CHAPTER 4

ALWAYS SHOW UP

Good leadership is paying attention to details. Every little seemingly harmless situation, discussion, text message, email or phone call is a potential leadership situation that needs your full care and attention.

Now, there are two schools of thought. One is that the emotional well-being of other people is your problem and that you should care about it. The other says that you can do and say whatever you want, and however people react is their problem and there is nothing you can do about it. We will talk about that later. The point is that your actions will, in one way or another, create reactions among the people around you. We are social animals, and we exist in relationship to others.

The most meaningful measure of my success in life will be what my children say about me at my funeral. Given a choice between my investors saying that I delivered a good return, or my children saying that I was a good dad, I would always choose the latter (even if return on other people’s capital has in many cases been the number one driver in my job). While I won’t be in a position to hear what anyone says about me when I’m gone, of course, the point is that care for my children guides me in my life.

In the end, you are judged by the sum of your actions. And it is not the sum of just the big and important actions and decisions, it is the aggregate of all the small things you do every day that will ultimately be your testament.

It then follows that 1) you would need to think about all your actions, all the time, and 2) you will find it useful to have a compass for guiding you through all the life situations that require decisions and actions – and sometimes non-actions.

In today’s word-based world, with its ever growing flow of information in emails, texts, tweets, posts, status updates, comments, reviews … it can seem that you are what you say. But you are the sum of your actions, not your words. You are what you do, not what you tweet.

This chapter is about you and your actions.

#019 Always Show Up (ASU)

Do what you have said that you were going to do. Simple. Or is it?

One of the most effective ways to be a good leader is to simply show up. One of the most effective ways to disappoint people is not to show up, or to cancel at the last minute with a bad excuse. Are you a show-upper, or a canceller? I’m normally a show-upper, but I have to admit that there are sometimes exceptions.

It’s OK to cancel if you have legitimate reasons, which might include your children being sick, your flight being delayed, or something really important coming up unexpectedly that you have to prioritize. According to most cultural norms, I assume, you must have a good and socially acceptable reason to cancel, and I’m sure that in your life you have had at least once told a white lie to get out of something.

Why is it so hard to simply say, ‘Sorry, I don’t feel like coming to the dinner tonight. I would really rather just stay at home and read a book’? In the best of worlds, that would be a legitimate reason, wouldn’t it? But in the best of worlds, people would also know that they could trust you to show up at a dinner if you have said you will.

There is a scale between always showing up, no matter what, and cancelling on a whim. At what end of the scale are you? Showing up 100% of the times you have a commitment, or never showing up? If you are a theoretical 100% show-upper you are a reliable wonder of stoic duty everybody will admire, and if you cancel every time people expect you to show up, you are a diva nobody will trust in the long run.

Ask yourself: Between 0–100%, how often do you actually honour your commitments? Is your show-up rate 25%, 50%, 75%, 99%?

You are probably somewhere in between the stoic and the diva. I guess you have cancelled meetings, not come to work or skipped a lunch appointment now and again. It happens. And you have probably also honoured a commitment against all odds, when nobody expected you to. Didn’t it feel good to honour your promises?

These things matter and people appreciate it when you show up, on time. If your show-up rate is sliding for any reason, take notice. It might be because you are over-committing and taking on too much and start missing entries in your calendar. Or you care less and become arrogant because you are famous. Or you are sick and tired and lacking in energy. Or because you think that the meeting is just a waste of time. Or you assume the right to always make last-minute changes because you are a busy politician who has to optimize your time with regards to the current priorities.

We all have meetings or events that we loathe attending. Do you find that sometimes you don’t show up for these because you think they don’t matter anyway – or to make a point? Well, this is called passive aggressiveness. It entails making a statement about something in an indirect way. And that’s bad. If the meeting is something important but boring, you should go. If you really feel it is not important, it might be better and more mature to explain to the organizers why you don’t find it an efficient use of your time, so that they have a chance to work on things. That is constructive feedback. Not showing up is bad communication and will reflect negatively on you.

An easy way to improve your show-up rate is to simply make fewer appointments. That’s OK, and can be a very sound and sane approach to both private life and work. However, having few things to do does not necessarily make those things easier to do. You may have noticed that when you have just one thing you are supposed to do (for example, making a work call during a lazy vacation week with an abundance of time) it is almost impossible to get it done, while during a busy work week with a full agenda adding one more call seems to require marginal effort even if you have much less time. It is often easier to get things done when you have a lot on your plate. As the saying goes: ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person.’

As a rule, show up. That is good leadership. And show others that it is important to show up. If you cannot be there, excuse yourself and have a good reason.

Now, if you have a business dinner to attend tonight – the third this month – but you feel that you should really spend time at home with your family, what would you do?

As a rule, choose A and show up. If you have the guts, choose E if that is what your heart tells you (and that is also good leadership). We often say that we ‘have to’ do things, as a way of avoiding taking responsibility for our actions. After all, how you decide to handle the situation is ultimately a product of your inner compass of right and wrong, your personal desires and the social consequences you are willing to accept.

When you get an invitation to a party, this is the ideal scenario: you RSVP as soon as possible, stating that you would be delighted to come. You show up in great shape with a nice and personal gift, have a good time, leave all the people you meet with a positive feeling about you, and leave equally inspired by the people you have met. Then you send a personal, hand-written, thank-you card stating what a good time you had and praising your hosts. Aim to live your life like that, and good things will happen. (Please also see Maximize Positive Interactions #031 MPI.)

#020 Control Upset Emails (CUE)

Stop destructive loops, spread good behaviour.

Being upset can mean being mentally or emotionally distressed, angry, frustrated, irritated or in other states of negative mindset. This is the story of The Upset Email. Every now and then this little bastard shows up in our inbox. In its own simple and devilish way, The Upset Email is one of the best leadership tests. The challenge embodies much of what leadership is all about.

Here’s the all-familiar situation:

You get an email that is full of emotion, maybe anger and disappointment. Things are not always spelled out, but you can sense much going on between the lines. In the email you are criticized in a way you feel is unjust. You start getting angry yourself. There are several points in the email that require some response. So, what do you do? React or act?

Some say that it’s good to show what you feel, and in many contexts this is true. But in the complex and fast-moving world of social networks, email, text messages and other means of instant communication, the human factor amplifies. And when communicating in a professional environment, it is best to stick to the issue; and to sort out whatever emotional conflict may exist, to Reduce The Noise (#093 RTN), it is better to meet.

The problem is that by replying to The Upset Email on impulse, i.e. sending back an email full of negative emotion, you will feed a destructive loop that will trigger an equally sour response until it gets out of control. Your job as leader is to stop destructive loops, not feed them. However, ignoring a bad email is not the solution either – the underlying problem is unlikely to disappear just because you didn’t reply to one of the symptoms.

