Maps: Finding Your Next Destination...

Where you decide to live your life and the geography that surrounds you, will shape who you become in your future.

When you were growing up, did you ever ask your Mom or Dad, why are we living here?

Did you ever have the pure curiosity to look on a map to discover where in your country your hometown was actually located? How far was it to your Nations Capital?

Your story as a young human being and where you started your early years going to a local school and taking a geography class was just your beginning.

What about the neighborhood you lived in and the friends and places around you that shaped many of your thoughts on life forever. That single map you were curious examining, was just a small world view of our entire globe and your opportunity.

In 2022, you now have the satellite imagery resolution and cloud-based services such as ESRI, Maxar or even just Google Maps to quickly explore your next destination.

Explore your next city, state and geography to live or work.

Your parents probably did not have those high tech tools when you were growing up across from the big lake, in just a small Mid-West community in our United States.

Now, how might you utilize a myriad of new technologies and online tools to research your next destination in life?

What questions might you ask yourself to begin to zero-in on a particular Zip Code or a proximity to the ocean, the mountains or the city with tall skyscrapers?

Would you begin with the weather site? Would you begin with ZipRecruiter dot com? Would you begin with Rent dot com? Would you begin with CrimeMapping dot com?

Yes, and unfortunately these days, people must consider all kinds of “Operational Risks” in their own particular community. Why?

We have all heard or experienced first hand the news reports from city names of where significant “Loss Events” have occurred across our America.

The spectrum of risks are wide and so unpredictable. Here are just four such examples:

• Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles, California in 1994.
• Hurricane Sandy in 2012 from the Bahamas to the Mid-Atlantic to North Eastern US/Canada.
• Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.
• The Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado in 2021.

Where will you find your next place to work and/or raise a family, so that you may truly prosper and your family will be more safe and secure?

Where are the schools you will choose to associate with, that start the day with our “Pledge of Allegiance”? Where you will find “School Protective Resource Officers” are on premise and kindly greeting students as they arrive each day.

Why will you volunteer with your local Citizens Corps Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and/or join your metro area InfraGard Members Alliance (IMA)?

Why will you learn CPR and how to use a tourniquet, organize a search and rescue team, learn self-defense and how to more effectively Understand, Decide and Act, with real-time digital active streams of relevant threat information?

Because of the geography where you grew up and it all began. Because of where you went to College and earned your degree(s). Because you learned and worked more than most in our International world of asymmetric warfare with continuous and invisible Operational Risks.

Because of your growing Christian faith. Because you have been Married once for 35+ years. Because together you and your wife raised a daughter and a son who were only 19 months apart working full-time.

Because your kids both graduated with Bachelor degrees from State Universities. Because they are now building successful careers within a Dow Jones Industrial Fortune 500 and a US Federal Government Agency.

Because you have your first Grandson. :-)

Because your own Mother and Father made the right decisions, on where to live and raise your family, as just another young kid on the YMCA Swim Team in that little Mid-West town.

In our wonderful and only, United States of America…USA!

Innovation: The Speed of Exploration...

Why does your organization encounter Operational Risk events that have caught you off balance, off guard or created substantial losses to shareholders and major stakeholders?

There are people in your organization right now that are still without the tools, the training or the methodology to solve new significant problem-sets.

More vital, is that your organization is not proactively generating new innovative ideas, new solutions and new answers to your own operational risk issues.

innovation - noun

in· no· va· tion | \ ˌi-nə-ˈvā-shən

Definition of innovation

1: a new idea, method, or device : novelty

2: the introduction of something new

To truly innovate a new product/solution, you must first do your research. Your field study. You must get out of the building and ride in the field.

Show up on the front lines of your business unannounced. This is nothing new, yet it works and it is amazing on what you will learn.

You have the awareness of why this method of discovery is the basis for better understanding the problem-set(s).

So why as the leader in your small business or Fortune 500 Global enterprise do you ignore or delegate the true innovation mechanisms in your company to just a few people.

Why have you loss sight of the mandatory Recruiting, Education, Networking and Sharing metrics by your front line teams?

Discovering, researching, prototyping, practicing, refining your methodology to more rapidly respond to threats, to your competition, to possible opportunities.

You see, you and your organization have become complacent. You have not changed your onboarding experience of new employees or new customers in over a decade.

Why is it true, that most people and organizations don’t focus on innovation and new solutions to a problem, until there is a significant loss event.

An incident that hits the local headlines. A risk event so damaging to the bottom line it could mean closing the business forever.

How might you design the methodology and the system in your enterprise to have continuous problem and threat monitoring, new innovation?

It begins with the right people working on the initial prototype together with the correct tools. It means getting senior management on board with facilitating the process to insure the prototypes are tested in the field or Area of Responsibility (AOR).

Next, those individuals who are in charge, in command, at the field level must have the resources and the authority to test, to learn and to gather new data continuously.

Your organization is slowly decaying right before your eyes. Your adversaries are winning.

