The Brainzooming Group

Monday’s post was a list of creative inspirations behind Brainzooming blog posts. The creative inspiration for this blog post on providing help and support when dealing with difficult people is similar to number 30 on the list: You have relevant pictures to share.

I saw this cactus receiving ample help and support to remain standing at The Buttes Resort in Phoenix. It immediately triggered thoughts about what it’s like to help and support difficult people at work (think “difficult” = “prickly”).

Dealing with difficult people isn’t typically what any of us would volunteer for in a work assignment. Until you can remove yourself from having to help and support a difficult person at work, however, you simply have to manage the situation as best you can.

16 Articles on Help and Support for Prickly People

Since we’ve written about having had to help and support a variety of challenging personalities, the cactus picture created an opportunity to bring them all the content on dealing with difficult people together in one place. These sixteen articles provide advice dealing with difficult people of various types, including handling yourself as the difficult person in your work life!

Undependable People

• Corporate Amnesia – 9 Ways to Prevent and Avoid 
• Assistance Unwanted – 5 Management Style Signs Helping Is Futile

Harmful People

• Corporate Sociopaths and Horrible Bosses – 7 Ways to Survive Them
• A Corporate Sociopath and How Dilbert Handles Bad Behavior from One
• You Can Learn From Anybody
• Random Inputs Week – 5 Keys to Innovating Amid Conflict

Inappropriate People

• 3 Strategies for Navigating a Political Environment
• Protecting Your Creativity in a Culture that Doesn’t Value It
• 3 Keys for Job Candidates – Have Your Own Interview Strategy

Ineffective People

• Beware of Morphfiends – Foes of Solid Strategy
• Great Leaders – 12 Ways Great Leaders Turn into Bad Leaders
• 5 Things You Can Learn from a Bad Boss
• 98 Pound Name Dropping Weakling
• Career Preservation Advice – A “Gotcha” Strategy Will “Getcha”

When You’re the Difficult Person

• Discovering the Toughest Boss I’ve Ever Had
• Frustration? To Hell with It!

Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at  816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Continue Reading

At a recent presentation, an audience member recommended talking in the future about what has helped create my personal career accomplishments.  I don’t recall ever being asked that intriguing question before, and the answer isn’t covered in any one place on the Brainzooming blog. That’s more than enough reason to take a run at sharing the most important 6 gifts behind personal career accomplishments in my life so far:

1. My Parents

Beyond supplying the DNA, growing up with my parents absolutely shaped how I think about hard work, accomplishments, and the right ways to achieve success. Plus, the fact they’re so different from each other provided a wide variety of personality characteristics to wind up adopting. That’s why I describe myself as an introvert (much more like my mom), but lots of people who know me think I’m very outgoing (like my dad). It’s been wonderful to have such a wide field to play on throughout my life.

2. Cyndi

As high school seniors, our instructor, Fr. Mike Scully, O.F.M. Cap, told us two things: Wait until you’re 25 to get married and marry your best friend. Being one to take solid advice, I got married when I was 24 years and 11 months to my best friend in the world, Cyndi. For all my tendencies to be contemplative about decisions, Cyndi is the one who pushes us to act, even if she has to trick me into doing it. When I was wandering spiritually, she was integral in me receiving the greatest gift ever – the rekindling of my faith (see the next point).

3. Spirituality

It wasn’t until I truly returned to the Catholic Church after a more than 10 year absence that I realized how influential spirituality had been in my life. Going to mass every day for many years now, you get exposed to a lot of the Bible, and I’ve been continually amazed at how many of the lessons that have shaped me are right there. This is especially surprising since I’d never gone to daily mass other than for a few months earlier in my life. Somehow the messages got to me through family, school, and a weekly dose on Sundays, however, and I wouldn’t be me without it.

4. Strategic Mentors

I’ve written about the three individuals who have been my most important strategic mentors on previous occasions. Each of them was (and in two cases, still are) important influences in how I think about, plan for, and conduct myself in business.

5. Gifts from God

At heart, it is hard not to be influenced by the talents we were blessed enough to receive. I was truly blessed to receive an eclectic mix of talents across a wide variety of areas. This has led to wide diversity of interests and a huge benefit of being able to adapt and change my focus throughout my career (i.e., ranging from being a left-brained researcher at the start of my career to a right-brained marketing communications leader). Every positive has its downside, and while having a breadth of interests, I do not have the gift of a deep and focused expertise in any one area.

6. Opportunities to be on Stage

For somebody who is a self-described introvert in new one-on-one interactions, I love to be up in front of a group of people. This is especially true if I am using gifts I have been given to share learnings with an audience. Because people who know me interpersonally are always surprised when the quiet guy gets up in front of a group and seems to have a different personality, being on stage has been regular opportunity to surprise people, create expanded perceptions, and open new career opportunities. Certainly in my corporate career, the ability to get up in front of a group and improvise content led to a whole host of new opportunities.

Enough About Me – What About You?

Turning this great question around to you, what have been the gifts behind your personal career accomplishments?

