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Archives for March 2009

Being Organized is (in part) about Being Ready

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From Time Management from the Inside Out:

Being organized, whether with your space or time, is all about being ready. It’s about feeling in command so that you are prepared to handle all of the opportunities, distractions, and surprises life throws your way. We live in a complex, fast-paced world filled with infinite possibilities and opportunities. When you develop good time-management skills, instead of being overwhelmed by it all, you celebrate it. You know what to choose. You feel clear and focused, ready to take on life.

This observation on how organization is about being ready echoes the title of David Allen’s second book, Ready for Anything. When you are productive, you are ready for what comes your way.

I would add (and so would the author, Julie Morgenstern, but she just didn’t emphasize it as much here) that being organized is also about being able to execute on your priorities.

So their are two aims and benefits of organization: being ready to deal effectively with what comes your way, and being able to chart the course you want to take. There are both reactive and proactive components to productivity.

Ultimately, these two come together, for even in responding to the unexpected things that come our way, we want to do so in alignment with our priorities. Being organized means you know what those priorities are and that you are able to able to act on them, both in responding to the opportunities and surprises that come your way and in charting the course you want to take.

Catalytic Mechanisms for Improving Organizational Performance

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Here are some key points from an article summarizing Jim Collins research on catalytic mechanisms for improving organizational performance.

Catalytic mechanisms are galvanizing, non-bureaucratic links that turn objectives, such as Collins’ concept of the BHAG, into performance.

There are several characteristics of catalytic mechanisms.

First, they often produce results in unpredictable ways. “Unlike traditional systems, procedures and practices – which may lead to bureaucracy and mediocrity – catalytic mechanisms let organizations achieve greatness by allowing people to do unexpected things, to show initiative and creativity, to step outside the scripted path.”

Second, they have teeth. “In contrast to lofty aspirations a catalytic mechanism puts a process in place that all but guarantees that the vision will be fulfilled.”

Third, rather than being designed to get employees to act in the right way, “catalytic mechanisms help organizations to get the right people in the first place, keep them, and eject those who do not share the company’s core values.”

Fourth, they have an ongoing effect. “Unlike electrifying off-site meetings, exciting strategic initiatives, or impending crises, a good catalytic mechanism can last for decades.

Notes on Weekly Management One on Ones

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One-on-one’s are weekly 30-minute meetings between a manager and each person that reports to him or her.

The guys at Manager Tools say that they are the most effective management tool that they know of. They have a series of three podcats on one-on-one’s along with a worksheet that provides some additional details.

I found the podcasts so helpful that I took some notes over them. Here are my notes.

Purpose
The purpose of 1:1’s is communication. A culture of communication, in turn, is a key ingredient of organization-wide alignment and coordination across departments. Communication is the most important lever an organization has for performance.

Basics

  1. Regularly scheduled.
  2. Rarely missed. This means “always reschedule,” instead of canceling. [I would say that sometimes, it just won’t be possible to reschedule and a week will have to be missed.]
  3. Primary focus is on the team member.
  4. Take notes. Keep in a notebook or electronically, and in each meeting refer back to follow-up items.


Agenda
Here is the standing agenda that seems to work best:

  1. 10 minutes: Them. Agenda items they bring and whatever they want to talk about.
  2. 10 minutes: You. Agenda items you’ve brought; updates that will be useful to them to know. Touch base on status of projects and quarterly goals if desired.
  3. 10 minutes: The future/development. (If there is time left for this.)

Preparation
To prepare, they suggest that it can be helpful to review 5 questions. [What I basically do is review notes from the last meeting and pull together agenda items I’ve collected along other items that come to mind (updates that will be useful, etc.).]

Anyway, here are the five questions they suggest:

  1. What things in my notes from last meeting do I need to follow up on? Then write them on your agenda.
  2. What do I need to be sure to communicate to this person?
  3. What positive feedback can I give this person?
  4. What adjusting feedback am I going to give this peson?
  5. Is there something I can delegate? (“There is a gross under-delegation epidemic in America.”)

How to Spell Bureaucratic

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I’m always forgetting how to spell this, and spell check never seems to suggest it when I need it, so I’m putting it here:

  • Bureaucratic

And, its anti-particle:

  • Non-bureaucratic

Why Your Organization's Efforts to Change May Be Failing, In Spite of Everyone's Intentions

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I recently watched a very helpful message by Andy Stanley on Systems. He made the very, very illuminating point that systems trump intentions and mission statements.

Here’s what that means. You might have a great mission statement, but systems are what create behaviors. So if your systems are out of sync with your mission, then your results will be off-mission too.

