Yesterday I wrote that it is a video world. Today I offer this incredible video.

And yes, newsletter subscribers will recall that last June I posted another uke video. (BTW, this little guy looks like he has been watching that video too.)

For those of us who aren’t ridiculous musical prodigies I think there is a great lesson in the I’m Yours video. This kid doesn’t know the words. (I’m fairly certain that isn’t the Japanese translation he’s singing.) He’s just belting out something that feels right. He’s going with it. He’s in the flow and doesn’t care how it sounds. He’s loving what he’s doing.

Compare that with how adults act when they don’t know the words. Most of us clam up or mumble. Worse, we sing the wrong words and get embarrassed. Then we quiet down the next time or spend the next 20 minutes feeling bad or stupid. At some point between 5 years old and 25 we allow shame to overpower joy.

That isn’t the way it has to be. In fact, when you mumble, the shame creeps in. But when you belt it out the way this kid does, confidence and joy will conquer shame. So forget about judgments and throw yourself in.

Erin and Jeff are getting married. As most couples do, they wanted to make sure that people saved their wedding date on their calendars. So they sent out a save the date . . . video. And not just any video – an awesome, movie trailer, mashup video with clips from tons of your favorite movies along with sub-titles that I assume are meant for the Wong side of the family. Here’s the video.

[Sorry, Erin and Jeff pulled the video. You can try this one instead. Not amazing the way Erin and Jeff were, but it makes the point.]

So other than being pretty cool, what does this matter for the likes of you and me? More and more this is a video world. And the technology is breaking down any excuse you may have for not using video. My guess is most people reading this blog own a digital video camera. If not you can buy a flip video cam for under $200 or a webcam for under $50. So video is cheap, but where should you use it?
* Resumes
* Business Proposals
* Thank You Notes
* Holiday Cards
* Electronic Introductions
* Pitching a New Idea to the Boss
You name it. Video makes a presentation stand out. You don’t need Erin and Jeff’s editing talent. With almost no experience I put this video together for the launch of Be the Hero. The editing process probably took about 90 minutes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jikgDCaQyS8&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
I welcome you to write a comment on this post. Even better, post a video. Which one will we all take more notice of?

I didn’t get to watch the lawyers make their cases. That doesn’t happen during jury selection. But I did get to watch numerous potential jurors make a case for being let out of jury duty. I was not impressed. They were alternately huffy and squeamish. Had they been on the witness stand the jury deliberation would have unanimously determined that they were lying under oath. Plus, even with the obvious falsehoods, they utterly failed to make their case.

The lawyers asked straight out, “Can you set aside your past experiences and be objective in this case?”

If you want out of jury duty and you are asked this question, sit straight up. Look the lawyer directly in the eyes and say clearly and in a strong voice, “No.” You might even add a flourish. “No. My experiences have left me with feelings far too strong for me to remain objective.” There. You’re done with it.

Instead, these potential jurors scowled and made great displays of how annoyed they were to answer these questions, and said things like, “I don’t know.” “I’ll do my best, but . . .” “I can’t absolutely promise you.” Of course, then the lawyers had to ask each one of them a dozen more questions. It wasted all of our time and these individuals who so clearly wanted to get out of jury duty had utterly failed to make their case to do so.

BROADER LESSON: If there is something you really want, make your case clearly. Don’t waffle. Don’t be huffy about it. State your desire or belief as directly as you can.

In my case, I told the lawyers I had a speech to give that would require me to be out of state. I thought my speech was pretty important and a great case for not serving. Little did I know at the time how much better that same case could be made.

My friend Alison Dorlen used to love to say, “speed kills” when we played pool together. It is tempting to simply hit the ball as hard as you can and watch all the ricochets and hope for the best. But usually the best doesn’t happen with that method. In fact, when you slow down, both in terms of how quickly you make your shot and how hard you hit the cue ball, your shots gain accuracy and effectiveness. You become a better player.

Fault operates in a similar fashion. My jury duty case was a medical malpractice case. The family was suing the doctor. Their father/husband had died. The doctor and hospital must be at fault. Someone must be to blame. Complications are unacceptable. It must be someone’s fault.

The thing about fault is that the more you focus on it, the more you seek out who was responsible for something bad that happened, the more your world becomes about criticizing, blaming, and defending. When you focus on fault you make people wary of what they do around you. You teach the people around you (your employees, colleagues, children) to be the first to point the finger so that they gain the upper hand in the blame game. And you destroy your own ability to accept responsibility graciously, to say, “I did that. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’ll fix it.”

