It is an “I wonder” morning this morning as I listen to the news.

Perhaps it could be that I am still despondent about the poor support for British politics as demonstrated by the 30% turn out in the recent local elections, or the Euro debt crisis that appears to run frequently in our news.

A Chinese proverb suggests that

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

 To me, this typifies the thoughts that I have about skill acquisition and personal, team, organisation and country development. We should be encouraging people to grow, we should be enticing  the satisfaction of motivation from all levels of people that are engaged, and  not continue to create a reward structure focused on our future wealth. For any avoidance of doubt, my definition of wealth is not just about financial return, but having the individual, the community, the region and the country participating in enhancing and extending our sustainable planet. This touches on working to eliminate poverty (for it is a man-made commodity), and empowering individuals, community, regions, and countries to take difficult decisions quickly to achieve the goal.

As a wider society, we need to encourage people to want to make a difference. To extend themselves and be empowered to do their great things.

Montaigne wrote

“When good health and a fine sunny day smile at me, I am quite debonair
Give me an ingrowing toenail and I am touchy, bad tempered and unapproachable”

I wonder then whether we should help people to eliminate the ingrowing toenail where we are experiencing the reaction to the ‘stuff’ going on around us, and encourage more sunny days.

Big time saving tip for you – stop doing this. Instead try an approach that I have adopted for about the last 2 months thereby saving me a lot of time.

Follow these 3 steps

1. Leave all you emails in the inbox
2. Use the search function to find what you are looking for
3. If you get a lot of similar emails such as purchase order, or acknowledgements, configure a rule to handle this for you automatically.

Just saved you hours each week!

It brings back memories of the BBC TV, the Onedin Line, that was occasionally watched by my family as I grew up. Nice memories of childhood.

A question that was asked recently was “when did you last feed the ducks”?

I find myself pondering this. I am not sure why. Perhaps it is my urge to always run at 200 mph (or kmh) or maybe it is the need for a good, long weekend removed from the pungency of growing a diverse and innovative business.

An observation made earlier today, was that I don’t tend to take too long to make a decision.

I find myself asking if this is an issue? I believe that life moves fast, and decisions have to be taken. Taking time to decide where something goes, or when should a new product be launched just gets in the way of innovation. So, I think not – but it depends.

Just perhaps, we all need to be a spartacular duck occasionally.

]]> http://www.blog.thecoachspeaks.co.uk/2012/04/the-musings-of-a-spartacular-duck/feed/ 0 http://www.blog.thecoachspeaks.co.uk/2012/03/are-you-a-fish-climbing-a-tree/ http://www.blog.thecoachspeaks.co.uk/2012/03/are-you-a-fish-climbing-a-tree/#comments Mon, 12 Mar 2012 07:00:18 +0000 Simon http://www.blog.thecoachspeaks.co.uk/?p=604

It was a deep revelation as to how a super giant CEO Steve Jobs was so successful and explored some of the emotional roller coaster that arguably the most influential and visionary leader of the 20th and 21st Century was before his untimely early departure.

Yet even leaving us so early, his legacy lives on. Not just in the incredible products that he pursued, but in the vision that he gave Apple, Pixar and NeXT.

His success has been summarised as

• Focus on innovation
• Focus on keeping it simple
• Focus on using own technology
• Focus on where they could make a difference
• Focus on only accepting excellence

Can you look at your business and say that you do this relentlessly, every day?