Jan Gondol's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

• Problem-solving is a natural and essential process that we are well equipped to do even if we have forgotten how. And problems never go away even if we want them to. So we better get good at it!
• You have everything you need right in front of you to solve problems. You have all time you need and more than enough resources. Even if you are not good at one type of problem, you can always hire someone who is.
• Problem-solving will teach you purity of thought and objectivity in action. Aren’t these goals enough of reason to engage any problem?

“They let creativity run wild at Pixar!” says Janna. “Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on their collective creativity. Ed and John Lasseter (and sometimes Steve Jobs) are in the center of the galaxy, keeping the gravitational pull strong and the company rotating, so to speak. Around them are the directors, who in the fractal org model lead the arms (no more divisions!). Each film team or cluster, from the storyboard artists to the renderers, goes through the iterations necessary to achieve the best results. Everyone is on board with creating exemplary films and they are relentless in demanding only the best. But in this process, as they say, they have to get all the “sucky” ideas out first. If they don’t reveal all the ideas, they don’t get all the perspectives and therefore might miss something important. In quantum physics and information theory, this relates to the observer effect and the importance of acknowledging the perspective influence of everyone in a scene.

“In top-down hierarchies, the opposite occurs, yet the people on the front lines are the ones dealing with the evolutionary changes going on around them and are the best source of ideas for solving tactical issues. You wouldn’t need “change management” if you made continuous improvements at the functional level the responsibility of every individual and team cluster.

when the company devolves into top-down, the turnover begins. That’s because of the internal competition that emerges in top-down organizations. The perception is that there’s only so much room at the top. At each level of management, the competition increases as cooperation decreases. Thus are created the ubiquitous “silos” of information that thwart collaboration and encourage redundant, wasteful business practices.

“Managers are supposedly promoted because of their ability to outperform others and not because of an intention to provide inspiration, guidance, and mentoring to their staff, nor are they openly rewarded for this behavior, even though it usually produces a healthier bottom line. The usual way of rewarding based upon meeting financial goals and managing budgets keeps the focus on short-term financial results only, whereas continuous improvement leadership by frontline staff creates more long-term successes.

In an IT shop you give me a task to do and let me do it, generally on my own, and never EVER put anyone under me, because I am hopeless as a manager.

But it turns out I’m not so bad as a leader.

Weird, eh?

We serve the company but often don’t feel part of it. Certainly the value structures and lines of authority that function perfectly well for most of the rest of the company don’t work at all well for IT. We’re vital but at the same time, well, so different that it’s hard to imagine a CEO emerging from the IT ranks. It happens from time to time. Everyone points to John Reed, who rose from IT to CEO of Citicorp, but Reed was an exceptional case. He succeeded because his predecessor, Walter Wriston, had an unusual interest in IT and mentored Reed. Reed succeeded, too, because he didn’t really come from IT but from Data Processing, which was more hierarchical. And ultimately he didn’t succeed at all, by some measures, because John Reed was fired.

So right now let’s just accept that it is very unlikely that, coming from IT, you’ll ever become the CEO of your company. That means you are instantly off the traditional management track

What the open source community has demonstrated is the superiority of a strategy that emphasizes early proof of concept, early release, and frequent releases with features added as needed — probably totaling 20 percent of the features identified in a needs assessment.

This is the new IT strategy we live with every day — 80 percent solutions because they are fast, increasingly reliable, and keep the end users in the loop from almost the beginning.

• Perks, when done well, foster customer loyalty.
• Perks can give you the leading edge when it comes to attracting first-time customers.
• Perks can make for great if not invaluable PR; customers will tell others—perks are excellent conversation starters—while the media (trend watchers included) love a good perk story.
• Perks can help make boring companies (insurance, anyone ...?) interesting again, and thus more desirable.
• Perks can help cultivate more desirable brand perceptions and associations—think anything from showing you actually care about your customers (gasp!) to showing you care about the environment, offering eco-perks.

Personal Shared Workspaces, Publishing & Subscription:

1. Educate the project team.
2. Identify the pilot group: There are three constituencies in organizations who will more readily see the benefits of using personal shared workspaces and who are therefore natural pilot groups:
   (a) subject matter experts who are inundated with requests for
   information and advice, who could benefit from having their 'electronic
   filing cabinet' accessible to and browsable by others in the
   organization, (b) those in the company who are already publishing
   newsletters and similar regular bulletins, and (c) those who are
   coordinating community of practice networks.
3. Develop a starting personal 'taskonomy' and starting personal content archive for each pilot group member.
4. Select and adapt a commercial weblogging tool and/or develop your own personal shared workspace tool.
5. Get
   the IT subteam to: Convert personal content archives to HTML &
   ‘bulk publish’ them, create a personal TOC for each group member, and
   develop a password protection scheme.
6. Offer everyone in the
   firm a brief seminar on personal shared workspace publishing &
   subscribing. Let interest in using these tools spread virally.
7. Talk up personal shared workspaces outside the organization.
8. Set up a personal shared workspace help/monitoring group.

Automatic Content Harvesting: (leading practice: Hill & Knowlton)

1. Create separate Public and Private 'My Documents' and e-mail folders on each employee's hard drive.
2. Whenever users 'save' or store a document or message,
   prompt them to decide whether the document should be stored in the
   Public (shareable) or Private folder.
3. Establish an automated mechanism like RSS to regularly
   'harvest' the Public folder information, to a central mirror site
   that other users can browse, and/or in response to just-in-time
   canvassing searches (see below), peer-to-peer.
4. Encourage people in the organization who maintain the most
   valuable context-rich content (e.g. subject matter experts, network
   coordinators and newsletter editors) to use personal shared workspaces (see above) to post
   and archive their content as part of their Public folder.