It has lost its initial purpose because you have not been continuously innovating on the front lines. In the geography and in the organizations of your own neighborhood.

The next time someone in your organization sends you or presents to you a Powerpoint funding proposal with more than 5 pages, with more than 4 bullets on each page without any true graphical data, you know you have to engage.

Filling in the standard forms in your CRM or your word.docx template on a monthly basis might be OK, if it calls for truth and relevant data from the front lines, yet is it focused on the real problem-sets?

How might you and your team change the way you are working on the front lines of your organization? Soon.

Why will you engage differently, before it is too late. What is the Speed of your Exploration?

Exceptional: Accelerating to Wisdom…

 Why will you use your ability to discern a course of action that is wise and insightful?

You were born with it and even at the earliest stages of your life, it was soon known that you were exceptional. Rare. Superior.

Over the course of your lifetime, you have possessed the ability to see what others can not. You have the abilities to recall and decide faster with extraordinary accuracy.

How might you utilize your God given talents and the DNA you were born with, to make a real difference here?

Your IQ and your particular part of the spectrum, is an asset that you shall utilize your entire life, in order to benefit others.

The problem-sets you discover in front of your organization, your agency, your business, and your family, are counting on your continuous wisdom.

Even with these abilities and your peer group superiority, you still remain unknown. 

Unpretentious.

Learning more than you already know and applying your deep experience, is still your passion.

What did you read this day, or this week that made you even more curious? 

Who wrote the words that sparked your insightful questions and increased your own appetite for finding out more? Yourself?

"Now you will analyze, you shall create the models and use the tools, to better Understand, Decide and Act."

The vast amount of data and the velocity of the technological innovations before us, will remain our greatest challenge. Our greatest opportunity.

How might you act, to make a difference for the benefit of those you really care about in life?

It begins with your own wisdom. Your own particular talents and your abilities, that will continue to remain exceptional.

Now get out there and make a real difference…

Trust Decisions 1-to-1: Yes or No…

What is your mindset as you walk down a cognitive path to Explore, to Observe, and to Listen?

How might you learn even more about your own neighborhood, your current work organization or the team you perform with on a regular basis?

Your journey shall be, to take the scheduled time to learn more about all those people, places and behaviors, that will make a significant difference in your life.

What if you planned a venture of Learning this next month or next year?  Where would you go, who would you schedule time to talk or walk with and how will you capture all that you will certainly learn?

This particular path will be far more uncertain and the distance so unpredictable, that a choice is now before you.

The decision is to trust your intuition and to realize that a decision to say “Yes”, or a decision to say “No”, could change your life forever.

In our 2022 world of continuous distractions, overload of asymmetric information warfare and continuous dramatic behavior by our own human race, it is even more of a true life adventure.

Your particular “Trust Decisions” ahead, will certainly determine your course and help you navigate towards a life fulfilled with accomplishment and joy, or degrees of failure and pain.

The choice is your own and your journey venture ahead has so many unknown destinations.

How might learning more about just one person you work with on your team, change your mutual goals or outcomes?

How might learning more about the geography of your county, state or country, change your decision about where to live and work?

How might learning more about the thoughts or opinions of those you care about, change your behavior or the future plans for your life?

Think more about your future plan for Exploration, Observation and Listening.

Do you need to learn even more than you are today?  One-to-One.

You see, you have been living and operating in a “One-to-Many” world for so long, that you have forgotten how valuable it truly is, to learn even more, just 1-to-1.

What new TrustDecisions will you make this day, or this year of 2022?

Will you decide “Yes” or will you decide “No”?  Either one will make a real difference…

Onward!

4 July 2022: "Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all"​...

 When was the last time you recited these Patriotic words? In the United States we have our “Pledge of Allegiance”.

You may remember when you first learned these verses in America. As a young student in elementary school or even on the ball field with your team starting a game.

Maybe it was a ceremony when you were in scouting or actually became a U.S. naturalized citizen.

Were you with a small group of like minded volunteers, beginning a meeting or training session to improve your skills and gain new knowledge?  Destined to really make a difference somewhere and somehow in your particular area of responsibility (AOR).

What about you? When you say this pledge does it make your heart beat just a little faster?  

Do you notice a small tear in your eye, as you see our magnificent flag of the United States?

As you gaze at 50 stars and 13 stripes of Red, White, and Blue in the wind, you know why. 

You know deep in your heart, what it really means to have the privilege of growing up in our America.

On our July 4th Day of Independence, we celebrate the beginning of our journey as a republic nation.

America as the land of the free, started on the battlefield. We gained valuable rights and agreed on the laws of the land, we call the home of the brave.

To make a difference each day to protect, to preserve, to innovate as we grow and prosper as a nation of our 50 United States?

Your story begins by raising your hand. To volunteer your time, your skills, your knowledge or your labor to improve our country and to sustain all that we believe in as U.S. Americans.

You see, the real story of the 4th of July in America is all about: 

“One Nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all”…