nect from laptops, iPods, whatever. The person in charge came to
me to test the assumption that guests would pay for that connectivity.
I spent ten minutes with him and let him talk, and the
more he talked, the more he realized he could convince the leadership
that guests would not, at this time, pay—the market for that
connectivity just wasn’t large enough yet. It made no sense to do
a study to find out.
I find it’s worth the investment of having a live discussion, and
I find myself encouraging conversations. Not more meetings, just
more conversations.
I’m probably more productive today because now I just push
back more, focusing on the things that are most important. I have
the ability to say I’m focused on this right now but have flexibility
in that I don’t shut my door.
This is a key to tough management: make sure that you are
focused on the most important issues at the moment, but stand
ready to change gears, even if only momentarily, when the situation
truly warrants it. Each “interruption” has to be weighed in
context of your top goals as well as its relevance to what you are
working on at the moment. This also will help reduce the level of
stress.
Morphing to Be Flexible
One way to remain flexible is through morphing, where you essentially
take the shape of the environment. This doesn’t mean changing
who you are, but rather totally adapting how you act and what
you do based on the current work environment in which you are
living at the moment.
For example, two-hundred-year-old DuPont, the oldest industrial
company in the Fortune 500, found itself in the midst of a
major shift in the late 1990s, as the knowledge economy took hold