Jeremiah in Iceland

Jeremiah Josey

Category: Best Business Practices

  • Working smarter and not harder

    When I was 13 years old, I was living with my family on a farm in far western NSW. This was “Outback Australia”.

    A new local TV tower had been installed about 5 km away and so we could now watch Australia’s equivalent to the BBC without watching it through a blue plastic screen that was needed to cut back the snow. That also meant that the 100′ high tower above the farm’s homestead holding up our TV antenna was no longer needed.

    The bigger boys – my mums’ brothers and her dad, Pop – took down the mast and it’s guy wires over the course of a few days and stored away the steel pipe. These where used used in building new stock yards and fences.

    But they left the last 3 feet of pipe and the large buried concrete base the pipe was embedded in. And it was in an awkward, obvious location.

    One day I decided to take it out. 🙂

    From early morning until well into the afternoon I toiled, using crow bar, breaking bar, shovels (post hole and flat) and lots of water to loosen and remove the earth from around the concrete plinth.

    The task seemed beyond me. My hands were raw with blisters – they had formed and broken many hours previously. But I had to rest – beside, Gran had arrived with lunch! I sat down on the grass and looked at the mammoth mass of concrete and pondered.

    What is going on? Am I doing this the right way? This how you always take out something like this: you dig and dig until it falls over. But it doesn’t seem right. Besides it’s taking too long!

    The process was working – hitting it on the side I could see that it was moving every so slightly. This was going to take days!

    Then I realised: I don’t want to get this thing across, I want to get it up and then out.

    What I need is to LIFT it….

    An idea formed.

    I went out the back to the large workshop we had and looked around.

    There was always lots of stuff to choose from. There always is on the farm.

    I found what I was after: two very sturdy short pieces of I beam – each piece weighing much more than me! I struggled, shoved, dragged and coerced each steel section to either side of the massive hole I had dug – concrete massif sitting smugly in the centre. Yes it was smiling at me.

    I then carried across a long length of 4″ x 4″ SHS, and placed a 10 tonne hydraulic jacks on top in the middle of the SHS. The jack was one of those big ones you can use on a truck. Not a car one.

    Getting the picture?

    I then found some heavy duty steel chain and connected the chain to the pipe protruding out of the concrete.

    Wrapping the chain over the lifting piston of the jack and tying it off on itself, I was ready.

    I inserted the lifting lever into the jack, and with just two fingers I watched this massive concrete rise up out of the water and mud. I remember how funny it felt as I consciously exerted as little  effort as I could.

    Magic.

    In a few short moments it was done.

    I adjusted the chain once or twice, but once the connection with the ground was broken the concrete block was mine!

    I tied the mass of concrete to a car and dragged it off into the scrub behind some gum trees. It’s still there to this day.

    The lesson I have remembered every since: work smarter not harder.

    Even today when I’m head down and focused on a problem, that feeling of “hang on, there’s an easier way” starts knocking and pretty soon, I’ll stop, reassess and find myself an alternative – my present day “jack and beam” solution.

    There you have it. Work smarter, not harder.

    Jeremiah Josey

    PS, here’s a Google Maps link that will take you straight to the homestead!
    Rostella Homestead

  • Avoid Working with an A-H!

    This is a great blog I came across recently by Guy Kiyosaki. I’ve posted a little bit of it below. You can find the entire post here:

    …Mean-spirited morons are still running much of the workplace, and it’s time to take a stand. Most nastiness is directed by superiors to subordinates; so before taking a job, do your homework and screen them out in advance. (After all, avoidance is the easier than curing.)

    To do this, I propose that you check your prospective boss’s references just like she’s checking out yours. I’m not suggesting that you ask your prospective boss for a list of references (you can try, but it may mean you don’t get the job).

    Instead, do a LinkedIn reference check. First, look her up to determine if you have any common connections. If so, find out more from people you trust. Second, use the LinkedIn reference check tool to find people who overlapped with her in the past…

    Read the whole post here: Guy’s No Asshole blog post.

    Linkedin.com in a great tool for business. You can see my profile by clicking here: My Profile

    Jeremiah Josey

  • Chicken Soup?

    90% Chickens pair up for the mating season, i.e. choosing only one sexual partner.

    50% of them split after the mating season (and go on to form other relationships the following season). The other 50% remain with the same sexual partner for successive seasons.

    Humans have similar figures: 90% of people choose to have one sexual partner at a time (90% of us marry). Our divorce rate is 50%.