Just-in-Time Canvassing, and People-Finders: (leading practice: Lend Lease corporation)

1. Use social network analysis (mapping or interviewing) to identify the de facto networks of expertise and trust in the organization.
2. Use these to identify network coordinators, the 'people to go to first' on key subject matter areas for your organization.
3. Have these coordinators create, maintain and publish
   Canvassing Lists (e-mail groups) with e-mail, IM, phone and other
   contact information for the people in these subject matter networks, so
   that anyone in the firm who wants to canvass people in a network can do
   so with one click. These lists should include experts outside as well
   as inside the organization.
4. Create Canvassing Templates, forms that people can fill in
   quickly and simply to describe what expertise they're looking for, and
   then send them to one or more Canvassing Lists.
5. Devise a simple one-page instruction sheet/FAQ on how to
   effectively use the Canvassing Lists and Templates, which
   communication media to use in different circumstances to contact them,
   and how to deal with telephone tag, non-responses and other situations
   when canvassing response is inadequate. It should also deal with
   appropriate etiquette and protocols to ensure the canvassing process
   isn't abused.
6. If you also have an Auto-Harvesting program (see above),
   consider putting experts' weblogs and other context-rich resources in
   the Canvassing List to use as a surrogate for people who are unable or
   unwilling to respond to canvassing requests personally.

• Identify, and then with executive sponsorship establish
  standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary
  e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions that
  prevent and interfere with critical work activities. Track and aim to
  halve the aggregate amount of 'non value added' time.
  
  
• Work with Learning leaders to develop voluntary training programs
  that can enhance time management, information management, work
  prioritization and oral communication (including story-telling!) skills.
• Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information
  (buying it, storing it, looking for it, reading it, figuring out what
  it means, managing it) and also the aggregate cost to the organization
  of not knowing -- the cost of
  failures (lost contracts etc.) and errors that demonstrably could have
  been prevented or mitigated had there been more or better information
  available. Use these measures to objectively evaluate information
  adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools,
  repositories, and processes.
• Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles customized for the
  organization that can be used to influence and drive strategy,
  structure, policy, and behaviour in the organization.

The daydream goes like this:

"I am incredibly busy right now. In fact, I feel as busy as I have ever felt in my life. Sometimes my life feels a little out of control. But I am dealing with some very unique and special challenges right now. I think the worst of this will be over in a few months. Then I am going to take a couple of weeks to get organized, spend some time with my family, start my 'healthy life' program, and work on personal development."

I have learned a hard lesson trying to help real people change real behavior in the real world. The 'couple of weeks' that you are fantasizing about are not going to happen. Look at the trend line. There is a good chance that tomorrow is going to be even crazier than today!

If you want to make real change, ask yourself this tough question: What am I willing to change now? Not 'in a few months.' Not 'when I get caught up.' Now.

Now, take a deep breath. Forget your glorious plans. Accept the craziness of your life. Do what you can do now. Let go of everything else. And make peace with what is.

I do have a couple of ideas that will help individuals make positive and lasting change or "quit dreaming".

1. Chose Friends Carefully

Such people will infuse more positivity than negativity into your life.

2. Limit Time With Friends: Even very good friends should not be overinvolved in each other's lives.

Denying an issue won’t remove or lessen it. Typically it makes it worse. The only sensible course of action is to admit to the difficulty right away and start working on how to deal with it.

For leaders, that usually means getting better information and feedback, so you can be clear about the true extent of the issue.

The only way out of our problems

The first and most essential step towards wisdom is acknowledging reality, however painful or embarrassing that may be.

The second is reflecting on that understanding and seeing what you have been denying about yourself, about others around you or about the situations you find yourself in.

Then—and only then—comes thinking about the action needed to deal with what you have found.

The quicker you face reality, the less damage it’s likely to do to you. The longer you stay in a state of denial, the more you are hurting yourself and the worse the final stages will be. As always, it’s your choice.

What pushes your buttons? What makes you instantly angry or fearful or sad? Questions like these will support you to see what it is that you need to work on inside yourself that allows events continually to push your buttons.

It’s never about the lawn mower—never.

The gray accountant-from-Hell

If Hitler is the sick, demonic parody of a success-at-any-price modern executive, Stalin is the control-freak, gray accountant who turns up from nowhere and institutes a reign of terror in the organization. He’s the godfather of the new boss who tells you you’ll have to do more with a smaller budget and fewer staff—and if you can’t succeed you’ll be replaced. He is the patron saint of the guy in Administration who tells you that your business trip to New Zealand will have to include a twelve-hour stopover in Mexico City, because it’s cheaper.

As a user, being popular in such online communities requires two things; being prolific and knowing your audience. If you know your audience, it isn't hard to always generate ideas that will be popular with them. And once you start generating content on a regular basis, you eventually become an authority. This is what happened with MrBabyMan of Digg (and all the other Top Diggers) who has submitted thousands of articles to the site and voted on tens of thousands of articles.  This is also what happened with Signal 11 of Slashdot almost a decade ago (damn, I'm getting old). In both the case of MrBabyMan (plus other Top Diggers) and Signal 11, some segment of the user base eventually cottoned on to the fact that participation in a social news site is a game and rallied against the users who are "winning" the game. Similarly in both cases, the managers of the community tried to blunt the rewards of being a high scorer - in Slashdot's case it was with the institution of the karma cap while Digg did it by getting rid of the list of top Diggers.

Although turning participation in your online community into a game complete with points and a high score table is a good tactic to gain an initial set of active users, it does not lead to a healthy or diverse community in the long run. Digg and Slashdot both eventually learned this and have attempted to fix it in their own ways.