Leap of Exceptional Faith at BarCampRDU

Jim Meyer spoke about his personal journey that started while working at Dreamworks.

The basic question of the session was "How do you be exceptional?"

Jim Meyer and his leap of faith at barcampRDU

The first step on the road to excellence is to take personal responsibility.

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (Stephen R. Covey) has a jewel of wisdom which relates to the balance between your area of influence and your area of concern.

Some of the best advice was to draw up a list of 5 critical things that are important to you.

The participants came up with a set of values:

• Personal Growth
• Flexible Schedule
• Connection to the value of your work
• part of a good team/ no assholes
• socializing with the team
• clearly valued contribution
• respect
• interesting work
• shared values with the team
• close to home/telecommute
• consistency in expectations
• financial security

What are your top five?

What core values to are missing for you?

We got in to a discussion of planning systems. Covey's seven habits is linked to the Franklin Covey planner system but an alternative is Time Manager who offer an excellent planner system. One that I used for many years.

Being part of a high performing team starts with ourselves
As I reflect on this session it struck me that it has obvious relevance to anyone interested in creating high performing teams. So often in large organizations people feel helpless. They feel that they can't make a difference.
Posing the question "What can I do to make a change?" is the first step to achieving exceptional performance.
We must stop worrying about how we can get the world, or our company, to change. Instead focus on the steps that we can personally take. By doing that we have taken the first critical step to becoming exceptional. Success in small ways becomes contagious.
Lead by example.

The 1-9-90 rule

Look yourself in the mirror and accept that waiting for your company or team to adopt a change is a cop out.

Don't worry about achieving universal adoption. It will never happen. Look at the success of Wikipedia. It is the poster child of the 1-9-90 rule. Wikipedia has achieved groundbreaking change with only one percent of the audience creating content, nine percent review and edit and the remaining 90 percent of the audience read the content.

If your actions lead to others adopting the change you are seeking then massive change can happen as others accept the change passively.

I agree with Jim's view. Being exceptional starts with taking personal responsibility for the change you want to see happen. Internalize it and take the steps that you can control to make change happen.

BarCamp is a step to being exceptional

When you think about the fact that over 200 people took time out of their weekend to travel to Raleigh to attend BarCampRDU that is testament to being exceptional and committing to make change happen through our own personal actions.