    We are animals after all, but chickens?!!

    Another interesting information about chickens:

    The “pecking order” commences immediately the chickens hatch and is complete by 4 weeks. The order is then set for the rest of their lives. The strongest rooster never gets pecked; the weakest male and the weakest female are pecked constantly (with the weakest of the weak often perishing as a result).

    See any similarities?

    Is this where things like “Ethnic cleansing” come from?

    And then consider, some of the strongest brightest minds who are living and have lived amongst us have issues that wouldn’t put them near the top of the pecking order if they were in a chicken coop: Stephen Hawkins has motor neuron disease, Richard Branson is dyslexic, Carl Sagan died prematurely from illness.

    Do we have a fundamental “animal instinct” driving us one way to the “pecking order”, and another, creative expansive desire pushing us another?

    I think so, but we’ll need to cross the road to find out!

    Jeremiah Josey

  • The Electronic Communication and Consciousness Conundrum

    When an email is sent or a blog is created, it is the written word that is transmitted – nothing more, nothing less.  Many studies have shown that the written word – words – only transmit 10%, at most, of the intended meaning of the communication.   My fellow Australian Allan Pease – specifically “body language” – pioneered these studies in the 1970’s.  I am sure however that implicit and explicit knowledge has been around as long as we have been around.

    So what happens to the rest of the communication?  How does the recipient get to 100% of the message, or at least the message they think they get?

    We make it up.

    Without the balance of the information (the 90%) the recipient will draw on their own database of information to complete the message – to get to 100%.

    That means that what is in the recipients database – their mind, their memories, their experiences – will have far more impact on the final message than the original 10% of the orginal message.

    Sound like a good chance for miscommunication?  Absolutely!

    So, what are the chances that the 90% ADDED to the message by the recipient ALIGNS with the Sender?

    That depends on one thing: the level of consciousness of the recipient.  The message will be lost if the receipt is unconscious.  Skewed by bias and innuendo, the recipient will create a message that fits only with their own world view, and will have very little relevance to the senders intended message.

    With increasing levels of consciousness, the correctness of the message will approach 100%.

    What does this mean – “increasing levels of consciousness”?

    Well remember that each human on this planet – that means you and me – is a balance of two things: our conscious beliefs and our unconscious beliefs.  An unconscious person draws heavily from their beliefs, their superstitions, their history, their parents, their peers, and the community around them.  Are they an active participant in their lives?  Not really. Look at them as a leaf in a stream. They will go wherever the stream takes them.  Their Self determination is low.  Awareness of the world around them – and their involvement in it – is low.

    Consider a conscious person, even one in the early stages of awakening.  They have assimilated their experiences and even developed their sub-conscious to be a reflection of their conscious self determination.  They are either awake, awakening or somewhere in between.  They understand their role in creation, their influence and their impact.

    So what happens?

    An “unconscious”, unaware person builds up the 90% missing information in an unconscious way.  So much so, they even believe they are getting 100% of the message from the sender just by reading their words.  This is how wars begin: email wars, and real wars…

    The conscious person on the other hand, understands the limitations of the communication medium and will either, depending on their level of consciousness, ask questions until they are clear on the communication (an unconscious person will typically be fearful of asking questions for fear of “offending” the sender, or most commonly, being seen to be “ignorant” or a “lesser person”), or the conscious person will be in direct connection with the sender empathetically. But that my friends is another discussion.

    Helping me to remember:  Become conscious.  Meditate.  Be with God.

    Jeremiah Josey

  • Semco Summary

    From Maverick, 1993, by Ricardo Semler.

    Semco is more than novel programs or procedures. 

    What is important is our open-mindedness, our trust in our employees and distrust of dogma. 

    We are neither socialist nor purely capitalist, but we take the best of these failed systems and others to reorganise work so that collective thinking does not overpower individualistic flights of grandeur; that leadership does not get lost in an endless search for consensus; that people are free to work as they like, when they like; that bosses don’t have to be parents and workers don’t act like children. 

    At the heart of our bold experiment is a truth so simple it would be silly if it wasn’t so rarely recognised.  A company should trust its destiny to its employees. 

    No, Semco isn’t a model, with programs to be followed with precision, so many recipes for participation, productivity, and profits. Semco is an invitation. 

    I hope our story will cause other companies to reconsider themselves, and their employees. 