It is hard to give general advice to The Upset Email dilemma. There are so many situations, social settings and different kinds of personal relations that it is impossible to give an iron-clad rule for how to reply. However, in general, it is good to know:

Please note that if the email is full of positive emotion, you can send back whatever positive response you like. There is no limit really to the level and amount of praise and happiness you can send. Of course, excess use of ‘love bombing’ risks resulting in annoying people, but as a general rule you can be as positive as you like when communicating, but one negative email can be disastrous.

When I get The Upset Email, my first thought is to identify it as such = danger. Then I pick up the phone to sort it out or suggest a meeting. I have noticed that people rarely send me angry emails nowadays, and when I call they are a little worried that it is because I want to sort something out. Email means that all is hunky dory, whereas a phone call can mean red alert. That is why I sometimes make a call just to say hello to neutralize the phone as a channel.

So, beware of emails. But as you have noticed, this is not about emailing, but how you choose to respond to everyday challenges around you.

#021 Interpretations And Responses (IAR)

Reality doesn’t hurt.

Reality doesn’t hurt in itself – it is our interpretation of it that hurts. As the author Byron Katie says: ‘It’s not the problem that causes our suffering, it’s our thinking about the problem.’ This understanding is fundamental to the idea of leadership. Much has been written in popular literature about this phenomenon.

In Getting Real, Susan Campbell, writes about experiencing ‘what is’, or seeing things for what they are. She writes that to ‘experience what is helps you make the distinction between what is, that is what you actually experience (see, hear, sense, feel, notice, remember) and what you imagine (think, interpret, evaluate, believe) … There’s a difference between what is, and the ideas you have about it’.

The constant chatter of our minds about everything that is going on around us can drive us mad. But know that we can control the mind and ask ourselves for a second opinion. The ability to think about how we think, our consciousness, is what separates humans from other beings. Use it! Here’s an example:

You are in love with someone. You adore this person and they are aware of your feelings. You have spent some time together and it seems you both like each other – but you don’t know whether the other person loves you, or wants the relationship to be more than friendship. In order to find out, you send a text message to suggest a dinner date. There is no reply for some time, and this is obviously painful. A lot of thoughts will pass through your mind; She/he is ignoring me … does not love me … has another lover … this was a stupid idea … why did I send this text? … I can never contact her/him again … shall I send a new text? … call? … let the whole thing be? Your mind is torturing you. It is not really the fact that you do not get a text message back that is hurting, but your interpretations of that reality.

Well, you can tell another part of your mind to inform you that the reason she/he isn’t replying is just because she/he is travelling or busy. You simply don’t know.

When you finally get a text back, saying ‘Sorry for not replying earlier, I lost my phone. Would love to have dinner’, you will feel the most wonderful relief and wonder why you put yourself through all this suffering.

In business life this happens all the time. Why don’t they respond to our proposal? Why haven’t they got back to us on the contract? Why did they send us this email about changing the meeting?

In the case of The Upset Email, you should know that you don’t have to react to it. You can read the email, interpret it any way you like (from ‘what an idiot’ to ‘he must have been having a bad day’) and choose any response (from ‘I will fire him’ to ‘let’s have a coffee and sort things out’). Never forget that you are in control of the options.

In a meeting, when your adversary comes at you with a provocative statement, you can choose to keep your head cool and take a deep breath before you reply. Do not be a victim of your own reactions, responding to whatever happens around you. Try to experience what is, control your interpretations and responses, be proactive and guided by your own compass. It is not always easy, but it is possible with training. Self-regulation (the ability to control reactive impulses and moods) is one of the five components of Emotional Intelligence, formulated by Daniel Goleman.

#022 Keep Head Cool (KHC)

Put it in the freezer.

‘If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too.’

From the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling, 1895

I rise early and often take a long warm bath to reflect on the day ahead. When I arrive at the office, into the whirlwind, there are meetings, challenges to resolve, decisions to make, potential pitfalls, etc. So when I start my day, I want to be grounded, not caught in the whirlwind and contributing to the general chaos, frustration and confusion. (See also Practise Daily Scales #017 PDS.)

So when my son asked why I take a bath in the morning, I explained that I want to be calm and ready when I come to work. I want to keep my head cool. He said: ‘But it looks like your head is red hot, so why don’t you put it in the freezer instead?’

That is pretty good advice. When things heat up it is good to simply change focus, do something different, put your mind on something else, somewhere else, and cool down. ‘Put it in the freezer.’ Stay there long enough and you will be forced to think differently.

#023 Apologize In Public (AIP)

If you screw up in public, apologize in the same forum to make it count.

This is certainly one of the hardest things to do, but you should do it without hesitation. I learned from one of my mentors that if you make a mistake in front of a group, you must apologize in front of the same group. There is not much else to it.

The rule is that you apologize at the same level you fucked up on. If you disappoint a friend, you apologize directly to that friend. If you make a mistake in front of the whole company, you apologize and admit that mistake to the whole company. If you screw up in public, like US president Richard Nixon did and several other politicians before and after him, you are supposed to apologize in public, to the people. Nixon never really did, but confessed his wrongdoings in the famous interview with David Frost in 1977. Richard Nixon is also famous for saying: ‘Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quitting does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits.’

Once, on a foreign trip with a delegation of distinguished Swedish academics and industrialists (where I happened to be an unlikely but grateful participant) led by the head of state, the King of Sweden, I screwed up one morning, over-slept and missed the bus where the rest of the group was waiting. Later that day, I apologized in front of the whole group. However, I made sure to finish my apology with a joke about myself and my mistake to try to end on a positive note. The King seemed to approve. In any case, I welcomed this embarrassing situation as an opportunity to practise this AIP rule.

#024 Tell The Truth (TTT)

Do you have what it takes always to be truthful?

Am I always fully honest? No, I have to admit. Do I always tell the truth and nothing but the truth? No. Do I sometimes leave out information, without actually lying? Yes.

How honest can you be? Interviewed in the Financial Times, Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, was asked about what stops him from being brutally honest, like his character in the TV series. His response: ‘Somebody would beat me up every day. You can’t be that honest and function in society.’

Business, like the rest of life, is all about people. That means that the social rules that apply to life in general also apply to leadership. The basics hold true: do what you have said you will do and keep your promises, be on time and don’t lie. The concept of truth is central, and often hard. There are at least two senses in which we can tell the truth:

I think it comes down to this – honesty and revelations. The first one is mainly motivated from within, while the other one is driven by external factors. When Billy Bibbit tells Nurse Ratched in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that he is not ashamed about sleeping with Candy, he is telling the truth about his feelings. This is an example of type A telling the truth. And he gets terribly punished for it. A so-called whistle blower at a company, revealing dirty secrets and uncovering a scandal is a type B truth-teller.

