarrassed if my parents found out.

Of course, I’m pretty sure they knew. But they respected my privacy, and I don’t think they minded that I looked at a few dirty pictures.

I know of other parents who searched their kid’s rooms, read their diaries and looked through their bags. No trust, whatsoever. And the kids felt it and responded by being less trustworthy.

I never smoked, took drugs or committed any petty crimes. I honoured the trust I had too much. Guess which kids had drug problems.

Now Windows Vista allows you to spy on your kids with greater ease. It can restrict the time they can use the computer, it can restrict the software they can open, but most worryingly it can log the sites that the kids access so that parents can see exactly what they’ve been looking at.

It’s become far too easy to not trust your kids. It’s too easy to turn a microchip into the parent. Welcome to the world of 1984 : Home Edition.

This is one of those technologies that makes life easier short-term, but creates weakness over time. It hinders, for example, the ability to develop qualities such as self-discipline and respect for authority.

There are crazy restrictions in the workplace too. That mentality of let’s not trust our employees to send personal emails or check out entertaining websites, because it could stop them doing their work. Suddenly, they can’t look at a website or catch up on their personal email, during a lunch break. And yet, they always got the work done before.

I was listening to a radio broadcast a few weeks ago. A listener phoned in and they began talking about his band. The presenter wanted to check out their MySpace page to see what the music was like and possibly play a little on air. Unfortunately that site was restricted by the stations IT department.

When I was at university (I was about 19), my friend and I were walking towards the entrance of the local Toys “R” Us store. The security guard stopped us at the door and told us we had to drop off our bags at the enquiry desk if we wanted to look around. We did as asked, but I felt really bad about it. I was surprised to find myself completely mistrusting the store, and was annoyed that I’d done as I was told and left my bag with a stranger. I decided never to go in that store again.

Of course, there was the possibility that I was a shoplifter. But we cannot look at everyone as a potential criminal. I deserved to be trusted until I broke that trust. At which time the law would (or should) take over.

I’m not saying Vista should not have parental controls, but it needs to be made clear that this is a punishment for breaching a parent’s trust. It needs to be made clear that this will have negative consequences if kids can’t earn that trust back.

Management based applications need to take such trust issues into account. If technology is going to be part of our people management strategy, it has to take that role much more seriously.