The April 2008 Harvard Business Review arrived in my mailbox this week and two articles caught my attention. The “Different Voice” section interviewed the choreographer Twyla Tharp and I’d like to record some quotes that hit inspirational notes:
“The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work. And luck, of course.”
“‘Goddammit my first symphony is not going to be better than Beethoven’s Ninth.’ And excuse me, probably it’s not going to be, so why don’t you just do it and get on with things?”
“I have all sorts of habits to foster change. When I look up a word in the dictionary, for example, I read the word before it and the word after it – you never know where the next good idea is going to come from.”
“Ideally, the best way to fail is in private. In my office, the ration of failure to success on the dances I create is probably like six to one.”
“I realized early on that it’s better to chose your own mentors than to have them choose you. Even today when someone asks me how to find a mentor, I tell them, ‘Just go to Barnes & Noble and pull down a book from a shelf – pick a writer, pick out a thinker. Pick out somebody who is going to teach you something . . . . If you want to learn, go for it – end of story’.”
In that case, my current mentors will be Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, and soon Mihaly Csikentmihalyi! I’m looking to have them teach me about personal insights, human respect and growth, and freeing oneself to pursue interests.
Later in the same issue of HBR, I was a bit enthralled and repulsed by S. Friedman’s article on a method for achieving work/life goals. He recommends a “Total Leadership” approach. In addition to sitting down with your customers, team mates, and bosses at the office, the article also recommends taking time to sit down with your outside of work stakeholders and set measurable goals for that realm at work. Goals should, of course, be measurable and realistic and reachable through “relatively simple experiments” that can be tweaked based on the outcome of the experiment.
For example, you might promise your family that you won’t check emails between 6:30 and 9:00 pm with the goal of spending more time helping your kids with their homework or helping with gardening.If this experiment works and your home life gets better while your work life also gets better as a result of the change of pace, then you might decide to tweak the experiment an wait until 9:30 to check email. If the experiment doesn’t work and you find that your family doesn’t necessarily like having you around or the office in India can’t wait until 9:30 for you to check emails, then you might readjust the time away from email in the opposite direction.
The idea is great and it is an excellent article, but the things get a little scary in their enthusiastic formula for the “Total Leadership Process.” Managing your family like you manage your office might not go over so well or might seem a bit insensitive to the ones you love. I was sort of waiting for the author to suggest replacing the paneling in the den with floor to ceiling whiteboards for family meetings!
Tags: Change, Creativity, Failure, Harvard Business Review
