inspiration – Page 3 – Emma Lo Russo

August 3, 2009March 29, 2017

The King and I…(and a story of learning courage)

This is not the start of some fictional story or make believe anecdote. Nor is it about my special memories of my mother, sisters and I all singing along to the Friday night movie special of The King and I, imagining what those days were like of impossible dresses and outrageous social expectations of women. This story is about courage and how The King and I played a role in teaching me about courage.

There were many messages of courage throughout the movie – the courage to follow your dreams, the courage to stand up to a bully or to fight for better outcomes despite the conventions of the day.

However my biggest lesson from The King and I came from having the courage to overcome your fears. Although this may sound corny, it is a real story and I will tell you how I learned to develop courage.

About 3 years into the workforce, I put my hand up to take on a big project. It involved doing some strategy work for a bunch of super smart, confident, talented, experienced – and as it turned out – extremely demanding people.

The brief turned out to be much more difficult and challenging than I had first expected. Certainly it was beyond my experience and knowledge of that time. I felt out of my depth and felt all the physical signs that come with fearing the enormous task and expectations in front of me – heart racing, legs shaking, stomach knotting and mind racing. At that moment of fear and crisis, in amongst thinking of all the reasons to not be able to say yes or to limit somehow what was possible to something more reasonable, somewhere out of the depths of memory, a song started playing in the back of my mind.

It went like this…

Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune, So no one will suspect
I’m afraid.

While shivering in my shoes, I strike a careless pose
And whistle a happy tune, And no one ever knows
I’m afraid.

The result of this deception, Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people I fear,
I fool myself as well!

And sure enough by immediately changing my focus from fear to “I will find a way”, and when I showed confidence that what was being demanded was possible, I actually began to believe those project goals could be reached that it was just a matter of finding the way. It allowed an immediate settling in my mind and an unwinding of my stomach so I could be free to focus on finding the solution and the “how”. In the example I mentioned, I confidently stated what they briefed could be achieved and shared a rough outline of the strategy and a plan of action. I included what the dependencies would be and set a new time to meet to present the more detailed strategy which bought me more time to work through the details.

The result was extremely positive. The goals were reached and a great sense of satisfaction and respect was gained.

But the biggest positive for me was the lesson of courage that it taught me. I was able to put the art of make believing I was brave, and focusing on the positives in every situation, and finding that I was actually brave and positive enough to face anything. By finding a strategy to overcome my fears, it allowed me to find the courage to overcome barriers, find solutions and be confident to continuously look for and do new things.

I have adopted this approach many, many times – whether it be walking into a new networking situation, addressing a large group of people, taking on what may seem to be the impossible brief or role. Each time you find you can do something, it builds your confidence to explore and overcome any future challenging situation. This strategy can be adopted as much in our personal lives as it can in our professional lives.

We can all achieve so much more if we allow ourselves to go as close to the edge of impossible as we can before we allow ourselves to feel limitations or constraints. If we limit our scope to something that feels safer, more comfortable, more easy – we lose the possibility of breaking new ground and achieving something truly new, remarkable and special.

The more we believe we can do something, the more others will believe you can and that they can do it too. As a leader, you will find that if you demonstrate believe, then you will have your people help you do whatever it is you need to do.

And so as the song continues…

Make believe you’re brave,

And the trick will take you far.

You may be as brave
As you make believe you are.

(Lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1951. The Movie “The King and I” starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr by 20^th Century Fox, 1956.)

July 22, 2009March 29, 2017

Taking your product to market – How to turn your product into a business

Emma presented the topic “Taking your product to market – How to turn your product into a business” at BootUpCamp, an intensive workshop where participants go from an idea to a fully operational web business in two weeks.

To watch Emma’s presentation go to:

Part 1: http://www.viddler.com/explore/BootUpCamp/videos/10/

Part 2: http://www.viddler.com/explore/BootUpCamp/videos/11/

Part 3: http://www.viddler.com/explore/BootUpCamp/videos/12/

Part 4: http://www.viddler.com/explore/BootUpCamp/videos/13/

July 8, 2009March 29, 2017

The power of “Pressing the Flesh”

It doesn’t matter how clever we are. Nor does it matter how many books, forums or surveys we read. Nor how many official meetings we attend. If we do not get out there to “press the flesh” we are not going to be across what is really happening in the world we are responsible for.

Without directly talking to those you have responsibility for – whether this be your employees, customers, investors, family or community – how can you really be confident you have a handle on their real sentiment and emotion? Can you really know how your recent decisions have impacted them? Be certain that what you think is important to them is the same as what they think is important?

The only way to really know is to stop, ask and to listen yourself to the people you are responsible for, and if you can, to spend some time “walking in their shoes”. This can never be met by having this outsourced or filtered through other people.

It may require you to consider it as an imperative, a percentage of time you set aside, or build it into your daily schedule to ensure you are spending enough time being physically connected to the people you are leading and are responsible for. As much as possible, be engaged regularly and as close as possible on their terms, without the formality of a pre-determined agenda. The less rehearsed the encounter, the fresher your read on what is really happening.

