Why Pixar’s Movies are So Good: Company Culture
A great post at 37 Signals from a while back. Here’s the first paragraph:
More on why Pixar’s movies are so much better than the competition: According to “Pixar Rules — Secrets of a Blockbuster Company,” the company has created an incredible work environment that keeps employees happy and fulfilled. The result: “A tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production.”
How Much Do You Tip the Pizza Guy?
I’ve never been clear on this — until now. Turns out there’s a whole website devoted to this issue.
My favorite page is what the tip is not. It is not:
- One dollar.
- Leftover coins.
- Saying how much you appreciate the pizza and the driver, but not giving a tip.
- Included in the bill.
- Included in the delivery charge.
- Included in free delivery.
What do you tip? The answer is here.
Why Growth Matters to Your Organization
From Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning:
With growth, the organization expands and people can build a career and a future. Growth enables a business to get the best people and retain them. People who see personal growth opportunities have more energy, better morale, and enhanced self-confidence.
At a company that is not growing, there is little emotional energy. Your entire workday is spent feeling as if you are moving underwater. The best people spend a significant amount of time looking for a job.
If you are not in a growth situation, you are in a limiting situation.
The Three-Fold Method for Evaluating Daily Work
David Allen defines three different types of “work” that we do when doing our work:
- Doing predefined work
- Doing work as it shows up
- Defining your work
Many people get caught up in number 2, and let 1 and 3 slide.
He then notes:
Your ability to deal with surprise is your competitive edge. But at a certain point, if you’re not catching up and getting things under control, staying busy with only the work at hand will undermine your effectiveness. In order to know whether you should stop doing something and start dong something else, you need to have a good sense of what your job requires and how that fits into the other contexts of your life.
Finland Makes Broadband a Right
And the Newsweek author who recounts this thinks it “makes sense.”
This is what happens when you don’t know what human rights really are — you end up trivializing the concept altogether.
The Three Areas in Which Any Organization Needs to Demonstrate Achievement
Rick Wartzman summarizes Peter Drucker in an article on why executives who devalue values are wrong:
For Drucker, these numbers surely would have been troubling. The way he saw things, any organization needs to demonstrate achievement in three major areas if it’s to be successful: generating “direct results,” “developing people for tomorrow,” and the “building of values.” If a business is “deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die,” Drucker warned in The Effective Executive, his 1967 classic. “All three therefore have to be built into the contribution of every executive.”
10 Lessons from NBC’s Bad Jay Leno Strategy
Advertising Age has ten lessons to learn from NBC’s failing strategy of moving Jay Leno’s show to prime time. The most significant one for all organizations, no matter what your industry, is this:
Cutting back on quality, even in a recession, can be brand suicide.
I cover this reality in more detail in my series on managing in a downturn.
The 50 Ugliest Cars of the Last 50 Years
BusinessWeek has a half-century of automotive eyesores.
(I happen to think that some of the ugliest cars around are still on the road. But, I’ll hold my tongue!)
Changing the Subject Line in Mac Mail
If you’ve ever wanted to do this in order to make the required action more clear in an email you’ve received but aren’t acting on right away, here’s how.
Review Once or Twice a Year What You’ve Actually Done
Peter Drucker, from Managing the Nonprofit Organization:
All the people I’ve known who have grown review once or twice a year what they have actually done, which part of that work makes sense, and what they should concentrate on.
I’ve been in consulting for almost fifty years now and I’ve learned to sit down with myself for two weeks in August and review my work over the past year. First, where have I made an impact? Where do my clients need me–not just want me but need me? Then, where have I been wasting their time and mine? Where should I concentrate next year so as not only to give my best but also to get the most out of it?
I’m not saying that I always follow my own plan. Very often something comes in over the transom and I forget all my good intentions. But so far as I have become a better and more effective consultant and have gotten more and more personally out of consulting, it’s been because of this practice of focusing on where I can really make a difference.
Only by focusing effort in a thoughtful and organized way can a non-profit executive move to the big step in self-development: how to move beyond simply aligning his or her vision with that of the organization to making that personal vision productive.
Executives who make a really special contribution enable the organization to see itself as having a bigger mission than the one it has inherited. To expand both the organization and the people within it in this way, the top executive must ask the key questions of himself — the questions I ask myself each August. Indeed, each member of the staff must do it, and each volunteer. And the senior people must sit down regularly with each other and consider the questions together.
