It would be easy enough for all of us to become very discouraged in the midst of all the economic news.
Economic growth is not steady Eddie. It is rather a continuing drama of periods of expansion followed by periods of contraction. This cycle repeats. Not in a regular pattern however. And, the periods can be long or short. All of this is commonly referred to as the business cycle.
I facilitated a two day planning retreat last Thursday and Friday for one of my core clients. About half way through the 2nd day, one of the executives stated “prior to working with you, we spent entirely too much time forming and storming and too little performing. Most of the rest looked at her in bewilderment.
I knew she was referring to work done in the mid sixties by Bruce Tuckman. Bruce was developing a model for teamwork in which he maintained there were phases a team went though in order to grow, face obstacles and challenges, find solutions, create a plan and deliver.
He called it the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing Model. A few years later he added two additional phases he called Adjourning and Transforming. Although it is a bit academic, it did form the basis more much work on team development.
I found some notes I made while visiting with Brian Tracy several months ago.
I usually take pretty thorough notes, but these were a little sketchy. I only put down four short comments, but now that I have re-read them, powerful points.
Some of us have a navigation system in our cars or a hand-held one we can carry around. Let’s call it Sally—mine has a feminine voice. If yours is male, you might not want to use the name Sally.
Let’s think for a moment about how they work. First, they contain a map of the territory. Most of their maps cover a very large area. All of the USA and Canada for instance. But, the map is not the territory it’s only a representation of the real territory. More on that distinction in a bit. What’s nice about that is you have access to the entire map any time, but do not have to focus on it. Instead you focus on the road just ahead.
Jay Abraham, a man I have referred to in the past, had a philosopher as a colleague. Spike Humer served as Jay’s COO until he founded his own firm this summer.
Jay gathered a group of primarily entrepreneurs from nearly 20 countries to hear from about 2 dozen sages in marketing in business.
At the end of the affair, Spike had an opportunity to share some of his thoughts on life. I think you will like them.