It does not have to take up a huge chunk of your time or be a major single event. You can daily walk the corridors and visit workstations taking time to talk to people on the way to somewhere else. Or allocate a day a month to visit your customers’ businesses – and really talk to those who are using your products or services. Or man the phones, have open lunches, create social events and actively participate or help out if someone is away. There are many ways you can get out there and press the flesh. But it is essential that you break the shackles of your work desk. You need to go where you do not normally go. Talk to those you don’t normally talk to. You need to look to encounter as much of a reality of all your people (those you have a responsibility for) as you can.

The powerful return is far greater than helping others feel good. It is about getting a firsthand account and measure of what exactly is happening. It allows you to see what actions you may wish or need to take. What priorities to adjust or what new initiatives you may need to introduce. You may discover you need to make different types of investments or decisions but it is more than likely you will discover that you will need to improve general communications.

You may discover that this practice uncovers a great new opportunity. An idea that can set your organization apart. A product concept that becomes the next big thing. Or just find that these actions of you connecting can energize your team to deliver something greater than before.

If you genuinely care about your people and align everyone under a common vision that they believe in, they too will respond with care, passion and commitment. By engaging directly, they will feel valued and that they have a voice. That they are not dispensable or not important to you, but are instead seen by you to be important and part of helping create something great.

One of the more likely outcomes is the energy source you yourself will gain. Remembering why you went into business, corporate, NFP or office in the first place.

So go on, get out there. Start pressing the flesh. Now.

June 29, 2009March 29, 2017

Get something positive out of the recession

Emma Lo Russo offers five tips (to electronics organizations) for grasping opportunities created by the downturn. Read the article as published in Electronics Weekly, 24 June 2009, and as promoted on the cover page and published on page 10. Electronics Weekly targets electronic product organizations and electronics engineers.

Full transcript of article below:

Recessions get a bad press. But they are really opportunities with halitosis. Once you get over the shock, you can set to and work with the opportunities to create breakthroughs. It’s all about channeling recessions in a positive way.

The electronics design sector is ripe for this kind of thinking. The current recession can be deployed in your favour, to blast away the staid thinking that abounds in the sector. That things are done the way they are done because they have always been that way is a common refrain. Time it went the way of the thermionic valve.

Here are five tips, made with appropriate humility, that reflect the opportunities for change under the cover of the current recession:

Innovate

Nothing that has gone before will be good enough for the future. This is code for “innovate” and innovate means doing different things in different ways, not doing things better.

So take a holistic approach to electronics design that starts with the broader desired user experience. How do they want to interact with your product (not how you want them to interact)?

And take a close look at the rule book on which you base your design methodology. Does it still serve your needs, or does it now struggle to do so? Is it based on a divide-and-conquer approach to electronics design, in which you divide the complexity of the task into manageable elements to conquer the design comlexity, only to find that you have killed off innovation?

Connectivity

It doesn’t matter how cool it is if it’s not connected. I doubt you need reminding that connectivity is the most important attribute of any device today. This is also code for saying that making something look cool is the minimum attribute of a successful product, and everyone will copy you very quickly.

If the past 40 years of electronics was the age of miniaturisation, we are already well into the age of connectivity. The next generation of electronic products will not be stand-alone devices, as they have been in the past. Instead, electronic products are being promoted, to become elements in much bigger ecosystems. They are now the means by which users tap into these ecosystems. The metal, silicon and plastics from which they are made become less relevant in this much broader view of design.

So, design from this perspective. That means start (once you have worked out the desired user experience, of course) with creating the intelligence you want to pour into the product, and then, and only then, find the right device hardware into which to pour it. After all, you don’t create a statue by starting with the mould. You reflect first on the emotional connection you want to make with the work of art you are about to create.

Intelligence

It doesn’t matter how cool it is if it’s dumb. Intelligence is at the core of successful products, and not just successful consumer electronic products. The intelligence of a device is also how you will differentiate in the future, and it is much more difficult to copy than hardware.

Designers must stop thinking of a design as discrete hardware, programmable hardware and software, and instead define a design by its functionality, and then map this functionality to the most appropriate implementation.

The true value inside tomorrow’s products is defined by the soft elements of the design. These soft elements should be the focus and the place to start. Don’t constrain the critical properties, its function, connectivity and the user experience of the end product before you have even started.

Changing competition

You no longer know who your competition is, or where they’re based. Sorry for stating the obvious. But one bad thing about recessions is that they can camouflage a much larger shift that had started before the recession kicked in.

Take a deep breath, Google “innovation” and see what comes up. These data show one thing: that the design and manufacture of products even as sophisticated as electronic components will likely be done somewhere else in the future. The question to ask, therefore, is whether you want to play in this game, and what do you do to stay in the game?

