5 Leadership Lessons from Playing Angry Birds

Many of your friends may have moved on from playing Angry Birds. Silicon Valley millennials may being playing Dots, Minecraft, or Fruit Ninja. Maybe you don't play games on your smartphone. Maybe the idea of exploiting emotionally-charged birds to destroy green, so-called bad piggies, who are hiding in their homes and, presumably, minding their own business is repugnant to you. That Angry Birds is a game phenomenon having grown into a vastly popular brand is undeniable.

Angry Birds allows the player to use birds with specific skills to destroy a defensive structure inhabited by bad piggies. When all of the bad piggies are destroyed, the puzzle is solved and the player can go to the next level.

BUT, Angry Birds also gives you an opportunity to experience five important leadership lessons. At the beginning of each level, the player is given a team of birds with skills that are adequate for solving that particular puzzle. The birds are used in a pre-arranged order, much like a batting order in baseball.

What can Angry Birds teach you about leadership? First, a leader needs to understand the skills and key strengths of each team member. Not everyone can do the same things equally well. Learn what key strengths and talents your team members have to maximize the results.

Second, match the team to the problem at hand. In Angry Birds, you have to use the team you're given, but that team is designed to solve the problem. In real life, make sure you design your team with the skills necessary to address the problem.

Third, have a plan of attack. Take some time to study the problem and review the resources that are available to you. Make a plan - at least a high-level plan - about how to get started and how to best use the team.

Fourth, when necessary, adjust your tactics to match the skills that are available. A poor performance might create a need to adjust the expectations on other team members. An outstanding performance may present an opportunity to capitalize on a special situation. Using baseball as an example, say a batter strikes out, so the next batter up is instructed to to do something different than would have been the case if the previous batter had gotten on base. Or, maybe a batter hits a triple and now the manager sees a special opportunity to take advantage of the situation and uses the next batter's skills in a different manner.

Finally, be flexible enough to modify the plan when events don't proceed as you hoped they would. Strategy is planning, but tactics are dictated by circumstances. An especially strong, or weak, performance; or, an especially good or bad bit of luck can signal the effective leader to modify the original plan. Things may become easier than anticipated. Things may become more difficult than anticipated. Risk factors may be either heightened or lessened. The effective leader is flexible enough to see, understand, and act accordingly.

Apple Really is Smarter Than You

Face it. You really aren't as smart as Apple. You quite possibly are as smart as any given individual at Apple, even Tim Cook or Jony Ive. But, you're not as smart as the whole Apple team is.

They have many times more collective experience than you can possibly have. They have a deep history of successful execution. They have a deep history of failure. They have more data inputs and more data analysis capabilities. They come from a culture specifically designed to be smart and to sustain intelligence.

They live in a learning culture, where the expectation is to always be moving forward. They add new talent. They acquire companies to add intellectual property and power. They file patents and experiment on product developments that never get built. They kill products, even successful ones.

They also know who they are and what Apple is. As a result, they do what they do, not what someone else does or expects them to do. Although they are rarely ever on the bleeding edge of technology leadership, they're not really followers either.

They make geeky tech stuff sexy, appealing, and fashionable. They make engineering innovations look incremental and mundane, almost as if anybody could do it. A new product announcement comes along for something that no one has ever seen or is the best anyone has ever seen and it's received as just another day at the office. Almost any company in the world would be happy with just one Apple-style hit product.

You think they should offer more options, add more features, make a bigger phone, make a smaller tablet, tack on a keyboard, support Flash, increase the megapixels, include expansion ports, blah blah blah. You think the price is too high. You think the system is too closed. You think gold is silly or the colors are yucky.

It really is time to take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself who has the track record here. For roughly the last 16 years, Apple has been unrivaled in designing and building great products, delivering excellent profits, and creating shareholder value. You may hate Apple or its products. You may prefer other consumer electronics or investments in other companies. Fine.

If you really think you're smarter and know better about what to do or how to do it, then get out there and get to work. We'd all love to see it. We're waiting...

5 Reasons Why You Should Play Angry Birds

Back in the old days, around 2009 or so, it seemed like everyone was playing Angry Birds. Everyone, that is, but me. My sons and their friends. Adults, teenagers, pre-teens, millennials - had their noses buried in their iPhones as they focused intently on controlling a menagerie of flying weapons. In my mind, playing was something to be avoided. I refused to get sucked in to the vortex.

A couple of years passed and, somehow, it happened. I downloaded the game and entered the world of Angry Birds. The addiction was instant. I erased all the other games on my phone. I gave up my beloved NY Times crossword. Angry Birds became my recreational activity of choice. Never mind that many of the people I knew had moved on to other diversions. For me, AB was a fun way to decompress, relax, and chill.

I got mad at myself - remembering all those times I made fun of the kids for being suckers. Thinking of all that time that I was wasting playing this maddening game. Frustrated by repeated failures at a given level. Obsessed by a need to achieve success and move on.

Reflecting on the dozens or hundreds (maybe thousands?) of times I've now played AB, a realization developed for me. Angry Birds can teach us a lot about performance, success and failure, and perseverance.