    To forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest of it, and to concentrate on building organisations that accomplish that most difficult of challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning.

    Jeremiah Josey

  • The What and Why Applied to Business – Implicity Semco Style

    I posted that last story because it always reminds me to ask the “why” about everything.

    I find that asking “Why” often enough will eventually reveal the “What” of the “Why”. The reason for doing something then becomes very clear. If there is no “What”, then most likely what ever is being discussed does not need to be done!

    This is how a company running the Semco model operates: the key focus is “What?” and “Why?” The “How” is not important and so it can adapt and change to suit the circumstances.

    The many businesses that focus on the “how” are unable to explain the What or the Why of their organisation. Their rigidity maintained by piles of procedures, rules and policies do not allow room to ask “Why”.  If it is asked the answer will be: “We have always done it that way”.

    What the company actually does, and why it does it. What it does best, why it does things a certain way. No body really knows.

    That’s what will make the difference between a company for the 21st century and one that remains in the 20th.

    Our world is changing rapidly, information is more readily available than ever before, challenges now affect the entire world.

    Adapt or perish!

    Jeremiah Josey

  • A Story About a Habit

    A newly married couple were in the kitchen one Sunday. The wife was preparing a piece of lamb for roasting and the husband was preparing the vegetables. The husband observed as the wife placed the piece of lamb onto the chopping block and promptly chopped 4 inches from each end, discarded the pieces into the bin. She then placed the lamb into the center of the large baking tray, around which the husband began to place the vegetables.

    The husband asks, “Why did you do that darling, that looked like perfectly good lamb you threw away?”

    “Oh, I never think of it”, she replied. “Mother always did it and that’s what she taught me. We can ask her when we visit her for roast dinner next Sunday.”

    So, that next Sunday they visited Mother for her Sunday roast and were served roast lamb and vegetables. Looking at the roast they could both see clearly that the ends had been cut off.

    The daughter asked, “Mother, why are then ends missing from the roast?”

    “It’s because
 I honestly don’t know”, replied Mother. “I’ve always done it that way, just like my mother taught me. She is visiting next week so come for dinner again and we can ask her”.

    So, another week passed and they were all seated at the table for Sunday roast, this time Grand Mother is present. And, like last week, the roast with its ends removed appears from the kitchen.

    “Grand Mother,” begins the husband, “I’ve seen both your daughter and your grand daughter cut both ends of a perfectly good roast before they cook it, and I was wondering why you taught them to do it that way.”

    “That is a very good question Grand Son.” says Grand Mother. “For many years when my daughter was growing up, we lived in a small apartment in New York. In that apartment we had a very small oven with a very small door, and the only way for me to cook my Sunday roast was to cut the ends off so it would fit into the small baking tray I used to fit into the oven. I stopped doing that years ago, ever since I got a larger oven – after my daughter left home I recall. Why waste perfectly good meat?”

    Jeremiah Josey

  • Keeping the Rotten Tomatoes at Bay

    We just returned home from shopping and we’re busy unpacking everything into the fridge and cupboards.

    I picked up a punnet of cherry tomatoes and pondered whether to take them out or leave them as they were and just put them into the fridge. We’ll that got me thinking about how much effort we go to when we’re packing away the food: we’re careful to bring the old stuff left over from last weeks’ shop out, or to the top of the pile, and we’re careful not to put new stuff in that might be rotten to start with or suspiciously close to going off. We check that there are no rotten tomatoes in amongst the good ones. There are no cucumbers about to turn to water. Why? Experience has taught us that if there is one bad or rotting item amongst the others, pretty soon that rot spreads to other items that would be have fine for the entire week, had they not been close to the rotten one – the entire lot of tomatoes can go bad much quicker with that one rotten tomato.

    That got me thinking about teams of people, of how important it is to keep the team aligned, focused and charging along in the same direction. One stray person that is left behind becomes a danger for the entire team, and hence for the success of the project the team is working towards. They can become stale, disgruntled, upset and well, rotten. They can then spread this to the rest of the team, the more susceptible ones at first, then the stronger ones, then finally, well, the team is no longer doing much good.

    So, just like a punnet of tomatoes, with a team of people it’s very important to keep the rotten ones out in the first instance and to make sure that ones n the team that start to turn are addressed ASAP, either being removed or realigned with the purpose of the team!

    All that from a bunch of tomatoes!

    Jeremiah Josey

Jeremiah Josey