Unambiguously unrelenting, unyielding, undeterred and undaunted

The question "What does 'good' look like?" was close to the surface of my brain when I was asked to get on a conference call about writing an introductory statement to an annual report. The proposed theme was "Shaping our own future." I was given a list of key messages that began with a statement about staying "ahead of the curve" despite "unprecedented economic challenges."

On the call, I said I wasn't very interested in asserting that we were shaping our own future, but I could get interested in exploring what "good" looks like in a time of unprecedented economic challenges. My friends gave me an hour to come up with something, because it was 11 o'clock on a Friday morning and the design concept would be presented on Monday afternoon.

This is what I wrote:

In the face of unprecedented economic challenges, what does uncommon achievement look like? We believe it's unrelenting client focus and unyielding pursuit of service quality and operational productivity, powered by undeterred associates, enabling an undaunted growth agenda and leading to financials that are undeniably solid, and unquestionably stable. Unambiguously.

I averred that the repetition of the prefix un- was an appropriate way to state positives in an off-the-charts bad year. When nobody is setting the world on fire, pressing on with undeterred associates and an undaunted growth agenda looks pretty good.

The Un- concept was presented as an alternative to Shaping our own future, and Un- won.

Oh, and why was the question, "What does 'good' look like?" on the surface of my brain? Because I had just finished two very fun days with three colleagues talking about how to translate leadership intentions into organizational behaviors in a time of upheaval. One of the levers we had settled on was to answer the question "What does 'good' look like?" in the new world we're trying to create. More on that later...

A sticky sentence

The second principle of sticky ideas, in the Heath Brothers' fine book, Made to Stick, is Unexpectedness. "We need to violate people's expectations," they say. It is not their intention to make this next assertion, but it is mine: you can violate people's expectations with a single sentence. My five-year-old grandson did it recently in a supermarket parking lot.

He hadn't had any breakfast or lunch, and we were in the middle of grocery shopping about 1 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Adam wanted to start eating the fresh pizza we had picked up in the deli department. I said no. He asked again at the checkout counter. I said no. On the way to the car, he asked if he could eat a slice on the way home. Again I said no. As I started to back out of the parking space, his stomach growled, and he said:

"I just heard myself starving."

Grammy and I laughed so hard I had to stop the car. I've repeated that sentence to lots of people, and they in turn have repeated it. Expectations are violated every time.

Words: how they look, and the sounds they make

I was working with a graphic designer friend on the renaming of a company, and he suggested the name: plumb.

I guess I didn't warmly embrace it. So he says, "Bill, sometimes you pick a word for how it looks more than for what it means." He points out the descending "p" and ascending "b" at the front and back of the word, and in the middle, the round mounds of the "m" right behind the scooping "u." And I saw the beauty of it all.

Tonight I was looking at a piece of print copy I had written and thought, "Yeah, and sometimes you choose a word for the sound it makes." Like this:

There’s a place where this can happen.

A pace at which it all unfolds to your liking.

A case for why it works.

A grace in the daily nature of it.

And a space, in the midst of it all –

among the activities, the friendships, the continuum of care –

a space that feels like home to you.