In one of my companies, a key person showed bad judgement. He was going to buy some old stock options from the company and on the last day before the options expired, he came back and offered a very low price. Now, we had no chance of finding another buyer and the price was very different from the one we had agreed with the shareholders. When I called him about the matter, I did not really tell the truth, I was not honest. I presented the problem as something that mainly concerned his forcing the board of the company to make a difficult decision by offering a lower price at the last moment. The real problem was not the stock options but the trust issue that this had created. Given this behaviour, did we want him to continue to be involved in the company? Directly addressing the issue of trust would have been honest. I did get around to it a couple of days later, when things had settled down a bit. But telling the truth up-front is hard.

Although President Nixon never formally confessed to any wrongdoings in the Watergate Scandal, he was under enormous public pressure to reveal what had really happened and his role in the affair. People wanted him to tell the truth, in a type B sense of the term. They wanted him to reveal something that he was hiding. If you have a secret lover, are using company funds for your own interests or do not possess the diploma you said you have, you are not telling the truth as understood in the example B above. You are not revealing the true state of matters.

Happily, the matters in which we are most often dishonest are more banal, like telling a white lie to avoid a dreadful meeting. Oscar Wilde, the famous British author and dandy, said: ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’

To tell the truth in all cases without any filters is probably social suicide. Our society is actually built on a small amount of healthy deception. Many of us have probably told someone ‘you look great’ when they in fact look miserable. If you care about the relationship, you generally don’t tell someone that they look awful, even if they do. The truth is often painful, and it can be used as a weapon, too. However, it is easier to tell the truth if the other person trusts you, and if you say it with empathy and concern. As a rule, you can say what you want and tell the truth if you say it with respect. If your friend looks awful and you are worried about their health, it may be that you can share this honest opinion with them if you do so with respect and regard for their feelings.

You should not only speak the truth when there is a truth to tell, instead, actively look for truths and tell them, so you don’t miss any. Make it a rule to tell the truth. Seek out truths that need to be told. That is an active mindset. Let me give an example.

Whenever I do a board presentation, I start with a slide I call ‘Good and Bad News’. I summarize the positive points I want to highlight, but I make sure to scan for any negative information that I think should be disclosed. To be on the active lookout for bad news is not a negative or pessimistic mindset, it is rather a way to try to tell the whole truth. It is so easy to forget or downplay the uncomfortable parts. It is human nature to shy away from the hard stuff and pretend it does not exist. The truth will always show up in the end anyway, and it is better that you tell the truth before someone else thinks you’re hiding it.

#025 Deliver Tough Messages (DTM)

Upfront, with empathy.

This is a rather short leadership insight. How do you deliver tough messages? Well, the answer is that you just do it, directly and with empathy if possible. Billy Beane, the baseball manager for the Oakland As, put it well in Moneyball: ‘Would you rather get one shot in the head, or five in the chest and bleed to death?’

The standard example of a tough message is when you need to tell someone that their job is being made redundant. It is a sad and horrible thing to take away someone’s job. You interfere with another human being’s life and livelihood. You have to take that very seriously.

• First, if you have bad news to tell, tell it up front and directly, without trying to soften the blow. People want to hear straight and unfiltered information when it concerns important things.
• Second, try to deliver a tough message with compassion, with a focus on the other person’s feelings. If you care for the person you are talking with, show it.
• Third, do it in person and do it personally. If you have a tough message to deliver, don’t let anyone else do your dirty work. Don’t deliver tough messages on the phone, or through email or text. Do it face to face, looking the other person in the eye.

#026 Take The Blame (TTB)

Failure is yours, success is ours.

When we make mistakes it is a natural human reaction to try to explain why, and sometimes to blame it on someone or something else – to find your alibi, your explanation of how you were not really involved at all. Resist that impulse.

Don’t give yourself too hard a time or bury yourself in self-doubt. But accept that your failures are always your own – and your successes always belong to others. It becomes you so much better than the alternative, that failure is always someone else’s, and success is always yours. If you take the former approach, you will be aware that someone will surely give you credit for some of the success in due time.

I once wrote a CEO’s letter to the shareholders as part of the annual report. The company had missed the plan, which meant that I as CEO had missed the plan, and I wanted to give some perspectives on what was going on in the company. We had launched new products and services during the year, expanded into new markets, raised capital and done a lot of other things. I wanted to take the blame for running the company in such a way that we lost focus, did too much at once and lost growth. Also, I felt the urge to give a better picture of everything positive that was going on in the company, since we had implemented a new strategy, spun off an interesting business under a new brand and had many exciting opportunities in the pipeline. Instead, I realized the letter must have sounded like a big excuse and an effort to explain. I used ‘we’ too often, where I should have written ‘I’. Always admit mistakes up front, always take the blame without a fuss.

• Anything connected to failure, like missing the plan, should start with ‘I’. I have missed the plan. I am sorry.
• Anything connected with success, such as winning a major client, should start with ‘We’. We won an important contract. We are happy.

When things fail, it is usually the negative result of a number of correlated and interrelated circumstances and people involved. The point here is not that you should always take on the sole responsibility for everything that goes wrong, it is rather about how success as well as failure is portrayed to others, and your approach to that. So, as a general rule in the back of my head: Failure is yours. Success is ours.

#027 Action Point Magic (APM)

Follow up on what you have said you will follow up on. Make things happen.

You know the situation. At the end of a meeting or a phone call there are a number of action points and you are supposed to follow up on your tasks. It could be a business setting where you are planning next year’s budget or with friends planning a ski trip. ‘OK, to summarize, we have three action points. You do this, you do that, and Fredrik, you do this thing. OK? OK!’

Has it ever happened that you did not follow up, and when someone asked you about that action point you had to admit that you forgot about it? And has it happened that you did not have time to do it, or simply just downgraded the priority?

Has it happened that other people forgot their action points and did not follow up on what you decided? Or that you actually followed up on what you were supposed to do, but the others had forgotten about it? Yes, I think all of the above happens quite often.

Action points do not always come from meetings, discussions and interactions with other people – they also come from yourself, without any expectations from anyone else. You make a note to buy that gift, send that card, call your friend, pay that bill, etc. How you organize your to-do list says a lot about you. How do you manage yours?

• In an app synced with other apps, in the cloud
• A list on paper
• In your diary together with all your other stuff
• In an Excel file on your computer
• On Post-it^© Notes all on the wall
• Not at all

Just as we are slaves to our clocks, we are prisoners of our to-do lists. It feels good to tick an item off the list, and it feels bad to see your list of unfinished business growing longer. Life is a long to-do list, and then we die.

