Is competing to be #1 more important than making friends? Not in our family

This weekend was the first slalom race for the kids.  I am proud of the kids.  I don’t know about you but when I was in grade school I don’t think I could get in the starting gate for a slalom race in front of lots of people.

I found this post on Parents who ruin sports for their kids by obsessing about winning.  One point made which I think many times is true is...

Parents think they want success for their kids but in many ways they want if for themselves.  Their kids, it turns out, want pizza.

But this statement isn’t quite true for my kids as they really don’t like pizza that much even though I have a pizza oven. :-)  We do want success for the kids and their is more to sports than winning.

By focusing too heavily on winning not only do we parents fail to focus on what is important, but far worse, we refute what is important. We lose sight of sports as a vehicle for learning and, instead, convert it into a means for parents to live out their own athletic dreams or take a gamble on the unlikely event that sports will pave a road into college. I would argue that athletic competitions offer one of the very best venues for learning some of life’s most important lessons.  But these lessons don’t require victories, and in fact many, like some of the following, are best taught in defeat:

What is sad is to see some of the kids talking to their team members asking what their time was.  No statement "great race.  You did well."  Just "what was your time?” Thinking I know I beat you. I want to hear your time.   Most of the parents don’t bother asking the kids or parents what time the others had they just go to the live timing site and look up their kids time vs. others.  http://live-timing.com/races.php.  I’ve heard some people say it is fun to look up the times.  No it is not fun to look up the time of your child vs. others.  It is an addiction to think you are better because your kid beats another.

My son isn’t the top in the group.  He is ecstatic to be make it into the top 10.  What I did notice though when I recorded some videos is what happened to many other kids racing vs. mine.  When my son enters the starting gate you can hear girls and boys same age and up to 4 years older calling his name.  Below is the video of my son starting.  The best part is hearing the kids cheer him on.

There are others who get to the starting gate and there is not a single person calling out their name.  Why? Others on the team don't know the person.  Those in their age group have raced down the hill ahead of them and are at the bottom of the hill or they are behind them in line waiting their turn.  The kids watching are the kids who have already made their run and came back up to cheer on their team mates or the others who have to wait a while before their turn.  Oh and many of those kids who don’t hear the words of support are the same kids who are focused on being #1.  The time they get is what is important.  Thanks Mom for making the priority to have the best time.

My son has the talent and focus to make friends.  He knows their names.  Cheers them on.  Says good things about their racing.  Eats lunch with them and hangs out playing games.  Not to beat them, but to be social and have fun.  Is it fun to race with your friends and cheer their victory or is it fun to look at the scoreboard and know your child beat another due to their competitive obsession, best gear, best training, and hope others miss a gate who might have beat you?

My daughter has the same talent, but her little brother has the bigger cheer section.  Which creates a different competition on who is more social of the siblings. :-)

This kind of reminds of what goes in many companies with overly competitive employees who think being #1 in performance is the most important thing to focus on, caring little if they get along with others and work as a team.

Making a Life Change, Om Malik's serious heart attack

Yesterday, my business partner just had a friend’s father suffer a heart attack.  Yesterday I was at UCSF’s new Hospital Project at Mission Bay working on some process ideas.  And this morning I saw this inspiring post by Om Malik on his life changing experience spurred by his serious heart attack.

Almost exactly six years ago, I survived a serious heart attack thanks to the team at UCSF Medical Center – specifically the cardiology division. 

Because of their diligence, patience and care, I learned a lot about my health and how I wanted to live the rest of my life. Those three weeks spent in the hospital were as healing for my spirit as for my body. 

At my doctor's suggestion, I adopted better lifestyle habits such as a mostly vegetarian diet, more exercise and no alcohol or smoking. But the bigger change came in my approach to life. 

One of the two promises I made to myself when I was released from the hospital was that I was going to stop trying to control everything. As life’s unpredictability showed me, the best you can do is control the inputs (or your own efforts). We cannot control the outcome. The other promise I made was to stop evaluating life by the moment and instead live in the moment. Or, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Live as if you would die tomorrow, learn as if you would live forever.”

These past six years have added up to what could be the best years of my life – for now. And I will forever be grateful to the UCSF cardiology team. They saved me from near disaster and gave me a chance to rewrite my life story. 

