Get Over It!

I've made many messy attempts to get things right in dance or music, but I realized I don't always take this approach when it comes to the rest of my life.

This goes back to my earlier post about failing – to me it’s fine to fail at first when learning something in an art, but I find myself wanting to plan everything in detail upfront before beginning execution on a project at work, which can lead to paralysis. (How many slide decks does a team of stakeholders need?)

I’m a little better about it when learning a foreign language; I used to obsess about every sentence I wrote in my early Japanese emails, which was helpful at the beginning when everything was difficult. However, I quickly realized that there’s no way to actually learn a language unless you try actually speaking it. Even if you make awful faux pas (I’ve made countless - addressing a Fujitsu manager as if he were subordinate! - and still do), you’ll never get over the hump to that great feeling of semi-fluency that comes with usage.

This goes back to doing. Without doing, there is nothing. Well, admittedly there is an idea, a vision. But it’s not concrete enough to sustain itself.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from being a program manager in operations, it’s this: You can plan all you want but there is absolutely no substitute for going out there and doing. Otherwise, you have no idea what it actually takes to bring the plan out to execution, things you wouldn’t have thought of.

It’s like a fashion designer who has created the most gorgeous evening gown on paper. After the gown is made, the model puts it on. The model tries to sit. She can’t sit. Back to the drawing board! (Tomas Maier of Bottega Veneta told the New Yorker: “Beauty … should never come at the expense of function.”)

In this vein, the pursuit of The Perfect Plan or the Perfect Blogpost or Perfect Anything should never supersede the need to actually produce something.

(That said, have a plan, or at least an idea. But just don’t get stuck in that stage.)

I almost never started this blog because I feared I’d never be pleased with my writing, and that no one would ever want to read it. Well, I got over myself. I eventually figured I’d never make it to the next step if everything had to be perfect first.

So take a leap of faith (or, in my case, it’s often the admonishment: “Get over yourself!”) and just get out there (or in there) and DO. There is no perfect moment to start something.

Good Accidents

You've felt it before: Someone else seems to have the life you want - she's publishing that book while you're struggling with article drafts. He's 5 years younger than you and already an executive at a successful company. She chucked that office job and is now following her dream to be a pastry chef in Paris. And so on.

And you think to yourself: "What am I doing with my life?"

On a chilly evening in December 2007 in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Wangfujing in Beijing, the pianist from the band that had entertained us sat down with me. He asked me about my journey from Nordstrom/hotel pianist (once upon a time) to high tech. “How are you so lucky?” he asked, smiling.

I was struck by this innocent question. I know I’m blessed in many ways – I have loving parents who worked hard to give me and my sister the opportunity to go to college and to build a future for ourselves. Although, I believe “lucky” also means being aware enough to know when an opportunity comes one’s way, and then acting upon it.

I feel that I’ve worked pretty diligently for any positive developments that have come my way. If something means that much to me, I’m pretty much willing to do anything (within reasonable limitations) to try to get there. Usually this means taking a leap of faith, trusting myself enough to know that regardless of the outcome, I have to try going down this path. Often this means that I run up against the wall and get a little banged up in the process, but it’s the only way to find out.

This is how I ended up working for nearly a year in Tokyo; this is how I quit my job and moved to New York City to dance; this is how I landed at my current job that has me splitting time between San Francisco and Beijing.

Do things turn out as I imagine? No, because there’s no way to even guess what things will be like. Do I always make the best decisions? No, and yes. I do make choices that have me run up against really tough situations, and they get brutal, but I know deep down that I’d rather go through it all than to never know.

You can only live it, and learn from it.

Most important, no one is going to set the wheels in motion for you. You have to see the opportunity and work towards positioning yourself. In other words, do something!

As an example, when I learned that the company I was working for was going to have a merger with our Japanese partner, I decided to teach myself Japanese because I hoped I could provide some sort of bridge between the two teams in my department. (It’s not fair that we tend to expect all others to speak English!) Even though my Japanese was beyond awful in the beginning, my efforts at reaching out to people worked; I became the de facto point person and one day my VP called me into the office and told me I was going on assignment to Tokyo. Voila!

Totally intended? Not quite. “Lucky” accident? Maybe. It depends on how you look at it. If you work pointedly towards something, those lucky accidents may come your way, too!

Before I close, let me say that I consider myself lucky for having been a part-time pianist - lucky to have made music I loved, helped couples feel romantic to the strains of Cole Porter and George Gershwin, and gotten paid for it! Luck, perhaps, is in the eye of the beholder.

Put On A Show, Together

The last post got me thinking more about working with others. No matter what you’re working on, ultimately you can’t do it alone. Even if you rehearse a dance for hours with nothing but the walls and mirrors, there are things you’d never know about your performance unless someone is watching you, telling you what they see. After all, isn’t a piece meant to be performed for others to see? (Yes, it’s for the creator and performer, too, but you get my point.)

