In 2015, I drafted my personal ten commandments and shared them through this blog. It’s been several years, a global pandemic, a marriage, a relocation, multiple bosses, and now approaching another decade in the next couple of years. Yikes. So, I thought it was time to brush off the commandments.
Your life will change. Your job will change. Your circle of friends will evolve. But your core values and principles should be consistent. And while you may compromise on compensation, title, which restaurant to dine at or movie to see, there should be certain things about which you refuse to compromise. Your values should drive how you respond to change, success, and to trials. Here are my personal 10 Commandments.
I. Be Mindful
Every day. This is first because in many ways it is the toughest. This is continuing to smile as you are given very disappointing news. This is being respectful when you want to scream profanities. This is rising above and, as Michelle Obama famously said, when they go low, you go high. And, as my Dad says, unless God calls first, there will be a tomorrow.
I try to make choices that I believe benefit the world and make it a better place. The world is especially challenging right now, making this more difficult than normal, but I still do my best to make good choices. I remember that though I may disagree with others’ acts and opinions, God still calls on me to love them as I love myself.
II. Be Kind
There is never any reason to be an asshole. Being unkind is not going to convince people to be nice to you. In fact, being a jerk is most likely going to cause people to dislike you and do as little for you as they can. You’ll commonly hear that cheaters never win, and the same goes for mean people. My mom taught me this more than most. After weeks of hearing me crying about bullies in middle school, she called me to the back porch and gave me a tough lesson for which I am eternally grateful. In the end, she taught me, the nice people are going to win with their dignity in tact. Think about your life in high school. The bullies are usually the ones who end up working under the people who were kind. They peak in that one moment you feel you are at your lowest, but you continue to rise. You continue to shine. Be kind, always.
I have often told the story of a senior leader at a prior job that called me into a meeting with him and proceeded to tell me something that ultimately changed my career. He said that the clients loved my work and I could be an integral part of his team but that I was too nice. He said I needed to be more of an asshole and stop doing things like letting my team go home at 10:30 pm!! I smiled, always adhering to my #1 commandment, and thanked him for his candor. I then called the superiors back in our home office and told them I was not interested in working with this individual anymore and that I would be working to leave the project or leave the firm, whichever was necessary.
I chose to be the nice guy. Even if it meant I would not be a part of this “marquee” team, I refused to be an asshole for sport. And I’m blessed to be able to say today that I am better for it. Better health. Better financially. Greater opportunities opened up for me. And the people with whom I have worked before would typically work with me again. Something I could certainly not say for this particular “leader”.
III. Be Bold
Change doesn’t happen overnight, and it takes a lot of voices for anything to get done. Whatever you have strong feelings about, use your voice to speak up to enact change. You have to make your thoughts heard if you want to help make a difference. This could be through actually speaking, posting on social media, blogging, or helping behind the scenes in activist groups. Part of courage is helping to lift others up. You shouldn’t be bold just for yourself. You want to help make a difference for others.
Roy T. Bennett says it well, in his bookThe Light in the Heart: “Be brave to stand for what you believe in even if you stand alone.” So true! It is easy to be safe and so hard to take chances. Especially if you fall in any bucket where you lack safety in numbers.
This is likely my hardest commandment. This is risky. This is taking a chance where the safe path would be so much easier.
IV. Be Transparent
Be honest and clear about who you are. You, as an individual, are important. You need to let the world see you for who you truly are. I keep a photo of myself with my husband and my dog on a wall that is featured in all my zoom videos. It’s important to me that everyone understands who I am and what is important to me. In order to be transparent, you must first be self-aware. There is a quote by Prasad Mahes that encapsulates this, “The mind is like water. When it is turbulent, it is difficult to see. When it is calm, everything becomes clear.” You have to know who you are and embrace it to move forward in the world.
V. Be Authentic
It can be tempting to pretend to be something you are not to move ahead in the world. Don’t do this. It isn’t helping you or anyone else. You need to be true to who you are. Being inauthentic is going to cause you a lot of stress and pain in the long run. And it is frankly EXTREMELY TIRING to be fake. Sometimes I want to shake certain people and say “snap out of it” just to get them to take off the façade they have built up so strongly around their authentic selves. So I refuse to pretend to be someone else, even if it means I may not get certain opportunities as quickly.