Drucker on Managing Yourself
If you haven’t read Peter Drucker’s article on managing yourself before, it would be a smart move. It’s a classic and one of the ten best Harvard Business Review articles ever.
Drucker covers five core questions:
- What are my strengths?
- How do I perform?
- What are my values?
- Where do I belong?
- What should I contribute?
Interestingly, John Calvin was one of the key pioneers of “feedback analysis,” which is one of the best ways to discover your strengths.
The Proverbs 16 Planner
The Resurgence has a helpful post on the importance of planning. There are three types of people when it comes to planning: the non-planner, the solo planner who leaves God out of the picture, and the Proverbs 16 planner who makes plans in dependence on God.
A Day for Things You Don’t Like
All jobs have some things about them that you don’t like. Your primary response to this should be to shape your role in a way that minimizes these things. The reason is that the things you don’t like doing take time (and energy) away from doing things that lie within your strengths.
If you let this build up too much, it will render you ineffective. As Marcus Buckingham argues in his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, the most effective people over a long period of time identify the things they don’t like doing, and stop doing them.
But you can’t achieve a utopia where there is literally nothing you don’t like doing. So what do you do about those things?
I’ve found that the things that I don’t like doing interfere more with the things I’m good at if they are spread throughout the week. This makes it so that I’m frequently shifting gears between things I’m good at and things I’m not, making for a draining day.
So my solution is that I’ve now defined a day for everything that I don’t like doing. Whenever something comes my way in an email or from anywhere that is important for me to do and which I can’t eliminate, but it drains me, I put it in a bucket for a certain day. (I’m not going to say what day that is!) Then, it is off my mind. When that day comes, I plow through those things and get them off my plate.
This keeps the other days much more free to do the things that energize me, without having to switch gears so much. Yet I still know that the “not enjoyable, but must be done” things will still get done, since they have a day assigned.
In addition to making my other days more effective, I anticipate that this will have two other positive effects.
First, it gives me a gauge for knowing, for real, how much of this stuff there is. By saying “all the stuff that I don’t like doing has to fit into such and such day,” I have a systemic incentive to keep that stuff to a minimum (rather than merely an intention, which always ends up getting over-ridden). When you let those things be scattered over the whole week, it’s like not having a fuel gauge in your car. You never know how much fuel you are really using. This gives me a gauge, with the result that I can more effectively seek to minimize these things.
Second, I hypothesize that I will find out that I actually do like doing many of these things that I currently don’t like doing. It might be the case that the precise reason that I don’t like doing most of them is that they simply aren’t a good mix with the other tasks that I like to do. But if they were all grouped into a specific block of time, where I didn’t have to switch gears between these things and other things, I might find that I actually like them.
Or, perhaps better, I will get a much more accurate idea of what I really don’t like doing, so that I can be more effective at ultimately cutting more of those things out for good.
The GAP Filter for Tweets
Good advice from Scott Williams. Here’s the gist:
Consider using the GAP filter for your tweets. That doesn’t mean put on GAP clothing before you tweet, but rather ask this question: “Is my tweet Genuine, Accurate and Positive?” The bottom line is Be Careful What Tweet, it may end up on the front page of a newspaper or worse.
Systems Trump Mission Statements; Culture Trumps Systems
A few months ago I blogged on how systems trump intentions because systems create behaviors. In discussing the attempted Christmas bombing plot, Dave Logan makes the good case that the reality goes one step further: culture trumps systems. Hence, no amount of systemic change will ultimately solve the problems that led to the security breach if the culture is not changed as well.
This is a good lesson for all organizations.
Here’s one of the core excerpts from the article:
The problem is organizational culture. As Peter Drucker, the late father of modern management, said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Culture says it’s OK to not think creatively about how a lead might connect to other information. Culture says that following up on leads eventually is soon enough. Culture says that doing what’s in our job description is “good enough for government work.”
….
Until we target culture as the issue, all we’re accomplishing with systemic fixes is the illusion of action.
No amount of Obama-style fixes will make a stupid culture any smarter, and remember, culture eats strategy — and systems — for breakfast.
In his press conference, President Obama said, “Ultimately, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it is my responsibility.” The question is: Why is no one taking responsibility for the cultures that produce these failures?
My Approach to Blogging
This is a guest post by Zach Nielsen of Take Your Vitamin Z (a blog which I highly recommend). Zach’s post gives a good “behind the scenes” view of blogging and how to be productive in it.
