Fast:Forward Farther

My sixth favorite lesson of the year:

Dunking Machine – Twice this year I journeyed to the world’s largest oil platform 150 miles off the coast of Newfoundland to provide coaching for the leadership team. Preparation required multiple days of classroom certification – including survival maneuvers should the Sikorsky helicopter encounter problems during the 90-minute flight. Atlantic Ocean temperatures there are beyond cold, so training includes donning a neoprene flight suit, boarding a mock fuselage, being fully submerged, getting flipped upside down, and escaping by knocking out a window and floating to the surface… in 20 seconds. Of course, you do this four times. Spending eight days with the 270 hearty souls on Hibernia is one of my proudest career achievements… and I get to return for more adventures in 2016.

Continuing counting down my best lessons of the year… #7:

Force Awakens – During our coaching sessions, one of my longtime clients inevitably finds solutions to his challenges by verbalizing options and making a decision. A few months ago he laughed and said, “There you go again, David, sitting silent and using that Jedi mind trick ability of yours to help me find the elusive obvious.” Actually, an essential element of a coaching relationship is for the coach to ask probing questions that challenge ingrained assumptions. Or, as Yoda said, the person being coached “must unlearn what you have learned.”

My 8th best lesson of 2015:

Poor Decision – Blue Bell ice cream is a legendary Texas product made for more than a century at the ‘little creamery in Brenham,’ a town of 16,000 about an hour from our house. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention linked a listeria outbreak – including three deaths – to the family-owned company. Blue Bell was slow to respond, choosing a limited recall before ultimately being forced to shut down all production. One of my clients is a cheese manufacturer in Wisconsin. When I told the head of product safety about the approach by the nation’s third largest ice cream maker, he shared the Farmer’s Rule: “Your first loss is the cheapest. Do the right thing and fix it today.”