Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

I found more evidence of just how much we lost when Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch died. Today, while revising my executive coaching materials on goal setting and time management, a colleague mentioned that Randy Pausch was most proud of his talk on time management.

We are in the midst of a famine,
a prolonged, widespread deficit of a resource
essential to life: productive time.

Pausch’s talk is a thorough and entertaining presentation of the essentials and I highly recommend it for my executive coaching clients (though I can not agree with every suggestion). You may have heard much of it before, but Professor Pausch’s celebrity, good humor, and excellent example give it tremendous impact. You will do something different and better as a result of watching.

Highlights

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• Record and priority rank your tasks to reduce stress

• Batch your tasks, questions, and communications by person

• Schedule blocks of time adequate for the task

• Avoid interruptions and distractions

The video and the PowerPoint slides, along with lots of other Pausch material, are available here.

Watching this talk may leave you with a big question, especially if the advice is familiar. “Why am I not doing these things despite the knowing that they work?” That gap, the mystery between what we know and what we practice, is my domain: executive coaching.

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A wonderful, apparently unique, skill of humans is the ability to weave the recalled events of the past and the anticipated events of the future into a meaningful story that supports how we feel now. Tragically, we are too often the victims of this skill when we could be its master. Most of us spend more time in this story of memory and speculation than we do in the actual present experience. We forget that the “now” is the only experience any of us truly know as we endlessly evade the present by engaging in regret or worry.

I saw a small example of this recently in my CEO executive coaching group. One member mentioned that

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I discussed with other executive coaches the same topic during two teleclasses. We explored the ethics of coaching a person on producing a result that had direct, significant impact on the coach’s personal finances. On the first call, I felt pretty sure that it would be ethical to coach someone with the agreement that I would share in that person’s increased sales, profits, stock price, etc. I was also comfortable with the idea that I could make part of my agreed fee contingent upon the client producing a particular result. I am now sure that is a bad idea.

I shifted my opinion during the second teleclass. I saw that if I, as an executive coach, become attached to a particular tangible outcome, whether it affects my compensation or not, I will be taken away from executive coaching toward some sort of manipulation, that is, I would

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I have been repeatedly surprised to hear from many of my CEO executive coaching clients that, of all the many skills needed for the top job, one area where they often readily admit weakness is in financial insight. They rely on their accountants or a “numbers geek” to watch and even interpret company results. A fundamental reason for this blind spot is, I believe, that so many CEOs are highly visual, intuitive thinkers. Rows of precise digits are not their preferred form of communication. It is essential, therefore, to display financial and quantitative data visually to have it used and absorbed by these executives.

A second flaw in most

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Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. [p. 228]

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We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in

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The Last Word on Power:
Re-Invention for Leaders and Anyone
Who Must Make the Impossible Happen
by Tracy Goss (Betty Sue Flowers, Editor)

Capsule Review

Tracy Goss has long been closely associated with Werner Erhard, the originator of EST and Landmark Education Corporation’s Forum. I expect happy graduates of those programs to be very happy with this book (I am and I am). The book presents the central concepts of those programs very clearly and in a format designed to help business people put the “distinctions” to work immediately. I doubt, however, that a person not trained in ontological coaching could get much sense from these pages. It can seem to be merely jargon and wild promises unless you have actually put the techniques to work for yourself with the assistance of a coach (as I have and I do).

For people experienced with the methods, this book is an effective refresher and spur to action. A friend and I

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I frequently coach individuals and groups on long-term goal setting. I have found a subtle trap that you can easily avoid if you take a moment to notice that not everything progresses at the same rate.

A great benefit of specific plans is the opportunity to track progress. After my clients set their ten year goal, I invite them to imagine themselves in the future, ten years hence, with the goal achieved. I then ask, “Look back five years. Tell me what how much progress you had made at the halfway point.”

Let’s say you have set a goal for

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