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Balancing Life's Demands

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Low-hanging Fruit Ahead:

Throw those buzzwords under the bus
Mark Cutshall | Outcomes, Jan/Feb 2007

I've been actualizing about something. Please, don't defrag on me. This is mission critical. Get it on your radar screen. Bottom line: There's a buzz in the air that's clogging the bandwidth of our own corporate cultures. It's a no-brainer. We've all pinged it, leveraged it and operationalized it. Allow me, if you will, to champion, uh, facilitate some goal-oriented blamestorming:

It's time for a new paradigm shift, a new best practice. Time for some best of breed, blue sky thinking, a golden thread of connectivity. Forget the warm and fuzzies, the bells and whistles, the low-hanging fruit. This is no one off.

If you're really going to give your people the core competencies they need to fulfill your organization's mission, we need to deep-six some of our value-driven verbiage. At the end of the day we can keep pushing the envelope, but we can't ignore the message inside: buzzwords can rob us of our story.

What's my performance measurement, you ask? Nothing less than what some consider to be the most well-crafted, best story ever fleshed out. I know you've heard it before. In fact, I bet you've even referenced it to your children, perhaps before they've downsized for the night.

The alarm has already sounded. I'm afraid if we allow buzzwords to have the run of the house, your best corporate stories, the ones you can and must spread far and wide, might soon be reduced to: "The Best Practice of the Incentivized Samaritan":

A goal-oriented expert in the law decided to go offline to drill down with Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "What must I do to insource some real empowerment."
"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you gainshare it?"
He answered: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind! In other words, be customer-centered! Love your cubicle mate as yourself."
"Slam dunk!" Jesus replied. "You're talking transformational change."
But the expert wanted to justify himself, so he rebooted and asked Jesus, "And who is my cubicle mate?"
Jesus said: "A man was going down from Wheaton to Carol Stream, when he touched base with some spammers. They got down and dirty and asked themselves, 'What are the risks if we turn him into road kill?' A priest with what he thought was an open-door policy saw the man, then self-directed himself to the other side. So too a Levite, when he saw the task at hand, failed to hit the ground running. But an empowered Samaritan, saw the man, did a sanity check, got his ducks in a row and stepped up to the plate. He took care of the man, put him in his rig and took him to a Red Roof Inn. The next day he shot the desk clerk an email and said, 'Make sure he's on board, and when I return, we'll touch base.'"
Jesus asked, "Which of these were customer-centered to the man who was out of pocket?"
The expert in the law replied, "Per your request, that would be the Incentivized Samaritan."
Jesus told him, "Bingo! Circle back to your team, and light a fire under them."