Fault kills. It kills your happiness and your pleasantness to be around. It kills your effectiveness as an employee, a parent, and a leader.

It’s easy to make these pronouncements and point the finger at others. “Other people blame. I’ve known them. They’re awful.” But the truth is we are all seduced into the blame game from time to time.

I do it. When I do it it’s a mistake. I’m sorry for that. I’m going to do my best to fix it.

I’ve seen layoffs and had to fire people. I’ve witnessed a loved one battle cancer. A friend of mine’s son has gone through 3 brain surgeries. Yet I’ve never seen people express so much pain and outrage as those asked to serve 5 days of jury duty. Thursday I was called to serve on a civil trial. It sounded interesting. I would have been happy to serve. Inconvenienced? Yes. But happy to serve. Hey, variety is the spice of life. I think sitting on a trial would have been fascinating. It was a medical malpractice suit. Healthcare is a hot topic. Sounds great to me.

I was dismissed (probably due to my upcoming travel schedule to deliver keynotes in Las Vegas and Miami). Now before you say that it’s easy for me to say I wanted to serve when I was dismissed, know this. The last time I was called for jury duty I did serve. Happily. For 30 days. And it was fascinating.

I didn’t lose my job or my family. I don’t look back now, 9 years later, and trace a string of life tragedies or career setbacks to that unfortunate turn of events.

But this week I saw people whine and complain. I saw some lie shamelessly, and really poorly I might add. You would have thought that those selected were going in front of a firing squad. They weren’t. They were just going to (have to/get to) serve jury duty.

There’s a broader lesson here. What do you tell yourself you have to do? I have to go to work. I have to take the car in. I have to pick up my kids. In fact, you get to do all of those things. If you’re lucky, you even get to serve on jury duty.

Do you speak French? Creole? Hmm. Me neither. Still, this is beautiful.
Once I got past the sheer enjoyment of watching and listening to that video it sparked thoughts about how we communicate? Did you understand what they were saying? Did you feel it?
We communicate in so many ways. All day long you are telling people things with your face, your body, your tone. The way you dress and walk carries a message.
What are you communicating outside of your words? When you get beyond the lyrics of your life, is the background music you are playing to people really what you want it to be?

Did you see the latest rave for Avatar? Or the one that wasn’t quite so giddy?

What about the news of the 6.1 aftershock in Haiti?

How about the latest corporate memo on security?

You receive too many emails. The web draws you in and keeps going forever. At home the TV has seemingly endless options to occupy you. There is a never ending supply of distraction in your life.

Everyone living in the information age society has a job in common. If you are an executive or a programmer or a marketer or a stay at home parent, your primary responsibilities all share this – your performance depends on the speed with which you discard non-essential information.

Get rid of the memos. Turn off the TV. Delete the joke email without reading it. Choose not to read the article your friend sent to you. Refuse to click another link.

Of course, there are some things you do want to read. Some people you should trust when they tell you you absolutely must check out this website (and this one and this one) or video or picture.

Did you click through? If not, you just might be a better person for it.

There they are on the wall. Framed. Possibly even in plaque form. There are 6 of them. (I don’t know why but corporate values most often seem to come in batches of 6.) They look beautiful. And if you ask any employee in the company s/he can probably name 2 or 3 of them without looking at the plaque. Herein lies the beginnings of the problems with corporate values.

First of all, you can’t change 6 behaviors at once. Have you ever heard someone make 6 New Year’s resolutions? Most people fail to carry out 1. Yet when most companies define their corporate values they offer up more new behaviors than anyone could possibly work to adopt at one time. The people who chose these values know this. So then they take the second step that makes corporate values useless.

They put the values on a plaque, stick them on the walls, and forget about them. And that’s what their employees do too. We all forget them. There’s no reason to do otherwise. After all, they have no bearing on anything we do. Out of sight, out of mind applies even to things that are framed and stuck on the wall. If there is no other reference to the values they will drift quickly into irrelevance.

To make corporate values useful they should be separated into 2 categories.

Commandment Values

Commandment Values are the list of values that you expect everyone to exhibit at some minimum level. For example, we think everyone should act with – Trust, Integrity, Teamwork, Customer Service, Respect, Quality. Behaviors that are obviously contrary to these values will be grounds for discipline and possibly even termination. They set a minimum expectation, a baseline for behavior.

