Two weeks ago, I started reading the book — <Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work>. I have not finished yet, but I did agree with the authors that people can arrive into a FLOW, when (and where, I mean mentally where) people are fully concentrated with focus, creativity and productivity. FLOW is a perfect word to name this mental status like ideas stream from up down continuously. If your daily mental performance is the economy class, you are upgraded to first class when you enter the FLOW status. That’s awesome, right?
In the book, not only a single person can be trained to enter into FLOW, but a team can do it together. That’s the Navy SEALs team do. I’m not sure how much I believe that, I’m very curious about that. So I’ll keep reading to find out.
A week ago, a friend recommend another book to me, which is perfect on time, <Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters>. Timing is perfect because I’m preparing Sugr’s annual review and preparing for new fiscal year (FY21) strategy. I had vague sense about good/bad strategies before, like good strategy has to be clear, following SMART principles; good strategy must be actionable, cannot stay with docs. After read this book with two nights, I’m pretty clear about good strategies. And of course what are bad ones.
I invited my core team to a nice co-working place in Shenzhen for this annual meeting. To have team get their brain out side of Sugr’s daily work. To fully focus on look back and look forward. So I name this meeting: Zoom.Meeting.
We did good preparations. By driving this meeting flow, I listed topics that team members have to write down before they join the meeting. That guarantees the meeting are efficient. For the two day meeting to be fun as well, I collected several video clips and inserted them into the flow, for the time that could be boring or tired (after lunch is one of them). Below are some of the videos:
TEAM BOND — Leadership Motivation & Growth | by JB Kellogg
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Summary
When Eric talked about presentation and speech skills, we together watched Independence Day (4/5) Movie CLIP — The President’s Speech (1996) HD
Scent of a Woman | “I’ll Show You Out of Order!”
We spent the first day zoom back, everyone focus on personal growth and improvement plan, same for teams and for Sugr. On the 2nd day, we together build our FY21 strategy. By forming 3 teams, we analyze the market, the economy and Sugr strength and weakness. The teams’ name are fun: VoiceX, 007 and 0.1B. It represents an American super hero company, an elegant UK genius and a Shenzhen billionaire. :-) Then 3 teams each presented the growth plan for Sugr: goal, numbers and path. The last session is to consensus the three plan into one. The whole day went so fast that team felt not a minute wasted. I’m not sure if this is team’s FLOW status, it feels like.
At night, we party and drink. That’s lovely too.
I’m supper excited and confident to work with my team build a strong fiscal year FY21.
p.s. Yesterday was 4th of July.
