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Archives for December 2011

Michael Hyatt on the Kindle Fire

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After about 21 days of using the Kindle Fire myself, I am in agreement with Michael Hyatt’s very  helpful, non-technical review.

Here’s his conclusion:

Overall, the Kindle Fire is no iPad killer. If you can afford the iPad, I’d buy that instead. It is just much more polished and, with so many available apps, can do so much more.

However, if your primary goal is media consumption at an outstanding price, you won’t go wrong with a Kindle Fire. With Amazon’s backing, it will only improve with time.

I agree with this: the main reason to get a Kindle Fire would be price. If that’s your goal, it’s a good device.

And I would add one more suggestion: At this point in time, price should not be a factor in choosing electronic devices. We are at a stage in history right now where the benefits of a truly exceptional device (such as the iPad) far, far outweigh the price difference between those devices and the lower priced attempts.

Additionally, the benefits of an iPad, iPhone, and so forth go far beyond the actual things you can do with the devices. The primary benefits are in how they affect your thinking, helping you see what’s possible and what’s next and how technology can be utilized to do good to the greatest possible extent. You cut yourself off from the fullness of those benefits when you go with budget models, and for a few hundred dollars savings, it’s not worth it.

Save money in other areas. Seeking to save money in technology is not worth the price.

The Myth of the Garage: Chip and Dan Heath’s Latest Book

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Chip and Dan Heath’s latest book, The Myth of the Garage, just came out last month and is available on the Kindle. It’s a collection of their best Fast Company columns. Here’s part of the description from Aamazon:

In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:

• Why you should never buy another mutual fund (“The Horror of Mutual Funds”)

• Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain (“In Defense of Feelings”)

• How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions (“The Gripping Statistic”)

• Why the “Next Big Thing” often isn’t (“The Future Fails Again”)

• Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks (“The Inevitability of $300 Socks”)

• And 12 others . . . Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight (or a long meeting).

The True Meaning of Justice in the Workplace

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Biblically speaking, to be just means to use your strength on behalf of the weak.

Justice most certainly includes an overall “fairness” and truth and integrity and honesty and refusing to show partiality.

But the essence of justice goes beyond that.

The essence of justice is that those with greater authority and influence are to use their stronger position in service of those who are in a weaker situation.

Helping those in a “weaker situation” might mean helping those suffering from poverty or sickness or some other harm, but it doesn’t have to be. It means helping anyone without the influence of formal authority you have. Which means, if you are a manager or leader in an organization (or in politics or anywhere), that it includes those who work for you.

Some people think that the biblical commands to be just in this sense and their corollary, radical generosity, do not apply inside the bounds of an organization. Inside an organization, “business rules” apply, which is interpreted to mean that people must be impersonal (a distorted notion of the concept of being “impartial”) and that doing things for your own advantage primarily is correct and right.

But this is wrong. The biblical commands to be generous and to be just apply in all areas of our lives, without exception. The Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12) and commands to be merciful as God is merciful (generous to all, especially the undeserving, Matthew 5:43-48) do not cease to apply at our jobs and in our work and in our organizations. They are not simply for the personal realm.

Their manifestation may look different in each area of life. But these principles of justice and generosity still apply in every area of life and we must be diligent to apply them in all areas.

So, here’s one example. Let’s take the workplace. Being just and generous in the workplace means that, if you are in authority over people, you use that authority in the service of everyone you interact with — including those in the organization who directly work for you, those around the organization who don’t work for you but you are in a position to influence, and those outside the organization that you interact with. It means you see yourself as the servant of all, and that you see your authority and position and role as existing not as some statement of how great you are or how hard you’ve worked, but rather as existing for the sake of those around you. Your authority exists to do them good.

Now, immediately here we run into “the fallacy of doing good,” which is the tendency of people to act contrary to the purpose and role of their vocations in in their attempts to “do good,” which ends up making things worse. One example might be a chef at a restaurant who gives away dozens of free meals every night out of a spirit of generosity, when it’s not his restaurant and the owner has not given him the authority to do that. In this case, the chef’s generosity of spirit is right, but the way he carries it out is not. (If he owned the restaurant or had been given the leeway to do that sort of thing by the owner, however, go for it!)

So, what does using your authority and role to “do good” at your job look like when done right? A lot could be said, but let me just say one simple, yet core, thing.