In other words, we work with others. We collaborate. Sometimes I find myself falling into the “I can handle this all myself” attitude to prove to myself that I’m strong and capable, but then I realize that this is not the point. To carry anything to completion, to make a production (a performance, a software program, what have you), you need other people. If you’re an engineer and have written an amazing piece of code, you still need people to test for usability and for quality, and whether your product is viable. If so, you need people to help you market it, handle sales, etc.

I may rehearse for hours alone in the studio, but until a coach or friend comes to see it, I don’t have the helpful suggestions to know if I’m doing something that isn’t what I’d intended, and to do what it takes to really make the piece sing. I realized that it’s impossible to work in a vacuum, and more important, it’s not desirable to try to do so.

Last year, one of my peer reviewers for my annual performance review at work wrote that I could collaborate more with others, and that I have a tendency to work in isolation. I was surprised, since I’d thought of myself as rather communicative with other team members. (Talk about the importance of having someone else tell you what s/he sees about you!)

I need to stay alert and see who’s around me, and to involve them in what I’m doing. Every time I learn something new that broadens my perspective about how to do my work. Others have knowledge and strengths that I may not have, and when we share with each other, together we become a stronger entity. Every project needs this kind of openness and sharing.

So find people! Invite them into your circle, learn from them, share with them, and there may be a fruitful collaboration in the works.

Work For Your Performers

Whether in performance, or in the office, you give to your people, and you work hard to make them look good. It’s always made sense to me when putting together something with artistic vision: if you strive to cast your dancers in the roles that will show them off, they generally try to work hard for you, which in turn makes a piece that shines more. However, I hadn’t always made that connection to the corporate world.

Whatever I’m running is a show, whether there are costumes and lights or not. I can’t do it all myself: I’m the visionary, the organizer. My people are the performers. They do the meat of the work – they take center stage in the performance. I am behind the scenes.

I have to learn to give more to my team. Admittedly it can be hard: I have an idea to do something a certain way, or I feel compelled to just do it myself. It can be hard not to want to dance the piece myself, or to let someone else carry out the task at hand. It’s true that the planning and creating is indeed my work, but the entire piece is bigger than that.

Once I began to realize this, it has become easier to let go, and happily it saves me time and energy as well. I have to let people do things; I have to trust and verify. The satisfaction of seeing people learn and grow surprised me at first, but it is a wonderful thing and I am only beginning to understand how to be more generous.

In being more generous, your people will look better and hopefully try to do you proud. My goal is to be alert and conscious to when I can involve people in my work. If people are glad to work with me, and maybe even feel lucky to be around me, I will have done something right.

As Twyla Tharp sagely writes in The Creative Habit: “Without that generosity, you’ll always hold something back. The finished work shows it, and your audience knows it.”

She couldn’t have said it better. So let go, trust your people, and see what blossoms!

Falling to Perfection

Robert I. Sutton makes a very compelling point in offering that one of the most telling elements to the culture of a company or organization is the answer to the question, "What happens to people when they fail?"

This was brought up in the course "Converting Strategy into Action" taught by Johann Lindig. Sutton maintains that fear can paralyze people into inaction, or simply focusing on how not to expose what may appear to be failures rather than moving towards an actual goal.

Just about nothing in dance is possible with trying and failing, usually multiple times. One of my favorite stories is told by former New York City Ballet principal dancer Melinda Roy. She recounted that during her days as a corps dancer (read: ensemble dancer, those who work tirelessly and are not front and center in the show) she had her first chance to take to the floor.

"It was my chance; my moment to shine," she smiled, but each time Mr. B (George Balanchine, arguably one of the greatest choreographers of our time) sent her back, saying she wasn't giving enough. After the umpteenth try, she was starting to get annoyed. "... So the next time, I came plowing across the floor and I slipped and fell, right at his feet. I looked up at him and said, 'Is that it?' and he said, 'Yes, dear, that was it!'" I love the grin on Ms. Roy's face when she finishes her tale.

A rule in dance is to make sure that whatever you do, make sure you end it well. It doesn't matter how many turns you pulled off if you botched the ending. The ending is what the audience remembers. Cruel, but true. I believe this applies to anything, including the office. If you reach your goal, despite a few wonky developments that you then took care of, I'd hope it would still be considered a success.

So where am I going with this? In dance you're almost expected to fail before you get something. In the corporate world, it doesn't seem to be that way. Even though we may not have ever done something before, we're expected to get it right pretty close to toute suite. "Fail early and fail often" can be touted but how often is it a reality? To be sure, dancers need to "get it" after a reasonable amount of time, but it's ok to fail at first. Unless we are in an environment in which we know we can try things, we will never be able to fly off the ground, whether in the dance studio or in the office.

The Orchestra's Strategy Execution Framework

I completed the "Converting Strategy to Action" class today! You can imagine my surprise and delight when instructor Ms. Lindig gave us our last exercise to wrap up the class began with a video clip of the Berliner Philharmoniker playing the 4th and most famous movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony ("Ode to Joy"). Ah, bliss.