These values are basically what most companies have already created. They are the general list of “traits and behaviors we wish our employees to exhibit.” We don’t closely track them. But they will enter discussions when someone clearly breaks them.

The problem is that these don’t guide exceptional behavior. They simply set the stage for disciplining bad behavior – necessary perhaps, but hardly inspiring. This is why you need the second type of value.

Focus Value

The second type of value is your Focus Value. It is one value from your list of commandment values that will be your focus for some time – I personally like the time frame of 1 year. At any given time, some value will rise to the top, not as most important, but as most pressing. Your company was just hit with insider trading scandals? Focus on Integrity. You’re falling behind more creative competition? Focus on Innovation. Fights between the line and management? Focus on Trust.

This isn’t a dismissal of the other values. It’s a difference in activity. I’m expected not to break any of the Commandment Values. I’m expected to operate within their guidelines. However, I’m not expected to proactively go out of my way on a regular basis to seek ways to act upon those values. I’m simply expected to uphold them as part of my normal everyday activity.

For the Focus Value on the other hand, I’m expected to go out of my way, to seek out new ways to exhibit that value. Once you figure out which is your Focus Value for the year, make it part of everything. Corporate meetings and events should begin with activities or discussions related to the Focus Value. Performance review and development conversations should include the Focus Value. It should be part of your hiring and succession practices. Your Focus Value should be impossible for anyone in your company to forget, and it should be something that everyone in your company feels compelled to act on.

Valuable Corporate Values

This combination of Commandment and Focus Values makes your corporate values useful. It makes them guide behavior in a way that is actually doable. So what if you don’t hold the reigns for your whole company? At the very least, create your own Focus Value for the year and hold yourself accountable to it. My Focus Value for this year is Heroism. Let me know what you choose for yours.

It’s MLK Jr. Day, and so a good day to celebrate diversity. I think it was during the 90s that diversity on a wide scale went from being a simple noun to a social, political, and organizational imperative. As that occurred diversity came to mean that a wide spectrum of non-white males should occupy a substantial percentage of the positions in any given area. That was an important objective that many organizations and groups are still seeking to attain.

Some organizations in the last decade moved beyond the diversity goal of filling positions with diverse people. For these organizations diversity took on a new meaning of tolerance. These organizations do diversity training to help people understand and be more comfortable with not only other gender, races, religions, and sexual orientations, but also plain old opinions. Diversity as tolerance brought the responsibility for a diverse work environment from the hiring manager to every employee.

For the new decade, and for those most advanced organizations, it is time to now overlay another concept on diversity – inclusion. Just as the hiring manager over the last 20 years was expected to seek out diverse applicants, the next imperative is for everyone to seek out diverse participation in whatever they do. This diversity could be along the traditional lines – gender, race, etc – but that isn’t necessarily the point. Inclusion for you could be inviting someone in a different organization silo into your project. It could be recognizing the clique you belong to in your workplace – yes, you do belong to a clique – and including new people in your group.

Inclusion should become the diversity behavior pattern of the next decade. It fosters better communication, creativity, idea generation, and problem solving. It is simple to do and costs nothing. It is an active step that we can all take.

Let me know what you think about this or any other topic I should write about. I’d love to include your ideas.

It used to be that news was something you could get for an hour per day. Thirty minutes for local and thirty for national and international. If you missed it, you could read the paper the following day. So when a tragedy struck somewhere outside of your neighborhood, your intake of that tragedy was limited to an hour of news and usually less. After all, the news programs had to deliver everything that had happened that day in just one hour, and without any scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to feed our hyperactive minds.

That’s the way it was, and much though I hate sounding like a crotchety old man, that’s the way it should be. Not just for watching a tragedy like the one now in Haiti, but for any great sadness, disappointment, or frustration in our lives. Ruminating and playing the same negative tape over and over only serves to reinforce anxiety, anger, and hopelessness.

We should stay informed. We should not ignore the problems in our world. But we should limit our exposure to them. Give yourself a half-hour to get caught up on the news today. If you are frustrated or angry with something in your life and you feel you must experience that anger, allow yourself a few minutes to dwell on it. Then push yourself to move on. If you have a hard time moving on, try completing this sentence 10 times:

I am so incredibly lucky because . . .

BTW, I wrote yesterday about ways to help Haiti including my personal recommendation to text “haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s International Response Fund. If you did, you weren’t alone. Turns out the response was historic.