When I chose to go back to Grad School at the UW  in 2004, I made a conscious decision that after I graduated, I would say “Yes” to every opportunity to learn more that would ever be thrown at me.

In the first few years, saying “Yes” meant speaking at the Undergraduate Marketing Club or Young Entrepreneurs Club, or meeting with VCIC students. That evolved into judging the UW Business Plan Competition, taking on interns for projects and guest lecturing from time to time. Before I knew it, I was teaching  real classes, trying to implement the parts of business school I benefited from the most as a student, while shedding the parts that I saw no value in.

And so here we are today. I just finished up the first part of  the two days I have the privilege to spend working with MBA students visiting the UW from Lucerne University in Switzerland. I wish someone would have asked 4 years ago if I ever thought I’d be teaching students who live 8,000 miles away. I wonder what m response would have been.

My discussions with them today reminded me about something I think proud Seattleites often forget. Namely, there are way more people in the world that don’t share the every aspect of the Northwest’s rain driven, liberal thinking, social media embracing, technology-centric, environmentally-maniacal, privacy shunning state of mind.

For example, other countries haven’t necessarily adopted the idea that every ham sandwich we eat should get its own Instagram photo, or why we would want our boss to know what articles we are reading.  The idea of building personal blogs to gratify our egos and promote our social importance isn’t necessarily a worldwide phenomenon yet.

But what is important is that globally, smart people want to learn more. Whether we are American, Swiss, German, Japanese, Korean, etc… there are people who want to understand how others think. They may not understand why, and they may not want to emulate it, but they want to understand the “how.” And the more people we have around the world who want to learn about how other cultures act, work, play and live, the better chance we have at finding a common ground.

Moral of the story: Always say yes to anything you can learn from.  You’ll never regret it.

I could have you click over to Seth Godin’s blog, which I strongly suggest you add to your list of daily reads. (You can even have it delivered via email, it’s that easy…)

But in case you are just browsing through and don’t want to click a link, here’s some wise words for the day.

On behalf of yes
Yes, it’s okay to ship your work.
Yes, you’re capable of making a difference.
Yes, it’s important.
Yes, you can ignore that critic.
Yes, your bravery is worth it.
Yes, we believe in you.
Yes, you can do even better.
Yes.

Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.

There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.

Seth, if you want me to pull this down, just say the word. I just felt like sharing it with my own tiny little tribe.

A friend of mine recently told me, “Your blog sucks.  If you aren’t going to write about business, then you need to write about personal stuff.  Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Now, I didn’t want to get into a debate of the value of SEO and owning your own brand name, so I took the point to heart.  So this post gets a little into a little bit of personal opinion on business.

I’ve waited a long time to write about this, mainly because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, and I want to keep the players in this story anonymous.  I’ve worked at a lot of places, and as a consultant I’ve been inside a number of organizations and groups, so I’ve changed some characteristics in order to hide the true identity of the players here.

Let’s begin.  I was recently told a tale by a long time colleague of mine.  This colleague wove a story about sharing drinks with an ex-coworker of mine, who likely didn’t know the two if them shared a connection with me. My colleague was caught off guard when this ex-coworker said something along the lines of, “I like to use jedi mind tricks of people I work with.  If I don’t like them, I’ll wait for them to have a really bad idea, then I’ll tell them it’s a great idea so they’ll go forth with it.  Then when they fail, they look dumb.  It’s really pretty easy to do.”

My colleague was pretty aghast, and he was especially shocked since this woman was involved with HR back in the days when I worked with her.   It led us to a discussion about “Intentional Acts of Destruction” inside companies.

Sure, nothing the woman did was illegal.  But what kind of long term issues did it cause for her company and group, to push forward ideas that were not in the best interest of the business?  What kind of resource drain was it for any man hours to be spent on research or exploration?  Where could those man hours have been better spent?

But more importantly, how many people think this way?  Maybe if you have one employee who does this, it gets cancelled out by the mass of the organization.  But suppose there is one person in each group who thinks this way?

Furthermore, as a manager, how do you decipher the evil from the ignorant?  If you want to allow your employees a lot of blue sky to fly in, how do you know when an idea is being endorsed by the rest of the team because they believe in it, or because it’s part of a sabotage effort?

We couldn’t answer any of these questions.  But we agreed that it was one of those management problems they don’t teach you in business school.  We like to think that we can follow a handbook, and that we work with well intentioned people who have the best interest of the team at heart.  But the reality is that some people don’t.  And the hard thing is, unless they drink in bars and share their misguided thoughts with others, we never know who endorses our ideas because they agree, and who is looking to execute an Intentional Act of Destruction.  It’s a good lesson for all of us to keep in mind when we head into the office.