Management by to-do list does not sound like much fun, but it is powerful and efficient because it focuses on getting things done. Properly handled, to-do lists get those action points actioned. Keeping a list, and systematically taking care of those tasks, actually creates reality. Say one of the tasks on your list is to make a phone call to someone. You make the call and reality occurs: something that was formerly in your head and on a to-do list now takes place in the outside world! You might think it is banal, but every time you take care of a simple little task, something wonderful happens:

• Things get done, you turn an ambition into something real.
• By getting things done, you spread good leadership by following up on your promises.

That is Action Point Magic.

#028 Give Away Pride (GAP)

Don’t let prestige get in the way.

My grandfather, Anders Gartnäs, was an inspiring person. He left his home in rural Dalecarlia in northern Sweden in the 1910s to go to university in Gothenburg and start a career as an engineer. It is remarkable because he grew up on a farm in a small village and was expected to take over the farm after his father. There were no books (and the story goes that he was forbidden to read) and no newspapers, no radio and no external sources of influence whatsoever. Imagine a life back then without Internet, TV or mobiles. But his dream was to become an engineer, and off he went. He got his degree in engineering from a prestigious school, Chalmers University of Technology, went on to work for the telecoms company L.M. Ericsson, one of the hottest technology companies of its time, where he invented new products, and later started his own business based on his ideas. He was a true entrepreneur.

Even though he died when I was only a year old and we never got to know each other, he has always been one of my greatest inspirations. My mother often quoted her father and I grew up with his approach to life. In his diaries he wrote a poem in 1917 about his efforts in life and his ‘Will of Steel’, and we sometimes read it at family gatherings. In a direct translation, it goes something like this:

Is your burden heavy to bear

Bending you to the earth

Appears your path dark and gloomy

The way is long and weary

Your goal is still far away

And you are so tired

Try your Will of Steel!

Better hold and obstacles will fold

Forward strive, not stay

Time will not stop

Chase the clouds from your brow

Be brave and hope again!

Besides the ‘Will of Steel’, he left two quotes that I always have with me. The first one simply says: ‘Stick and a bindle.’ It refers to the hobo, a wandering man with no belongings except the ones he is carrying in his small bag, called a bindle, tied to a stick. A hobo was a vagabond worker, going from place to place. My grandfather said that you should not own more than you can carry with your ‘stick and a bindle’. Of course, most of us have more possessions than that, and the advice is not meant literally. It really means that you should not depend on material things, and if you lose everything you have you should be happy anyway – because all you really need fits in a small bag, symbolically. It’s your inner strength. That was the strength he had found when he left home for his adventure. I often think that it would be OK to lose everything, I would still have myself and my inner core. I think about my grandfather and feel confident and strong.

Another quotation of his that stays with me is ‘You should not have so much pride that you can’t give some of it away’. There are several shades of meaning here. You should be proud enough that you can easily lose some of your pride without suffering any ill effects. And all your pride is not really worth anything if you cannot let go of some of it. You should not be too greedy with your pride, give it away. The general expression is ‘Swallow your pride’, but I think that giving it away is more relevant because when you let go of your pride and lose a little bit of face, it is often to another person that you are handing over some of that prestige.

So, I think in business negotiations, when both parties are locked down in a battle of principles, that I should be the first one to give away some of my pride. And if I don’t, it’s not a sign that I’m proud, but that I’m poor. Giving away a little pride does not really make you less proud. Note that there is a difference between corrupting your integrity and willingly losing some prestige. You can be the bigger person without having to sacrifice your core values.

So much in life and business gets stuck because of pride, prestige and people’s fear that they will look stupid. Instead, accept that you sometimes have to do something you find embarrassing. In business it is results that count, and if you have the opportunity to trade some of your personal prestige to create a better outcome for everybody, nobody will look stupid and you will get a big return on that pride you gave away.

#029 To Be Nice (TBN)

The importance of kindness.

To be nice is one of the most underrated virtues. Nice people can sometimes be regarded as weak, soft or ineffectual. Mean people get attention and respect, if not trust and affection. But as Roger Federer, the tennis champion, is known for saying: ‘It is nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice.’

Recognize that all people fight their battles. The man you pass in the subway, the woman at the checkout, the child you are raising, your father and mother, your colleague at work, your boss. We all have our problems, challenges, ups and downs, struggles and battles. We are used to life’s hardships, and we don’t expect support and understanding. Life is life. So when someone is nice to us, for no reason, a stranger on the bus, it warms the heart. It does not cost you anything to be nice to the people around you, but the sunshine you spread is priceless. To look at someone, smile and say ‘Hello, how are you?’ is all it takes.

It is usually in tougher environments that people tend to be nicer, maybe because of a deeper underlying understanding about the hardships of life. I have noticed that it is more likely that a stranger entering an elevator in New York City will say ‘Good morning’ than someone entering an elevator in Stockholm.

In raising my children, I chose three simple things that I wanted them to focus on as a success formula for school and everyday life:

• Do your homework.
• Brush your teeth.
• Be kind.

For more about simple guidelines in work and personal life, see Stick To Three (#094 STT).

#030 Listen Without Commenting (LWC)

Can you hear the feelings?

I went to a strange four-day retreat in northern Sweden in Vikarebyn, that proved to be useful in one interesting way. I learned how to listen without commenting. If you have ever tried and experienced how hard it is, you should know. To listen to another person, who is maybe terribly troubled, without intervening or reacting is difficult to do. It is human nature to comment and try to help, sometimes just because we tend to think that we should, and not out of real compassion.

This is how the exercise works. You and another person, who might be a stranger to you, sit opposite one another. In turn, each of you then tells a very personal story. The task is to listen to the other person, without interrupting, commenting or trying to give any advice. When the other person has finished telling the story, you are still not to comment on what they have said, but simply to express how you felt when you experienced the story, and how you felt for the person who told it. The point of the exercise, as I view it, is to listen not only to the words and the narrative but also to other people’s feelings, and to your own. It is also about truly focusing on another person, which can be pretty good leadership training.

Too often in work and in life you are trying to step in and solve someone’s problems, fix things, give advice. It is good practice to just listen, resisting the temptation to interfere, speak, act. Be aware that often your role is just to be there, silent. And if you are to comment on anything, just confirm the feeling: ‘I can see that you are angry, or happy, or sad …’ You don’t have to try to fix everything.

#031 Maximize Positive Interactions (MPI)

Make every contact count, in a good way.

Much in business and life is about frequency. In selling, ‘frequency’ is a key term. It refers to the number of times you reach your customers through certain channels. If you are a travelling sales person, the frequency can be the number of doors you knock on. In online marketing and e-commerce it is the number of ad impressions, the clicks on those ads that bring visitors to your websites, and the resulting sales. Frequency is any kind of interaction with a customer, and can also be applied to the layout of a retail store, a supermarket or a mall, referring to the way customers are exposed to the offerings and the deliberate path that takes you through the building. In a political campaign, for example, it may be the number of hands you shake.

