Business – Page 2

Forbes: 10 Things They Don’t Tell You In Business School

6. If No One “Owns” A Project, It Won’t Get Done… Which is why all projects need champions. Not the kind who beats his chest and spews happy mission statements. The kind who’s backside is on the line if things don’t pan out. More importantly, the kind who has the authority and resources to make decisions that other people have to follow, else their backsides are on the line.

7. Be Clear. They actually do tell you this one in b-school, but not in so many words and not vehemently enough. The clearer you are, the more thoroughly you probably understand what you’re talking about, and the more capable and trustworthy you will seem to customers, colleagues and employees.Being clear has immense ramifications–on productivity, customer satisfaction and employee morale. If your Power Point deck contains the word “ideate,” cut, and do not paste. In fact, eliminate all jargon from everything you do. (If you think the word “utilize” is a smarter version of “use,” please, please read The Most Annoying Business Jargon.) This applies to electronic exchanges as well. The simplest, most straight forward emails can, and will, get twisted beyond meaningful comprehension. If the message is mission-critical, communicate face-to-face, or by phone, as best you can.

InformationWeek: How To Interview For VP: Expert Advice

From this InformationWeek article… (Source)

Candidates must sell themselves. I look for energy, structure in the answers, subtle efforts to influence, and the ability to lead. If a candidate can’t sell me, then how could he or she ever sell a new program to the business or a change in technical direction to the technical staff? Convincing people, often with incomplete information or unknown motives, is a fundamental role of an IT VP.

Having a plan for what you will do during the first six months is a critical differentiator. Don’t talk about goals without an accompanying plan. Don’t be concerned that the plan isn’t perfect.

HBR: The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

Great Harvard Business Review article—I love the rituals he highlights… (Source)

Abiding by a specific bedtime to ensure that I get 8 hours of sleep. Nothing is more critical to the way I feel every day. If I’m flying somewhere and know I’ll arrive too late to get my 8 hours, I make it a priority to make up the hours I need on the plane.

Work out as soon as I wake up. I’ve long since learned it has a huge impact all day long on how I feel, even if I don’t initially feel like doing it.

Launching my work day by focusing first on whatever I’ve decided the night before is the most important activity I can do that day. Then taking a break after 90 minutes to refuel. Today — which happens to be a Sunday — this blog was my priority. My break was playing tennis for an hour. During the week it might be just to breathe for five minutes, or get something to eat.

Immediately writing down on a list any idea or task that occurs to me over the course of the day. Once it’s on paper, it means I don’t walk around feeling preoccupied by it — or risk forgetting it.

Asking myself the following question any time I feel triggered by someone or something,: “What’s the story I’m telling myself here and how could I tell a more hopeful and empowering story about this same set of facts?”

InfoWeek: The Five Core Competencies For Developing IT Leaders

From this InfoWeek article… (Source)

Departmental directors should have mastered the basics of managing people, including teaming, motivation, follow-up, task assignment, legal issues, communications, and company policies. But many haven’t. High-potential directors often have gotten to where they are because of their deep personal knowledge of an area, a favorable set of circumstances, or a great team. Often, my first step in developing a high-potential director is to move him or her to a new area under a different VP and monitor carefully how the director and VP manage the change.

WSJ: The Genius of the Tinkerer

I remember reading once that an entrepreneur is simply someone that takes existing assets (or perhaps ideas) and reconfigures them into an arrangement that produces more value than in their present setup. It seemed such a dry description and lacked the sexy and exciting “invention out of thin air” that we have been trained to think is what happens in business.

As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve come to realize this definition is pretty accurate—“bricolage” as Steven Johnson points out this fantastic WSJ piece:

But ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. We like to think of our ideas as a $40,000 incubator, shipped direct from the factory, but in reality they’ve been cobbled together with spare parts that happened to be sitting in the garage.

He then goes on to discuss Stuart Kauffman’s concept of “the adjacent possible” to describe those first order combinations that appear in nature.

