Russell Bishop - Workarounds That Work: How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work

How to Conquer Anything That Stands in Your Way at Work

RUSSELL BISHOP

Editor and columnist, Huffington Post

Copyright 2011 by Russell Bishop. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-175373-9
MHID: 0-07-175373-7

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For Valerie, my loving wife, friend, and constant reminder that God must love me

I first met Russell Bishop in 1978 when I participated in a selfdevelopment seminar he was leading. Within the first hour of the event I told myself, Im going to work with this guy! He was demonstrating a mature command of core principles of effective behavior along with an uncanny knack for making them real, digestible, and immediately usable for an amazing range of people and circumstances. This was true life education, in my view, and gave me a star to follow in my own career.

I fulfilled my prophecy, spending several years in close quarters with Russell professionally and personally. Our collaboration planted and nurtured the seeds of what was to become the core of my work in productivitythe Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. My respect for him as a mentor in working with the dynamics of human interactions hasnt wavered over the decades. Im thrilled that hes made much of his understanding and cogent advice available in these pages.

This book tackles a neglected arena in the professional development environment: the people and behaviors that have to work well together in the vast gap between the world of leadership and the real-world requirements for day-to-day execution. Too often the landscape is littered with business gurus, off-site retreats, and organizational-change consultants that run counter to corporate training programs focused on practical skill building and core business processes.

Executives wind up staring at their navels, challenged to think about what their company wants to be when it grows up. Worker bees stare at their computers, taking online courses on how to work their customer databases and other systems. People at both levelstop and bottomcan easily feel like victims of circumstances.

The executives, managers, supervisors, and key sole contributors at the heart of organizational performance frequently become squeezed between lofty initiatives generated at the C-levels and the plethora of projects and people that drive real-world growth and success.

This is messy territory, populated by smart, high-performing people who find themselves caught in the inevitable conflicts that arise between vision and the structures that emerge to institutionalize it. These folks have the responsibility to grapple with multiple ambiguities, figure out how to deal with them, and produce results, no matter what. Ive spent much of my time and research deep down in the trenches with these folks, one-on-one, attempting to get a grip on what the work really is and what needs to happen to accomplish it. Invariably some of the most imperative matters to deal with involve elements that they feel are out of their control. Theyve been dealt a hand, and they are expected to win the pot, come what may.

Most all of us want to go somewhere and have some idea about how to get there; however, our practices and procedures frequently seem to get in the way. Those experiences are as often the result of our own internal making as of the external restrictions we rail against. This challenge is equally shared by the chairman of the board and the new hire on the front line, each of whom struggles with conflicting commitments, diverse constituencies, and immediate demands on time and responsibilities. The solutions, likewise, will be shared by all of us.

You wont read anything in the following pages that you dont somehow already know, and know that you should donor anything that you dont immediately have the resources to address. Of course, thats likely true of 99 percent of the suggestions in the huge library of business self-help books, not to mention the abundance of diet, exercise, and create-personal-wealth how-to manuals. The difference here may be the elegance of the understanding of the issues along with formulations of the tricks we can employ to address them. This is subtle and sophisticated stuff, but Russell has made it accessible as a game that we can all playand win.

Its in situations of challenges and constraints that we seem to optimally grow. Creating workarounds that work may be a key part of our existence here.