It means being for the people who work for you. Which means believing that they can excel and do good work and make a contribution, even when few other people might be able to see it. And it means using your influence to give them opportunities and, yes, advance their career whenever you have the chance.

Note I’m not saying you shouldn’t be smart and discerning. But I am saying that you should have a default belief in people and therefore do whatever you can to give them a chance, to give them greater opportunities, and to give them a break whenever you can and whenever it seems they will be able to meet the opportunity and succeed in it.

And it means, even when you aren’t in a position at the moment to help advance someone or given them an opportunity, that you are encouraging and always seek to be the type of person that builds others up and helps them get better at what they do.

So much here is about your spirit and attitude — the disposition you have and with which you carry yourself. You need to see yourself as existing for the good of others, and charged with the responsibility from God to use any influence, authority, and resources you have in service to others.

But note that I’m not simply saying “be for other people.” That is a critical thing. But it’s not enough, because it’s so easy to say that we are “for” someone but never take action. It’s easy to say words that we don’t back up with our behavior. The true disposition of a servant is to be for people and to be diligent and forward and effective in identifying ways to promote their welfare.

This is a call to give thought to improving in both our dispositions and our concrete actions. See yourself as existing in your role for the good of others, and be proactive in finding real opportunities to use your authority and influence and resources to serve others and build them up.

That’s a how true Christian operates in his job and lives his entire life.

How to Know What's Best Next

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Here’s one way. It’s not the most important. But following up on our posts from yesterday and the day before, one significant way to know what’s best to do next is to ask this question:

“Which one thing, if I accomplished it, would result in the greatest number of all these other things that I also want to do also getting done as a result?”

How to Get More Done Without Doing More

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This is the converse of yesterday’s post, where I made the point that you have to be OK with not doing everything and instead focus on what’s best next.

Here’s the irony: When you focus on what’s most important, you often get all the other stuff “thrown in.” This happens by virtue of the spillover effect. Doing the most important thing leads to positive ramifications that often accomplish the aims behind all those other things you weren’t able to do.

I’m not saying you will literally find that all the things you decided to leave undone are accomplished. Some of them will be. But more significantly, the point behind them will often be accomplished through the spillover effect.

That’s significant.

But if you try to do everything directly, you often end up accomplishing nothing. (Or, almost nothing.)

You Have to be OK With Not Doing Everything

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The point is to do what’s best next, not everything that’s next.

And the reason for this is the simple fact that there will always be more to do than you possibly can do. It is simply impossible to do everything.

And, if you know what’s best, if you know what’s most important and what really counts, you will be OK with that.

The Fallacy of Pitting "Learning How to Learn" Against Learning Facts

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The reason it’s a fallacy to pit these two against one another is that learning is about making connections. That is, learning is about making connections between facts — between truths.

Hence, you cannot learn anything without knowing facts.

The process of learning is the process of seeing and identifying and even delighting in the connections that you see among various truths. Without a storehouse of knowledge — of facts — this can’t happen. With a great storehouse of knowledge — of facts –, however, this can happen in abundance.

Learning how to learn is important. However, the first step in the process of learning is to gather the facts — gather information and truth. As you are doing that, connections (learning) will come. And as you gather more truth, more connections happen — and thus learning increases.

If in our schools and colleges and graduate programs we only focus on learning “how” to learn, we set people up to be incredibly behind. For they will have to embark on the actual process of gathering the information that is the fuel of learning after they are done with their school or program, rather than getting a bunch of that in place during their program.

Far better to learn how to learn and, right along with that, actually learn. Then, when you graduate, you will not only know how to learn when you encounter new territories, but you will already have a large storehouse of knowledge to build on. You won’t have to take so much time getting basic (or advanced) knowledge in place, and thus you will be coming at the new territory with a significant head start.

I think this is recognized in most schools, but there still persists this idea, perhaps only in popular conception, that the most important thing is “learning how to learn” rather than actually learning specific and abundant facts and truths as well. Though probably we could do better in most schools and graduate programs as well (with graduate programs, perhaps, focusing more on the making connections component of learning rather than mostly gaining information; also critical here is gathering the right information — which means, for theological education at least, reading fewer liberals).

One last thing: The fact that almost everything is available now through an internet search does not eliminate the need to actually learn facts. I love Google and looking up whatever I need to know when the need arises. But since learning is the act of making connections between facts, you need to have a whole bunch of facts in your head — not just available through a quick search on the Internet — in order for learning to take place.

(And, it’s also more efficient not to have to look everything up.)