Some people have inquired about my method for blogging. How do I approach it? How much time does it take? Do I make much money from it? How does it all work? Here is my response.
The number one catalyst for my blog is very simple: Google Reader. I subscribe to over a hundred and fifty different blogs via Google Reader and most of those posts form the content of my posts on Take Your Vitamin Z. Google Reader makes my blogging way less time consuming than if I was bookmarking all those blog sites. If you read a lot of blogs and don’t use RSS yet, you are simply wasting a lot of time. The idea is not complicated. It’s just like checking your email, except for blogs. All your favorite blogs can be read on one internet page. Google Reader updates whenever a blog that I subscribe to updates. If I am going directly to one of the many blog sites that I like it may or may not have updated, but with Google Reader (or any other RSS feed provider) I have the freedom to only be notified when those blogs that I like update. This makes my blog reading much faster and efficient.
In terms of how I decide what to post, it’s pretty simple as well. I just look for things that I find to be interesting. This is how my blog has been all along. If I find it interesting then I’ll post it. This usually means that the topics include Christian theology, music, art, some sports, culture, adoption, abortion, leadership, short essays that I choose to write on various topics, and other random things that I find amusing.
It seems that there are other people out there who resonate with the same things that I do and find my blog worth reading, but it is also important to note that I have been blogging at least 5 days a week for almost four years in a row. Most people don’t understand that it times a huge commitment over a long period of time to have a blog that might be consistently read. Guys that know way more about blogging than I do always say that the key to a good blog is great content and consistency over a long period of time.
When I first started my blog I thought I would write long essays everyday that would be full of life changing wisdom. I found out after day two that day one’s post wasn’t all that life changing and the well was dry for day two. Thus, taking my cue from my college roommate, Justin Taylor, I mainly post things that other people have written. Those folks can usually say it better than I can anyway and I’ll bless way more people if my blog is more than just what stems from my own reflections. Also, I simply don’t have time to craft my own short essays everyday. Even if I did have that much to say, I wouldn’t be able to justify it in light of the fact that I have a wife, four kids, a busy church job, jazz gigs on the weekend, and am planting a church in Madison, WI in 2010.
I usually do most of my posting in the morning. Google Reader fills up during the night and in the morning there are usually 50-100 items for me to looks through. I can look through these very quickly and if I see something that is of interest I can copy the text, copy a photo, write some short interactions with it, etc. in a matter of minutes. On Blogger (my blogging platform) you can schedule what time your posts go live on the web so at times I’ll schedule four posts, an hour apart, but do it all at once. I often check Google Reader through the day but this usually only takes 1-10 minutes since there usually are fewer items to sort through.
I have started to make a bit of an income from blogging. It’s nothing that I could support my family with, but it is a nice extra bonus every month. This comes through two various streams of income, 1) Amazon.com, and 2) paying advertisers. The Amazon.com program is rather remarkable. All you have to do is click on any Amazon link that I provide anywhere on my site and then buy whatever you want (not necessarily the product that you first clicked on) and I’ll get a small commission. This extra income is a great way for us to save money for our church plant in Madison, WI, so if any of you out there would be willing to remember to click through my site when you buy on Amazon it would be a blessing for us. All you have to do is go to my blog first and then click on an Amazon link in the right sidebar under “sponsors” or any Amazon link in my posts.
In my life, this whole blogging thing has taken on a bit of a life of it’s own, beyond what I ever thought it would, but I enjoy it quite a bit. If you are interested, I have posted some other reflections here on why I have a blog.
The Sum of Good Government
Well stated by Thomas Jefferson in his first Inaugural Address in 1801:
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
The core principle of wise governing is very, very simple and very, very clear.
9 Ways to Use Evernote
Here’s a post on how one person uses Evernote to manage just about everything. I use Evernote as well, but slightly differently; I’ll post on that down the road if I can. This article is a helpful overview of what you can do with Evernote.
Why Many (Most?) Great Ideas Never Get Off the Ground
Scott Berkun has a good article on how describing your idea or product is as important as conceiving it. Here’s are a few excerpts:
Just about anyone in the professional world is, in effect, a professional speaker. Every single idea in the history of the business world had to be explained to at least one other person before it got approved, funded or purchased by anyone else. Call it what you like–sales, marketing, pitching or presenting–but I know the history. Despite dreams of a world in which the best ideas win simply because they should, we live in a world where the fate of ideas hinges on how well you talk about what you’ve made, or what you want to make.
