I use this blog to collect and make available some of my articles, insights, and guidance for the top executives I coach. My clients can easily find my best advice on goal setting, running meetings, stress reduction, and other topics important to anyone running a business. You can even learn how–and why–to meditate. I have videos, instructions, posters, and research results on this blog and a podcast on iTunes.

You are welcome to use all this in your work and to pass any of my posts along to your colleagues. I only ask that you preserve the attribution to me and not alter the content.

To contact me by telephone or email, click here for the “About Tony Mayo” page. A video that answers the most common questions asked by prospective clients is also on that page.

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This latest podcast is part four of a funny and useful conversation between top executive coach Tony Mayo and his longtime client Ron Dimon. Ron is an expert on the use of information by executives of large organizations. Listen as two experienced business people play with useful ideas in this episode including;

• Low stress mindset for high performance on a variety of unstructured and unpredictable tasks
• Meditation & centering for executives
• Transforming overwhelm into flow
• Procrastination
• Creating vs. fixing
  • “Something’s wrong, & it’s me!”

Just click here and either listen through your computer or subscribe through iTunes to have this and all new episodes placed on your device as they become available.

You may also set up an automatic “feed” to non-Apple devices by using this link: click here for other devices.

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You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.

–Yogi Berra

Happy New Year!

Or so we have been saying. But will it be happy for you? Will it even be all that new? Or is it just the same stuff on a different date? Is 2012 your future or just a rearranged version of your past?

Try this quick exercise. Pretend it is now January 1, 2013. How are you feeling about 2012? Was it a year of satisfaction or disappointment, growth or decay, health or decline, contribution or frustration? One year from today, what will you wish you had done sooner?

Like most of the people I ask, you have probably retired from the “New Read the rest of this entry »

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In the first year or so it wasn’t just about proving how tough I was, I had to be tough. I was pretty sharp with people. But I’d learned in the classroom, the last thing you want to do is put somebody down because then they freeze, and not only do they freeze, but the whole class freezes. I had to relearn that lesson as a manager. … Early on I didn’t know how to delegate things. I was always trying to do other people’s jobs. I learned that first of all, you’ll drive yourself crazy doing that, and secondly you won’t have very good people working for you very long.

…

I found it useful to remember that most institutions don’t want to change. They’re institutions because they’ve developed a certain set of traditions and norms and expertise, and change is hard. A lot of the work I’d done as an academic affirmed that usually institutions change when they’re failing. It’s very hard to make them change when they’re succeeding. They take the cues too late from the environment.

 

I found three things helpful.

1. One is that you have to paint a picture of other times that that institution has responded to change and difficulty successfully.
2. Secondly, [it helps] if you can find in the institution a counter-narrative that supports the direction of change.
3. And finally you have to look to see whether there are impediments to people doing the right thing. Mostly in good organizations, and the Department of State was certainly one, and I found this at Stanford too, people want to do the right thing — they don’t want to be obstructionist — but sometimes there are things that make it hard for them to do the right thing.

– Condoleezza Rice
On being Provost of Stanford University
& Secretary of State
in Harvard Business Review

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Overthinking ushers in a host of adverse consequences:

It sustains or worsens sadness, fosters negatively biased thinking, impairs a person’s ability to solve problems, saps motivation, and interferes with concentration and initiative. Moreover, although people have a strong sense that they are gaining insight into themselves and their problems during their ruminations, this is rarely the case. What they do gain is a distorted, pessimistic perspective on their lives.

–Sonja Lyubomirsky
The How of Happiness

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Levy: Let’s talk about web services. Amazon Web Services is dominant in hosting—one observer says that you are the Coke of the field, and there’s no Pepsi. How did an ecommerce site wind up in the position where it’s hosting web powerhouses like Foursquare, NASA, Netflix, and The New York Times? … Young startups all tell me that even if Google offers them free hosting, they still want to use Amazon.

Why do you think that is?

 

Jeff Bezos: We were determined to build the best services but to price them at a level that customers couldn’t match, even if they were willing to use inferior products. Tech companies always have high margins, except for Amazon. We’re the only tech company with low margins.

 

Levy: How did you do it?

 

Jeff Bezos: We really obsess over small defects. That’s what drives up costs. Because the most expensive thing you can do is make a mistake. We can afford to focus on smaller and smaller defects and eliminate them at their root. That reduces cost, because things just work.

–Wired
December 2011

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