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Continuing work on my Tiger Moth I’ve assembled the horizontal and vertical stabilizers.

It finally looks like a plane! I’ve attached the lower wing, the horizontal stabilizer, and the vertical stabilizer. This gives me a big rush. I can finally see the plane taking shape and want to rush to get it completed.

eflight TM400

Chapter 7 of The Leadership Challenge is titled Search For Opportunities. Search for opportunities is the fifth commitment of Leadership.

Search For Opportunities is the introductory chapter in the section devoted to challenging the process. Kouzes and Posner compare leadership in a company to being a venturer. They describe how challenge and adversity cultivate leadership.

The authors describe how leaders should treat every job as an adventure. By coming to work everyday as if it was your first day on the job, you start to question why procedures have been put into place.

By seeking meaningful challenges, leaders bring out the best work in themselves. Motivation is stronger when your work has meaning to you.

Leaders should also find and create meaningful challenges for others. Again, everyone does their best work when challenged, and motivation is even stronger when that challenge is meaningful to the person.

Everyone wants to have fun at work, and we all work better when we’re having fun. Leaders should promote a fun environment.

Questioning the status quo is a difficult skill for many people. Leaders are encouraged to question routines and processes and eliminate the ones that don’t make sense.

Another tough practice is to renew your teams. Whenever money gets tight in a company, the first thing to get cut is training. Yet without training, teams get disconnected and stagnant. New ideas and new practices take longer to develop.

Creating an open-source approach to searching for opportunities means allowing anyone interested to take part in creation and innovation in the organization. New ideas are not just created by a few hand-selected people.

Visit my past articles on The Leadership Challenge:
How to Lead.
Envision the Future.
Enlist Others.

Books mentioned in this post:

book books leadership reading

There’s an old folk warning that if you throw a frog in boiling water he will quickly jump out. But if you put a frog in a pan of cold water and raise the temperature ever so slowly, the gradual warming will make the frog doze happily . . . in fact, the frog will eventually cook to death, without ever waking up.

One of my tasks this week is to gather together a sample of all the test data we store and send it to a vendor for analysis. I’ve always known that we had multiple formats of test data, in fact I created one of them. Today I just realized how bad it really is.

Since we never took control of our test data and tried to find a single home for it all throughout the company, we had little pigeon holes of data. Some comma-separated value files on this tester, some csv files on that tester in a different format, an Access database on the tester in the factory down south, some paper records… This is getting ridiculous!

The closest we’ve come to trying to harmonize this data was about 6 or 7 years ago when we hired a contractor to convert our paper system to an electronic system. His answer was a bad, bad Access database. This system worked for a number of years. It had it’s share of problems when it came to multiple users accessing it on the network, but it did keep us focused on having one source for test data.

Since then we’ve added multiple automated systems, each with a slightly different log file format. Now that we’ve expanded, merged with other companies, and partnered with multiple manufacturers in China, the number of file formats has grown to the point where it’s unmanageable!

Trying to gather these samples reminded me of the folk warning about how to boil a frog… If someone had suggested to me that we have 10 or 15 different file formats for our test data, I would have jumped out of the pot and tried to come up with a single format to handle everything… Instead they crept in one by one, year after year and now the water is starting to boil.

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