Plan B Mindset

If you are like me, you see a bunch of interesting thoughts, blogs and articles every day that you hope to get around to reading. Here’s my answer – 28 seconds of my learning around a topic I have been exploring. If you think the 28 seconds justify reading more, I believe you will get a “useful insight for your day.” Jeff 28 Seconds of Insight on Small Data: Quantifiable, personal data (what I have labeled Small Data) takes the generalization out of life – “I am pretty active…” is proven to not be accurate when you now understand exactly how inactive you are on a day that you sit in meetings from 8 am to 5 pm. What gets measured gets managed, especially for goal-oriented people. That is as true in personal endeavors as it is in professional endeavors Instant and immediate feedback changes behavior. People will play the “game” towards beneficial results (just as they will toward non-beneficial results). The Deeper Dive Into Small Data Big Data is the buzzword of the

Summers are mostly consumed with baseball for my family. Both of my sons play Little League and also on local tournament teams. I have helped coach with several of their teams over the years. Baseball is an interesting game to me – it is a team sport and an individual sport at the same time. No teammate can really help the pitcher or batter, but yet defense is clearly dependent on a team. And when you are 10 or 12 years old it is pretty easy to put pressure on yourself on the pitcher’s mound or in the batter’s box. One of my favorite encouragements from coaches (of which I have done as well) is, "Have fun out there, kid." During one game this year I wondered what that actually meant. There is the pitcher, usually struggling, out there on the mound alone. The pressure of the moment has usually caused the player to over-think, aim the ball and most often, not have the best result. Moving from that point to “fun” is a hard place to get (if you don't think so, trying &qu

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Brazil with other credit union leaders to study the SiCredi cooperative financial system (what we in the U.S. would call a credit union or credit union system). They have a federated model much like Quebec-based Desjardins caisse popular (also a credit union system) with a centralized “home office” that can build expertise and scale, but is owned and governed by individual financial cooperatives each with their own individual governance models. In a sense it is like a super-franchise – a common brand but the “franchisees” own the entire system rather than the home office. SiCredi's president is a gracious man named Ademar Schardong who was instrumental in building the federated model in the 1980s as Brazil re-emerged from the military dictatorship that ruled the country since the 1960s. He spent a great deal of time with our study group explaining how their model works and their impressive growth trajectory in the last decade.

Now is a great time if you are a sports fan – college football bowl games having just completed (except for this BCS thing that drags on until mid-January) plus the NFL playoffs and the college basketball conference season getting rolling. Over the years, I have had the great pleasure of listening to a number of college coaches from the state of Iowa talk about their teams and their approach to coaching. With each one of them, I ask one question, “What do you do between games to prepare your team for the next game?” It is a question about how a team moves from a win or a loss in its previous game to focus on the challenge ahead. I think it is a question that goes to preparation in any endeavor – sports, business, drama or music. Nick Saban made business journal and blog headlines this past summer after a Sports Illustrated article talked about how Alabama prepared for games (click  here  for article). This was followed up with a sister publication, CNN Money , adapting thi