Since it’s a New Year, I thought I’d address the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. Every January, many of us reflect on the previous year and make some kind of resolution for the New Year. We vow to lose weight, take a new adventure, volunteer, eat healthier, read a few classics from the pile of books we’ve borrowed from friends, or just do something that we didn’t make (or didn’t have the time to make) time for the year before. And every year for as long as I can remember, my New Year’s goal has been to do something new–visit a new country or volunteer somewhere new or sign up for a new event or activity. And as amazing as all of these adventures have been—and I wouldn’t trade them for the world—I realize that they all involved adding MORE to my already busy life.
All of us face an inexorable “to-do” list every day and the list seems to grow longer every year. With so much MORE coming at us from every direction, my New Year’s Resolution this year is to take stock of all of the things I already do and try to do them all BETTER. I was inspired by a terrific article in the October 3, 2011 issue of The New Yorker by Atul Gawande entitled “Personal Best”. In the article, Gawande reflects that after practicing as a surgeon for 8 years, he felt he had reached a plateau and wasn’t getting any better. He then considers the helpful role that coaching can provide and wonders why coaching is more common in some professions—such as professional sports—than in others, such as his own profession as surgeon. (This is an intentionally unnerving comparison when you stop to think about the repercussions of failure in a football game vs repercussions of a botched surgery.) What struck me about this article, and inspired my New Year’s intention, was the underlying need Gawande has to get “better”—to improve, to learn*, to continue to grow. I think this need to get “better” is shared by anyone who buys a business book or is looking at this website. After all, we all have way too many things on our “to do” list—do we really have time to be browsing a website? Probably not, but somehow we found time for it today. Why?
My guess is that we are all looking to do what we do every day a little bit better/more efficiently/more successfully, so that we can ultimately do “more” in the long run. (Whatever “more” means for you—retire early, make more time for kids/family/friends, whatever.) But in order to do “better” we need to invest a little more time up front—what leadership consultant and author Roger Schwarz calls “going slow to go fast.”** And hopefully, you’re on JosseyBassBusiness.com because you trust that we will provide you with the resources to help you get better.
This year, my resolution/intention is to get better at what is already on my plate. Specifically, I intend to be a better leader to my team so that my team members can develop their own leadership abilities; to be a better editor/facilitator to my authors so that we can achieve more working in partnership with each other than either one of us could alone; and to be a better listener to you, our community of customers, to find out what we need to get better at—what content, formats , and resources we should be offering.
This is where JosseyBassBusiness.com comes in. Now you have a forum to let us know what you think. What are you looking for in terms of content, formats, resources? What could we be doing better? And what can we be doing to help you be a better you in 2012?
*Nitin Nohria and the late Paul Lawrence discuss the need to learn as one of the 4 primary drivers of humans in their Jossey-Bass book, Driven (J-B,2002)
**See his website: http://www.schwarzassociates.com/