VI. Be Curious
As a human being, you are designed to be learning all the time. The end of formal schooling does not mean you should stop seeking knowledge. Make it a point to continue to learn new things all the time. This could be a simple as getting a daily calendar with a new fact each day. Or, you could seek additional formal education to seek out something new. Some examples of things you could study are a new culture, a new religion, a new recipe, or something related to your job.
Always ask questions and seek new information. It will make you a better person. I blogged a while ago about Hiring for Character and Values. And one of the main targets was the intellectually curious!
VII. Be Honest
Lying is another behavior that can be tempting if it will help move things in a certain direction. However, it’s not worth it. Lying is never going to end up working out for you in the end. Someone is bound to find out it isn’t the truth, and that is going to cause a lot of trouble for you. Also, if you have to lie to get something done, it isn’t something you should be doing anyway. The mental stress lying will cause you, plus the fact it isn’t very ethical, is why you should avoid it at all costs. General rule of thumb: consider how you would feel if it appears on the cover of Wall Street Journal.
VIII. Be Straightforward
There is a well-known phrase that deals with being straightforward. You may hear someone reference the knife someone put in their back. This often means that someone thought another person was being honest with them but went behind their back and did something they didn’t approve of. You want to avoid this. If you have something to say to someone, just say it. Don’t talk behind their back on side channels or in backroom chatter. It’s rude, and it isn’t going to solve anything. It also doesn’t make you look good as people are probably judging you for talking that way about someone behind their back.
IX. Be Purposeful
Some people surround themselves with many people and call them all their friends. For some people, this works. However, I prefer to have a few select friends that I develop a deep friendship with, rather than a bunch of people I don’t actually have a connection with. I have changed my mindset from wanting to be surrounded by people to embracing time with a few close friends. In work, I try to seek out opportunities where my work can also drive positive change.
X. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
You are bound to make some mistakes. It is part of being human. However, you have to learn to recognize when a mistake is something that needs to be focused on and fixed versus when a mistake is something you need to just let go and move on. For example, failing one math test in school is not going to ruin your life. Learn from it and study harder next time. Stewing on the failure is going to make it harder to do well the next time. However, if you mess up something at work that is going to impact many people, you should work on fixing it and how to avoid making the mistake the next time. Just remember that the small mistakes aren’t going to matter at the end of your life. Don’t let the stress ruin your life.
YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED. You will know you deserve that promotion more than the other individual. You will listen to their words that tell you they value you yet not see any evidence. Someone you love will hurt you with their mistake or their transgression. You will see people with more money, more this, more that. Life isn’t always fair. But thank God for life and the opportunity to live another day regardless. Be grateful for the opportunity to walk around your neighborhood and find wonder in those little miracles you would otherwise ignore. Look at the ants at work. Smell the roses. Note the gentle swaying of the trees at the faintest breeze. Watch the birds chirp it up while the squirrels start to stock up for the winter season.
Remember that you work so that you may live. You don’t live to work. So Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!
Commandments are guidelines, ideals
The first part of living a successful life is knowing what you want to get out of it. It is up to you to decide what ideals you want to live your life by. Take my ten commandments as a guide and create your own list of commandments you want to guide your life. Perhaps your list will be similar to mine, or maybe you will have a completely different list. Do what works for you. I would love to hear from you.
Be well. Lead on.
Adam
Covid is still an issue. Please stay safe, get vaccinated, and wear a mask around lots of unknown people.
Adam L. Stanley
Connections Blog Technology. Leadership. Food. Life.
This blog was coauthored with Leif Maiorini, a tremendous leader within my team at Cushman & Wakefield. These are our views and not necessarily those of the company.
Your “citizens” do not need another arms race
You’re probably familiar with terms like “arms race” and “mutually assured destruction.” This refers to the Cold War period (1947 – 1991) between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union, who stockpiled nuclear arsenals to keep each other at bay. Now, it is true that none were ever deployed. Thus, we have two countries with lots of dead/decaying warheads, which is a costly mess to unwind economically and ecologically.
The net result is a great deal of value destruction (trillions of dollars). Driven by differences in social, economic and political points of view, their mutual desire to suppress the expansion of the other’s ideology is likely one of the greatest wastes of economic, political and social capital ever enacted.
The result was driven by fear, fear that the other would have a strategic advantage or a capability that would be used to tip the scale, changing the balance of power and resulting in global expansion of their opponent’s interests. The panic that one party would have an advantage over the other led to a considerable amount of irrational investment that would only be apparent in hindsight, long after the capital was spent, the leaders gone, and the stakeholder value destroyed.