This will be true in spite of the best of intentions. Even if everybody in the organization wants “change,” the change will not happen if the systems are set up in a way that produces and rewards the opposite behavior.

Your systems must align with your strategy, which must align with your mission. Intentions and even mission statements are not enough. You must have people that give attention to making sure that your systems align with your principles and the results you want to produce.

Vision is essential. But it is part-one of a two-part picture. The second component is your system. Organizations — including creative, bold, and visionary organizations — need to have good systems in order to be effective. Otherwise you may just be a crazy maker.

As an aside: This is why I’m not a big fan when people say “I’m great at vision, but I ignore the details.” To me, that seems irresponsible. It’s like saying, “what I like to do is create a bunch of work for people that I don’t like to do myself.” True, leaders can’t get too deep into the details. But they will have to delve into some — and then make sure that they have and can effectively give strategic direction to the other leaders on their team that are good at systems.

How Many Hours a Day do you Spend on Email?

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I would be really interested in knowing how many hours a day everyone out there spends doing email.

How much time do you spend on email each day?

How many emails a day do you get?

And, if desired: How do you feel about that?

Large Monitors: The Easiest Way to Increase White-Collar Productivity

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Jakob Nielsen, the web usability guru, makes a point about large monitors that I completely affirm:

Big monitors are the easiest way to increase white-collar productivity, and anyone who makes at least $50,000 per year ought to have at least 1600×1200 screen resolution. A flat-panel display with this resolution currently costs less than $500. So, as long as the bigger display increases productivity by at least 0.5%, you’ll recover the investment in less than a year. (The typical corporate overhead doubles the company’s per-employee cost; always remember to use loaded cost, not take-home salary, in any productivity calculation.)

Apple and Microsoft have both published reports that attempt to quantify the productivity gains from bigger monitors. Sadly, the studies don’t provide credible numbers because of various methodological weaknesses. My experience shows estimated productivity gains of 5-10% when users do knowledge work on a big monitor. This translates into about an 0.5-1% increase in overall productivity for a person who does screen-focused knowledge work 10% of the day. There’s no doubt that big screens are worth the money.

I personally use a 2048×1536 display, and I wouldn’t even call that a really big screen. Within the next 10 years, I expect monitors of, say, 5000×3000 to be in fairly common use, at least among high-end business professionals.

Starting at 1600×1200, users rarely stretch their browser windows to the full screen because few websites work well on such a wide canvas. Big windows are magic for working on spreadsheets, graphic design, and many other tasks, but not for the current paradigm of Web pages. Today, big-screen Web users typically utilize their extra space for multiple windows and parallel browsing.

In sum: Get a big monitor — at least 1600×1200 resolution and 24 inches. It might cost a little more, but in a very real sense it may be wasteful not to.

As an aside, here is a very interesting comment that he makes on where the web may be going as monitor resolution grows even more. Very, very interesting:

To serve Web users with truly big screens in the future, we’ll probably need a different paradigm than individual pages. Perhaps a more newspaper-like metaphor or a different information dashboard will prove superior down the road.

5 Questions to Consider When Creating a Personal Mission Statement

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I recently came across a helpful article by Rick Warren on defining your life’s mission.

Warren, obviously, is most well-known for his book The Purpose Driven Life. Now, I would want to say that we should be promise-driven people rather than purpose-driven. (The promise is the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection for us. God acts on our behalf. Therefore we can work.)

I doubt Warren would disagree with that. I see it as very important for understanding the role of a mission statement correctly. In sum, a mission statement is not the ultimate motivating purpose in our life. God’s work on our behalf in Christ is. Our purpose — and motivation for it — flows from that.

Now, within this context, I think that personal mission statements are useful and important. They help guide your direction in life so that you are not aimless, but rather focused on what is most important for you to be doing.

In this regard, I’ve found that Warren’s article provides very helpful insight into creating an effective mission statement. He points out that there are really five questions to address:

  1. What will be the center of my life?
  2. What will be the character of my life?
  3. What will be the contribution of my life?
  4. What will be the communication of my life?
  5. What will be the community of my life?

What is so unique and helpful about this is that we often think of a mission statement simply in terms of what we should do — the ultimate, overriding aim that we are to achieve in our life.

But Warren points out that our mission involves more than just what we are to accomplish. It involves what we say through our lives — the overriding message we communicate in all we do — and, further, our mission should not be conceived apart from a context of relationships with others.

His thoughts on the center of your life echo what Covey has to say about that in The Seven Habits. Covey speaks of the problems that come from being possession-centered, or career-centered, or self-centered, or person-centered, and advocates being principle-centered. I think that the true and ultimate expression of that is to be God-centered, and Warren hits that well here also.

Anyway, enough commentary. Read the whole thing.