January 17, 2012 | Tom Suddes
Making Progress in Meaningful Work
In my last post on THE PROGRESS PRINCIPLE, I suggested that this could be life/organization/team changing.
I hope you had a chance to read the article and notice that the biggest ‘epiphany’ for both the authors and everyone engaged in this study was the #1 most potent force that impacts Work Life:
MAKING PROGRESS IN MEANINGFUL WORK.
Not money. Not titles. Not bonuses. Not country club perks.
“PROGRESS… in MEANINGFUL WORK!”
We in the For Impact World have the best opportunity of any organizations to provide MEANINGFUL WORK!
It’s up to us if we are helping people make PROGRESS.
Email This Nugget
| Comments 
| Share
January 13, 2012 | Tom Suddes
Pay attention. What follows could be life/organization/team CHANGING.
On an all-night flight to Ireland, I read one of my favorite ‘magazines’, ROTMAN, cover to cover.
I love this quarterly publication from the University of Toronto and Roger Martin, design-thinker to the best leaders in the world.
THE PROGRESS PRINCIPLE: Optimizing Inner Work Life to Create Value.
*“Inner work life is the constant stream of emotions, perceptions and motivations that people experience (during) the work day.”
‘Inner Work Life‘ is (obviously) a huge part of a team member’s (aka associate, employee, staff, Googler, or whatever) contribution to success.
Here are the 3 biggest forces identified by the authors as the most potent forces that support ‘Inner Work Life’:
- 1. PROGRESS. Making progress in meaningful work.
- 2. CATALYSTS. Receiving catalysts, things that directly help get the work done.
- 3. NOURISHMENT. Benefiting from interpersonal (nourishing) events that uplift people at work.
Authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have put together a compelling case on the benefits of understanding, and impacting, your team’s ‘Inner Work Life‘!
*Article adapted from THE PROGRESS PRINCIPLE.
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
January 12, 2012 | Kerry Suddes
For Impact Live: Custom Training Sessions 2012
Happy New Year to the For Impact Community! The new year brings new opportunities to connect with us live and in person via For Impact Training, Workshops, Teleseminars and Office Hours.
In 2011, we launched a special Custom Training opportunity for organizations that need help with their message and funding plan. This special session is a valuable and affordable way to get customized help from For Impact. Each 1.5 day session (with Nick Fellers/Tom Suddes) involves simplifying your message, building your funding plan and training around a true sales process. We bring together up to five small organizations to provide group training exercises that have been proven to generate funding results.
Key Deliverables:
- Strategy to help customize:
- Message
- Funding Rationale
- Help with Prospect Strategy
- A Funding Plan
- Sales (Engagement) Tools
- Draft Engagement Tool completed by our Design Team.
- Three months of strategic support in the form of a coaching call check-in at 30, 60 and 90 days after the training.
- One year of continued online training and support ($2500 value)
We are excited to announce initial dates and locations for this Custom Training session in 2012:
- February 23 – 24, 2012: Phoenix, AZ
- April 17 – 18, 2012: Columbus, OH
- May 15 – 16, 2012: Columbus, OH
Interested? Please contact me to learn more, kerry@forimpact.org.
P.S. We use each training opportunity to help our community apply the frameworks that we’ve used in the field to raise $2Billion – Including the entrepreneurial thinking shared in our W.O.W. emails, tools to frame your message, a sales process for funding, and a relationship-based funding model. Check back often for training, teleseminar and workshop updates on our event calendar. Or better yet, send me message with an invitation to visit your community!
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
January 10, 2012 | Tom Suddes
All of us have probably come across Jim Collins’ eponymous quote:
“Get the RIGHT PEOPLE on the BUS.
Get the WRONG PEOPLE off the BUS.
Get the RIGHT PEOPLE in the RIGHT SEATS.”
Regardless of how many times you’ve heard this, it’s a very powerful way to begin this New Year! It applies to your staff and your board.
NOW is the best time to sit down with all of your current people and have a BUS conversation!
- • Are they on the right bus?
• Are they in the right seats?
• Do they know what direction the bus is going?
***In a 24-hour period last week, I spent three hours each with two wonderful super-women advancement leaders going over the ‘organization structure‘ and their ‘bus‘. Here are 10 big things that we talked about:
-
1. Who, Not How
2. If the Job Could Talk
3. Ideal Profile
4. Heart, Head & Heads
5. Screw the Interview
6. Focus on Strengths
7. Eagles & Ducks
8. The Talent Spectrum
9. Mavericks & Crazy People
10. Circles vs. Boxes
I’m in Ireland this week but I’m going to try to write up the support on each of these nuggets.