You’ll hear the same term — “arms race” — applied to corporate America a lot right now. Nuclear war is far more serious than a concept like acqui-hiring, yes. But the arms race in corporate America, mostly seen through M&A, has the same root: irrational fear that the competition is getting ahead and need to take bold action to ensure that they have a defensive position. Far too often, ego-driven, growth-seeking leaders allow their personality get in the way of strong decision-making and experience (which presumably got them to that perch).
Many corporations are in their own version of a “cold war.” Afraid that their competitors might have an advantage, they rush into risky investments that usually result in a destruction of value for their stakeholders. Few companies get the synergy promised in their business case when they acquire another entity. More often than not, the acquiring company overpays and the culture clash results in a type of organ rejection that jettisons the best minds from the combined entity leaving the shareholders with a fraction of the anticipated value.
When you make decisions from a place of fear, power and ego, it can cloud your decision-making massively. The decisions that result are sub-optimal at best and essentially destroy companies at worst.
A good example here would be Hewlett Packard. They bought a company called Autonomy for $11.7 billion in 2011; because of accounting issues around that deal, they had to take a $8.8 billion write-down, which knocked out all their profits for an entire quarter. Some people have called HP and Compaq the worst merger in tech history. Meg Whitman has engineered an incredible turnaround there, but the company today is a much smaller version of what it was at peak.
Arms races rarely serve the best interests of “citizens”, in the case of corporations, our clients and customers. Thus, we believe we must seek first to understand unmet client demand and then invest in technologies and solutions that address those needs. We will not make technology investments from a position of fear, ego, or irrational impulse.
We continue to find partnering the most advantageous strategy for this rapidly changing space. With hundreds of start-ups entering the commercial real estate ecosystem each year, the ability to pivot and exploit the best solution is greater if you are able to partner. Few solutions offer true, differentiated capabilities and our clients dictate that we leverage and support a wide variety of solutions, often solutions that are seen as competing. This is difficult to do without an open, partnership approach.
We are a global real estate services company that leverages technology to increase the value we deliver to our citizenry. Acquiring a technology company does not make us a technology company, nor does it justify trading at multiples of revenue rather than EBITDA; thus it is possible that value is destroyed by most technology acquisitions. We look to strategic partnerships with aggregators like DMGI and Accruent as ways to support continued growth and investment in CRETech.
We continue to partner with innovative accelerators like MetaPropNYC, 1871 in Chicago, and Moderne Ventures to identify new players that could help us meet the needs of our clients as we work toward a POC as a Service model across our markets.
Our focus is on making our service lines more productive, creating a level of interconnectedness between them and our client, and providing the analytics that enable more effective decision making. Given that for most companies, real estate is their top (or second) largest expense, helping our customers get the greatest value from this investment is our top priority. .
So here’s the soapbox – Stop the arms race. The arms race described above — the Cold War version — certainly didn’t benefit any citizens. Companies have “citizens” too, those being clients and customers. So before you go out and make an irrational decision, ask a few questions:
What are the unmet client demands?
How should this demand be addressed? What are the solutions that create the greatest value?
Has this problem been solved? Is there something in the market (or a derivative market) that could help solve them?
What is the option that results in the greatest benefit to all parties and the greatest value for our customers?
What is the value of an acquisition, investment, or partnership? Who benefits? Are there competing solutions and will our strategy result in a transient, strategic, or little/no advantage for our stakeholders?
Would we be positioned to buy this market player? Is that the right decision?
What would that look like financially and culturally?
Are we buying this tech just to buy it, or is this serving a need and researched?
We believe that answering these questions, playing out the scenarios, and looking at the outcome with a high level of scrutiny will result in less acquisition activity, greater partnerships, and higher overall value for all involved.
Adam L. Stanley Connections Blog Technology. Leadership. Food. Life.
Virtual Reality: The New Reality For Real EstateIs virtual reality the new reality for real estate? This brief chat with BuiltWords was part of The Fourth Edition of the Cushman & Wakefield Occupier Edge e-zine, which highlights insights and trends identified and explained by global real estate experts. Check it out for more interesting articles and discussions on technology and other trends impacting the commercial real estate industry, including gamification, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and alternative talent sourcing. Do you have experience with virtual or augmented reality? Is it a fad or rad? Where do you see this technology going over the next few years?Be well. Lead on.Adam
Please stay safe.
