#TheWizardofOz #leadership #workplaces
Even if you’ve read the book or seen the movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” you may not realize that it offers great lessons in leadership.
Workplace expert BJ Gallagher brings some of those lessons to light in her book, “The Leadership Secrets of Oz: Strategies From Great and Powerful to Flying Monkeys – Unleash Some Magic in Your Management.”
Using actual lines from the book and/or movie, Gallagher addresses how one can build brains, heed your heart and cultivate courage.
To jog one’s memory, Dorothy and her three sidekicks were looking to Oz to provide each with the one thing they thought they lacked. The point is that they didn’t lack that characteristic at all. The wizard helped give them the perspective they needed to see that they indeed had what they needed all along.
Sometimes, when we think we don’t have something, or believe we can never find that one thing that we believe will put us over the top, often it is our perspective that is lacking, as Andy Andrews often writes and speaks about.
Have you ever heard someone say, “if I just had a …, I could do …?”
Perhaps what they don’t have is money. They may have a job, but perhaps live paycheck to paycheck. Perhaps they are overwhelmed with debt.
Perhaps they really want something – a nice car, for example – but believe it takes the money they don’t have to get it.
There are many ways to get money while still working that job that doesn’t pay enough, in a person’s mind.
First: spend less and save more. It’s old advice, but still applicable today. If you are young, you can get your nice car, if that’s your dream, but perhaps not right away. If you skip, say, one trip to the coffee shop every day, and saved the money you would otherwise spend there, eventually you’ll have the money put away for that car. Better yet, buy a container that will keep your coffee hot for a long time, make your own coffee, skip the coffee shop altogether and save what you would have spent there. You’ll be driving those dream wheels even sooner.
By the way, while saving for the car, put a few bucks into an account for your retirement. You never know when the day will come that your job will go away. The more and the longer you can save, as well as invest wisely with good trusted advice, the bigger your smile will be when your job eventually goes away.
Second: take a second job or, better yet, use a few non-working hours to help generate an income that could be even better than that from a second job. Maybe it could even outpace your main income source. There are many such vehicles out to help you do that. To check out one of the best, message me.
One can dictate his own future by the right perspective on each circumstance. The Oz characters came to realize that what they lacked was not lacking at all. They simply lacked the perspective that could help them better see what they had.
We all make choices. We all have circumstances. Sometimes, seeing opportunity amid catastrophe requires merely a new perspective. Sometimes, looking at other ways to do things that may be different from what you are used to can turn catastrophe into a dream come true.
Peter
Tag Archives: “The Wizard of Oz
NO WIZARDRY: JUST DO IT!
Nike owns the trademark on “Just Do It,” but it is also part of “The Oz Principle,” as explained in the book by the same name.
Not only should you “Do It,” but beforehand you should “See It, Own It and Solve It,” as authors Roger Connors, Tom Smith and Craig Hickman explain.
They base their findings on the characters in “The Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, made into a 1939 movie that is still shown to audiences decades hence. Basically, the characters journeyed to see the wizard in the great land of Oz to get the things they needed for a fuller, happier life. It turns out, they could have gotten what they wanted all along, through their own efforts.
“The Oz Principle” preaches that you have what you need to get what you want in most cases. But YOU are accountable for getting it. You are not a victim. It’s not someone else’s fault. You just must always ask, “what can I do to get the results I want.”
Empowerment is a great thing. We’d all like to work with entities in which the person you are talking to can get you what you need, and has the authority to make things better for you. Too often, though, we run up against entities in which the voice on the phone, or the person behind the desk, can’t fix things himself, whether he might like to. If the person doesn’t care, kicking the problem to someone else is a perfect out. He can claim that it isn’t his job. If he’d like to help you, one would want him to take the risk of helping you, even if it isn’t his job.
We must also look at our own lives. Some of us have been dealt serious blows, particularly in the last few years. Some of what’s been done to us is not our fault. Still, we must own our own destinies. No one is going to give us a life. What we thought was “safe,” has proved otherwise. We must take control of us and, in turn, hold ourselves accountable for our outcomes.
Gotten laid off, downsized or reorganized out of a good situation? Not only does it happen, but it will probably happen a lot more often in the future. When it happens to us, we cannot be the victim of our employer’s (pick one: greed, bankruptcy, declining market share, merger). WE have the ability to turn our lives around. But, here’s the key: we have to be willing to look outside our comfort zones for something that will give us the opportunity to control our destinies.
That isn’t to say things are not going to happen. We can’t control natural or even corporate disasters. We can’t control the marketplace. We can’t control what someone else does that could hurt us. But we can control how we deal with the situation.
So when your comfort zone is upended, it can’t be that comfortable anymore. Wishing for it to be the way it was won’t make that happen. Only we can make the change that we need, to get the results we want.
When your comfortable chair wears out, you may never find one exactly like it again. But, you have to sit. So, you have to shop around to find a chair that may be different from the one that wore out, but that you can, at least eventually, find comfortable.
Sometimes, chair shopping is easy. Sometimes, it may not be. But comfort zones wear out and new comfort zones are required. If your comfort zone has worn out, visit www.bign.com/pbilodeau. You may find something totally different, but you won’t know how comfortable the chair is unless you sit in it.
We all must see our problems, own them, solve them and do what it takes to get the results we want. No wizard is out there to hand us what we need. We have to create it or find it. Circumstances will hit us, but we have to decide how we are going to deal with them.
We have to be OUR wizards. We may have to travel down different yellow brick roads to create a life, but it has to be our doing. We have to account for it. We have to do it, even if it scares us.
Peter