Friday, August 8, 2008

Heads-Up, Heads-Down, Blame, Behavior, Fangs, and Fodder

Authors Miller and Blanchard, in their management/leadership book, “The Secret”, talk extensively about Heads-Up and Heads-Down work. Well, July was a whole lot about heads-down for your's truly.

There's an couple of old sayings about "remembering the trip and remembering which horse brung you to the dance" that keeps me reflecting on the past and it's doubtfull that I'll forget the past 12 months any time soon. A year ago, I would have never thought the sub-prime collapse would have such far reaching fangs.

A deep inside view of what has caused much of what you are experiencing can be found in Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla’s "The Chain of Blame.” Whether it was John Glenn's knowledge of how I like looking over the past, or the fact it is just good fodder, his book recommendation has fulfilled both.

Overall, I'm extremely thankful for our behavior this past year. One thing we’ve consistently done right during these reorganizational times has been how we've behaved. With the reverberations of the collapses have come auditors looking in every nook and cranny of every mortgage company of any good size.

How has Alethes done through all of this? Well, we’ve been poked and prodded very well thank you, and to-date, we've been blessed with good audit after good audit. One of the audits verified a modest increase in profits over the previous year. Thank you Lord.

My focus in the coming months will continue to be about building trust, truth, and best business practices; in essence, good behavior.

Along those lines, I’d like to point out something about the truth; when truth is a person’s guiding value it helps a person internalize wisdom and build good character. What we think about affects what we do; therefore, we practice the truth by regularly testing our thoughts, actions and words against it. What we regularly do builds habits and further shapes our character. Our character is displayed in our behavior.

Let’s practice good behavior.


Have a good weekend,

Danny

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that visualization is the key to success in any aspect of your life. With this you must have truth in your visualizations. When I look at our current market I see ways to capitalize on things that we do well which will make us all successful. I do not care to focus on negative media or thought but rather how great today will be when I wake up make a new homeowner just that an owner or see the smile on the kids face leaving closing talking about their new room. I believe if you have a vision of where you are going and use truth to light the path success will follow close behind.

DannyLSmith said...

I agree, we should never "focus" on anything negative. Yet, we must be aware of what caused the negative actions so as to not repeat them.

It is many times necessary to study and ponder on the actions for a period of time to really understand what happened.

Not focusing in the way that it brings you down, but just plain being smart and getting rid of blind spots.

There is so much from our own personal and cultural history from which we can learn.