Adam L. Stanley Connections BlogTechnology. Leadership. Food. Life.Follow me on Twitter | Connect with me on Linked In | Comment below.
Many of my American readers will have seen the commercial with an older woman who has fallen in the bathroom and needs help. “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up,” she calls out. Luckily, she has Life Alert, a device that allows customers to, in the event of an emergency, simply press a button on a small pendant and call for help. The commercial’s premise is that because this woman had thought about her weaknesses BEFORE she had the fall, she was able to be rescued and live to tell her story.
When do most businesses try to change, or shift something up? (A new revenue stream, new reporting structures, reduction in headcount, etc.) Usually — not always, but definitely the majority of the time — change management efforts come when the company is doing poorly. When things have fallen and they can’t get up! This is logical. Usually change is a reaction to less-than-expected performance, or the belief that the company needs to be shaken up to get back on track.
I came across this thought from Trevor Edwards, the President of NIKE Brand, recently. It speaks to the same idea:
“Most change is driven by poor performance, but rather than waiting for a crisis — consider disrupting the status quo when the numbers are strong. Trying to revamp your business in a crisis can lead to bad decisions. Your thought process will be clearer when things are going well.”
I couldn’t agree more. I also think it applies to both personal and professional life.
Making changes in your personal life
Personally, a lot of people try to make changes when they feel they are at rock bottom. They’ve lost a job, a relationship has ended, a family member or friend dies suddenly, and emotions send them grasping for change. But when you make a change at that point, you’re entirely reacting to the most recent negative event. If you got fired for a specific performance issue, you may over-focus on correcting that performance issue as you look for new jobs. But you may have been great at that aspect of a job; the evaluation may have been subjective, or you may have really been terminated to help the company meet a growth target. Likewise, running away from a job, or any other relationship, because things are bad can lead to a disastrous “boomerang” effect. You may hate the new [fill in the blank] more than the former.
Negativity reduces context. That’s a good reason to consider personal improvements when you’re already feeling good about life. It will give you more perspective.
Applying this to companies
On the professional front, I use the term “tour of duty” a lot. It’s a different way of thinking about the standard employment contract. Basically, you are bringing people in for specific jobs. They do those jobs and they either roll off or they transition onto another team/project. Josh Bersin, a people development thought leader, calls this a “team of teams” approach. You see it commonly in the military and in the consulting industry, and it’s becoming more commonplace elsewhere.
It makes sense because oftentimes, job roles are very unclear. They’re clear at first — the hiring was a response to an immediate need of a hiring manager — but after that need becomes less of a priority, the person hired is still on the books. Sometimes, they can become a 8-to-10-year employee and not have a clear role for much of that time. This limits flexibility of the organization. You can’t do strategic pivots, and you can’t do effective change management, if you have a lot of people locked into intractable, potentially unnecessary roles.
The elephant in the room here is terminations. When we talk about companies changing in the bad times instead of the good times, usually the main way that happens is terminations. These happen for a variety of reasons: companies trying to clear money to prove growth, trying to deal with a performance issue that’s been lingering, or a host of other financial reasons.
Regardless of why the company is embarking on terminations, it’s almost always a bad play. Research has shown layoffs don’t have short or long-term benefits. They’re simply just a reaction to a bad revenue cycle.
If you consider the approach of “change while times are good” and you structure your hiring more as “tour of duty,” I think a lot of these issues can be alleviated. Sadly, the nature of most companies these days isn’t to reward employee longevity. So from an employee side, loyalty has been declining for years as people think they may be better off thinking as independent contractors moving from one project to the next.
Consider the example of Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp. They were doing super well in 2014, onboarding 100s of new clients every day. He still decided to radically shift the company and its reporting structures, saying at the time:
“Change is great – as long as it’s not forced change. Forced change is often resented change. When you’re forced to change because things aren’t going well, you’re often rushed and unhappy. When you decide to change when things are going great, you can do it on your own schedule and your own way. That’s what we decided to do – we decided to make this change right now while business has never been better.”
Amen, sir.
Top 3 reasons to change while times are good
Busy executives, especially those who are driving innovation in the digital economy, will continue to struggle with organizational change in the midst of transformation change. BUt the fact is, they are completely interdependent. You cannot lead a major business transformation without a people transformation and vice versa. So, constantly looking at your organization and looking for ways to restructure, rethink, reduce, and redeploy will make you more successful.
