Your performance context

We’ve been coaching a new client in Tokyo this week, and have been delighted to confirm to ourselves that the high performance principles we seem time and again in different environment, situations and cultures clearly resonate in Japan too. We’re always eager to learn from our clients as well and one story, which we’ve heard before, was told by one of the team here. The story centres around a frog, which if put into boiling water will jump out. However if put in room temperature and the water slowly heated, the frog will adapt to the temperature so successfully to start with, that eventually it will get cooked, boil and die. It’s a story that has meaning for the incredibly industrious Japanese who, we’re told, are the only country in the world to have a specific word for “working yourself to death”. Ouch.

So the learning question is, how good are you at adjusting to your environment and how good are you at managing your environment?