No Blog Tomorrow

Tomorrow is Good Friday, so in keeping with tradition around here, there won’t be a new blog post published. See you back here Monday! – Mike Brown

Continue Reading

Today is my parents’ 58th wedding anniversary. Congratulations Mom and Dad for making a commitment to each other and living it out in your marriage during an era when society as a whole seems to have less respect for commitment by the day.

Growing up with such a stable family life and living in a unique small town with many of the trappings of a much larger city provided tremendous advantages. I am so blessed to have had that upbringing.

I have started writing posts on lessons learned from my mom and dad individually. On their wedding anniversary, however, here are six personal relationship lessons they have demonstrated as a married couple which have tremendously shaped my views on marriage specifically, and personal relationships in general:

• Not only do opposites attract, opposites make a stronger team. My parents are very different from one another, which strengthened them as a couple. I have some of both their diverse characteristics. While that can frustrate me about myself, I also see where it importantly helps in considering diverse viewpoints.
• Talk about stuff with each other. Discuss what is in front of you, consider your options, and make the best decision you can.
• Don’t get caught up in yourself. Be humble and appreciative of everything you receive because it’s all a gift.
• You may not have an obligation to do so, but when somebody who is trying hard needs help, provide the help without any expectations about what you’re going to get out of it.
• There’s always going to be something in the future to provide the gratification you may be seeking today. As a result, waiting until you can afford the gratification won’t kill you or even harm you very much at all.
• It’s important to tell people you love them – daily.

Continue Reading

Seems like everybody is a “solutions provider” these days. Whether you make a product, provide a service, or do just about anything, you better be telling clients you’re a  ”business solutions provider.” In the past, it used to be all about “answers,” but when everybody started doing that, “solutions provider” became the new buzzphrase for every vendor to tout.

Having had a lot of vendors call on me in my corporate life talking about being a solutions provider, I became very skeptical about the buzzphrase and what business expertise might really be behind it.

What Does It Really Mean to Provide Solutions

In light of that, it was refreshing at an event I was helping produce recently to hear a business-to-business services customer offer his perspective on what being a business solutions provider really means for him. While his list was industry specific, his remarks prompted this short list of questions a vendor (or their business clients) should be able to answer “yes” to if solutions really are part of the equation:

• Do they start out by listening to clients’ business concerns, issues, and opportunities?
• After listening, do they follow up with strong questions before they launch into an extensive spiel on their own company?
• Can they talk about real, measurable business benefits they provide instead of simply reciting product features?
• Are they up for challenging client thinking and perspectives?
• Will they reach out to other parties (external to their own company, if necessary) to bring better business capabilities than they have alone?
• Are they willing to experiment and try things they’ve not done exactly that way before to address business clients’ specific needs?

This list clearly just skims the surface. For those of you buying business products and services from companies claiming to provide solutions, what do you think separates  companies really solving challenges from the posers who claim to but don’t?

– Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement.  To learn how we can bring out the best innovative thinking in your team email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320.

Continue Reading

The two TED talk video presentations by Kathryn Schulz and Eli Parser during the 2011 TEDxKC  event were related in treating transparency in thinking and how we receive and process information. They’re both featured today. Attempting to link the Kansas City presenters back to the “If only. Only if.” theme for  2011 TEDxKC, each recaps begins with my perspective on how the theme could be completed for that presenter’s talk.

Kathryn Schulz – “On Being Wrong”

If only you would understand the danger in believing you’re on the correct side of anything.
Only if you come to realize the most right you are is when suspecting you’re going to be wrong.

Kathryn Schulz’s 2011 TEDxKC talk was a video from TED 2011 all about being wrong. Schulz – a “wrongologist” – has spent five years thinking about why we misunderstand things and the insights uncovered about human nature.

Something quite evident that seemed new in the way Schulz discussed is absent a point of comparison, being wrong and being right feel the same. Her claim is we don’t tend to have internal cues about “wrongness,” but more on that later. Since people perceive themselves as correct, they have to rationalize those who disagree. Schulz offered three assumptions individuals us to deal with those who disagree:

• The Ignorance Assumption – The person disagreeing is ignorant, and you just need to educate them.
• The Idiot Assumption – The person disagreeing is an idiot and beyond education.
• The Evil Assumption – The person disagreeing with you knows you’re right and is simply distorting the truth for his or her own gain.

Karen Schulz’s point is we continually expect one thing to happen and then something different happens – with both big and small events. We generate stories about how the world is going to play out and then the world astonishes us by doing something different.

This was a topic near and dear to me, and even more so after Schulz referenced a quote from St. Augustine’s “City of God” which translated to “I err, therefore I am.”  For me, that good Catholic sense of suspecting (okaying “knowing”) you’re wrong has shaped my life, attitudes and willingness to hear others out on their (even extreme) points of view. Because, to paraphrase Dennis Miller, “I’m probably wrong.”

Eli Parser – “Beware of Online Filter Bubbles”

If only algorithms realized humans don’t follow perfectly executed behaviors.
Only if people stand up and demand to know how their online information is being curated.