If you've never played, Angry Birds is essentially a set of puzzles. A player deploys a specialized assortment of angry birds individually (a team) to collapse an elaborate defense system thereby defeating the bad piggies and solving the puzzle. Each bird on the "team" gets a turn...sort of like in kickball or baseball.

What can you learn by playing? Angry Birds teaches five important lessons.

A great performance by one team member does not guarantee a win.
A poor performance by one team member does not guarantee a defeat.
There are several paths to a victory.
It ain't over, 'til it's over.
A plan is a good thing, but being flexible is critical.

Great performances are exciting and dramatic. They're fun to watch. They can be inspiring. They do not guarantee that you'll win though. Many is the team that went to defeat while a star excelled.

By the same token, a below average or poor performance can be overcome and victory gained in spite of it. Whether by luck, a great performance by someone else, or a glaring weakness in the competition, some teams find a way to overcome an individual  poor performance and win.

Victory often comes in unexpected ways. No two victories are ever exactly alike. For whatever reasons, each victory can seem like its very own special and unique experience.

For every team, in every situation that won at the last possible moment; on the last play; on the last shot; with no time remaining on the clock; in a great comeback; there was another team that lost; collapsed; choked; was defeated; that somehow stopped or fell short.

Good planning is essential, but things rarely ever go the way they're "supposed" to. You have to adjust to circumstances. Flexibility is crucial to success.

Finally, a response...

This post is a further explanation to the excellent comment by Beechcreek and since only 4,096 characters are allowed in the comment section, I felt that a more thorough answer was in order.

The short answer is that the blog title comes from something the late Paul Blair, my kids' swim coach, always said. He was a renowned and highly-respected coach with national champions and Olympic Gold Medalists to his credit. He always said, "It just isn't that hard. You swim to one end of the pool, turn around and come back." Of course, he was right. What could be easier than swimming to one end and then swimming back? Swimmers the world over do it thousands of times a day. The trick is that there really is a lot of complexity to it as well.

If you're happy with that answer, then this is a good time to stop reading. Next though, I want to focus on what I think is the heart of Beechcreek's comment: "how to spend one's limited physical and mental time are quite complex decisions; ie, not every interest or desire is satisfied. What in your life is really not that hard?"

I usually think of things along two axes, x and y. Along the x axis, you could put "Simple" on the left or, zero point, and put "Complex" to the right. On the y axis, you could put "Easy" at the bottom or, zero point, and put "Hard" up at the top. You then have a clear set of quadrants that help in putting things sort of where you think they go. A trip to the moon is both hard and complex so it goes in the upper right. That simple illustration helps me think about things in relative terms. Do I find the task complex, but easy? Is it simple, yet hard? We all have some way to categorize and sort things out so that we can cope with them. Not everyone will categorize a given situation/problem in the same way. Your simple may be my complex. My easy may be your hard. This is just a model for helping sort and sift stuff out.

The Simple/Complex axis is more about the steps involved, the calculations required, the science inherent in the situation than anything else. The key is always to break complexity down. Simplify as much as possible. Start with the end in mind and work back to a reasonable beginning.

The Easy/Hard axis is more about character, will, values, and ethics. On that axis, we're looking for the right thing to do, the best outcome, the Good. Sometimes finding that point is harder than at other times, but maybe only because we make it harder. At our core, we usually know what should be done. We hear people talk about making the "hard choices", but I suspect that's more public relations and political correctness than real moral dilemma.

Beechcreek asserts that "how to spend one's limited physical and mental time are quite complex decisions; ie, not every interest or desire is satisfied." There are two ideas in that statement and I want to address each one. The notion that "how to spend one's...time [is] complex..." is certainly truer for some of us than for others. I know people for whom those decisions are simple; not at all complex. For others, though, those decisions are of such complexity that they are paralyzed by indecision. There's a good bit of current research that discusses "decision fatigue" and "ego depletion" and the effects of things, like poverty, on buying decisions in grocery stores. By way of example, making the decision to go grocery shopping might be easy ("food is needed and the market is across the street"). But, getting out of the store properly provisioned and on budget might be complex ("I must feed four people something nourishing for 3 days and only have $25"). Decisions may be made more complex because of external conditions, including the number of decisions required in a given time and the amount of money available.

The second idea in the comment is that "not every interest or desire is satisfied." That is generally true for most of us although all of us can probably name someone who at least thinks their every interest and desire have been satisfied. Maybe, we can think of times when we experienced that feeling ourselves, even if only briefly. I've never been of the opinion that my every interest or desire would be, could be, or should be satisfied.  That concept might very well be the basis for most of the volumes of religious and philosophical writing.

Perhaps, like Beechcreek, I have felt many times that life is hard; that the choices facing me were difficult; that there was too much of the world and not enough of me. It dawned on me one day that Coach Blair was right. We swim to the end of the pool, turn around and swim back. The famous basketball coach, Bobby Knight, was giving a speech to a gathering I was attending one time. In a nutshell, he said that he believed there are four steps to great performance: 1) do what needs to be done; 2) do it, when it needs to be done; 3) do it when it needs to be done, as well as you can do it; and, 4) do it when it needs to be done, as well as you can do it, over and over again. Simple; but, at least for me, sometimes hard. Chalk that up in my personal Upper Left Quadrant.