Now it's my turn to give back to the team that gave so much to me. My goal is to raise $25,000 to help fund various heart disease-related projects at UCSF, and I would really appreciate your support.

There are three things you can do to help:

1. Contribute any amount to the campaign before January 31. 
2. Get more bang for your buck by contributing on Tuesday, December 3. To sweeten the pot, Indiegogo will kick in $1 for every $20 contributed to a #GivingTues campaign on December 3. 
   
3. Tell your friends about this campaign and ask them to contribute. 

UCSF is at the forefront of some of the most exciting research in cardiology. Private support is vital to their work. It allows UCSF to recruit outstanding faculty and trainees, launch cutting-edge research projects, and incubate them until they become competitive for government funding sources. All funds raised will go directly to the division of cardiology in the department of medicine. 

Isn’t it sad that sometimes to change your life needs to be at risk?

How many things finally change habits in the data center after a critical outage?

Psst, Kids achieve more when they cooperate vs. compete

America is a competition obsessed country.  I just spent 5 days at a race ski camp for our kids and was thinking how we support our kids in the camp vs. others. My wife and I are focused on how our kids participate, engage with their peers, learn from their coaches, and improve their skills.  We aren’t competition obsessed and we don’t want our kids to that way either.  We are in the minority as most believe winning, being competitive is the way to success.  Here is a Psychology Today article that may let you into some insights from professionals who disagree with the focus on competition.

Cohen cites the research of Spencer Kagan and Millard Madsen which shows that children's achievement levels are superior when they cooperate versus compete. He also cites the research of  David and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota which showed 122 separate studies reporting cooperation promoting higher achievement than competition, and the research of Robert Helmreich of the University of Texas which showed that scientists, businessmen, academics, pilots and people in other professions who were considered experts, reported that personal challenge meant more to them than achievement through competition.

For those of you are ready to argue back that competition is the right way, the article throws this point up.

The argument is often made that intense competition builds character. Learning how to win and lose is supposed to toughen us and give us confidence. Yet, as anthropologist Jules Henry has said, "a competitive culture endures by tearing people down."

Consider the logic of it. Trying to outperform others and "win," is damaging, because like gambling in Vegas, the odds are against you. You will lose most of the time, because you can't win all the time. So every competition sets up the potential for humiliation, embarrassment, and demotivation, if the aim is winning.

And oh by the way.  You are obsessed with competition if you find you need another fix like a drug addict.

The other problem with the focus on winning, is that once you've tasted it, you need more. It's like an addiction. The pleasure effect of winning does not last, unlike the satisfaction of having done the best you can. Finally, a focus on winning makes people focus outside themselves for validation of their worth. What is their value if they don't get the medals, media attention and wealth that goes with winning? In contrast, the satisfaction of success and doing the best you can through cooperation has been shown to be linked with emotional maturity and strong personal identity.

There are many who are in ski race program who believe being competitive is the key to success.  Having worked at big companies like HP, Apple, and Microsoft i am so used to the hyper competitiveness that permeates the vast majority. of people. But, the winning is not the bonding factor.  The hours spent working together to persevere is what creates valued relationships.

Cohen argues that the most disturbing feature of competition to win is how it negatively affects our relationships. Competition in schools, sports, the workplace in families and among countries can be the thing that divides, disrupts and turn to negativity. While we like to preach that competition brings people closer together it is rarely the winning that does that, it is more often the personal journey, the shared experience and compassion for failure that is stronger.

The last paragraph is something I’ll try to keep in mind when our kids are in the ski race program.  

Perhaps the final indictment of an obsession with competition and winning, is that it restrains people from engaging in a personal journey of self knowledge and finding one's place in life as an entirely internal and personal process, not one that requires the comparisons and constant competition with others as a measure of self-worth.

Understanding where you are at in a race and being OK with it.  You tried your best and finished the race is more important.

