SELF IMPROVEMENT

Self Improvement Before Team Improvement - This is the story of how Nokia became the world’s producer of cell phones. As Illustrated by John Maxwell

It all started when the hundred year old company, now a huge conglomerate began losing money, having passed through a lot of ups and downs. About that time in 1990, a young executive was asked to take over an unprofitable division: mobile –phones, his name is Jorma Ollila. He was so successful at turning this division around that he was made the president and CEO of the company in 1992.

Subsequently, he was met with the challenge of turning the entire company around with a two headed approach. Believing that the company’s greatest potential lay in communications technology, he began to divest other interest. Second, he realized that for a technology company, human resources were more important than natural resources. Ollila says that today “The technology cycles are shorter. We must build on our discontinuities and turn them into our favour”

Ollila believes in constant self-renewal and has made his personal goal of self improvement the corporate goal as well. “Continuous learning entitles everyone at Nokia to develop themselves and find ways to improve their performance,” says Ollila. “And what’s true for the individual is just as true for the whole company.” To improve the team, improve the individuals on the team. Ollila’s philosophy of individual self-improvement helped turn Nokia into a $20 billion global telecommunications system.

Additional Information:

The Nokia people are always self-improving, and are therefore ready to face new situations. “People who are constantly improving themselves make three processes an ongoing cycle in their lives:”

1. Preparation
Self-improving team members think about what they can do to improve themselves in the present, not in some far off future. They look for today’s potential learning moments, and they seize them. At the end of the day, they think about what they have learned and what they need to learn more about tomorrow. In this way, they become deliberate and continuing learners, which prepares them for challenges.

2. Contemplation
People who have greatly influence the world have spent considerable amount of time alone – contemplating, meditating, and listening. “Time alone is essential to self-improvement.” It allows us to evaluate our actions, to make adjustments where they are needed, and to plan for improved future action based on what was learned in the past.

3. Application
Now is the time to start applying what you have learned; don’t keep putting off that difficult change. Maxwell says change generally comes when: 1) people hurt enough that they have to, 2)they learn enough that they want to, and 3)they receive enough that they are able to. The goal is to keep learning so that you want to change for the better daily.

Furthermore, to become self-improving….
· Become highly teachable; learn and adopt the attitude of a learner, not an expert;
· Plan your progress. Adopt two levels of learning. First, choose an area that you want to improve and select books, lectures, conferences, experts to speak in the coming months. Second, create learning moments each day so that you learn something new everyday.
· Value self-improvement over self-promotion: “Make your next career move based on how it will improve you personally rather than how it will enhance you financially.”

Maxwell concludes with an anecdote of Charles Lindberg, the great Aviator. He says that Lindberg’s historic solo flight across the Atlanta was not a solo endeavour. It took the collaboration of others to make it happen. But, when it was time for the pilot to make his thirty-three hour flight, he was ready. A friend of his tells a story that shows that Lindberg had begun years earlier “just practicing” staying awake all night so that he would be ready when the opportunity to make that monumental flight presented itself. We all have much “practicing” to do to be ready when our big moment comes.