It’s not often that I meet a legendary business leader. It’s less often that I receive a book in the mail from that person. So when Robert K. Irving sent me a copy of The Founder’s Mentality by Chris Zook and James Allen, I was eager to discover what Mr. Irving found to be so compelling.

What I found was a book that answered the twin questions: why do successful, growing organizations stall, and what can their leaders do to restore sustainable growth? Every business has to find an answer to those questions. So do volunteer organizations.

I work for a family-owned business that lives many of the same values that Mr. Irving described as the bedrock of his companies. I was not surprised, then, that The Founder’s Mentality is applicable to my work. What delighted me was how relevant it is to my volunteer activities.

What does the founder’s mentality look like?

• It features a bold sense of mission that everyone in the organization understands.
• It obsesses about the front line, where employees interact with customers and suppliers.
• It shares an owner’s mindset, which is biased towards action and against bureaucracy.

As I worked through the opening chapters, I kept nodding in recognition. Among others, I recognized:

• Robert K. Irving, who had paid a visit to our company—a new customer—to personally ask whether we were being well served and to explore whether we could find more opportunities to do business together.
• Ward Griffin, whose passion for customer service has been the north star during our company’s growth over the past two decades.
• Fr. Michael White from Timonium, Maryland, and Fr. James Mallon from Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaders in a movement to build vibrant, energetic Catholic parishes.

The authors maintain that success and growth present an organization with potentially lethal challenges. As they grow, businesses become more complex. They offer more products, they cover larger areas, they hire more people. Volunteer organizations introduce more programs and recruit more volunteers. Each addition adds complexity and dilutes the common vision. Growth stalls and, at best, the organization treads water.

Reigniting growth depends on adopting, maintaining, and spreading the founder’s mentality throughout the organization. A sampling of the recommended practical steps include:

• Embed the front-line obsession throughout the organization.
• Open up the lines of communication.
• Share the burden of leadership.

Do I recommend The Founder’s Mentality? Heartily. For anyone who cares about their business or volunteer organization, it offers important insights and practical suggestions. I expect it will be part of my working library for years to come.

A Technique for Producing Ideas nestled on Remembrance of Times Past

In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.
[Srini Pillay, Harvard Business Review]

We’ve all experienced it. We grind away at a problem until we give up. When we leave our grindstone in despair and forget that it exists, inspiration strikes. If you’re like me, at that moment you ask yourself: “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?”

There’s a simple answer. You didn’t lose focus fast enough.

It turns out that neuroscience is giving us permission to drop our focus. If we let our brain’s “Default Mode Network” take over, we can relax while it “activates old
memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas.” It’s like having a mental butler serve up ideas while we engage in positive constructive daydreaming, pretend to be someone else or take a nap. [Pillay]

Science has spoken. Besides, who would want to argue against naps and creative play?

If you don’t live by every word that falls from the lips of neuroscientists, there are other, more entertaining sources to confirm your bias that napping and play are good for you.

James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas made the same point in 1939 without the arcane references to the inner working of the brain. In the space of 5,600 words (only 280 20-word tweets for those who live on Twitter-sized crumbs) he told advertising executives how to generate ideas: do the detailed research about your product and then drop the problem. When the idea interrupts your relaxation, write it down and get back to work, refining and testing the idea.

Maybe Young got his idea from Proust. (Trigger warning: Remembrance of Times Past is the equivalent of nearly 60,000 20-word tweets.)

In trying to force his mind to recall something he wanted to picture, Proust’s Marcel failed ten times in succession.

And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and my hopes for to-morrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

In the same way, he struggled to recall the appearance of towns he had visited, people he had met, music he had heard. Almost always, the recognition returned when he stopped dredging the river of his memories.

Filing away memories worked in a similar way. Here’s how Marcel came to internalize music he listened to:

…with regard to works we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning.

So take heart. Developing ideas, remembering, and learning all benefit from diversion and loss of focus. Need convincing? Skip the neuroscience and advertising executives. Lose yourself in Proust. Nap with his book in your lap. Your creative genius will thank you.

The demand for more and distinctive marketing content chews through a writer’s time and energy like a cloud of grasshoppers devouring a wheat field. Calls for tweets, blog posts, LinkedIn updates, landing pages, emails, flyers, ads, RFP responses — they ride in on the west wind and take bite after bite until the content calendar is shredded.

The agriculture industry has learned how to fend off grasshoppers. Marketers? Still learning. When not writing, marketers can often be found reading about writing. We check tweets, blog posts, ebooks and courses that promise to help us advance in our craft.  Instead of giving us powerful tools to hold back the swarm, much of the advice goes like this:

• create awesome content
• create jaw-dropping headlines
• create out-of-this-world images
• capture the “wow” factor

The west wind keeps blowing in the grasshoppers, so we need resources that will help us write faster, better, more consistently. Fortunately, there’s good material to be found. Ann Handley’s Everybody Writes fills an important need and should be on every active marketer’s reading list.