Email This Nugget
| 2 Comments | Share
January 9, 2012 | Tom Suddes
Here is a great set of articles from Ode Magazine on GIVING and much more!
Great way to start the New Year by looking at some articles ODE. As Founder, Editor and Chief Jurriaan Kamp says, “ODE sees possibilities where others see problems and believe that despite overwhelming challenges, there’s a way to a better world.” These articles add some great backup to why it’s GOOD TO GIVE! “Giving improves health, spreads wealth, strengthens social bonds and, best of all, it’s CONTAGIOUS!”
3 Great Reasons/Triple Win from reviewing these articles:
- • Yourself. ‘The more you give the more you get’ is not just a cliché. It works.
- • For Your Organization. The better you understand this whole concept, the easier it is to go out and SHARE YOUR STORY and PRESENT OPPORTUNITIES!
- • The Giver (aka Donor/Investor). Helping people enjoy the benefits of GIVING is just a great calling!
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
January 6, 2012 | Nick Fellers
The Gen Y Social Entrepreneur Wave: Part I
I’m reposting a series of series of essays from 2010. You will be reading a lot more from us ‘on talent’ in the coming weeks/months. It’s a great time to revisit ‘The Gen Y Social Entrepreneur’. (originally posted Feb 2010).
—————————
Talking about social entrepreneurship in our sector is like talking about clean energy in the energy sector… tons of chatter and conceptually, not new. Until recently I’ve dismissed much of the conversation as ‘change chatter’.
To be clear, I LOVE the concept of social entrepreneurship… the idea of people thinking creatively and with an entrepreneurial attitude about changing the world! I actually feared (and maybe still do) that all the hype will elevate to a level of buzzword jargon (and maybe it has).
Lately, I have a new perspective on ‘change chatter’. And this perspective is that it IS our future. Social entrepreneurship (esp the young SE’s) will define or re-define the ‘change sector’. It will probably continue to wash away traditional lines of not-for-profit and for-profit and continue to organize around ‘for-impact’ or any other jargon – I’m open.
Last summer I had a chance to be with Robert Egger in New York. He shared a narrative about how the activism of the 60’s and 70’s gave rise to today’s nonprofit sector. The passion that was seen in the form of protests and marches matured to result in much of the nonprofit sector growth in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
This got me thinking about all this ‘social entrepreneur’ stuff and ‘change chatter’. From Ashoka to David Bornstein’s book to the Stanford Innovation Social Review… a lot of stuff. From what we, at The Suddes Group, are seeing in-the-field there is CLEARLY a swell from those in their 20’s.
Literally, out of nowhere, we’ve had a number of new young-social-entrepreneur-movement-type-orgs pop up on our radar – either they’ve attended boot camp or we’ve met up with them in the field.
- PEPY Ride
- The Unreasonable Institute
- Better World Books (BWB hasn’t been to boot camp but Xavier, one of the founders was my first business partners at Notre Dame so I stay close with Xavier).
- Invisible Children
As a side note, if you ever get to hang out with any of these orgs or any other Gen Y social entrepreneurial orgs – do it. Incredible energy, passion, enthusiasm. Pretty damn refreshing.
It’s cool to think about the nonprofit sector as we know it today and think about the DNA injected from the chatter of the 60’s and 70’s and then think about what it will or won’t be in 10-15 years.
Who cares how one defines ‘social entrepreneurship’? I’m up for the downstream effect of the ‘chatter’. Here comes a generation that only knows of the world as flat and one that isn’t caught up on for-profit or not-for-profit but going at the goal to save lives, change lives and impact lives in the best possible way…. That simply by using the word ‘entrepreneurship’ entertains an entirely new vocabulary and way of thinking.
They’ve already given a cache to the movement. In and of itself, that is an achievement. We have two new Notre Dame grads working with us The Suddes Group. When I came on board ten years ago (also out of ND) people seemed to look at me with pity for ‘wanting to spend my life with charities’. Pat and Mark – they’re like rock stars – jumping into the new world of social entrepreneurship!
Read The Gen Y Social Entrepreneur Wave: Part II
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
January 3, 2012 | Nick Fellers
Most People Underestimate What They Can Achieve in Three Years
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in three.”
No idea who said this*… but I use it frequently and have constantly found it to be true with individuals and organizations alike.