A large part of your life is interactions with other people, not only people you physically meet every day but in addition all your digital interactions. Today’s social networks offer the possibility to interact globally on a scale never seen before. Updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, company intranets and other online forums empower you to communicate daily with a large group of people. This was simply not possible before.

By communicating with more people online, you will eventually also meet more people offline. You get in touch, get to know each other and eventually meet for some reason or the other in the real world, have lunch. How many interactions do you have every day, online and offline? Not counting the constant flow in the social networks and various updates, I would say I probably have an average of 100 interactions every day: breakfast with my children, meetings, brief checks with colleagues, emails, messages, calls, texts, random encounters. That makes it around 36,000 interactions every year, not counting the online chatter in social networks. That is 36,000 opportunities to transmit a positive or negative experience.

In his book Moments of Truth, Jan Carlzon describes the insight that the whole company is judged in every single interaction between a customer and an employee of the company. Jan used to run an airline, with countless opportunities for interactions between the company’s staff and its customers, from check-in at the airport to touch-down at the destination. If the interaction with the company employee is positive, the whole company is regarded positively.

Jan Carlzon: ‘Each of our 10 million customers came in contact with approximately five Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) employees, and this contact lasted an average of 15 seconds each time. Thus, SAS is “created” 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time. These 50 million “moments of truth” are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company. They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative.’

If the encounter is negative, it reflects badly on the whole company. How many times do you think you have dismissed an entire corporation because of a single bad experience? It happens, right?

Now imagine you are like that company. You also have countless interactions with the people around you, and you are judged in your entirety by each interaction. Whether online or offline, you want to make a good impression and spread energy. Aim for maximizing positive interactions.

#032 Follow Your Heart (FYH)

There comes a time when you have to find the answer within.

Every leader will eventually face a situation where there are two or more equally reasonable options to choose between. The film Thirteen Days (2000, New Line Cinema), based on the book by Robert Kennedy, describes the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the president, John F. Kennedy, was facing the horrible prospect of World War III. The Soviets were placing nuclear arms on Cuba, within close firing range of the United States, and the ships bearing the missiles were steaming ahead across the Atlantic. They had to be stopped.

What to do? In the movie, Robert Kennedy says: ‘We got a bunch of smart guys. We lock ’em up together in there, kick ’em in the ass til they come up with options.’

And yes, the experts and advisers do come back with two options. One is using aggressive military force against the Soviets and the other option is more peaceful. It all comes back to President Kennedy, who has to choose between an air strike or a blockade.

There will be situations for every leader where an equally strong case can be made for several options. The dilemma is that you cannot base your decision on facts and reason alone because all options are plausible and reasonable. There is no clear right or wrong. Everything is possible. What do you do? That is when you have to rely on your instincts, your values, your intuition; not what is right but what feels right.

John F. Kennedy did not go along with his joint chiefs and order an attack, which risked triggering a nuclear war. Instead he opted for the blockade and negotiations with the Soviets, and World War III was avoided. Because of the constitution of the United States, the ultimate decision and course of action was up to one single man, and the president had to follow his heart.

Be inspired by how President Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. If the challenge of a global nuclear war can be resolved by heart, you can surely find the confidence to solve your everyday problems by following your heart, too.

#033 Check Before Promise (CBP)

Have you secured that ‘yes’?

It happens all the time, and it is one of the most common leadership traps. You cannot deliver on a promise you have made because delivery would require people you have not involved or resources that are not yet committed. It is a characteristic of the typical entrepreneur to over-sell, to the extent that it’s almost part of the job.

As a rule, don’t promise something that involves other people without checking with them first. When my children are invited to birthday parties, it is usually their parents who send out invitations by email to the other children’s parents (like me). Sometimes I have replied ‘yes’ just to get the reply off, minimize the list of tasks on my to-do list, and put the event in the diary. Children always want to go to parties anyway, yes? Well, no. It happens that my children, on the day of the party, don’t want to go at all. I remind them that you should always show up if you have committed to be somewhere. But then they remind me that I did not ask them if they wanted to go to the party, and they are thereby not committed at all. In all fairness, I have to admit they’re right. I did not check with the people involved before making a promise to someone else.

To make plans and promises involving others without involving them in the decisions is to treat them like children. And even children do not want to be treated like children. They want respect.

In a business, the typical example is sales people promising customers delivery of something that they have no control over, since it might require further development from the product department, who have not been consulted. But it’s not just sales people who do this, it can happen to anyone who is under pressure to deliver. So, check before you promise something if the fulfilment of that promise in any way relies on other people or resources. Taking someone else’s time and commitment for granted is a sure way to demotivate people.

#034 Adapt Beginner’s Mind (ABM)

‘Stay hungry, stay foolish.’

I cannot say I’m an expert at anything. In fact, I don’t want to be an expert. For me, having The Beginner’s Mind means that I am always learning. I never get too comfortable, lazy and content with my own knowledge. Even when approaching the projects and activities I’m most comfortable with, such as starting and running companies, I feel that I am nothing but a beginner learning new things every day. I am hungry, restless, dissatisfied, worried, frustrated and making mistakes. I’m trying to be wise, but I constantly find myself facing new challenges that require new solutions and things I have never done before.

Adopt The Beginner’s Mind and stay hungry. As I have been a beginner for most of my life, I may know a little more in my field than the beginner who has just started to learn. But that does not mean I am an expert, and it does not mean that I don’t have to learn from others. By viewing yourself as an expert, you risk guarding your knowledge too much, since that is the foundation of your professional identity. This makes you unwilling to challenge your own beliefs, making you weak and vulnerable to new knowledge since it becomes a threat to you rather than an opportunity. So, being an expert can be a potential weakness. The beginner moves ahead with the flow.

If you think of yourself as an expert, you might base your existence and livelihood on it and demand that people respect your authority. To be an expert, in a positive sense, means that you are willing to share your ‘expertise’ on a subject when you are in a situation with people who have less experience than you. It will sometimes happen that you are invited to a meeting or event in the capacity of an ‘expert’ on one thing or another. If you find yourself in this position, be humble about it, and also acknowledge the limits to your knowledge and experience.

Arrogance is one of the worst social crimes. The arrogant person thinks he knows more than other people, and looks down on them. It may well be that he knows more, but that doesn’t mean that he is superior.

There have been times when I have found myself to be the most knowledgeable person about something – for example the workings of an online business – and I have lost my patience with people who don’t have the same level of understanding as I do. It has happened that my impatience, and, yes, arrogance, showed. It always makes me feel bad. The consequence is that communication is lost; the rapport and the relationship are replaced with hostility and coldness. Instead of achieving something together, there are then two opposite parties instead. Avoid becoming the arrogant expert and distancing yourself from others. Be the humble beginner.

#035 Stop Doing Things (SDT)

What you and everything around you would benefit without.

