A Note From The President

Avil Beckford, President

You present your idea and it gets a lukewarm response, don’t despair! Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, popularly known as Lewis Carroll, the very successful English writer, experienced modest success at first with Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. He didn’t lose heart and wrote another Alice tale, Through the Looking Glass. More and more readers discovered the Alice stories and really liked them, and the rest they say is history.

So, if you are considering abandoning your idea, think about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the many others who were persistent until they achieved success. The market may not be ready for your idea, or people may need time to get to know you to establish trust. Or, perhaps you have to dig around to see what’s been done before and connect your idea to a related idea to form something new. Make the connection with purpose.

This month our Invisible Mentor (Interviewee), David Gray, connects people with a purpose in mind. As a constant networker, whenever you meet with David, he is always thinking about who he knows in his circle of influence that he can connect you to. Read David’s interview and discover what’s important to him, the books he reads, obstacles he faces and how he addresses them. Parts of his interview are presented in the body of this Ambeck Edge, but you can download the entire interview and read it when you have a minute (Instructions are found in the Challenge section). We can learn from David Gray, and Alice in Wonderland, this month’s Invisible Mentors.

And, if you didn’t get the opportunity to read Rodger Harding’s (last month’s Invisible Mentor) interview, it’ not too late. Click on the Resources tab at the top of this newsletter and choose January/February Ambeck Edge. Compare and contrast how Rodger and David resolve challenges, use failure to springboard them to success and so much more.

Ambeck Edge and its Invisible Mentors will change the way you look at the concept of mentoring.

From my desk to yours!

P.S. Like this newsletter? Will customize, or create a new one for medium-sized firms that want to distribute it to their staff. Contact me at avil.beckford@ambeck.com and let's talk!

Book Review

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is really about learning from our mistakes, firing the imagination and making the impossible possible.

In the fantasy, Alice chases after a white rabbit sporting a waistcoat and tumbles down a rabbit hole into a world of wonder, one that’s very dissimilar to the one she came from. The silliness of Alice in Wonderland makes you laugh and makes the book very appealing.

As Carroll takes Alice from one adventure to another I see a bit of Alice inside myself where I make the same mistakes more than once until I finally get it. In the land of make believe, where animals can talk, Alice’s size fluctuates, up and down like a yo-yo until she finally figures out how to control it by nibbling on a piece of mushroom. More than once, she offends and frightens, by telling the mouse and birds about her cat Dinah who loves to catch mice and chase birds.

While reading Alice in Wonderland I was reminded of the poem Autobiography in Five Short Chapters by Portia Nelson. The poem makes you laugh, but you are laughing at yourself because you can relate to it. Someone walks down a street and falls into a pothole, and he does it again even though he clearly sees the pothole, he walks down the street again sees the pothole and walks around it until one day he decides, what the heck, I will walk down another street. It’s a part of the human condition and a metaphor for life. Falling into the pothole is a metaphor for the mistakes we make in life.

1. Communicate in simple, clear language to avoid misunderstandings
2. Don’t take things personally (One of the four agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz)
3. If you have a destination, does it really matter how you get there? How about you enjoy the journey instead?
4. Manage your emotions – never lose your temper
5. Think before you speak

So, how can you apply the simple concepts in Alice in Wonderland? Think of a challenge that you are currently facing:

If you were standing on the shoulders of a giant, how differently would you view the challenge? And, if you could shrink the challenge, or break it down into smaller chunks, what difference would it make in resolving it? The way you view the world depends on where you are positioned, and Alice in Wonderland opens you up to many possibilities. Transform the impossibilities in your life to possibilities!

