Author Kel Landis Speaks About His Book
My twin careers in business and in civic life have taught me so
much about my responsibility as a leader. This created the impetus
and genesis for me writing The Little Book of DO!
And from that experience, I share in my book all the things I
learned from great leaders I observed and had the pleasure of
working with or watching from afar. I also share the most meaningful
and practical nuggets of wisdom from all the many business books I
read over the years, and just some of the insights I have had in my
own life as I move into the 4th quarter of my life. I remember reading
the book “Half Time” 15 years ago—I may not be in the 4th quarter,
but I am sure somewhere in the third—but you never know how
things will unfold, so we all want to make the most of our time here
on Earth.
Why did I write this book?
I think that the answer to that question is best answered in the
preface to the book. I think it speaks most succinctly to why I wrote
the book and my intended purpose of sharing its message with the
world.
So now, the rest of what I have to say today will highlight the
primary themes and messages in the book which I hope can be
helpful to all of you.
The over-arching message of the book and my talk today is
simple.
We have a choice every single day when we wake up—to DO what is
important for:
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Ourselves (have to do that first)
Our families
Our businesses
Our communities
You will notice that I capitalize the word DO throughout these
slides as I do in my book. And I have even started to DO this in all my
email correspondence with my co-workers and others in my civic
endeavors.
I believe that the simple two letter verb DO is the most powerful
word in our lives if we will live what it means.
In my 30+ year career in banking and now private equity—and
decades of involvement in my community in North Carolina—I
observed that the most successful, happy, and effective people have
one thing in common:
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•
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They are DO-ers. DO is the differentiator in their lives.
They DO what they say they will do.
They organize their lives to get stuff DONE.
They act on their passions and instincts to DO what really
matters in all their roles in life.
Questions for all of us to consider include the following:
How many of you struggle to feel like you accomplish each day
or each week what you either HAVE to do or WANT to do?
Do you have things that get in the way like fear, or time, or
resources?
You might watch a year go by or even 10 years and you didn’t
get to one of your really important “wanna-Dos” deeply held
passions?
If you’ve answered YES to any or most of these questions, let’s
explore some of the ways we might minimize these feelings or even
conquer them.
Life of DO
Let’s move more towards a life of DO--that is more fulfilling,
effective, and feels like a life that is more PACKED WITH PURPOSE.
I suggest that by DOING we BECOME—who and what we want to
be—and enjoy the journey along the way.
Another call to action aligning with this theme is the slogan from
Nike that says “JUST DO IT.”
We see that in an athletic context but maybe have never thought
about it as a powerful call to action for life. I suggest that we DO.
DO IT NOW
One of the first messages I want to suggest to you is DO IT NOW—
life is flying by.
The average 60 year old has 9,000 days to DO what matters in his
or her life. This simple statistic is offered not to depress you, or me as
I turn 60 soon, but as motivation for us to DO what we can and want
to do with our lives.
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•
•
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To not leave undone our wanna-do’s.
Accomplishments in our careers.
Goals for our businesses.
Trips with our families.
Or even our bucket list.
Choose to DO
It’s often said that “there is no time like the present”—it might
be a trite statement, but it is SO TRUE—and it is our CHOICE whether
we DO or not.
I suggest that we are normally much better off to DO it now, or
at least PLAN it now with a firm date on the calendar and absolute
commitment to ourselves to DO it by the date we choose.
But I know it’s not that easy—there are many competing
priorities that confuse us and sometimes even frustrate us.
The question of WHAT TO DO and what NOT to DO confronts us
daily.
The Structure of DO
We might all remember the Stephen Covey quadrants of
importance and urgency. I have used this analysis since I read that
first book introducing the concept of “important but not urgent,” or
the easy one of “not important and not urgent.” You just DON’T do
those, although today’s world of email and constant bombardment of
information can make us think everything in urgent.
In thinking about this more as I wrote my book, I thought there
was a glaring missing consideration to that two dimensional analysis,
i.e., it was leaving out passion, or the things that really MOVE us to
DO stuff.
DO! Wedge
So not trying to be too fancy, I came up with what I call the DO
WEDGE, which plots initiatives or endeavors on a three dimensional
cube that always you to think about things incorporating all three—
importance, urgency and passion.
The book describes all the cells in the wedge, but some easy
ones might be explained by examples like filing your taxes, things that
don’t move your passion meter, but things that are important and
might be urgent depending on the time of the year.
And then there is the sweet spot where things hit all three
buttons. For me, that might be my daily walk that is important for my
health, urgent that it been done with high frequency, and hits my
passion meter to be outside clearing my head and providing good
thinking time.
And then there is that easy spot on the wedge with things that
are low on all three. In which case we just have to have the discipline
to NOT DO it—and not clutter our day with things that don’t really
help us or others.
It is a tool and a methodology for thinking through what to do
and how to prioritize our endeavors.
And I also talk about SAYING NO—something I am not good at.
There are tools offered that allow for a polite NO, or perhaps some
thinking time to extend the time between THE ASK and the polite NO
or the qualified or modified YES with an offer to help in a different
way.
The key is to put our TO-DO’s into some kind of consistent
framework to help us DO what matters and moves us to DO what
inspires us.
DO-ing for ourselves first may seem a little selfish. But again, we
have to take care of ourselves first before we can help others or be
effective leaders in our organizations.
In business school over 30 years ago, I had Dr. Jerry Bell at UNC
who introduced the notion of a personal life plan. We do strategic
plans for our businesses, but most people do not write a plan for
their personal life. Dr. Bell suggested the same format with a
purpose and vision statement for one’s life, and the supporting goals
and tactics to achieve each one. I wrote one 30 years ago and must
admit that it gathered dust until I wrote this book. I wrote one this
year and it is typed up just like a business plan, and my wife and I
have committed to review it again next year.
