Leadership Advice: How to Draw an Owl

I recently read a Seth Godin blog that compared leadership and business advice to being asked to draw an owl.  The article suggests that the approach typical of much business advice would be analogous to saying that there are two steps to drawing an owl.

First, you draw two shapes to represent the head and body.  Next, you draw the rest of the owl.  In other words, the advice is not very helpful. The statement that particularly caught my attention was what followed the above instruction. Godin suggests that “the difficult part is learning to see what an owl looks like. Drawing an owl involves thousands of small decisions, each based on the answer to just one question, what does the owl look like?” Godin suggests that the process of drawing, erasing and re-drawing is representative of the iterative process that we all go through as we learn to see the world.

I’d like to draw from the work of Betty Edwards who wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.  It can be a very useful exercise to learn to draw the owl by drawing the negative space that surrounds the owl.  If we pay too much attention to the details of the owl, then we might simply come up with the answers that are already known to us.  So, it can be a very useful exercise to see the owl differently than we might normally look at it.

Creativity can be a useful thing.

BIZBUZZ: Restak, Richard; The Naked Brain

This is episode 8 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations to challenge business owners to consider new possibilities and to Act Boldly.  The following video highlights some of the content from Richard Restak’s book The Naked Brain that grabbed my attention.

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to BIZ BUZZ.

I’ve chosen to comment on The Naked Brain, a book written by Richard Restak that deals essentially with the subject of emotion and logic.

I’d like to make three observations from the book that I feel are worth considering.

The first deals with verbal communication.  Restak contends that tone of voice is the most revealing of all sensory channels when it comes to detecting a speaker’s true feelings or beliefs.  Is our listening active enough that we pick up tone of voice?  Perhaps more importantly, do we pay attention to it?

My next observation deals with customer loyalty.  Restak states that customer loyalty has a profound emotional component.  He underscores the significance of this statement by indicating that a 5% increase in the number of loyal customers will, on average, increase your profit per customer by 25 to 100%.  That is very dramatic!

My final comment deals with some Gallup research that is presented in the book.  Gallup found that people stay loyal to brands that engage their trust and their affection.  The limbic part of our brain controls our emotions.  Are we reaching that emotional level with our customers?  Are they merely satisfied with our products & services or are they genuinely happy?

That’s it for The Naked Brain.

Your comments are always welcome.

Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.