….
From my studies of innovation history (which led to my best-seller, The Myths of Innovation), I know that the difference between relatively uncommon names like Tesla, Grey and Englebart, and household ones like Edison, Bell and Jobs, has more to do with their ability to persuade, convince and inspire than their ability to invent, create or innovate.
One potent thread in the fabric of reasons why some ideas take off and others don’t is the ability entrepreneurs have to explain to others why they should care. The bigger the idea, the more explaining the world demands. Yet these skills are constantly trivialized in many organizations, leading to dozens of great ideas being rejected, and their creators wondering why lesser rivals with weaker concepts are able to capture people’s imaginations and pocketbooks.
….
I see too many inventors and executives who see speaking about their work as the least important thing they do. And it shows. To the detriment of the quality of their ideas, their presentations are the spotty lens through which those ideas will be seen. Without dedicated effort, those lenses distort and betray what it is they truly have to offer.
Business as Missions in the Wall Street Journal
This was a good article from last month on business as missions in the Wall Street Journal. Here are three interesting excerpts:
Faith-at-work movements have been popular at least since the 1857 businessmen’s revival in New York City, in which noon-hour prayer meetings were so full of the city’s professionals that many businesses closed during the gatherings. But churches have typically kept business people at a distance, needing their money but questioning their spiritual depth. With the business as mission movement, that has changed. In 2004, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism, founded by Billy Graham, featured a track on business as mission. At a recent missionary conference in Hong Kong, Doug Seebeck says mission leaders apologized to the business people present. They had been guilty of asking for their money while keeping them in the foyer of the church, outside of the sanctuary.
….
Now Mr. Seebeck says, “Business is the greatest hope for the world’s poor.”
….
While advanced economies question capitalism, Christians who work in developing countries see how essential business is to provide jobs and health care, build communities and even minister to souls. For these business owners, a desk job overseas has become a full-time ministry.
How Sound Affects Us
Julian Treasure has an excellent 5-minute TED talk on “4 Ways Sounds Affect Us.” Here’s one shocking fact that he gives: open plan offices decrease productivity by 66%. (He does give a simple solution to this, however.)
(HT: Jeff Paterson)
Should We Change Calendars?
The Wall Street Journal recently had an enjoyable article on different alternatives to the Gregorian calendar that have been put forth to try and solve some of the idiosyncrasies of our current system.
(I personally find some of the idiosyncrasies of our calendar to be a good thing — it provides variety.)
Listening
Listening is not simply, or mainly, hearing what the other person is saying. It is thinking about what they are saying, and doing so from their point of view.
Implication: This includes a willingness to be influenced by others. If you are generally unaffected by what other people say, you aren’t listening.
Why Most People Don’t Keep Their New Year’s Resolutions–And How to Keep Yours
Most people don’t keep their new year’s resolutions because they don’t translate them into their schedule.
It’s that simple.
If you make a resolution, but don’t plan time to actually accomplish it, it usually won’t happen. It won’t happen because it remains merely an intention. And intentions that aren’t specifically translated to “actionable zones” tend to be treated by your mind as “nice to do, but not necessary to do” items.
The result is a hit-and-miss approach. Some days you remember and follow through, and others you don’t.
Think of an Olympic athlete. They don’t simply say “my goal is to win the gold medal.” Instead, they adhere to a workout schedule. Without that concrete mechanism of action, the goal would simply be wishful thinking.
Now, what about those more intangible aims such as “lose 10 pounds”? How do you schedule that? Obviously you can schedule the exercise portion of that goal. But what about the “eating less” portion? Speaking from experience, it’s easy to get to the dinner table and forget (or deliberately neglect?) all intentions of eating healthy.
This is where reviewing your goals comes in. Mindsets that need to be more or less continuous (like “eat less”) tend to be kept in mind through regular review until they become second nature. The weekly review helps accomplish this; for things that tend to fall out of mind easily (like “eat less”), just pausing at the beginning of your work day to remember your aims can be helpful.
Which leads to one last thing: you have to keep your number of resolutions small. It’s not possible to create actionable mechanisms for or keep in mind a large number of new (or renewed) aims.
If you find it helpful to make new year’s resolutions (and they are a good thing — see John Piper’s article on resolutions, as well as his article on what to do when you fail), make just a few that really count, and then create simple, actionable mechanisms to make them happen.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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