Check your tools

Nothing should stop you from doing what you want to do, or have to do. This is code for assess your tools and support systems right now. If there is any aspect of what they offer, or how they work, that gets in your way, be ruthless. Change them. Change them now under the cover of the recession.

June 3, 2009March 29, 2017

Nurturing and inspiring tomorrow’s heroes

Most of our kids harbor a burning desire to be number one at something. They can easily conjure an image of themselves scoring the winning goal, coming first in a race, hitting the winning shot….but how many of them at first call on an image of the invention they are going to create that could change the world? Or a design of a building that breaks all previous thoughts or examples of possibilities? How confident beyond the age of two or three (when they really do believe they are a superhero), do they think they have a chance to be society’s hero? And if you asked them if they wanted to, would they think it is possible for them to be able to do so?

With three children of my own, and with experience of schooling across 3 stages (preschool, primary school, high school) and across four schools and three schooling types (State, Catholic and Private), I have discovered a distinct gap in our education system in helping nurture and inspire our children to become the inventors, entrepreneurs, and creators of tomorrow. As many of us know with our children, the connection between what they are learning today in school and how it helps them in their future is rarely understood by them. And to be honest, unless you raise the level of abstraction in how the skills they are really learning can be applied in life – it is difficult for us to provide an answer to that connection in a way that will satisfy them. More than that, it seems that whilst our children might get lucky with an inspirational teacher, the exploration of engineering something new, the time given to create and celebrate a new invention, learning how previous inventions have changed our lives and the extraordinary achievement it represented in its time, does seem to be lacking, particularly in the early years of schooling.

By the time our children hit high school, unless they have a particular self-interest, most do not relate their natural strengths or interest in Mathematics, English, or Art to the possibilities within engineering and invention. We begin to prescribe requirements for university entry scores in relation to possibilities for pre-defined career paths, but are we really engaging our future minds on the problems, opportunities and possibilities that present every day for them to be inspired to solve and the path to get there?

Thomas Edison claimed that Genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. It seems to me that our education system is putting too much emphasis on, and we are providing too much by way of our own example, of the perspiration element. We seem to be ignoring the importance and are not providing enough emphasis and example-setting on the inspiration aspect. By emphasis I am talking within the design of our education system and in the time and responsibility we have as parents in encouraging, nurturing, and inspiring our children’s creativity and exploration of the “what if you could…” scenarios.

As we have increased our protective care, prescribing the after-school activities in a way that gives our children the best possible opportunities (or so we rationalize), is it possible that we may have not correctly weighed up the cost of preventing or constraining the ability for our children to run free and learn through natural exploration and invention? As we look to ensure enrichment, gifted and learning, and assisted programs to be supported at schools, have we put the same energy into seeing how creativity and invention is being supported and celebrated at school?

If we think about the future for our children, where do they sit within the world’s estimated population?

We know IQ is distributed evenly through the population. So how do we help our children make a positive footprint on the world, both for their generation and for their children’s generation?

Australia has an estimated population of 21million, an approximate 0.3% of the total world’s population. Rather than accepting it is OK to plod along, and accept what is, we have a responsibility and requirement to create a country of global visionaries. Those who see their playground as bigger than the constraints of our shorelines and the comfort we feel in our history of enjoying “the lucky country” and the “she’ll be right” philosophy.

It is absolutely critical that we teach our children now the importance and relevance of their uniqueness. Their unique mix of talent, skills, smarts and experiences. Of the same opportunity that they have as an individual to anyone, anywhere else in the world. They have an equal chance to make a difference; and that difference can come from their own creativity and invention. The problems they can be thinking about to solve may not just be the ones that they face, but rather the problems that we as a global nation of people face. Or may be something that can be enjoyed by others, enhancing and improving many lives, not just their own.

As a country, as business people, as parents – we have a responsibility to nurture and inspire our children to become tomorrow’s heroes.

I know I don’t have all the answers but I do want to keep asking the right questions. And help my children to keep pushing and exploring what could be. I would like for us all to find a way to break inertia, break stereotypical types, break the habits that too much “dead use of technology” like television and electronic games etc provide, and muster the energy to encourage our education system and society in general to promote and support invention and creativity in our children. For us to celebrate our inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs so they become the leading examples in our society.

Here are my thoughts of what we can do to nurture and inspire tomorrow’s heroes:

We must accept our responsibility to inspire and nurture our own children. We must help our children explore what could be and not allow them (or us) to get bogged down on the “how to get there”. We must make the process of exploration and creativity positive; we must invite it, suspend judgment, and allow for self evaluation. We must help our children see the beauty and the impact that inventions have bought us – everything from the printing press, microscope, bike, paperclip, microchip, spaceship all the way to the iphone and everything in-between! They are just a few examples – I am sure you can think of many more exciting examples to inspire others.

And it may be that with this focus, our children will dream bigger dreams, will be given the confidence to explore what could be and take will become tomorrow’s hero.