Unlike Carl Lewis and Daley Thompson, Derek Redmond is not a name that conjures up memories of Olympic gold medals. But it is Redmond who defines the essence of the human spirit. Redmond arrived at the 1992 Olympic Summer Games in Barcelona determined to win a medal in the 400. The color of the medal was meaningless; he just wanted to win one. Just one. Down the backstretch, only 175 meters away from finishing, Redmond is a shoo-in to make the finals. Suddenly, he heard a pop in his right hamstring. He pulls up lame, as if he had been shot. As the medical crew arrives, Redmond tells them, "I'm going to finish my race." Then in a moment that will live forever in the minds of millions of people since then, Redmond lifted himself up, and started hobling down the track. His father raced out of the stands, and helped his son cross the finish line to the applause of 65,000 people. Redmond did not win a medal, but he won the hearts of people that day and thereafter. To this day, people, when asked about the race, mention Redmond, and can't name the medal winners.

Getting executives to hear the Data Center Issues, Speaking Truth to Power

I had beers for the holidays with some data center friends last night.  We had fun chatting about all kinds of topics.  One guy is lucky to have executives who will listen to the data center issues.  One of the other guys is unlucky with management who doesn’t understand the data center.  The gal is watching craziness at the executive level at another company as they save costs.  My own situation at big companies is long gone.  My past problem at big companies is I was focused on doing the right thing in spite of management.

Just yesterday I was reading this white paper on Speaking Truth to Power and many points are made that resonated.

The truth that makes men free is for the most part 
the truth which men prefer not to hear.
--Herbert Agar, A Time for Greatness (1942)

The author writes about an authority power dominated company (Cowles Media) vs. an open challenge of authority’s decisions (FedEx) and summarizes with...

The lesson I drew from these examples nearly three decades ago was that mangers in companies with healthy cultures were constantly willing to rethink even their most basic assumptions through a process of constructive dissent.

Many companies have the belief the CEO should always be the authority with power.

thanks to the much-publicized behavior of imperial CEOs in the 1990s, a cultural expectation has been created that leaders need to be decisive, tough, take-charge men who quickly fire those who are not "team-players." Imagine the courage it would take to tell a Jack Welch, a Scott McNeely, an Andy Grove, or a Larry Ellison news he didn't want to hear? Even in a book by fawning admirers, Jack Welch came across as a modern-day Attila when GE mangers dared to question him. Dissenters were berated, insulted, and abused: "According to former employees, Welch conducts meetings so aggressively that people tremble. He attacks almost physically with his intellect-criticizing, demeaning, ridiculing, humiliating." One humiliated former GE-executive who had been publicly dressed down by Welch for daring to question his boss admitted to the moderator of an Aspen Institute seminar in the early 1990s that Welch's furious tirade "caused me to soil my pants."

The white paper is a long read, but will get you thinking about the challenges of Speaking Truth to those in Power.

Wouldn't it be great if IT Services behaved like well mannered house guests, respect the territorial boundaries

The holiday season is a time of travel.  Which means either you are the guest at someone’s house or you are the host of guests.  Benjamin Franklin’s cited as the originator of the classic quote, and here is an article that build on the concept in Psychology Today.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that guests, like fish, begin tosmell after three days. Many of us are inclined to agree. I myself recently struggled to share my space and resources with a houseguest. I wanted to be hospitable yet I experienced an unexpectedly inhospitable reaction to my mackerel-like guest (herein known as “Mack”).  The dissonance was intense. What was up with that? Fortunately, my psychology arsenal includes tools from the psychology subdiscipline ofenvironmental psychology. It is there we find theories and research on human territoriality that explain the trouble with houseguests (at least some of it!). 

What comes to mind though is wouldn’t life be better if IT services behaved like well mannered house guests and respect the territorial boundaries of the host.

How many of you are frustrated when new IT service change your routine?

Houseguests then, are stressful to the extent that they disrupt our routines and usurp the high amount of control we normally enjoy in this personal territory. If their routines interfere with ours or if their presence restricts our normal uses of home spaces, stress is likely. 

Unfortunately new IT services don’t leave like a house guest, so their habits now influence yours.

How many of you think some of the IT services that come in leave a bad smell in your clean operations?

Of course, territoriality isn’t the whole picture. Among other things, increased household labor also makes guests “smelly” (often more of an issue for women in traditionally gendered households where they bear the brunt of cooking and cleaning). The moral of this story: if you want to stay a welcome houseguest, it probably pays to respect your host’s home as a primary territory, and to keep your visit short.