I stopped by the grocery store and as I was parking my motorcycle in the parking lot, some slouchy rider pulls his bike onto the sidewalk near the entrance to park. What’s that about?

Maybe he wants the attention. Maybe he’s lazy. Almost certainly he’s self-absorbed.

Why does everybody need to walk around his vehicle while the rest of us use the parking lot? It makes me want to park in the middle of his yard, although I doubt he’d get the irony.

Self-absorption in it’s many forms stinks. Our navels are not the center of the universe. The pursuit of our own happiness doesn’t give us the right to impinge on others. We all live as part of a larger community and need to consider the big picture.

Everybody else seems to get that. Except the self-absorbed.

Improvement without change? It doesn’t happen.

Not all change is an improvement, but all improvement requires change. I’ve been involved in an effort to improve some significant processes within an organization. Most everyone want to improve the processes; few are willing to actually change them.

Recently someone threw up the old “change for the sake of change is not good leadership.” That’s true, but not always relevant. Often that phrase is a crutch for people unwilling to change or who are only willing to look at the downside risks.

It reminds me of the old adage “everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”

Everybody wants their team, company, family, organization, etc. to get better–just don’t ask them to change anything.

Improvement without change is a myth, and one of the hardest jobs of leadership is dealing with those unwilling to accept it.

Our family just returned from a trip to Mexico where we’ve visited many times before. This time we stayed at the Princess Resort near Playa del Carmen. Our experience was extremely disappointing despite the beauty of this new hotel.

As Darla and I reflected on our disappointments, we realized that probably 80% of the problems would have been reduced or eliminated if the hotel had simply informed us of our options and benefits. Our greatest challenge was finding out, often after the fact, about perks our package included. If our initial orientation had been done well and information provided, the hotel would have performed much better for us.

Another problem was the lack of communication. As someone who has visited Mexico 20 times, I know most service providers there speak better English than I do Spanish, but evidently because this hotel is new they’ve hired many employees who we couldn’t understand and who couldn’t understand us. A rudimentary ability to communicate with guests is key to a successful experience.

And if you really want to perform, inform your team. Service training was sadly lacking. Many employees simply didn’t know what to do despite whatever intentions they may have had. We sometimes ran into a welcome exception to the poor service rule, and these were typically employees who had been employed–and I assume trained–elsewhere before joining the staff at the Princess.

Information should always precede execution. As simple as this sounds, overlooking it can derail performance.

My friend John Maxwell has another excellent book just out called Leadership Gold. In it he contradicts a popular leadership myth: if it is lonely at the top, you’re not doing it right.

Effective leaders should be surrounding themselves with good people and building strong relationships. While there are decisions that ultimately the leader must make and make alone, he or she should never isolate nor burn relational bridges.

What’s the point of rising to the top if you can’t take good people with you? And why labor alone when there is so much talent available, willing and able to help?

It shouldn’t be lonely at the top.

I was reminded of that recently. Sometimes despite your best preparation stuff happens. Life, as we are all too often reminded, isn’t completely within our control. When bad and unexpected stuff happens, the mark of a professional is his or her ability to recover; or to use an overused metaphor, make lemonade out of the lemons.

Two words will serve you well when it comes to your performance: the first is preparation. Good preparation results in the prevention of most problems. To the degree you can, prepare diligently to create a favorable environment and outcome. Of course the second word is recovery. When something happens beyond your control, don’t let it rattle you. Instead, use grace under pressure and make the most of the situation.

With all the gloom and doom we’re surrounded with these days, this video clip from Harley Davidson should provide you a little encouragment: Screw it, let’s ride.

Sanborn Associates here posting an interesting mention on “Uncle” Mark made by Mike St. Pierre writing at LifeHack.org:

Mike had some fun with the whole family tree paradigm and created a family tree consisting of the top productivity bloggers on the internet (according to his criteria). This is what he says about Mark:

The Rich Uncle: Mark Sanborn, Sanborn & Associates
When Mark’s book The Fred Factor, hit the bookstores in 2005 it propelled Mark beyond other public speakers and married productivity with customer service. Mark is values-based and sets high standards for organizations and their interaction with customers.

Mark doesn’t necessarily consider himself a productivity blogger so it’s interesting to look at his work through Mike’s lens. We guess that when you look at it, the notion of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary (the theme of The Fred Factor) is a productive endeavor. Coincidentally, Mark just released a new eBook on productivity. In it he’s compiled a list of 101 of his most effective productivity tips.

In honor of Mark’s placement on St. Pierre’s productivity family tree, we’ve created a special coupon good for $2 off 101 Tips for Improving Productivity; simply go to the store, login or register, and apply coupon code mstpierre to receive the discount!

We were also pleased to note that productivity pro and our pal, Laura Stack, also made Mike’s tree as the Responsible Mom. We’re wondering if she’ll bake us cookies for pointing this out! By the way, congratulations to Laura on her latest book, The Exhaustion Cure. We understand it’s zooming up the best seller lists. (We just checked - #3 in Healthy Living on Amazon.)

James Cagney never said “You dirty rat” in any of his films. Nor did Humphrey Bogart say “Play it again, Sam” in the movie Casablanca.

The Caesar salad isn’t named after Julius Caesar. It was named for its creator, Caesar Gardini who first prepared it in his restaurant in Mexico.

The cashew isn’t technically a nut (ever see a cashew shell?). It is classified as the seed of a fruit called the cashew apple. And speaking of seeds, that what a coffee bean really is–not a bean, a seed.

These entertaining facts point to a bigger question: how much of the important things we believe to be true really aren’t? I’ve read–and been unable to source–that 15% of what we are certain happened didn’t; that we’re recalling events incorrectly. While this might explain a few disagreements with your spouse, it should also be reason to pause next time you feel like forcefully advancing your point about what really happened (even if 15% may not be completely accurate).

I’m not advocating a life spent waffling. I am suggesting that we’d all be well served to dig a little deeper into our beliefs and opinions. Obviously much if not most of what we believe is well-founded and true, but the minority of our beliefs that are erroneous can be potentially ruinous to decision-making, relationships and even effective leadership.

We live in the age of easy answers. As much as I love the convenience of the internet, I remind myself that just because it appears on the web doesn’t make it true. Cads and liars can use the net just as easily as you and me.

If you are truly leading, you are truly learning.

If you aren’t learning much, you aren’t leading very effectively.

I am working on an article for a friend’s ebook. The focus will be on “what I wish I had known about leadership at the beginning.”

Here’s an insight learned over many years of leading:

“How can I help you?” is a better question than “How can you help me?”

When people know your leadership isn’t about you but about being of larger service and greater value, they’ll provide insights about how you can help them be better contributors.

That is the focus of The Journal Report in today’s WSJ. The section provides some interesting insights into the dollars and cents of ethical behavior.

Such questions, however, miss the point: if ethical behavior didn’t pay, should it be abandoned? What’s the alternative?

I know business professionals are interested in the implications of ethical behavior, and as an economist I find the data fascinating. But the best reason to be ethical is because it is the right thing to do–whether or not it increases the bottom line.