Straight to the point...fast!

I happened to attend one of the most inspiring and open & direct presentations a couple of days back. This was by one of our vice presidents in the organization where I work and man am I glad this guy works for us.

He is as straight a shooter as one can get, this person is pretty foul mouth but is just so damn inspiring. He didn't mince his words one bit. He openly shredded some of our internal practices and policies. He took the HR people sitting on the front row on a ride a few times. I am sure they were shivering in their pants as to what he may say next but we didn't mind, we were too stirred up.

He took two sessions, one on Leadership and another on Intellectual Honesty. We came back all fired up from his session. Here are some of the quotes from him (assume a little hyper but serious guy is telling this to you and at a fast pace):

He started with this: "Everyone raise your right hand, up high, put it in your pocket...now take out that bloody cell phone and switch it off"

"Today we will have a exchange of ideas. It means you will come in with yours and leave with mine."

"BKMs suck" (BKMs = best known methods; its an acronym we use almost everywhere in our org)

"Consensus is the source of all evil"

"If you think the meeting is a waste of time then just stand up and say "It's bull $%@#"." (People in my group are itching to use this!)

"I love chaos, I love arguments. I love to participate and see people arguing in meetings." He said with a twinkle in his eye.

"Someone said attack the issue and not the person. So I asked them back "Ummm...then can I say that the issue is a son of a @#$%^?" What do you mean don't attack the person???"

In his presentation he quoted George Bernard Shaw "The resonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Our group came back and on the pretext of being unreasonable decided to be the biggest jerks and pain in the you know what around ;-)

Another thing he said that our organization should do is "Always challenge status quo...without fear." And "Can Do!"