In short, there are three major benefits to changing while times are good:
Priority of focus: The changes occur on your time/schedule, as opposed to a rushed process to meet certain accounting goals.
Sensitive to employees: Changing in boom periods allows for thoughtful change that’s ultimately considerate of individual impact.
Smarter: When you change in a good cycle, the decisions will be better and rooted in a clearer thought process.
I know this isn’t always possible, and sometimes in the good periods you just want to ride the train of revenue growth and not think about what can be changed, but I hope the above is a compelling context for why your best quarters are exactly the time to shake things up.
Be well. Lead On. Adam
Adam L. Stanley Connections Blog Technology. Leadership. Food. Life.
The last year that stunk as much as this year was 2010. That was the year my step-dad died. My work got really stressful for a few reasons I will not share here. There was a horrific earthquake in Haiti and a tragic disaster with the BP oil spill. My TV favorite actors from The Golden Girls, Different Strokes, Dynasty, and Designing Women died. I wasted two hours watching the astoundingly awful “Grown Ups” with Adam Sandler that I can never get back. And politics started getting really nasty in America.
Well, this year, lovely 2016, is going down in such a way as to make that year look like roses. Work was great albeit there were tons of challenges and complex problems. My family had a great year. We lost my aunt and had some health challenges but were able to celebrate a few weddings, births, and graduations and other fun events that made Family Life more joyful in 2016.
2016: Worst Year?
Outside of family and work life however, it was a true shitshow of a year. My idols started to drop: Prince, David Bowie, George Michael, Alan Thicke, Natalie Cole, Mohammed Ali… Professor Snape. Come on!! I recently looked at the list of famous people who called it quits this year. Shocking. Like they were desperate to leave before ….
Which brings me to that other big thing that happened this year…. The election. What a season. Great for Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin as The Donald was almost as funny as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. With SEVENTEEN candidates, it was bound to produce ample material. Sadly, 2016 also became the year where it seems the country stopped laughing. Hatred. Mistrust. Anger. So much Negativity.
There were multiple mass murders in 2016. Including ones that truly hurt me more than I would have imagined. Considering myself in my younger days traveling for work and occasionally visiting nightclubs or bars in the cities in which I worked. And pondering what if an insane, conflicted, homicidal man had come to one of those clubs and killed almost fifty innocent people. (#Pulse) Picturing walking the streets of Paris and the Christmas markets I experienced in Hamburg as I remember with horror hearing about the Nice and Berlin truck murders.
And Chicago…. I. Just. Can’t. So many young children dying from senseless gang violence. High taxes and troubled schools. Politicians in and out of jail. And so many closed minds!
To be honest, I’m not actually wanting to say goodbye to 2016 as much as I’m saying good riddance. Good riddance to the hate and the nastiness. Good riddance to the racism on all sides. Good riddance to feeling forced to choose sides between two outrageously flawed individuals, between rich and poor, black and white, LGBT or “straight”, Muslim and Christian. And good riddance to the hatred that resulted in so many deaths of innocent people. Good riddance to the steady stream of news of my favorite TV and music stars passing.
2017. I welcome you with renewed focus on showing love and compassion. I anxiously await more phone calls to and from friends. I pray that peace will prevail SOMEWHERE. I am hopeful that the worst is behind us and the best is yet to come. And regardless of whether I’m proven right or massively wrong, I will still never compromise my values. I will choose love over hate. And I will live each day as if it’s my last. That’s what really matters.
As always, I will not write a New Years Resolution, though I do hope to shed a few pounds and get more sleep in 2017 (most would say that is more of a necessity than a resolutional goal). However, I will suggest that we try to work together to make 2017 more forgiving, more loving, and more joyful than 2016. And I could find no one better (with the exception of Jesus) to give us the words to live by as we move into the New Year than the woman who was canonized into sainthood this year, Mother Theresa.
I love you each, specially, for whatever role you play in our world. You BE you and do it as GOOD as you can. Your life matters.
On the professional front, I use the term “tour of duty” a lot. It’s a different way of thinking about the standard employment contract. Basically, you are bringing people in for specific jobs. They do those jobs and they either roll off or they transition onto another team/project. Josh Bersin, a people development thought leader, 
Top 3 reasons to change while times are good