We are normally focused on doing things. We go to meetings, we pick up the children after school, we lift weights at the gym to get in better shape and drive to the supermarket to buy groceries. Most of the things we do, we do for a reason so we don’t really question it. And there is, as you have noticed, a tendency to add ever more things to do until we feel that we are doing too much and that time flies too fast. Still, you sense that you are not doing enough and look for ways to fill your days in new, ingenious ways. It is easy to do things, but why is it so hard to stop doing things? We become enslaved by routine, patterns, ambition, duty and deadlines.

A real key to success is to take a critical approach to how you spend your time (or even your life) to find out what you can do without. Some things are obvious to some people, like stop smoking or stop eating unhealthy food. Some things are less apparent, like stop criticizing or stop talking, if that is something you tend to do too much.

You get experience by doing things, and evolve by stopping doing things. And by understanding what you should do less. Can you think of three things you do that you know do not contribute in any positive way to your life, to the people around you or to society as a whole? Write them down. Are you willing to stop doing them?

When you stop doing things it might have consequences in the short and long term, depending on the thing you stop doing. If you stop being married or quit your job, it will probably have more impact on your life than if you just skip another meeting. When you think about stopping doing things, rank the thing by 1) the consequences it will have, and 2) how those consequences will play out in time, short and long term. You will also see the things that you want to keep on doing and maybe do more of. (For a note on perspective, see Find The Ratio #074 FTR.)

#036 Quantity Time Rules (QTR)

It is not what you do, it is how much you do it.

One of the worst expressions I know is ‘quality time’. It implies that when you have little time, you should do more with it. The classic example is the hard-working parent who has very limited time to spend with the children. So, when the busy parent with a guilty conscience decides to do something with the children, like spending Saturday afternoon together, it is with the ambition to make it the best Saturday afternoon ever, stuff it with great things and make sure it is true ‘quality time’, not wasted, low-quality time. What is wrong with this?

• First, a relationship is based on ongoing interaction with ups and downs and regular communication. You cannot simply make it up with ambitious events.
• Second, by betting on ‘quality time’, you are under great pressure to deliver. What if the quality time turns out to be disappointing?

In a company, doing a conference, trip or off-site event with your team can be a good thing, but it cannot replace the daily relationship. With kids, as a father, I know that hanging out on the sofa watching TV – a typical low-quality thing to do by many standards – is a perfectly relaxed way to spend time together. With colleagues at work, as with children, what counts is the amount of time you spend together and that you get to know each other, not the exact quality of that time. The best off-site conference we ever had in my management team was a trip to the north of Sweden to ski, and no work agenda. Just spending time together. Quantity time rules.

#037 Rest Restore Recharge (RRR)

Get some sleep.

Did you ever get that question: What is keeping you awake at night? It is supposed to mean: What is really important and challenging? Personally, I have had nights when I could not sleep because I was thinking so hard about something, usually a problem or challenge at work.

Sleep is essential to keep you sane and healthy. Working through the night should not be a regular occurrence, or it will affect your performance and judgement. If your worries are leaving you sleepless, make sure you seek help and advice for this if it goes on too long. It’s important that the expression be nothing more than an expression: ‘It’s keeping me awake at night’ should mean that you have a difficult problem to solve, but you chose to sleep on it instead, waking up refreshed in the morning to take a new sober look at the challenge at hand. Chances are that it will look like less of a problem.

If you ever get that question ‘What keeps you awake at night?’, you just reply: ‘Nothing, I sleep at night.’ Even if you have big, hairy challenges, don’t let them ruin your sleep. Rest, restore, recharge.

#038 Change With Facts (CWF)

People have more respect for facts than opinions.

It never fails to astonish me what facts can do. The typical state in a business, especially a management team, is a constant and sometimes heated debate about everything. It often happens that one faction holds a certain belief and another faction disagrees, or that a group of people all hold differing views that can’t be reconciled.

Going back to the facts of the situation is always a good strategy, provided that everyone involved believes in the facts. You can never­theless, find yourself in a situation, like President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the facts are all agreed upon – but not how to respond to them.

For making change happen, I use facts in two ways. The first one is to change my own opinions. The second one is to change others’ opinions.

I can have strong views and ideas, based on my gut feeling. If I suspect that something is not right, I want to get the facts. If the fact actually points in another direction than my initial thoughts, then I’m more than willing to change my mind. It’s better to do the right thing than to be right.

To change others’ opinion, first you must be sure yourself and present factual evidence to support your opinion. I have seen many projects, deals, investments, expansion plans and ideas take a 180-degree turn when new facts were presented. And the funny thing is that it is often quite frictionless. Given that the facts are trusted, people are open to change. It is so much harder for people to admit that the opinion of another person is right than it is to admit that the facts are right. Facts are not personal, they are objective and neutral. This is why it is easier to change with facts than opinions.

#039 Never Give Up (NGU)

Be persistent, by default.

It is possible to create new things, situations, fortunes, futures and possibilities through the sheer force of your mind, also great companies, beautiful art and trips to the moon. I believe that just by wanting something strongly enough, you will get it. It takes just one person and their idea to make it become reality. It might take time, but it will happen if you persist.

In his modern inspirational self-help classic, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill described how the early American super-entrepreneurs like Rockefeller and Morgan built business empires through determination and mental power. You can have everything you want if you are willing to work hard and make sacrifices. You have to decide whether it’s worth it to work hard and become a multi-millionaire if it also means that you never see your children grow up.

I have two balancing perspectives. One is that you should never give up – eventually you will get what you want. The other perspective is something I call Let’s Fail Quickly (#078 LFQ). To give it up. There is a fine line between knowing that you will ultimately succeed by hanging in there and applying more willpower, and realizing that it is time to quit. Put it in perspective: you want to win long term and don’t give up on your goal, but along the way you might have to fail many times.

It is always better to identify early on when you are up against unbeatable odds and cut your losses, try a new route forward. An example of long-term failure, from hard experience at one of my own companies, came from investing year after year in establishing our business in a new market, only to realize after years of time, money and effort spent that we weren’t going to succeed because of poor economic conditions, messy competition and the wrong people hired. Had we pulled out all the stops and thrown more time, money and resources at it, we might ultimately have succeeded – but it was simply not worth it.

I think, of course, that if you never give up even the most hopeless project will eventually be a success. Everything is possible and nothing is doomed. But sometimes it is not worth pursuing. Since my mindset, by default, is geared towards making things work, I don’t give up. I try, and try, and try. However, if I become convinced that it is not going to work, I’m quite eager to fail as quickly as possible, take the loss and move on.

The tricky question is to know when to quit. It could be a financial decision, an operational one or simply a gut feeling. Usually, the reason and the moment will appear naturally. It is generally harder to quit or shut something down when a lot of time, effort, financial and emotional investment and personal and political prestige are involved – not to mention complex dynamics, like the European Union and the euro – while more trivial projects can be closed down more easily. Just as you should like to succeed, you should be aware of when it’s time to fail. But your default setting should be to never give up.

