015 Charlie Kiefer – Just Start

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

Welcome to Career Tips & Trends.
Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

We live in a fast paced world where disruption is common place – not only for individuals and companies but for whole industries.

Are there strategies we can use to effectively manage our careers in this ever changing reality?

Our guest, Charlie Kiefer, co-author of Action Trumps Everything and most recently Just Start, works with companies to improve the quality of their thought and capacity to innovate.

He is the founder of Innovation Associates, Inc. (IA) pioneers in the field of Organizational Learning as described in The Fifth Discipline.

Most recently, Len Schlesinger, President of Babson College, and Charlie developed a set of ideas based on the logic and methods of serial entrepreneurs that enable large organizations to operate successfully in the face of extreme uncertainty.

Charlie joins us to share the latest results in their research. We think you’ll be inspired with practical ideas that apply to all aspects of your life and career regardless of the path you choose.

Charlie shared important lessons from serial entrepreneurs that we can apply to all aspects of our life and especially in making choices in moving our own careers forward.

The importance of starting with an understanding of where we are at and where we want to be.

It’s the knowing what we want – that desire that moves us forward and allows us to persist – That “action is in favor of what you want”. It is action that helps us learn. That we can’t think your way into the unknown. The importance of embracing what we find so we continue to learn and build.

But action isn’t reckless.

It is acting smartly and quickly with the means at hand, weighing our acceptable loss (time, money, reputation, opportunity), bringing other people along, and building on what we find.

Summarized as ACT – LEARN – BUILD.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Leave a comment or send us an email.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

Here are some exurps from todays interview…

From the show

…the basic idea behind Just Start is that most of us are completely enmeshed and immersed in a prediction oriented kind of logic and what I mean by that is you are in a situation where you know where you are and you know where the future is going to be and the future is pretty well unavoidable from the present. You can start out with the best place for you to be and the best kinds of things there are to do and the best kinds of results to accomplish. You can evaluate the various ways of getting those and select the one that is optimal and then put together a plan and get the resources and then go out and execute the plan and should you unfortunately get thrown off course you just get back on plan and off you go and that kind of logic and that kind of tactic in the world is well educated in that before grade school through the rest of our lives and once we get out into the work force, of course, it is reinforced even more. But if you are faced with a situation that is really unknown, that logic doesn’t work at all.

If you know what the world in front of you more or less is going to be then doing a lot of thinking and thinking your way through it plainly makes a lot of sense but you can’t think your way into the unknown. You simply cannot do it.

It turns out serial entrepreneurs are less risky than bankers but the image out there is that we are people hanging on the cliff by their fingernails but typically they don’t do that at all.

So the whole idea of how you get into action as quickly, efficiently, and as cheaply as you can. So first act quickly with the means at hand, and stay within your affordable losses, the third is bringing people along with you. These serial entrepreneurs aren’t solo acts. They are always trying to involve other people and they are doing that to spread the risk out so that everyone is playing within their acceptable loss, if you will, to bring more resources to the table than they could bring themselves, to validate the fact that they are doing something which is, in a sense, not utterly predictable but if people are willing to go along with them then that is an indication that what they are trying to do is pretty smart and then the fourth thing is that you build on what you find.

Absolutely, and that is what I was saying, about desire. First of all it motivates you to act. Second, and perhaps even more importantly it motivates you to persist. What makes real success in any endeavor is you keep at it and if the desire isn’t there you aren’t likely to follow-through on this thing is a little tough.

You just need enough desire to get started. Start taking some steps in a direction that really matters to you and allow the caring for the venture, the caring for the things that you are trying to do build and developed over time. That is the way it is done.

So this notion of really grounding yourself to the things that really matter to you allows you to bring your best creative energy to something but also if your feet are really on the ground If you are really in the habit of understanding and acquiring current reality and you aren’t blowing smoke in your own face so to speak, what you care about could be a very good guide to what you ought to be doing next. It is remarkable to see when people really start to pursue the things that matter to them and assuming they aren’t distorting reality and making it better than it is or worse than it but they are actually seeing it straight on that aiming yourself in the direction of things that you care about is a very, very good way of creating what you want. Probably the only way.

Acceptable loss framework means you are working knowing the answers to the questions. You know how much money you have. You know how much time you can put into this. You know what positive and negative affects you will have on your reputation. You know what you are not doing in order to do this. So much so that all of the uncertainty is run out of the system in terms of your next step by the acceptable loss idea.

…if you aren’t doing something 5 or 6 hours a week pursuing something that matters to you, that is essentially your own personal life raft, you are opening yourself to quite a lot of exposure.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode. Leave a comment or send us an email.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

RESOURCES

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’t know or aren’t quite sure – just start with what you think you might want. Take small smart steps and follow your gut. Talk to people who are already doing the work you’re interested in. Connect with them on LinkedIn.

To learn more about the Just Start Program check out our Just Start Page.

Career Coaching, Job Search – Branding – Résumé Strategists

Tom & Deborah help creative engaged professionals turn their dream job into a reality.

Contact: Deborah Burkholder – Tom McDonough

Continued Learning

We’ve found these books very helpful and recommend them to our coaching clients.

*You can support the show by using our Amazon affiliate links above. Thanks.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.