Everybody Writes delivers well-organized chapters in a reference book divided into six parts:

Part I. Writing rules: how to write better (and how to hate writing less)

Part II. Writing rules: grammar and usage

Part III. Story rules

Part IV. Publishing rules

Part V. 13 things marketers write

Part VI. Content tools

The book is notable for its generous spirit. Ann Handley not only shares her own experience and advice but shines a spotlight on other resources. In doing so, she has created a reference book that artfully serves as a springboard for writers eager to learn more about their craft.

I turn to Part V often. It provides useful tactics for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, landing pages, infographics, blog posts and annual reports. A copy of the chart “The Ideal Length for Blog Posts, Podcast, Facebook Posts, Tweets, and Other Marketing Content” sits beside my keyboard.

In every book, there’s a passage or idea that flashes a green light to continue or a red light to set the book aside. The green light began flashing in Chapter 28, “Deadlines are the WD-40 of Writing,” when I read :

Do the best work you can by the deadline you’ve set, and then consider your writing project finished.

Over the years, I’ve learned that no matter what type of work I’m called upon to do, the same rule applies: deadlines are the ultimate constraint. Usually, deadlines are imposed by an external party.

• In politics, issues have to be dealt with in time to head off bigger problems.
• If RFP responses aren’t delivered to the purchasing agent by the deadline, the response won’t be opened.
• In the printing industry, the customer’s deadline sets the scheduling in motion.

If left to create their own deadlines, undisciplined writers are doomed.  The urge for perfection undermines their schedule. Their writing seizes up like a rusted piece of farm equipment. The grasshoppers swarm the field and leave behind devastation until the WD-40 puts the equipment back into the field. In Handley’s words, “… give yourself a hard deadline. And then strictly adhere to it.”

[Ann Handley. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014. Follow Ann Handley on Twitter: @annhandley.]

Can anyone win the name game? You know the one I mean. You’re at an event and a friend introduces you to someone. Your friend lobs the name to you like a hanging curve ball, expecting you to hit it out of the park. Whiff! The name flits past you and the umpire rings you up. Another failed connection!

If you’ve experienced this, you’re in good company. Forgetting names is one of the three most common getting-to-know-you problems people have, according to Keith Rollag in the December 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review. The others are—you guessed it—hesitating to introduce yourself and failing to ask questions.

It’s the “names challenge” that interests me. Some jobs just demand that ability. For example, how do the good politicians and priests keep their mental Rolodex up-to-date? The politicians remember their constituents and the priests put a name to each sheep in their flock. Do they have skill or talent? Or help from above?

Rollag advises us to work at it: say the name in conversation right after hearing it; write it down as soon as you can and review your notes until the name is locked in; and, of course, create a vivid image to link the name with an unforgettable object or situation. Picture Rock Hudson as a giant boulder dropped into a river, with the New York City skyline in the background.

Can this advice work? Seeing is believing, so I’ve long been a believer. In the summer of 1972, I took a course in Canadian history from Dr. Bev Koester. As the students straggled into the classroom for the first session, he studied us without uttering a word. When everyone was seated, he began to take attendance.

“Mr. Williams,” followed by long seconds of silent scrutiny.

“Mr. Goski.” More silent scrutiny.

The process continued until all thirty students had been named, scrutinized and entered into his name bank. “Please take the same seat at our next two sessions, after which you will be welcome to sit where you please.”

The methodical roll call resumed in the second and third sessions. From then on, he used our names without hesitation or error, regardless of where we sat. A year later, I took another class from him and was greeted with “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Goski” as I entered the classroom.

By then, I had come to know why he had developed this skill. It was an essential part of his previous job—Clerk of the Saskatchewan Legislature. Dr. Koester was required to recognize each of the 59 members of the House in turn by the name of their constituency when the member rose to vote on an issue. [And yes, I never addressed him as anything other than “Dr. Koester.”]

After an interval as a spell-binding lecturer at the University of Regina, Bev Koester went on to become Clerk of the House of Commons, where he duly mastered the names and constituencies of 282 Members of Parliament. By then, I was working on Parliament Hill and would watch in admiration as he handled the standing votes: “The Honourable Member from Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, The Honourable Member from Kenora—Rainy River, The Honourable Member from Assiniboia” and so on, until the roll had been called.

How many hours had he spent, poring over lists and pictures of the Members, linking their names and constituencies to the faces? I don’t know, but I’m reasonably sure he had the memory work done before newly-elected Members even came within view of the Parliament Buildings.

So yes, we can win the name game. It takes desire, will and practice. Judging how clearly I remember my reaction when my name was called out by Dr. Koester after the interval of a year, the effort is worthwhile.

[For further information about Dr. Bev Koester, see this brief Wikipedia article and this entry from Hansard. For more on succeeding in new situations, see Keith Rollag’s article in Harvard Business Review.]