Managing vs. leading
The difference between managing and leading is starkly simple. Imagine you’ve got a patch of woods that’s brambles, thorns, trees, and brush.
Leadership is being the girl or guy in front, hacking away at the foliage, making the trail.
Managing is being the team behind the leader that’s maintaining the trail, keeping it clear, keeping it free of the obstacles the leader has removed, for everyone else to use.
You cannot do both well.
If you’re leading, it’s counterproductive to go back down the trail and manage. If there’s no one else to do it, there’s no one else to do it, but every second you spend managing the trail is a second you’re not moving forward.
If you’re managing, it’s irresponsible to forsake your charge, wander off, and attempt to lead. You might not know where you’re going, and more importantly, the trail behind you will fall into disrepair quickly.
Neither is better or worse. Both are vitally important. If you want real success, know the difference between management and leadership, know which better suits your personality, and know which you’re more talented at.
Inspired in part by Ken Savage and New England Warrior Camp, which is where the photo was taken.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
April Out of Date Newsletter Has Shipped!
In this month’s issue, we look at two very obvious things you should be doing with LinkedIn, plus iPad apps (premium content only), a nifty way to back up WordPress, and much more. Are you subscribed? If not, go here and subscribe now.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Back from the road
After two weeks of travel, excitement, and learning, I’m back. Before anything else, I’d like to thank all of the guest authors who kept the blog not only going, but with content that was top-notch. If you missed any of the guest posts, please take a few moments to read up on what you missed:
Other posts in the series:
- What's Obvious to You? by Ann Handley
- With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability, by Michelle (Chel) Wolverton
- 4 Steps To Awaken Your Superhero Power, by DJ Waldow
- The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them, by Helena Bouchez
- Making the Jump, by Tamsen McMahon
- We All Have It In Us, by C.C. Chapman
- Teaching the Pebbles, by Bryce Moore
- Stop Being the Green Lantern of Business, by Justin Kownacki
- Taking The Vow of Super Heroism, by Whitney Hoffman
- Crisis and Motivation, by John Wall
As for the trip itself, it was an amazing, wonderful, and interesting experience. Let’s talk about a few different pieces, then dig into pieces in subsequent posts.
Normally, I hate to fly. Not because being shot across the sky in a giant aluminum tube frightens me, but because flying is such a miserable exercise, thanks to the TSA, cost cutting, and airlines trying to squeeze every last dime out of you. 14 hours in coach across the Pacific Ocean sounds like a recipe for Hell itself. Thankfully, for the trip I decided to go via Korean Air rather than a US carrier, and what an incredible difference that made. Meals that were hot, filling, and actual food instead of various snacks in bags. In-seat entertainment that was better than some of the stuff I had at home. Flight crew that were amazingly attentive and courteous, not to mention hardworking – they literally cleaned the restrooms on the hour, every hour during the trip.
The best part was that all of the amenities (including the slippers, toothbrush, toothpaste, blankets, pillows, wine & beer, etc.) were all bundled into the price, so once I was on board, there was nothing else to pay for. Even the aircraft itself was configured nicely. One non-obvious fact about aircraft is that they are basically large rooms when ordered; the customer (the airline) orders how many seats, restrooms, etc. will be in each aircraft. In the case of Korean Air, all of the seats even in economy had more legroom and room in general than premium legroom seats on domestic US carriers.
If every airline managed to provide the same level of service and quality of experience that Korean Air did, flying would be a joy (minus the TSA) rather than a punishment. Of course, the reason that airlines like Korean Air can provide vastly superior experiences is that they’re flag carriers, which means they are either part of or heavily subsidized by their national governments. The government of South Korea founded and funds Korean Air. Squeezing every last passenger you can possibly fit (and overbooking by 150%) isn’t necessary when you’re paid for by the taxpayers. As a result, all of the little quality of life factors add up to make a much better experience, which means less air rage, which means the staff is inclined to treat you better… which means a better experience, etc. in a nice virtuous circle.
Korea itself was an amazing experience as well. I’ll dig more into it in subsequent writings, but here’s a few fun tidbits:
There’s no diet soda, or very little. Coke Zero is about it. No artificial sweeteners – on the table will be regular sugar, raw sugar, and finely ground sugar, but that’s it.
Decaf is practically unheard of. Koreans make up for this by serving a depressingly weak cup of coffee. Speaking of which, there are coffeehouses EVERYWHERE in Seoul. No joke, there are more Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts in Seoul than there are in Boston. The photo above is right outside Deoksugung Palace, one of the five royal palaces where tradition and history meet modern Seoul. I love that a palace guard stands watch over not only the palace grounds, but the local Dunks.
Seoul itself is a gigantic megacity like none other I’ve been to. 26 million people living in one city, more than twice the size of New York. Yet amazingly, almost no litter and no visible homelessness. Granted, I spent a lot of time in the tourist-y areas which should be cleaner than the average city block, but even in New York City in the best areas there’s still plenty of both.
McDonald’s delivers.
Portion sizes are very small, and the food can be insanely spicy. I had a chuckle at the supermarket after I got back while seeing a headline at the checkout counter – “ASIAN SECRET TO GETTING THIN”. Really simple: portion sizes are probably 30% of what’s served on a plate in America. Our appetizers are the size of Korean entrees. If you cut 70% of the food you ate and made the rest ridiculously spicy (so as to avoid eating too fast), you’d be thinner too.
QR codes are EVERYWHERE. From coffee cups to store shelves, there isn’t a place without a pile of QR codes.
Gasoline is about $8-9/gallon.
If you’d like to see the rest of the photos from the trip, you’ll find them here.
