Find Your Great Work has only just made it into this world for you, but for me it’s been percolating away for a couple of years.  One of the great pleasures of that time has been doing The Great Work Interviews, 20 – 30 minute conversations with people who make me think and who’ve got an opinion on Great Work.

Guy Kawasaki is one of those Names in the world of marketing and technology.  His break was working with Steve Jobs and being an advocate for the Apple Mac although he’s hardly been resting on his laurels.  He’s written nine books (The Art of the Start is a classic), starting numerous companies and is currently championing his latest project Alltop (a new and better way of getting the best information you care about from the web)

In this interview with Guy we talk about how Apple set him up (”I’ve spend the last 25 years coasting” he says inaccurately), the joy of being an entrepreneur, the importance of “engaging people who are seemingly not perfect” and what he sees as the three motivations for doing Great Work.

“I can sit and I can grind.  There’s nothing magical about what I do”

One of the most powerful insights for me from this interview came when I asked Guy how he managed to do so many things – writing, blogging, Twittering like a crazy man, not to mention running various companies.  What, I wanted to know, was the magical ingredient, the something-something that made him different.

You of course already know the answer – there IS no magic dust.  In fact, Guy puts it down to the fact that he’s “willing to grind it out” as being a big part of what’s driven the success.

This ties right in to what Seth Godin says about The Dip, of course and is a theme picked up in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art as well.  Doing Great Work doesn’t mean sitting and waiting for the muse or just lying around having ideas.  It’s about having the idea AND doing the grind.

=> Where do you need to grind today?

I’ve just had an article published in TrainingZone.co.uk about three (not-what-you-were-expecting) truths about coaching in organizations.

It’s a dilemma.  We all know coaching can be a useful intervention in organizational life, for the sake of both the individual and the company.  It’s one of the best ways to help Great Work flourish.

But for the most part, coaching isn’t having the impact it should.

So what’s going wrong?  And what can you do about it?

Here is the first of the three counter-intuitive insights I offer in the article:

1 Don’t create a coaching culture

‘We’re going to create a coaching culture’ is a commonly proclaimed goal, with some leader filled with visions of coaching reinventing life and work in that organisation.

But coaching alone is not always able to miraculously drive change, improve performance, increase happiness, make money and lift the level of engagement in an organisation. Coaching is a powerful tactic that is best used to support and achieve a specific business objective.

The focus on a ‘coaching culture’ runs the danger of confusing the means for the end, and it is a lack of context – why exactly do I need to use coaching? – that can undermine any attempts to get managers coaching. Commitment and engagement with coaching works best when there are two levels of context.

The first is the business context, and we’ve found that enhancing coaching skills works best when it’s serving a specific business purpose – for instance, building team resilience before a corporate re-branding and re-organisation, increasing key customer retention or reducing the churn of front-line sales staff.

The second is a personal context, or more bluntly: how will this help me and my work? Getting managers to see how coaching can be not just another thing to add to the to-do list, but rather a way of actually reducing their own workload while increasing the focus on their own ‘great work’ builds the likelihood of it being a tool that’s used. Context allows managers to see coaching as a support and a solution – and not just the latest HR trend.

You can read the full article here – and please feel free to comment on their site or on this.

“I learned … that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into you slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”
~ Brenda Ueland, journalist

It’s so hard to find a little solitude and idleness.  When I do create that for myself, I spend the first part of it ranting and raging and feeling confused and irresponsible and unsure just what the hell I’m doing here.

And I know for certain that inspiration doesn’t strike when I’m buried deep in the hard churn of Good Work, when I’m focused on productivity and efficiency and making sure I’m Getting Stuff Done.

It’s strange to think that one of the ways to find inspiration is to step into the insolent uncertainly of solitude and idleness, but I think it’s true.

And I suspect it won’t happen, at least not often, by chance.

You have to go and find it.

How will you find – then hold and protect – the space of idleness?  The place for inspiration?

This is it.

This is what you need to remember.

Created, and shared under Creative Commons, by Matt Jones -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3365682994/