*The web attributes to about 15 different sources.
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
January 2, 2012 | Nick Fellers
Getting Things Done (GTD for short) is a system for organizing your thinking and increasing productivity. As described by the David Allen Company, “Implementing GTD alleviates the feeling of being overwhelmed, instills confidence and releases a flood of creative energy.”
I read Getting things Done. The Art of Stress Free Productivity several years ago and attended the seminar in 2009 with Kerry. I would recommend both.
GTD allows you to:
- Only process information once. We frequently read emails on our blackberrys and then think, “I’ll come back to that.” This wastes brain power. You processed the email without an outcome. At best, you will have to do this again. At worst, you’ll forget.
- Arm yourself to always be productive. Using the GTD system you have readily available action-steps. For me, I always have a list of calls and phone numbers that I can make from an airport. I also always have a list of things to think about over coffee.
- Return to your priorities on a regular (weekly) basis. A critical part of the system is the weekly review — a pattern of revisiting your key priorities and activities.
- Dump or Delegate. This is a great rule for an activity that does not support a key priority.
Very few people seem to follow the system perfectly. I probably use more of the mental processing tools and fewer of the scheduling routines. Every referral that’s skimmed the book or attended a seminar has received value I’m mentioning it here as a great recommendation to start 2012.
Email This Nugget
| One Comment | Share
December 20, 2011 | Tom Suddes
I meant to throw this up last week.
December 15th is Walt Disney’s birthday. Walt has been gone 45 years (1966) but what he imagined and envisioned lives on today in a truly amazing legacy. One of my favorite parts of the Disney enterprise is called IMAGINEERING. In Walt’s own words: “There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward – opening new doors and doing new things – because we are curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new path. We’re always exploring and experimenting… we call it IMAGINEERING – the blending of creative imagination and technical know-how.”
Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of Disney says that “Imagineers are not just curious, but they are courageous, outrageous and contagious!”
Question: How many Imagineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Does it have to be a light bulb?
Disney’s Imagineers are story people and visual people… who make magic! Their process is learning and succeeding by dreaming and doing!
Dream. Design. Build.
That would be great mantra for all of us heading into 2012!
Special Note: I had a training gig recently with a wonderful college development team in Central Florida. Added on an extra two days to take Tatum, Roscoe and E.J. to Disney World! (Oh yeah. Also, Aunt Kerry, Mom & Dad Meghan and Jon.) Had a great time.
Some new construction going on. On the wood enclosures surrounding the new experiences were quotes by Walt. Here are a couple that I wrote down.
“Get a good idea. Stay with it. Dog it. Work it until it’s done. And done right.”
“Most of my life, I’ve done what I wanted to do. And had fun doing it.” (Yeehaw!)
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
December 19, 2011 | Tom Suddes
The 19th! (Celebrate Your Birthdate)
For the last 15 years, I have tried very, very hard to make my BIRTHDATE a special day every month. (March 19th is my BIRTHDAY, thus today is my December BIRTHDATE.)
I’ve been quietly trying to encourage everyone around me to CELEBRATE their own BIRTHDATE. And, not so quietly, I have challenged thousands of individuals at certain speaking engagements to do the same.
Here’s a great goal/challenge for 2012: Make your BIRTHDATE a special day for YOU!
Do something solo. (Breakfast or coffee shop, with a journal or a book. A motorcycle or bike ride. A yoga class. Whatever.)
Then, do something special with those you love. (Spend a little time with the g-kids. Catch up with a sib or a child away from home. Have lunch with the ‘girls’ or a beverage with the ‘boys’.)
*I also use the 19th as the once a month review of my goals (lifetime, this year, upcoming 90 days, etc.) and to set Action Plan for next 30 days.
Most people laugh (hard) when I tell them to take their BIRTHDATE off. Yet, if we can’t set aside even one day for ourself… things are pretty screwed up.
My last 3 birthdates (September, October and November) have been in Dublin, Ireland (19 Sept.), Dublin, Ireland (19 Oct.) and Chicago (19 Nov. with two special grandsons!)
Today, will be: feed animals, year-end goal review at First Watch, a workout at Sullivan’s Boxing Gym, time with Taggart, then family dinner and Savannah’s choir performance! Great day.
Email This Nugget
| Comments | Share
-
About For Impact
We help "nonprofits" fund their visions through training, coaching and consulting based on 25+ years of experience and $1Billion+ raised directly and $1Billion via coaching/training. For Impact is also our message, our commitment and a movement.