David Gray’s (This Month's Interviewee) Desert Island Books

1. Hero of a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell (He taught me to 'follow my bliss)
2. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes (The first modern novel, this book revolutionized the imaginative approach to the then core myth of Chivalry, itself a central concept in most European's self-construct. This book reminds us never to take at face value the assumptions of the society in which we happen to live because of vagaries of our birth in a particular geographical space, social context and time)
3. The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History - Philip Bobbitt (An erudite and sweeping review of European history until the 19th century and then an analysis of world history in the 20th and early 21st centuries viewed from the dual perspectives of Law and War. This book provides a context within which to grasp the complex geopolitics of the world we currently live in)
4. The Poetry of Robert Frost - edited by Edward Connery Lathem (This book reminds one that the only life worth living is one including a degree of reflection)
5. The Measure of a Man: a Spiritual Autobiography – Sidney Poitier (This book teaches a man how to live as a man. In a day and age when men are increasingly out of touch with their essential masculinity, Poitier's story of his personal challenges, triumphs and philosophy of life reads like a melodic breath of very fresh air)
6. Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fuelled His Greatness – Joshua Wolf Shenk (A biography that reads like a detective novel. The real Lincoln is far more fascinating and inspiring than the manufactured American myth of the man. Like Poitier's book, this one provides insights into what is possible to achieve and, far more importantly, what it means to live life as a man who is true to his own vision, come hell or high water. Interestingly, in Lincoln's case it was the hellfire of a bullet, whereas for Poitier it was a near-death experience with high water)

March 2009 Book List

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbells

Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt

The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem

The Measure of a Man: a Spiritual Autobiography , Sidney Poitier

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fuelled His Greatness , Joshua Wolf Shenk

Survey Results

According to Executive Excess 2008, a survey by Institute for Policy Studies and United For A Fair Economy, which takes a look at CEO compensation in the US:

• S&P 500 CEOs last year averaged $10.5 million, 344 times the pay of typical American workers
• The top 50 hedge and private equity fund managers averaged $588 million each, more than 19,000 times as much as typical U.S. workers earned
• More than 85 percent of the public companies on the federal government’s top 100 contractors list paid their CEOs over 100 times the pay of average U.S. workers
  
  

Source: Executive Excess 2008: How Average Taxpayers Subsidize Runaway http://is.gd/pJJ6

How Did They Do That?

Interview With David Gray, Your “Invisible” Mentor, DSG Associates http://www.davidgraycoach.com

Challenge: My biggest business challenge was probably embedded in the realization that I was no longer interested in corporate life and not particularly entrepreneurial. So, I set out to learn how to run my own business doing what I loved doing, which was working with individuals, one-to-one, to energize and inspire them with useful insights.

Although like anyone else, I have had numerous challenges in my business career, the most fundamental consisted of trying to move at the age of 47 from working within a corporate structure for 28 years either as a paid employee or as a commissioned salesperson, to working as an entrepreneur, something I had not done since I was 16 - 19 years of age when I co-founded and co-owned what started with one lawn-mower and a few tools in the back of an eight year-old car, and quickly became one of the largest landscape build/maintenance firms in Toronto. As a teenager, I had been "Mr Inside" - the Operations guy, so even then I had not really been the entrepreneurial brains behind the enterprise.

Additionally, although I had tremendous experience in large and small organizations, in sales, marketing, line management and business consulting, I had never once worked in an HR capacity. And my ambition at 47 years of age came to focus on working with individuals in what was in essence an HR oriented function as a coach and consultant. It took me several months of badgering to convince a London UK based firm to allow me to operate as an unpaid Associate whereby I was given an office and administrative support on the basis that I would "eat only what I killed myself." It took another three months to land my first client. Eventually, I was billing more than anyone else in the office. However, as interesting an achievement as that was, I found myself back at square one two years later when my wife and I decided to return to Canada. Ironically, although a Torontonian by birth, I had no credibility in terms of credentials (no coaching certification) or track-record in Canada, no understanding of the corporate HR services market in Toronto and no connections. I tried to get hired corporately but to no avail. So, I started my own practice and depended largely on word-of-mouth to attract new clients. The challenges consisted primarily of generating sufficient client work to make an income, and secondarily of quickly convincing clients that I knew what I was doing despite the lack of an HR background or pertinent credentials.