#040 Be The Diplomat (BTD)

Do you want to be the trouble-maker or the trouble-solver?

One of my ancestors, Folke Arnander, my father’s uncle, was a young and promising Swedish diplomat when he was killed in a car accident in Rome in the 1930s. Though I never met him he is one of my inspirations. Whenever I find myself in a tricky negotiation or in the middle of some trouble that has to be resolved, I think of Folke and find the inspiration to solve the problem in a ‘diplomatic’ way, by positioning myself as a liaison between the conflicting parties. It’s part of my compass.

For example, when things are getting tense and an issue is escalating to a destructive conflict between people, suggest having a coffee outside of the office at a nice café, change the scene and the atmosphere, slow down, take a walk and spend some time together and have a chat. This will also give you an opportunity to listen more profoundly to the feelings and what ‘lies beneath’, the real reasons. Diplomacy depends to some extent on good listening skills.

Personally, I don’t really like too much conflict and confrontation. I do it when I have to, and I try not to hide from the tough and frank messages that I have to deliver sometimes, but it does not come naturally to me. I like to be the diplomat and find peaceful solutions. Maybe you are different and solve issues in other ways. To be the diplomat is not a standard recommendation I can make, but it fits me.

For me, to Be The Diplomat is a way of having some control over the way I interpret what is going on and of choosing my responses in order to achieve something constructive. It is good if all parties are open, honest and share their views, but to be diplomatic means not taking too rigid a stance and trying to bring the parties together.

In any case, you have the choice to be the one stirring things up or being the one calming things down. You can choose to be any of the two, and it is a typical leadership choice. In good leadership you choose your route of action and behaviour. As you know by now, human beings have that ability.

#041 Build Positive Momentum (BPM)

Negative beats positive, unfortunately. Build the positive instead.

One day in the street, a negative attitude met a positive attitude. Who won? The sad thing is that the negative attitude usually defines the situation. The negative beats the positive, unfortunately.

‘What wonderful winter weather!’

‘No, I hate this snow.’

End of discussion.

If you are in a meeting and someone comes up with an idea, beware of the group dynamics. This is how it can work:

Of course, not all ideas are good. But if there is someone in your team who routinely shoots down others people’s ideas, be aware that this behaviour may be related to power more than it is related to the task at hand. Saying no to other people’s ideas, thoughts and initiatives can give some people an illusion of control. And while a good part of running a business is knowing when to say no so that you don’t over-commit yourself, if you don’t say yes now and again your company will not grow and change. This is the demanding part of creative work – trying out a lot of ideas that will never fly in order to find the ones that will.

The core of ‘brainstorming’ is to say yes to whatever comes up, and try it.

A positive attitude builds momentum, but this can rapidly be destroyed by negative input, complaint and whining. A negative attitude is one that doesn’t see the point in exploring ideas and options; that wants to focus on the enormity of problems rather than possible solutions. If there is a negative attitude in the room, it will demand very much positive energy to change that negative charge. As a leader, you should welcome constructive and good-hearted feedback, but you should not accept a negative attitude. View it as a weed that needs to be removed from the garden of ideas. Build positive momentum.

One of the core qualities of Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer and an admired leader, was his optimism. Shackleton is famous, among other adventures, for bringing his entire crew back home safely during the most challenging conditions imaginable, after his ship, The Endurance, was crushed by the pack ice in 1915. It is said that he insisted on optimism and cheerfulness from his team – and nourished optimism within himself to spread a positive spirit around him.

#042 Lead By Questions (LBQ)

Ask more than you tell.

There are basically two ways to lead: you can tell people what to do, or you can ask them their opinion. In modern life, people tend to appreciate being listened to and getting their opinions across.

As a general rule, it seems to be good to listen more than you talk. And when you do talk, it does not hurt to repeat what you have just heard to show that you are listening. To lead by asking questions has many advantages.

• First, if you accept that you don’t have perfect knowledge about everything and how to solve every issue, you will learn something from asking others. There is always something you have not thought about, a perspective you have not considered.
• Second, by asking questions you involve others in problems and processes and make people more motivated than they would have been just by being told how it is. You make people think.
• Third, it lets others be seen, which is also a driver for motivation. That leads to another useful rule: ask anybody about what they think, not only your usual set of colleagues, advisers or friends. You will spread motivation and engagement, while getting surprising answers.

You are always entitled to ask so-called ‘dumb’ questions – questions that appear to be straightforward, humble and simple but are tricky because they go straight to the heart of the matter. ‘This sounds all great, and I’m not really an expert on online advertising. Excuse a very dumb question, but why would anyone click on this ad?’ Just be cautious not to come across as arrogant or aggressive. That’s not the point. The point is to lead forward in a constructive and involving way.

#043 Take It On (TIO)

Don’t limit your challenges – challenge your limits.

The Olympic athletes Aimee Mullins and Oscar Pistorius have shown that everything is possible if you embrace your challenges. They are both world-class runners, and they were both born with fibular hemimelia, and had their legs amputated at the age of one.

What is your reaction when adversity, challenges and difficulties suddenly stare you in the face? Do you feel unlucky, or lucky? Do you think, ‘Shit, why does this have to happen to me? Please make it go away!’? Or do you welcome the hardships?

Take it on! This is one of the most powerful tools for any leader. Shit happens, but the question is how you decide to view the reality. The concept of taking it on means embracing adversity. First, because it will not just disappear anyway. Second, because you can learn, grow and find energy from it. It is a source of personal development. The concept of taking it on actually makes you indestructible. Whatever comes your way, you welcome it instead of avoiding it. Much in modern human life is about minimizing negative impact; for example, home insurance, pension funds, safety belts, bicycle helmets and employment contracts. But no matter how hard we try, life hits us anyway. If your mindset is to embrace adversity, adversity loses its power to hurt and frighten you.

After practising to take it on for a while, you might find that you actually go looking for adversity – just for the joy of taking it on – since it can be so rewarding.

In their book The Adversity Advantage, Paul Stolz and Erik Weihenmayer outline how you turn adversity to your advantage. Paul is the originator of the Adversity Quotient method for measuring and strengthening human resilience. Erik is a mountain climber and the first blind person to climb Mount Everest, and other peaks around the world. Erik’s lesson is that being blind is an adversity, especially if you are a mountain climber, but using that adversity to take on even more extreme challenges led to a rich and fulfilling life. The obstacle became his advantage and he grew thanks to it.

According to Paul and Erik, the first thing you have to do when facing adversity is to define exactly what it is you are going to take on. Is it the world’s highest mountain, running a marathon, starting a company or fixing a broken coffee machine? Once you have it defined, you know what it is you are taking on. Then leadership begins.

