Jonathan Raymond Quotes & Sayings

People get into debt head over heels because banks make it so easy to do so. Then the banks come along and act like these people who can't or won't pay their bills are the dregs of society. — Jonathan Raymond

People who have a choice will no longer work to serve your reasons, your goals. They will not work to serve your authority, they will only work to serve their own. — Jonathan Raymond

Why, with all this good intention, does it still feel so muddy when we talk about culture, what it is, and how to make it better? It's because we're trying to bring personal growth and spiritual ideas into the workplace without first changing the underlying agreement that governs it. The — Jonathan Raymond

The reason you're mentioning what you're seeing isn't to rub salt in a wound or micromanage, it's to give the person you're trying to help a real-time experience of your values and standards. You're using the Mention to show them things like: (1) how keeping an eye on the details is a form of caring for yourself and others; (2) why it's important to try and identify patterns because that's what leads to innovation; and (3) how no matter what's going on in the hustle and bustle, they work for someone who never loses sight of the human beings in their care. Before — Jonathan Raymond

Livability has always struck me as a consolation prize. — Jonathan Raymond

And she had discovered the best reason, the one that trumps all others: She did it because she liked the way it made her feel. Is — Jonathan Raymond

The dangling of promotions, the promise of raises and bonuses, chair massages, and yoga classes, all can elicit a general sense of compliance, more or less. We still reach goals. We get hard work - which is not the same as great work. But these tactics don't give you what you really want. What you want is a feeling - the same feeling that every leader who has ever lived craves: "They've got this. I can relax." Why don't any of these tactics get us to that place? It's because they all have something in common. Can you see it? It's that they all start with the needs of the business, and put the needs of the individuals second, usually a distant second. This — Jonathan Raymond

Great employee development is focused far more on who people are and how they relate to others, and far less on overseeing projects, tasks, and deadlines. It's a conversation that can't wait for quarterly reviews - and oftentimes even weekly reviews are too far past the moment when things are ripe and ready for change. Ideally it starts in a person's first week on the job, and it doesn't end for as long as they're on your team. Your goal is to create a world where mentoring, accountability, and support are the norm. — Jonathan Raymond

The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game. — Jonathan Raymond

Step one: The CEO or owner has to open the door. The only way to do that is to admit that they don't know how. It's a moment of vulnerability. It's only one moment, but I've seen CEOs put it off for decades. All it is is this: "Hey guys, I really want to make this a great place to work. And, as you know, I've tried a lot of things over the years. But the truth is, even though the business has gotten better in some ways, when it comes to the culture - how people feel about coming to work here - I know it hasn't changed in the ways you need it to. I don't know how to change it but I want to start a new conversation with you about it. Okay? — Jonathan Raymond

We could say that the health of a culture is equal to the collective ability of the people who work there to feel the impacts of their actions on others. Now if you're an app developer and want to help me build a tool that tracks that, please give a call. What I've seen over and over again in my career as a business leader and leadership mentor is that this one thing - the inability of people to feel their impact on others - is the cause of cultural dysfunction. And the higher up you are on the org chart, the more problematic that weakness is in terms of what it does to the culture at large. Which is why, as a manager, the most important thing you can do - after recognizing your own impact on your team - is to help people see their impacts on each other, and to help them let go of the emotional story they're telling themselves that's keeping the pattern going. In — Jonathan Raymond

We rolled back the clock in a full company meeting and shared each of the steps that came together to help us arrive at this decision that was going to impact everyone on the team. We wanted to show people what "risk being right" looked like to us. How — Jonathan Raymond

Most managers make the innocent mistake of starting at the opposite end. They try to address individual performance and cultural issues through group announcements: generic statements about the need to own your work, care more about the customer, be a better communicator, etc. Managers hope that these messages will reach their intended audience, that they will move people to take action and change unproductive behaviors. But they mostly don't. It's not because people don't care or don't want to grow. It's because that's not how growth happens, especially the personal kind. Those group announcements, at best, point to something that needs to change. But they do nothing to show people how to make the changes themselves. Great — Jonathan Raymond

You can't know what the future holds, though you might conjecture on it, and if you're psychic, you might venture a guess. — Jonathan Raymond

Cultural listening is the skill of being able to see beyond the symptom to the underlying dynamic. It's an extremely powerful tool to develop as a leader, whether you're the CEO, a team leader, or a solopreneur just starting out. — Jonathan Raymond

Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s. — Jonathan Raymond

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage. — Jonathan Raymond

Why do I have an issue with banks? They have their greedy fingers in everyone's money. No other industry has the power to deduct a bill or fees directly from your own bank account without so much as a notice. — Jonathan Raymond

I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad. — Jonathan Raymond

Great accountability is nothing more and nothing less than having the courage to demand that the people who work for you use their strengths in a responsible way. Learning — Jonathan Raymond

Yo can't reason someone out of something he didn't reason himself into. — Jonathan Raymond

All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to. — Jonathan Raymond

The earlier you intervene, the less likely that people will get defensive. The more real-time and specific your feedback is, the easier it is for people to receive it and learn from it. The — Jonathan Raymond

You can't know what you don't know. You can't know about things you have yet to discover. — Jonathan Raymond

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money. — Jonathan Raymond

Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it. — Jonathan Raymond

Here are a few patterns you may have seen that indicate the person you're managing is avoiding their next step of growth: covering up or attempting to brush off the severity of a mistake; hoarding data; embedding themselves as a go-to person (aka: bottleneck) by creating a system or process that only they know how to use; resorting to quick fixes instead of asking questions and looking for root causes; asking for more time or resources beyond what was agreed on in order to complete a project, instead of coming to you to talk about what went wrong so you can work together to improve it; letting tension build with a teammate or between departments instead of coming to you for advice on how to handle it. When — Jonathan Raymond

It was Dell who came out with their build-on-demand process, where they are able to keep a zero balance inventory. That means they don't purchase parts until an order is received. That is a way to greatly reduced overhead, since you don't need to warehouse parts or overstock parts you may not end up using. — Jonathan Raymond

Our strengths are not our own until they are freed of the burden of having to heal the past. — Jonathan Raymond

In my new business, this is one of the things we work actively with CEOs to see: how one idea from the top can spiral into 100 projects for the team and overwhelm them in ways the CEOs can't even imagine. But — Jonathan Raymond

As a manager, the more you talk about something without following up with action, the less those words will matter. — Jonathan Raymond

Banks will fee you to death. If you bounce a check, the bank has a policy to re-post the check three more times to see if it will be paid. If it continues to bounce they charge a $30 overdraft every time. So, one bounced check will rack up $90 for the bank. — Jonathan Raymond

I can't find good people" becomes "I can't know who my A players are until I challenge them to find out." "Nobody cares as much as I do" becomes "I haven't figured out how they care in their own way that can harmonize with the way that I do." "I can't afford to invest time in someone who is just going to leave anyway" becomes "I don't have time to do anything else." "I'm not a therapist, I don't have the skills to help them with their personal problems" becomes "I'm not a therapist, but I am two steps ahead of this person as a professional and can help them grow by sharing the things I've learned along the way." "We just need better systems and more communication" becomes "We don't need more communication. We need to start speaking a different language." Imagine — Jonathan Raymond