Eli Parser, author of “The Filter Bubble,” in a 2011 TED video talk discussed the negative implications of the web’s growing propensity to create personalized views of results. While Parser never mentioned EdgeRank by name, he did share Mark Zuckerberg’s perspective that, “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

Algorithms examine your social graph to deliver content, recommendations, visuals, user experiences, schedules, etc. tailored to you. According to Eli Parser, Google employs 57 cues even when you’re not logged in to personalize your experience. Parser describes this artificial view of information as “filter bubbles,” and hints we may be surrounded by “information junk food” based on what and where we’ve clicked online in the past. He points out it’s not confined to Facebook and Google; the same phenomenon applies in varying degrees for other online content providers too.

The internet story of readily available, unfiltered information may be (I think “is”) wrong hypothesizes Parser. Rather than the Internet eliminating information gatekeepers, human gatekeepers have simply been replaced by algorithmic ones. Because of this, Parser advocates for programming civic responsibility and a sense of the public life into the algorithms so we continue to receive uncomfortable and challenging information, just as we would in looking at general offline communications.

And, based on Kathryn Schulz’s talk, we better program a lot of inaccuracy into the online algorithms as well!

– Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com  or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

Continue Reading

One of my wise strategic mentors, Greg Reid, instructed us on the “dinner table analogy” when it comes to project management and project team member interactions:

• When you’re with your family eating around the kitchen table, you can argue, squabble, and be a little unruly with few concerns about it.
• When you have friends over to eat, you need to be on better behavior, mind your manners, and say “please” and “thank you” even if things aren’t as formal as they could be.
• When guests are over for a formal supper in the dining room, however, you have to be on your best behavior and make sure you don’t do anything to embarrass the family in front of your guests.

He likened the family, the guests, and the different dining situations to project management interactions we encounter at work.

What Type of Dinner Table Are You At?

Family Dinner around the Kitchen Table

The first situation is when you have project team members working actively and closely together. You owe it to each other to introduce, build on, modify, and vet ideas while recognizing not every idea will be fully developed (so you need to go easy at this early stage). The opinions and ideas aren’t yet ready to share with others, which is completely appropriate. It’s the time from a project management standpoint to ask tough questions and challenge ideas in a productive way as the project team then moves forward with a unified strategic approach.

Having Friends over for Dinner

The second dinner table situation applies to introducing more prepared ideas or a plan to a broader audience, but not yet the ultimate one. You’re looking to introduce what you’ve done, be ready for questions and handling suggested modifications from your audience. The key among family members (i.e., the project team) is not using the opportunity to ask fellow team members challenging, damaging, and embarrassing questions. Those need to have been handled before the presentation or afterward in a future “family dinner” setting.

Formal Dinner

The last situation is when you present a final project deliverable, often to a senior management team or client group. By this point, things are very choreographed, all the project team members knows their parts, no strategic or even tactical side discussions are raised, and everybody uses their best manners while presenting the final project deliverable. It is definitely not the time to voice intra-project team disputes, grievances, or objections. It’s all about making sure the guests come away with the best possible experience.

Putting the Dinner Table Analogy  into Action

The dinner table analogy all sounds pretty straight forward, but it was surprising how often you’d see project team members put  fellow team members on the spot in a “formal dinner” setting. Bad move and completely unnecessary.

When you’re on a project team or in charge of project management, think about what type of situation you’re in and make sure you’re using the appropriate manners and behavior for whoever is coming to “dinner.”  – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us atbrainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help enhance your marketing strategy, project management, and implementation efforts.

Continue Reading

We don’t have kids, something we came to terms with relatively early in our marriage and have accepted as part of life. While it means missing out on a range of incredible experiences, we’ve been able to do things for others (particularly our niece and nephews) that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. The net of it is accepting what life hands you and making the best of it.

Last year, our niece Valerie called and asked to speak with me. This was unusual, but as I’ve written before, Valerie has lived an unusual life. That includes getting married initially in a group wedding ceremony on Valentine’s Day 2008 at Loveland Pass. This was an event the family first learned about when my mother-in-law saw it reported on the Weather Channel!

When Valerie began talking about a second wedding ceremony where friends and family could be present, I was hesitant since we’d have to play a big role in putting it on.

As the phone conversation began, I told her our ability to help was limited since her cousin was getting married about the same time and we might have to get Valerie’s grandma to it. While stating my case, Valerie interrupted to ask, “Would you walk me down the aisle?”

Walking a bride down the aisle was something I’d long ago come to accept as an “I’ll never get to do it” moment. Suddenly my tone changed and being able to do something I never thought I would do completely changed my perspective. I was all for wedding ceremony #2 and making it happen.

The life-changing lesson here is the important reminder to remain perpetually hopeful. Things you think can never happen can happen. If there are possibilities you’ve shut out of your life, maybe it’s time to open them back up.

And in true Valerie fashion, she followed her life-changing comment with another incredibly touching one. As we were getting ready to walk into the ceremony, she told me, “Who else would I have asked to give me away. With everything you guys have done for me, you’re like my father.”

That’s Valerie!

Wrap-up: Hope you enjoyed this series on life-changing words!  Have a great holiday and rest of 2009! Thanks for reading Brainzooming!  – Mike Brown

Continue Reading