It has goals about health and family, my role in my company’s
business success, and specific personal goals for myself, like learning
to be still and slow down. I’m not sure how much progress I might
make on that one, but I am going to try.
Another theme I discuss and believe in so greatly is the power of
DO in business, not to just achieve success in the business itself, but
to DO good in the process.
Henry Ford said that a business that does nothing but make
money is a poor business.
We are all entrepreneurs or we serve them in the financial
services industry. Creative entrepreneurs make our society better and
the most successful ones take their success and share it with others.
Steve Jobs, who created products that make our lives so much
easier (if we learn how not to LIVE on them), said that the only
people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world
are the ones who DO.
If we all DO our part to make our businesses great, and support
others who do great things, we can harness that collective power to
accomplish truly great programs for our communities.
I hope you will read my book and see the emphasis I place on DO
for your Community—the title of Chapter Six.
In my book I tell the story of one of my heroes: Coach Dean Smith,
who as a young assistant basketball coach in 1964 decided to take a
black man to lunch in the then segregated town of Chapel Hill.
Because of Coach Smith’s health at the time I wrote the book—he
since passed away—I interviewed Dr. Bob Seymour, who
accompanied Coach Smith that day. After their actions, others
followed, and five years later Howard Lee (a now great AfricanAmerican public servant) was elected Mayor of Chapel Hill. Before
Coach Smith’s health deteriorated, NY Times columnist John Feinstein
interviewed him about this—and when he commented to Coach
Smith that he should be proud of what he did, Coach Smith said, “I
shouldn’t be proud of that. I did it because it was the right thing to
DO.”
And to close this point about DO for your community, Winston
Churchill said, “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by
what we give.”
But we cannot take on everything and DO everything, and we have
to be careful and thoughtful about what we DO and do not DO:
• We have to carefully pick what we do—run it through the filter
of the DO WEDGE
• We have to say NO sometimes
• We have to be careful of the law of diminishing returns that is an
economic term that applies to our to-DO activities
We have to be careful too of health consequences when we overdo it too.
And of course, this concept applies to businesses too. Michael
Porter says that “the essence of strategy is deciding what NOT to
DO.”
Life is really a long list of TO-DO items. Let’s guard it and manage
our list carefully and thoughtfully.
But as we attack our list of things that matter, there are what I call
DOs BIGGEST FOES:
• Fear-conquered by simply doing it
• Procrastination-muster up the strength to do stuff we really
don’t want to DO
• Analysis paralysis (look for clarity over certainty)
• And time—lack of time can be real, for sure; “I didn’t have time”
means I did not MAKE time
A simple oath that may capture the essence of DO more than
any other is the Golden Rule—DO unto others as you would have
them DO unto you. The power of it is in its simplicity. If everyone in
the world lived by this call to DO, we would not have many problems.
There are many tools to help us DO what’s important and must
get DONE.
Even though some of those tools are quite simple to use, they
are often hard to execute and implement. I break them down into to
physical tools and mental tools.
Physical tools come in the Flintstone’s mode or the Jetsons
mode. I use both with my computer and smartphone, but I also love
the simplicity of a Flintstone’s paper to do list that I use every day to
complement my technology tools.
What I call the mental tools are much more powerful. I capture
them in what I call our PAD—our persistence, our attitude and our
determination
This is where we just look ourselves in the mirror and dig deep
with our emotion, passion, and grit to get it DONE. It’s what’s inside
us to succeed and we all have to rely on these mental tools and
understand that we are in charge of all of them—WE individually
determine the choice to use them—and this is normally the
difference between achievement of success or something less.
And then one of the most powerful and effective oaths we can
all live by is what I refer to as DWYSYWD.
While I was writing my book, I read another book by Bill George,
who was CEO of Medtronics. His book, True North, is about how we
can have a compass inside us that guides us to our own and unique
“true north”—our:
• Values
• Motivations
• The things we believe in passionately
I would highly commend this book to you as one of the best
“business books” I have ever read—but really more a book about
leadership.
Adapting this concept of True North, I tried to wrap up all themes
of my book in one diagram.
I capture the inputs and outputs of DO in a chart I did in the form
of a compass pointing you your TRUE NORTH.
Your authentic self—how you are and what aligns with your
values—your compass rotating to that place for you.
WE, i.e., YOU are in the middle.
In the bottom half are the inputs, the DO activities and tools we
use to BECOME who we want to be—our:
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Values
Passion
PAD
Planning
The upper half contain the benefits and beneficiaries of our DO
actions—our:
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Work life
Personal life
Family
Community
These benefits are HUGE and will lead to powerful impacts on all
the people and things we really care about.
Writing and sharing this book has been a lot of fun for me. But I
didn’t do it for money or fame—I did it for impact, and that is why I
have been sharing this message with college students, business
groups, and even seasoned leadership gatherings—as the themes
apply to people of all ages and experience levels. I point out in the
book that Jack Nicklaus took golf lessons through his final days of
playing the game, where he was regarded as the greatest of all time.
Using my book as a jumping off point, I have set up a non-profit
foundation to receive and give away all proceeds from the book—the
foundation is titled The Foundation for DO!
Each month we make a grant of $1,000 to a person or entity that
lives by and demonstrates the themes of the book in their community
or workplace. And all they have to DO in return is keep DO-ing their
good work. The board of my Foundation is my wife, son, and
daughter. We are getting great joy out of doing this—even though we
wish the dollars could be more meaningful. You can learn more
about this on my book’s website.
So now—in closing and in summary—I offer the following as the
key points:
Yes, DO is our choice. DO it now. DO for ourselves. DO for others. DO
is in all of us. DO = a live well-lived.