To handle any adversity, Paul and Erik suggest a simple model they call CORE: Control, Ownership, Reach and Endurance.

• When you are suddenly surprised by a snow blizzard, for example, you ask yourself: What can I control? To what extent can you influence whatever happens next? Well, you cannot change the weather, but you can maybe control what you do about it, and you can always control your attitude towards it.
• Second, you decide whether you are the one who is going to solve the situation. How likely are you to do anything to improve the situation? A non-leader would say: ‘You got us into this bloody snow storm, now you better get us out!’ A leader takes ownership.
• Next, how far does the adversity reach? How far will this reach into other areas of your work and/or life? A blizzard could very well be life-threatening, and a divorce could be a tragedy, but you can also choose to see these as difficulties with limited impact.
• Finally, how long will the adversity last, or endure? You can say to yourself: Also this shall pass.

So, define it, take it on and handle it. With some practice, you will be able to lead through any adversity that crosses your path. When I was facing great adversity at one point in my life, my friend Grant Calder asked me: ‘Where’s the gift?’ If you look for it, you might be able to see how your troubles bring with them something positive. Take the bitter with the sweet.

As I learned from Leif Johansson, the former CEO of Volvo, ‘Life is a package deal’. Don’t look at bad or good things in isolation, view the whole, and your adversities will maybe appear in a different light.

#044 Liked Or Respected (LOR)

What do you prefer?

This is a somewhat philosophical question. If you could choose, would you rather be liked or respected? The obvious answer is that you would prefer to be both, like Nelson Mandela, I guess. People like to be with you because you are such a warm, loyal and fun person, and they respect you for your competence, farsightedness and drive in business. They love and fear you, you are the One, the Father, the Leader.

Well, that is rarely the case. The truth is that many people working together neither like nor respect each other. They are often totally fed up with the people around them. Whether you want to be liked or respected is a matter of personal preference. If you look at a leader like Steve Jobs at Apple, he probably did not care whether he was liked or not. His point was to deliver innovative products and build company and customer value. And he was respected for that.

It is rare for a leader to be both liked and respected, as there will always be many conflicting views around a person who has a job leading others. In a company you usually have a lot of people with great leadership skills, despite not being Formal Leaders in the organizational chart. They are liked because they are such great buddies in their teams, and respected because they have great skills in whatever they do and inspire others. They are developers, key account managers, support staff and others who just create a good atmosphere, bring a cake to work and play table tennis with their team while doing a good job. That’s your everyday leader, the Mindset Leader that the organization depends on.

One of the most important things that makes people happy is the opportunity to be with people they like. So if you want people to enjoy their job, to be more motivated and happy, be sure to recruit likable people, create a culture where it’s fun and where people like to be, and be a person yourself that others can like. Achieve this and you will be liked, and probably respected, too.

There is another aspect to this, described by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence: if you like people and show it, there is a high probability that they will like you back. How do you show it? Simply say, ‘I like you.’ Try it.

#045 Don’t Do Lunch (DDL)

Spend your time right.

In his book The Seven-Day Weekend, Ricardo Semler described how he stopped having business lunches with clients to instead spend time working on how to deliver even better value to his customers.

To ‘do lunch’ is to have a lunch meeting with someone, usually for a business purpose. To ‘have lunch’ is to eat food. We all need to eat food in order to survive, but we can all quite happily survive without useless meetings. Don’t get me wrong, building business relationships over a good meal can be both pleasant and valuable business-wise. But if you fall into the habit of having frequent business lunches, you must ask yourself why. Most people don’t ‘do lunch’, they just take a lunch break and eat with their colleagues, or by their desk. However, the networking Entrepreneur, the ever-administrating Manager or the relationship-building Leader often gets suggestions for a lunch meeting. The idea is that you can meet in somewhat more informal and intimate circumstances than a meeting room or office. It’s supposed to be nice to spend time together while indulging in good food. Finally, most people assume that you are busy most of the time, but since you have to eat, you might have time to meet during the lunch break. The lunch has become a void in the middle of the day when people think it is OK to suggest meetings. They say, ‘What about lunch some day?’ It’s a trap, I think.

Your lunch is not an empty slot that is waiting to be filled, your lunch is a precious space in the middle of the day that you can do valuable things with. Personally, I like to go to the gym in the lunch break and get something healthy and quick to eat after the work-out. Sometimes I bring my lunch date to the gym and we can discuss our business on the running machine or while lifting weights. It gives you energy, changes the setting and actually provides something useful for us all. Other days I simply work through lunch to get things done so that I can be home early to spend time with my family. Still, you have to eat and eat well. Skipping meals is a very bad idea.

Now, telling people that you don’t do lunch can be perceived as rude. If you say, ‘I don’t do lunch as a rule, I work or go to the gym’, you will even come across as difficult. What you must do, however, is to assess the purpose of the lunch. If it is only about a casual catch-up with an acquaintance, you might just as well suggest a coffee around the corner and get it done in 15 minutes, if you have to do it at all. If the point is to strengthen the relationship with an important client it might be worth the effort, but the client might still appreciate it more if you spent that hour at the office working on how to provide more client value instead of buying a lunch for company money. If the lunch is with a co-worker who would like some of your time in an out-of-the-office setting, take it! As a leader, it’s always right to spend face-time with your people. But as a casual habit, don’t do lunch. Don’t spend your time on useless things: challenge convention. (See also Stop Doing Things #035 SDT.)

#046 Face To Face (FTF)

When in doubt, meet.

Whenever you are in trouble with people, meet in person. FaceTime is the name of the product of a mobile phone manufacturer and software company that would like its users to enjoy being able to see their nearest and dearest smiling on the phone screen. The truth is that people have limited use for seeing friends and family making funny faces on the phone, even though it’s entertaining for a while. Usually people are happy to know that everything is OK and can just as well drop a call, email or text message to confirm it: ‘Hi, great to see you yesterday at the party! Look forward to seeing you again soon, you crazy bastard’, or whatever.

When you really feel the urge to meet to talk things through is when something isn’t working and you have to sort things out. Have you ever tried to solve a difficult, complex relationship problem by email, phone or text? Or by blog or Twitter? It just doesn’t deliver. It will only fuel more misunderstandings, questions, distrust and problems.

If you have to solve a problem, sort it out face to face if you can. You have to meet in person, sit down and spend time together in the real world until you have discussed things and hopefully feel all right about the situation. You may never reach that goal, but trying to solve things over the network will just create an inhuman challenge in communication that is destined to fail. So far digital communication, the transfer of zeros and ones in packages over the net, has not solved how to transmit the twinkle in the eye that is the foundation of physical meetings, and which makes them so superior.

In addition, seeing each other in person is a sign that both parties care to make the time and effort to meet. And that’s a pretty good start to solving a problem.