Resolution: The resolution of the challenge was simple and elegant: Provide one half hour of free consultation by phone. Then bill strictly by the hour on the basis that the client would never be on the hook for more than one hour of consulting advice at a time. In other words, I HAD to deliver or else I would be in effect 'fired.' The major lesson I re-learned was one I had first learned as a teen-age. When people are paying with their own hard cash, as opposed to soft corporate dollars, they are extremely demanding and expect fast, effective results. It is essential to very quickly establish trust, dispense with the niceties of a more structured approach, and demonstrate an ability to understand both the individual and that person's perceived challenges (which might in fact be very different from my perception as to their primary challenges) and then get right to the heart of how to generate solutions to those challenges. In other words, I operated more like a surgeon in a battle field medic unit with limited access to back-up and technological resources or in an ER room of an inner-city hospital rather than in the more gentrified manner of a corporate HR practitioner or surgeon in a suburban hospital setting with access to all the best equipment and resources.

As a result, now that I am working within a more structured environment once again, in a quasi-corporate capacity as an Associate, I am able to combine the best of the corporate world (access to tremendous technological and human resources) with the best of the lean and mean entrepreneurial mind-set which demands and conditions one to think outside the box and quickly develop innovative approaches in real-time to client's real-life challenges on an individual rather than a corporate cookie-cutter, traditional HR perspective, basis.

As arrogant as this might sound, I firmly believe that in addition to the essential traits of empathy, technical expertise and good listening skills essential to anyone who aspires to be a 'consultant' in any capacity, the combination of my many different life and business experiences within many different business (sales, marketing, manufacturing, telecomm, business & technology consulting) within diverse geographical contexts (Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Alberta, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow UK) is part of my secret to success as one who would aspire to advise people concerning business challenges. Who would you rather have as a business, leadership and career advisor - someone with multiple coaching and related designations who has spent twenty five years in Toronto in various HR capacities, or someone with a wide and deep variety of business and life experience in multiple locations, an MBA majoring in Strategy, minoring in Operations with a thesis focused on Leadership and Empowerment, with a mind-set and world-view which is coming from a relatively unorthodox perspective?

Lessons Learned

1. I learned to follow my dreams regardless of what obstacles were in the way
2. To remain optimistic and persevere no matter what other people thought or said about what I was doing
3. One is never too old to reinvent oneself
4. Challenges and pursuing a dream reinvigorates one at any age
5. It's a wonderful life
6. To never, ever be complacent or accept limitations without first trying very hard and for a very long time to overcome them
7. The more you accomplish, the more that other doors of opportunity open for you
8. The biggest obstacles any of us face generally reside within our own world and self view rather than out in the external environment
   
   

Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

My biggest failure was in not recognizing or having confidence in my own potential as a young adult. As a result, I worked at manual labour and other mundane jobs while other fellows were going to graduate school. Eventually, I wrote the LSAT (pre-law exam), scored in the 93rd percentile and realized I was actually quite bright. That gave me the confidence to do an MBA, go into Business & Technology consulting and then enter the Leadership and Career Coaching fields.

What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

The toughest decision I have had to make was to walk away from a friendship of many years that had turned sour. To this day I feel the loss, but despite my best efforts there was no way I could discover to turn the situation around.

How do you integrate your personal and professional life?

My personal and professional life are seamless in the sense that I work almost every day and I set my own hours, so one blends into the other in that respect. On the other hand, I make a very clear distinction between clients and friends. Sometimes one becomes the other and vice versa, but for the most part my private life is just that.

What's a major regret that you've had in life?

I regret not having traveled the world when I was in my twenties instead of jumping right into a career.

What are five life lessons that you have learned so far?

1. Treat everyone as a friend unless or until they give you reason not to do so
2. Seek to understand and only then to be understood
3. Be completely trustworthy, as trust is the foundation for all true relationships
4. Be true to yourself
5. Treat everyone with dignity and respect, but be especially gentle with the old, the young, the weak and the less fortunate

How have mentors influenced your life? Do you use your biggest failures as a springboard to success? How do you cope with the disappointments in your life? To read David Gray's responses to these questions and more click here to download the entire interview.

What Can Ambeck Do For You:

Ambeck Enterprise provides diverse business research, analysis and writing services to senior executives, through the relevant distillation of diverse facts and data.

Formula for Success

David Gray’s Success Definition

Success as I define it is an intensely personal and individual reality. For me personally, success fundamentally consists in being true to my own ideals and life philosophy while engaging in a genuine way with clients and friends such that they feel enriched for having spent time with me.

David Gray’s Success Formula

The formula for success is simple: Chase your dreams, not other people's ideas of success.

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