What was the exercise? Apply the Strategy Execution Framework to the Berliner Philharmoniker! Please don't be fooled by the mass of bubbles and arrows if you clicked on the link. Once Ms. Lindig took us through it, I found it to be a simple way to gain clarity on a previously indecipherable organization and articulate some sense out of where it is, and where it should be. To do this, you systematically go through Purpose, Goal, Culture, Structure, Strategy, and Portfolio (not necessarily in that order, but it's advisable to start with the first two).

The exercise showed us that the framework can be applied to any kind of organization, not just the corporate kind. The fact that this exercise was used in the class was extremely gratifying to me. My experience dancing in New York City taught me that the performing arts is, after all, a business with a bottom line. Definitions of teamwork and what constitutes success may vary from that of the office, but each ensemble, whether it be a large company like the San Francisco Ballet or the freelance rockstar duo Jacoby&Pronk, there is a raison d'etre, goals, a culture, and a structure that aligns with the strategy ... and a portfolio of programs and projects through which to develop and sustain itself.

The point is, no matter what kind of organization you are (or are in), you can use this method to plan and build a new one, or to make sense of an organization that could benefit from reevaluation. I have already drafted up a version for the organization I am in, and feel a growing sense of clarity now. Although, I must admit it was much more enjoyable to apply the framework on the Berliner Philharmoniker!

Do Do Do

Today was my second day of the "Converting Strategy to Action" class, part of the Stanford Advanced Project Management series. The concept of the "Knowing-Doing Gap" by Stanford Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton was introduced by our engaging instructor Johann Lindig. In a nutshell, it says that despite a ton of classroom time, consulting, and research, people in business don't enact much change. You can't just sit in a classroom discussing things and then expect to be able to DO things that move a business.

Whoever built the slide introducing the concept is to be commended, since it showed an image of a ballet dancer. Dance was never brought up in the class, but yes, I thought, dance is a perfect example! You can't read books about ballet and expect to be able to just get up and show the world 32 fouettes, much less a beautifully turned out and pointed foot.

I realize I take for granted that everything in dance and in music I have to attempt to do before I can do anything. Without doing there is ... well, nothing. You can just stand there and think about how you are supposed to engage your muscles and align your hips and on and on and ... there you are, still in the same place. It's happened to me lots of times when I think about a movement excessively; I'm literally paralyzed. I can't move. I have to get over myself and just try it. It'll take many wonky tries before I even start getting it, but that's part of the process.

For the office, though, I've never thought about it quite the same way. Sure, there's no way you can know everything before you try something, but there's so much planning, analysis and re-analysis, and consensus building going on that individuals and teams are often similarly paralyzed into inaction. Talking is no substitute for action but it can be like a sedative; it makes us feel as if we've done something. Think about it this way: A dance isn't going to create itself from a lot of discussion. At the office, often it's simply a time constraint that forces us to action.

But what if we can see it as trying out a new step, or a new, difficult passage to play on a musical instrument? There's nothing until you do something. It may not be right the first time, so for this approach it's important to be in an organization that supports doing and doing again, with learnings from the first time. Google often encourages teams to "launch and iterate" and yet in some organizations we try so hard to avoid any "failures" at the first attempt due to significant resources on the line. What's the balance here?

I don't have an answer that satisfies me yet, but I do know that going back to the dance and music parallel helps ground me. I'll remind myself: Without doing, there is nothing.

Perhaps that is enough for now.

Innovation? Observe, and Copy!

So often we are told that creativity and innovation are the hallmarks of successful people. It's ironic: if we were all innovating, who would do the execution? Can you imagine producing (much less choreographing) a full-length ballet without any dancers? Would that awesome feature available on Google have been possible without a group of product/program managers, engineers, and user experience folks who then planned and built it to spec and user need?

As dancers and musicians, we watch our teachers and others we admire rehearse and perform. We are right behind them, trying to copy their footwork, the torque of their bodies, or marveling at the way another musician plays a phrase just so - oh! I'd never thought about it that way! - and we absorb. We try it on ourselves. We learn.

What does this accomplish? This builds a vocabulary, as Twyla Tharp put it in her wonderful book "The Creative Habit" (I highly recommend reading this). Without all the observing and copying, trying to get it into our brains and muscles, we wouldn't have the rich tools with which to draw upon when we ourselves branch out and try something new for ourselves. "What would Martha Graham have done here?" "How might Yundi Li phrase this passage?"

In other words, to be creative, we first need to study, to emulate, to copy. As my mother always said, "Even Picasso started out practicing 'normal' art before he got all crazy with his own style!"

In the office, what does this mean? It could mean finding someone in your organization whose communication, planning, or execution style you find works well - someone you admire - and observe them in meetings, email exchanges with groups, and in other interactions. Have them mentor you, if possible. Observe, study, and emulate. Try it on for size, see if it works for you. Keep the parts you like, discard those that don't mesh well with who you are. But be sure to try it! You'll never know if you just think about it without actually doing anything.

As you build your vocabulary, you'll acquire a greater arsenal of skills and approaches to draw upon when faced with various situations. Just like when you're listening to other musicians, or trying out a step that you've seen another dancer do, seek out what intrigues you; watch, and give it a try.