“You do not merely want to be considered the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones that do what you do.” – Jerry Garcia
To quickly answer the question of why this message is opening with a quote from Jerry Garcia, I came across it in the Tom Peters book Re-Imagine! Peters talks about a speech he delivered to the leadership of a company whose team members believed they had begun to lose their mojo (my term).
The story continues, Peters deletes 126 of the 127 slides in his presentation to the company leaders, saving one slide that asks simply, “who are we these days?” As we begin to reopen our economy and re-emerge from our stay at home orders, I suspect each of us can consider ‘who we are these days’ and how this season provides a catalyst to go forward.
Consider author and consultant Keith Ferrazi’s challenge, “Let’s not go back to work. Let’s go forward.” Ferrazi advises us to recognize a paradigm shift in work practices and to pursue a concept he calls ‘co-elevation,’ a ‘we will go higher together’ commitment to the mission and to each other.
Ferrazi offers eight recommendations, which reinforce three of our existing behaviors and suggests three additional behaviors for us to embrace going forward. We already ask employ a helping mindset in our work with businesses and communities, have built a team that can self-organize into cross-functional work groups, and trust each other to deliver on our responsibilities.
Going forward, we will continue our weekly Zoom team meetings and expand them to organize informal ‘sprints’ for projects and will seek to ‘bulletproof’ our projects through review sessions. In addition, I am asking out existing team members, who else do we need on our team?
– Alan Tio
