The Ethical and Practical Principles That Guide Jim’s Practice – 2024 Version
Wake up each day thinking “Today I may do the most important thing I will ever do.”
Act ethically, strive to find ideal behaviors, promptly, and urgently.
Be 15 minutes early, first in line, quicker than fast, smarter, sharper. Get the best choices.
Consistently challenge the standard assumptions and practices of our profession, build its importance, and enhance the ability of all practitioners to better serve others from the other’s perspective. Raise your hand. Your most powerful change tool: be Inconsistent.
Do the doable; know the knowable; get the getable; arrange the arrangeable.
Expect to be helpful and useful. Teach Pattern recognition the source of most successes.
Focus on what truly matters. Always through an ethical lens.
Go beyond what those you work with believe or already think they know.
Intend to make a constructive ethical difference every day. Ask better questions.
Intentionally look at every situation and circumstance from different perspectives.
Look out for the real victims. Act to protect them and prevent more.
Remember, it’s your boss’s “bus.” They get to drive it wherever they want. If you don’t like it, or can’t deal with it, hop off and go to somebody else’s bus, or drive your own.
Every issue, question, concern, or problem is a management issue, leadership question, concern, or problem before it is any other kind of issue, question, concern, or problem.
Start where leadership or management is or you will arrive at different destinations.
Recommend doable, sensible options. Help the boss build solutions. That’s what they do.
Preserve being heard: If the boss won’t agree to or do your suggestion in 10 days, they never will. Give it up and suggest something else. New ideas get old fast.
Do the Platinum Rule: help others help others achieve what matters to them from their perspective. You will reap the thanks and gratitude you almost never get acting alone. Greet enthusiastically, respond faster, suggest the ground rules, almost always win.
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** “To the extent that any single [leadership] quality determines success, that quality is adaptive capacity.” - Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas, “Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values and Defining Moments Shape Leaders”, 2008, Harvard Business School Press, page 91