As a corollary to Coach Blair, what Coach Knight said is spot on. You can start every day with a keen desire to be where you think you're supposed to be; to do everything you can to create a positive value in the lives of everyone you see; to learn something new that you didn't know; and, to be as open to the possibilities in the world as you can.

Each of us is surrounded by tremendous opportunities, many of which we never recognize for what they are. We are more capable than we give ourselves credit for being. We are also often our own worst enemies. I think that, excepting mental illness, when given a chance to make a so-called difficult choice, most people make the right decision, most of the time. The bad decisions that people make (and that we see reported on the news and Internet) are often the result of external influences that have a negative, debilitating, coercive, or threatening effect on the person. When we take the time to think through the possible outcomes, reflect on the damage to be inflicted, seek other paths, or subdue our personal demons, the odds of making a better decision improve.

When approached with good intentions and good will, truly seeking the best outcome, there are very few decisions that are either right or wrong. We never get to make decisions with all of the facts or knowledge we need or want. We don't get to peer into the future to see the outcome. We can only do our best. Then, we can adjust and do our best again. Most of us proceed along a fairly bumpy road, sometimes stumbling and sometimes strolling. Neither condition is permanent. Neither condition may be entirely of our own making. We just continue...and endeavor to enjoy the journey in each and every moment.

Peace.

Training and Boundaries

In cycling class the other day, my legs were aching, my lungs were on fire, and the sweat was pouring off of me like I was living in a rainforest. And, that was the good news. The bad news was that we were only about half-way through the hour. It was my first time riding in this leader's class and I was learning a lot about him, indoor cycling, and myself.

I took an important lesson away from Jim's TeamICG class. Training isn't just about fitness. Training is about learning that the limitations you're seeing aren't real. Training is pushing yourself beyond those imaginary boundaries that you set up.

Whether you're exercising your body or your mind, training helps push you to the next level. It's how you break the bonds that you wrap around yourself.

America is Diversity

Do you have friends/acquaintances that are unhappy with how things are going in the US? You may know someone who mentions secession as an option for correcting the country's ills. Here is a short list of questions.

How would you make the U.S. be just the way you want it? Who could/couldn't live here? Who could/couldn't work here? Who could/couldn't vote? What laws would there be? Who would enforce them? Would there a job for everyone who wants one? Would there be a federal government? How would it be formed? What religion(s) would be prescribed or proscribed? Would there be taxes? Who would pay them? What relationships would we have with other countries? Who would decide? How would you prevent crime? How would you create justice? What would you do about the poor, homeless, and sick? The list of questions could go on and on.

What I want to understand is: if you could create the ideal USA, what specific things would you do? Not just "throw the bums out"; "follow the constitution"; "quit being socialists"; or, "close the borders". Anyone can complain about stuff they don't like. What solutions do you have and how do they all fit together? Paint the picture; don't just throw paint on the wall.

There are about 365,000,000 people living in the US. I imagine that nearly every ethnic group, nationality, language, religion, political philosophy, economic theory, and belief system that exists on earth, exists in the US. Sure, there may be exceptions - the language spoken by 10 inhabitants on some atoll in a remote ocean, for example. Generally, though, I bet that if humans are involved in it somewhere, it is also represented by someone here in the US. Hate diversity? This may be a tough place for you.

No other country in the world is like the US. There are places with less of a mix, but nowhere has more of a mix.

When did that begin? Roughly 500 years ago. An Italian, sailing under Spanish colors, with a crew of who knows what origins came to an island just a few hundred miles south of the north American coast. That coast may have been visited by Vikings and that island was inhabited by people whose forbears migrated from Asia - hundreds, or maybe thousands, of years before. You want homogeneity? Good luck. Try Outer Mongolia, maybe.

The US is, and arguably always has been, the definition of diversity.

Space May Be the Final Frontier

Music is the space between the notes. - Claude Debussy

It's the silence between the notes that makes the music. - Zen proverb

The space between us, is it a space that separates us or a space that unites us? - June Singer

Captain James T. Kirk spoke the opening words of the original Star Trek, "Space: the final frontier." 

I hear those words now much differently than I did as a teenager. What once I understood to be literally true, now is meaningful to me on another level.

The space between us is the final frontier. There is vast unexplored and unconquered space between us. There are enormous gaps in our understanding and comprehension.. Individually, corporately, nationally. We are so near, yet so far away from, each other.

Still, we are bound together across space by all sorts of things. The list is practically endless. And, we are more alike than we are different. It seems, though, that we spend almost as much time peering and shouting across the void that separates us as we do immersing ourselves in the unseen energies that attract us and allow us to connect.

Why is that? Is it because dust is blocking the light, causing huge dark clouds like the Horsehead Nebula? Is it because we only look into the space from one angle and see red? Or from another angle and only see blue? 

We get red sunsets and blue skies from the same source of light.