More to come in the days ahead, but I’ve got a massive inbox to clean now, so we’ll talk a bit later.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
What’s Obvious to You?
Other posts in the series:
- What's Obvious to You? by Ann Handley
- With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability, by Michelle (Chel) Wolverton
- 4 Steps To Awaken Your Superhero Power, by DJ Waldow
- The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them, by Helena Bouchez
- Making the Jump, by Tamsen McMahon
- We All Have It In Us, by C.C. Chapman
- Teaching the Pebbles, by Bryce Moore
- Stop Being the Green Lantern of Business, by Justin Kownacki
- Taking The Vow of Super Heroism, by Whitney Hoffman
- Crisis and Motivation, by John Wall
When C.C. Chapman and I were writing our book Content Rules, I kept asking him, “Does this have any value?” “Isn’t this stuff that everyone already knows?” And ultimately, “Isn’t this obvious?”
Well guess what? It wasn’t obvious. And thousands of book sales and tons of positive reviews later, I finally grok that.
Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, calls this “Obvious to You. Amazing to Others.” In a video he released the other day, based on an earlier blog post, he says, “Any creator of anything knows this feeling: You experience someone else’s innovative work. It’s beautiful, brilliant, breath-taking. You’re stunned…..
“Afterwards, you think, ‘My ideas are so obvious. I’ll never be as inventive as that.’”
But in his own work, Sivers discovered something surprisingly profound, he says, “Everybody’s ideas seem obvious to them.” Great musicians or artists struggle with this too. But the key is to rememeber one thing: What’s obvious to you is amazing to someone else.
Why is it that we are terrible judges of our own creative value? It’s because we stand too close to our own selves. It’s impossible to maintain any perspective; our purview is inherently limited.
I see this all the time when I talk to companies about the content they are producing as part of their business: They think that their blog post ideas are silly, or ridiculous, or so painfully obvious that it’s not worth talking about, because their customers already know whatever it is that they consider sharing. (Hint: No, they don’t.)
That lack of perspective limits companies in other ways, too, when they rely on insider-y language, corporate-ese or “Frankenspeak” (as we call it in Content Rules) to get their messages across. They forget that the language they use inside their industries or companies isn’t the most effective language with which to communicate with customers. Again, they’re standing too close.
So what about you: Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share? How do you try to gain perspective on your own work?
Hat tip to C.C. for the video.
Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs and the co-author of Content Rules. People seem to like her writing. She’s a huge deal on Twitter, a point which might make her family proud, if only they knew what that meant.
With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability
Other posts in the series:
- What's Obvious to You? by Ann Handley
- With Great Challenge Comes Great Adaptability, by Michelle (Chel) Wolverton
- 4 Steps To Awaken Your Superhero Power, by DJ Waldow
- The power of realization or Superheros are where you find them, by Helena Bouchez
- Making the Jump, by Tamsen McMahon
- We All Have It In Us, by C.C. Chapman
- Teaching the Pebbles, by Bryce Moore
- Stop Being the Green Lantern of Business, by Justin Kownacki
- Taking The Vow of Super Heroism, by Whitney Hoffman
- Crisis and Motivation, by John Wall
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. ” - Stephen Hawking
Most of my life I’ve faced one challenge or another. Nothing special, plenty of people have faced darker roads. A host of them came from making bad choices in the midst of the challenges I faced which lead me not so elegantly to another bad situation. As a result of each challenges, I learned to adapt quickly and you can too.
Whether you need to adapt because of the decisions you’ve made or because of the decisions someone else made or a situation that nature caused, the first lesson to learn is that change is inevitable. There is no way to avoid change and the chaos that comes with it. Don’t try sticking your head in the sand. It doesn’t work.
You want to quit your job and do something that makes you happy. But you live in fear. You’re tired of what you’ve been doing the past decade and want to try something new. But you stall on taking the steps to make it happen. A competitor came up with that innovative new idea faster than you. But you dismiss the concerns of your smartest employees pointing out the signs until it’s too late.
Instead of ignoring what’s happening or running around in a panic-induced purple haze with flying invisible pink monkeys, here are three ways you become more adaptable so such things don’t throw you entirely off your game.
- Just make the f—king choice already. There’s only so much you can debate before you can do before making a choice. Yes, give yourself time to enter the witness state, but then choose a path.
- Don’t waste time asking “Why?”. Does it really matter? What happened, happened. It’s what you do next that shapes the future.
- Do not underestimate kind, loyal, and punch-you-in-the-face-with-the-truth friends to keep you straight. They’ll keep you from making foolhardy decisions out of snap judgement.
Don’t make the excuse that you can’t handle what’s happening. All of the life challenges you’ve experienced up until this moment have conditioned you to be able to handle whatever may come with more grace than you think is possible.
Don’t make the mistake of fighting with reality. The faster you accept whatever change has happened, the more quickly you can adapt.
Lastly, adaptability also requires an understanding of parts at a granular level. If you understand all the parts, you can rearrange them much faster and achieve a better outcome in the end.
Even though developing adaptability takes much strength, courage and fearlessness, paradoxically, the more adaptable we are, the stronger, more courageous and fearless we will become. And when we learn to adapt we gain the ability to face anything, a superhero’s strength that will allow us to fight off the real villains when they come calling.
Michelle (Chel) Wolverton is a productivity hacker, social marketing strategist, WordPress dev, and geeky accomplice to several individuals and businesses as the owner of Chel Consulting. She deals with the yearly insanity of being lead organizer for Podcamp Boston, an unconference that strives to teach those new to podcasting and social media. She blogs over on chelpixie.com at random and often shares her snarkiness on Twitter as @chelpixie.
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.