Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Smartbrief on Leadership Poll: When adopting a new tool for business what are you most interested in knowing?
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Tuesday, March 23, 2010
To Blog or Not To Blog? - The Unequivocal Answer is TO BLOG! | Bnet | View from Harvard Business
Why Business Managers Need to Blog
So it’s remarkable that blogs have seemingly escaped the attention of most business managers, especially those in larger organizations. Only about 20 percent of participants in Harvard Business School’s General Management Program, for example, write a regular blog.
Those that don’t use this tool are missing a tremendous opportunity.
“Blogs are a powerful asset in managing an organization,” professor Marco Iansiti tells me in this interview on HBS Working Knowledge. “If you are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people, ensuring clear, consistent communication of your ideas to the entire group is a difficult challenge.”
Blogs can be highly effective in jump-starting conversations that can shape strategy and align the organization around it, he says.
Frankly, I was a little dubious — until I saw it play out in the hands of a master.Steven Sinofsky, who led Microsoft’s development of Windows 7, used a blog that ultimately ran over a thousand pages to share with his large and diverse team thoughts on everything from the 10 things that make for a good one-on-one meeting to the importance of accountability.
His writing is so good that Sinofsky and Iansiti teamed up to write the recent book, One Strategy: Organization, Planning and Decision Making. Iansiti provides the theoreticial and research frameworks that Sinofsky employs in his day-to-management, as revealed through blog posts.
Here Sinofsky writes to his team about the inevitable need to cut features as the product development cycle advances.
“As we progress through milestones it is going to become clear that we cannot get everything done that we need. That’s a given. We are going to have to start cutting features. That is always tough. We’ve talked before about how having a prioritized list of features doesn’t help here, and it sure doesn’t. The reason is obviously because we don’t know where the problems will be and they turn out not to occur in reverse priority order. So at this point it is important for dev, test, [and] pm to work together to understand the problem areas, understand the options for ‘backfill,’ which can mean changing the architecture, reducing the surface area of impact, altering the scenario, or any number of other options. And yes this can include cutting the whole feature. The last option is where the vision really comes into play…”
What Sinofsky does here in simple language is to acknowledge the real-life concerns his team is having, admit that the fine work of some folks is going to wind up on the cutting room floor, and goes on to explain how these decisions are made and why they are important.
Talk to us about how your company uses blogs at work. Are they used effectively by the CEO and middle managers? What would you do differently?
Monday, March 22, 2010
Get Inspired NOW! at the office! | Bnet | The Corner Office
10 Classic Ways to Get Inspired
Ever wonder what your brain is doing most of the time? Me neither. But I’m pretty sure it’s either observing, remembering, or associating one with the other. Sometimes it’s actually reasoning or trying to solve a problem, although in my case that probably happens less often than it should.
In any case, once in a great while you get that rare flash of insight that completely changes the way you look at a problem. In my experience, certain environmental conditions are highly conducive to inspiration, while other conditions can squelch neurological activity more effectively than seven or eight margaritas.
I don’t know why, but I got to wondering if the same conditions that work for me also work for you and everyone else. Well, there’s only one way to find out. Here are one blogger’s …
10 Ways to Get Inspired
- Drugs. No, not that kind of drugs. We’re talking coffee or tea in the daytime and wine at night. Just one or two. More than that and it has the opposite effect. Also the act of having something, anything to drink seems to make a difference.
- Nature view. Not to be confused with being in nature, which always makes me wonder if ants are crawling on me or I’m sitting in pine sap, which is usually the case. I’m talking about a nice, long view of trees, mountains, or water of some sort.
- After mental or physical stress. When you come down from mental or physical stress, your blood vessels either constrict or dilate, I’m not sure which. Whichever, it leaves me open to abstract thoughts and new ideas.
- Not when I’m whitening my teeth. Or otherwise being bugged by anything physical or mental that’s not supposed to be there, like whitening trays and toxic chemicals in my mouth.
- When I’m half asleep. It happens a lot. I’m not even aware that I’m thinking about a problem when a unique solution just pops into my head. The same goes for the morning shower … sorry about the visual.
- Conversing with a like-minded individual. The smarter and more involved in the subject, the better. It could be anywhere, in a hallway conversation or on a bullet train in Japan.
- Zero human or electronic distractions. I prefer relative quiet although white noise, like a fountain or the ocean, is great. Some types of music in the background are sometimes okay, but nothing else manmade.
- Brainstorming offsite with a management team. It does depend on who’s running the session, how it’s being run, the individuals involved, and what’s going on at the company, but it generally works for me.
- Not at work or in a cubicle. I don’t think I’ve ever come up with a single inspired concept or brainstorm alone in my office - certainly not in a cubicle - at work. The office at home is fine, probably because it fits some of the other criteria (view, distractions).
Wait a minute, that’s only nine. Hmm. Sorry, can’t find the inspiration for the tenth. An associate says things come to her when she’s driving. All I know is she’s always late meeting me because she misses highway exits. Maybe she should get a ticket for Driving While Inspired (DWI).
So, how do you find inspiration, and are any of your environmental conditions consistent with any of mine?
Amaze yourself and customers with "quiet time" at work! | Bnet The View from Harvard Business
Shuuuuttt Uppp! Why Your Company Needs 'Quiet Time'
We’ve talked here about the damage caused to productivity by constant interruptions, such as reading e-mail, answering the phone and checking out a Web site (like you’re doing right now).
In short, when your attention is diverted from a task, it takes time for you to get your mind back in the flow of what you were doing. Add up all the interruptions you get during a day and you can see the hit to productivity.
Which is why many companies are now going back to the days of pre-school and installing “quiet time,” periods when workers are sequestered from interruptions to focus on the work at hand. According to the entrepreneur.com article E-mail is Making You Stupid, companies including in IBM, Intel, U.S. Cellular andDeloitte & Touche regulate the time of some staffers by:
- Putting time limits on e-mail use, and even banning e-mail on certain days.
- Adopting no-technology days, where employees clean their work space and tidy up the paperwork.
- Establish programs and processes that encourage face-to-face contact.
Usually technology quarantines are not enforced company wide, but rather at the department or project level.
The idea of quiet time emerged from research at Harvard Business School, according to the magazine.
“Ten years ago, Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow famously chronicled the interruption of a high-tech software company. Its engineers were interrupted so often they had to work nights and weekends. After studying the workplace for nine months, the source of the dysfunction became clear: No one could get anything done because of the bombardment of messages. Perlow came up with an intervention: Quiet Time. For four hours in the morning, the 17 engineers worked alone. All messaging and phone contact was banned. In the afternoon, communication could resume. Given time to concentrate, the engineers got a project for a color printer completed without the graveyard shift.”
A year ago my employer shut down computer access for a day in order to install a new IT power supply. It was revelation. We talked with each other. We talked with customers. We found paper documents we hadn’t seen in years, and threw away paper documents were didn’t want to see ever again. Having time divorced from our computers was almost like a vacation day.
