Continued from page 1 ...
NWC: The way technology is today, people equate it to drinking from the fire hose -- you get technology overload.
JP: I think that's a human factor. It's the humans that created that situation, and it's easy to jump into that timeframe. My wife would say to me, "When do you have time to think?" And it suddenly dawned on me. I'm in the shower -- that's my thinking time -- or when I'm sleeping, something's going through my mind. And it became clear -- you get on the plane, you're doing e-mail, you're on the computer; you get off the plane, your pager's going off, you pick up your cell phone as soon as you get off the plane... Humans are creating that scenario.
I got to the point where I said, "I'm not taking my laptop unless I'm giving a presentation somewhere and I have to take it." So I sit on the plane, and I take out a notepad, and I think. I use that as thinking time and doodling time and strategy sessions. It comes back to those "P"s. ...If you don't strategize and create visions and think, you become a slave to technology -- not the technology becoming a slave to you. It's a matter of maintaining that master/slave relationship we have with technology, and you've got to know when to turn it off just like we needed to know when to turn off the television.
NWC: And was that one of the most difficult things for you to do, to break free of technology and damn the consequences?
JP: Well, it's not that you can damn the consequences. When I first started to work, I'd go into my boss's office and he'd have piles of paperwork in his in-tray, and I said to him, "It must take you a while to go through that." He said, "No, not really." I said, "Well, tell me how." And he said, "I ignore it. People come back for the stuff that's important -- all the other stuff is not important." So that was one learning experience, and the majority of it is true. What that does is sort out a lot of chaff. It has its own flaws in it, but most of the time it works pretty well...if you delay your response for a day, 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter a damn. In fact, it's probably better because you had more time to do a quality response.
NWC: Then there are people who say, "You have to respond to everything within a certain timeframe."
JP: Technology allows us to do so many more things at the same time. I mean, you can send an e-mail and within seconds you can get a response. And you can do this Sunday night at midnight, and suddenly you're having an e-mail conversation with somebody, and have you had time to think, "Is this important right now? Do you really need to think about it?" But because you know someone's there... it's real-time engineering as opposed to well-thought-out process engineering.
It's that immediate response of technology that's forcing us into a situation of reaction as opposed to thinking. We've become reactionary and real-time implementers and developers and engineers as opposed to proper planners. ... I mean, I sit now, now I'm aware of it, I sit and watch others, and I smile and think, "Wow. They haven't got it yet. They don't understand yet." I feel I'm much more productive, more balanced, and more aware. It's awareness. I feel more aware than most people.
NWC: Name one quality you have that has helped you come as far as you are. Is it the ability to back off and be unemotional? Or what?
JP: You need support from your family. I think that's crucial. If you don't have support from your family it makes life much more difficult. I've been fortunate to have incredible support from my family.
Then you need to have basic skills. It all depends on the job you're doing, but what's made me successful, I think, is visionary skill, practical skills, execution skills, motivation skills, team-building skills and the ability to integrate all those together as one. In other words, you have people that can do each one of those things, but using them all in harmony is like creating a different instrument and creating music as an orchestra, as opposed to everybody playing an individual instrument and having it not make sense. ...What's also made me successful is the ability to relate to people on a human basis, an individual basis, recognizing their efforts, to be at the level of everyone, be part of a team, not be a whip handler or a dictator. Share in everyone's personal views and be part of the solution not the problem, and also be empathetic -- have a lot of empathy for individual situations because it develops loyalty, allegiance, and trust.
Trust is crucial. If you have the trust of the people on your team, if they trust you [enough] to jump off a cliff and say on the way down, "John, we trust you, but why did we jump?" -- it's that level of relationship that you can build once you have trust and respect. It creates allegiance, and that way you create team spirit as a collective whole, which allows you to achieve so many different things. There's nothing that a team pulling together with trust, empathy, and respect for one another can't achieve. They can have everything in the world, anything in the world.
RSS
