There is a lot of talk in our society about finding balance in life. For me, sometimes, it seems like there is so much pressure and focus on this topic that I have to have everything in perfect balance every moment of every day and, if I don’t, I’m failing. Often, this perceived failure causes me to end up even more out of balance as I try to drop what I’m doing to fix the imbalance which, inherently, causes more imbalance. If you’ve ever seen the I Love Lucy episode where they are working on the factory line, yep, sometimes it feels just like that!

Thinking Outside of the Box is a phrase often used but rarely done. It can be easy for us to say we want to or are thinking outside of the box but the very fact that we are still thinking about the box indicates that we are still constrained by that box. The idea, however, remains important as the practice of out of the box thinking is critical to the health and growth of individuals and organizations. If we don’t figure out how to master thinking outside of the box, how can we have breakthrough innovations and ideas?

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege to speak at one of the premier IT industry events in Orlando, FL. One of the sessions was titled SOPs for your SOPs and really covered two topics. The first was how to write great SOPs and the second focused on building a solid culture around continual process improvement. While I tend to focus heavily on finding our flaws and continuously seeking to improve, I can tend to forget to see what we do well. It was rewarding and an honor to share with the attendees what we have learned, often, from our own mistakes. In this blog, I’m going to focus on things that we have found are critical to writing great SOPs.

When I am in the middle of buying something, sometimes I back up and look at the experience from an existential perspective. I enjoy looking at the process that is taking place to see how the different parties are interacting and their overall posture in the exchange. While there are exceptions, I have been disappointed to see how often the process involves lies and manipulation just to get the sale. It sometimes leaves me wondering if there is such a thing as ethical sales. Then, however, I remember good sales…ones where both parties were looking out for each other and were collectively trying to create a positive outcome for each party.

As we grew as an organization, one thing that I realized was that, while I had a good idea, in my head, of why JNR Networks existed, I wasn’t doing a very good job of casting that vision to my team and our clients. As we set out on a journey to define the traditional business “Mission, Vision and Values”, we struggled. Some of this struggle was because we didn’t have the kind of clarity that we needed but some of the struggle was that we just couldn’t find a way to fit our ideas into that structure. At least not in a way that felt right, had the punch we wanted it to have and embodied what we wanted to say.

Five weeks ago, I sent out my first blog of the year with a statement that I was planning to hold a rhythm of adding a blog article every one to two weeks. This is the second blog of the year. I almost ran out of fingers on one hand by the time I figured out that I completely and utterly failed to meet this goal! So, why set goals at all? How do we handle failure? How do we avoid failure…or is that even the right question?

Growth is a really interesting concept. On one hand, you could call this one of the most obvious values to have. On the other hand, it is a value that many organizations easily overlook but spend a lot of time figuring out how to achieve.

For us, growth is not a goal in and of itself as much as it is an outcome. We believe that when we are doing the right things for the right people and for the right reasons our actions will help them grow which will cause us to grow as well. To this end, growth is an outcome but a very necessary outcome.

When we sat down to write out our core values, we had a long list. As we worked to whittle it down, we found that a number of values were distillates of other values. As an example, we see honesty as a distillate of integrity. Because of this, we wanted to narrow our values down to those things that were root values and were causative of the other values we have. That is where we came up with Impact.

Often, we think of integrity as a concept relating to someone’s character and integration as something relating to processes and systems. The reality, however, is that the two words are intertwined.

We all have things that are important to us but it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle of everyday life and forget what’s important. We can either completely forget our values or, at the very least, end up making small compromises that end up getting us far off of our path. I struggle with this as well.