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

Finally, Johnson ties things back to modern “closed-door” corporate R&D:

The premise that innovation prospers when ideas can serendipitously connect and recombine with other ideas may seem logical enough, but the strange fact is that a great deal of the past two centuries of legal and folk wisdom about innovation has pursued the exact opposite argument, building walls between ideas. Ironically, those walls have been erected with the explicit aim of encouraging innovation. They go by many names: intellectual property, trade secrets, proprietary technology, top-secret R&D labs. But they share a founding assumption: that in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.

He ends with one of my favorite scenes from Apollo 13 where the engineers have to design a carbon dioxide filter from miscellaneous items aboard the damaged spacecraft dumped on to the table (“We gotta find a way to make this fit into a hole for this,” he says, and then points to the spare parts on the table, “using nothing but that”). (Source)

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

HBR: Worry Isn’t Work

Great Harvard Business Review article about judging yourself on your output rather than on your stress level. (Source)

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.It’s OK to take care of yourself. To take time to exercise. By all accounts, exercise improves brain function. It’s OK to eat well, and to slow down enough to eat consciously and appreciate the food. Proper nutrition improves brain function as well. Go on vacation. Meditate. Take a break each week for an hour to see a therapist, or a movie, or stop in a church, if that’s your practice. Sit quietly on your porch in the evening and reflect. Chaining yourself to your desk is no more correlated to productivity than mental self-annihilation.

Manifesto for Passionate Creatives

In PDF form, from John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Hagel further defines passion in this other blog post as… (Source)

…strong emotions that motivate us to move beyond our comfort zone and to achieve the potential that resides within us. Passion comes from within each of us; it cannot be imposed or mandated from outside. At the same time, it compels us to move outside, to engage with the world around us.

John Seely Brown: Collaborative Innovation and the Pull Economy

Excellent Stanford talk that touches on ecosystems, practices of reciprocity for network building, and the notion of knowledge flow rather than stock. (Source)

Unexpected Rewards from Daniel Pink, Michael Eisner and Reed Hastings

Daniel Pink takes on motivation in his new book Drive. I recently had the pleasure of hearing him speak in Pasadena, something I recommend to anyone given the opportunity (he’s an exceptional speaker, see his speaking schedule or this TED talk), where he reinforced a key message from his book about rewarding: when rewards are expected, performance suffers. “If you do X, then I’ll reward you with Y” scenarios undermine intrinsic motivation. In a typical job situation, assuming we’re paid enough of a baseline salary commensurate with our value, it’s the unexpected bonus that’s most effective.

This is precisely what I heard from Michael Eisner and Reed Hastings at a recent Churchill Club dinner in Santa Clara. With two very different takes on management, they had a lively discussion about succeeding in the “nimble” technology or more “traditional” Hollywood industries. Eisner as the elder statesmen of formal management, and Hastings as the up and coming entrepreneur with a new take on leadership—which is detailed, by the way, in the excellent Netflix culture deck. It was a lively conversation (you can also see this take on the culture clash).

What stood out for me on the heels of Daniel Pink’s talk, was when discussing how to compensate executives, the two agreed that “if-then” targeted bonuses do not align actions to long term interests of the company. Hastings recounted an event where Netflix had extra money and considered spending it on marketing to drive more subscriptions, which his executive declined as being too expensive on the margin. What if that executive had had a bonus target tied to subscription levels? Their motivation may have been suspect.

Eisner, in turn, describes his ideal model as paying a good salary and stock package (baseline rewards), but then providing unexpected bonuses when the executive demonstrates nimbleness or does something extraordinary. Exactly what Pink’s research confirms, and a testament to Eisner’s leadership ability and understanding of motivation, as well as the astuteness of Pink’s book.

As is fitting to the point here, sometimes the best parts of study and reflection are connecting the dots when you least expect them. Thanks to Daniel Pink and the Churchill Club for an unexpected reward!

Update 2/26/2010: You can now view the video of this event.