What's Best Next

The New iPhone

by

It will be available starting June 19. See an overview on the Apple site. Looks excellent! Key improvements include:

  • 2 times faster
  • Built in video camera (finally! — although I know you could take video before if you “unlocked” it)
  • Voice control — play music or place a call by voice
  • Compass
  • Spotlight search so you can search across the whole device (finally)
  • Send photos and videos in your SMS
  • Copy and paste (part of the software update, so it sounds like you have this even if you don’t upgrade the phone)

Google Wave

by

You’ve probably heard about Google Wave. If you haven’t (or even if you  have), TechCrunch has a good summary of Google Wave that is worth taking a look at. Here’s the 40,000 foot view:

Everyone uses email and instant messaging on the web now, but imagine if you could tie those two forms of communication together and add a load of functionality on top of it. At its most fundamental form, that’s essentially what Wave is. Developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon out of Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, Wave was born out of the idea that email and instant messaging, as successful as they still are, were both created a very long time ago. We now have a much more robust web full of content and brimming with a desire to share stuff. Or as Lars Rasumussen put it, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Having seen a lengthy demonstration, as ridiculous as it may sound, I have to agree. Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale.

What Does That Really Cost?

by

The cheapest option is not always the cheapest option. The management blog over at About.com has an introduction to the concept of Total Cost of Ownership. Here’s the start:

If I buy product “A” for $50 is that cheaper than buying Product “B” for $60? Well, that depends.

The concept of Total Cost of Ownership, usually abbreviated as TCO, helps us evaluate the true cost of the purchases we make for our companies, and for ourselves.

I would like to add another cost as well. I call it the “pain in the neck cost.” In other words, you need to look not only at the purchase price of the item and not only at the total cost over the life of the product, but also at the potential for problems and trouble and turmoil that the product will simply cost your sanity. This cost is intangible — you cannot necessarily assign dollars to it — but is just as real.

These days, when time is the new scarcity, the pain in the neck cost is more important than ever.

Don't Kick Yourself for Your Productivity Failures

by

Good advice from Time Management from the Inside Out:

The worst thing to do is berate yourself for not getting everything done, for periodically procrastinating, and for slowing down from time to time. The time and energy you spend feeling guilty create a downward spiral of nonproductivity. Even the most productive people occasionally have off days. The thing that makes them good time managers is that they realize these things are a part of life, forgive themselves, make the necessary adjustments to their schedules, and move on.

Don’t kick yourself for your productivity failures. If you do, you might create a downward spiral that makes things worse. Besides, everyone has bad days.

The Productive Value of Unproductive Time

by

From Time Management from the Inside Out:

Another reason people incorrectly estimate how long tasks take is that they overlook hidden time costs. Emily was a novelist whose goal was to write for three hours every morning. So she’d schedule three hours of writing time. That was logical enough; however, she consistently got only two hours of work done each day.

After paying attention to her habits, Emily realized it took her an hour to warm up. During this time, she read the newspaper, drank coffee, and gathered her thoughts. When she skipped this step, her writing was dreadful.

She had to accept that part of her process included warming up. For Emily to write productively for three hours, she needed to schedule four hours. To calculate how long it would take her to write a piece, she would have to allow for this transition time.

It is very interesting that this person spent one hour essentially doing other things in order to get “warmed up” for the writing she intended to do. It would be tempting to say, “that’s inefficient — she should just skip those things, and she’ll get more done in her day.” But, as she noted, if she skipped those “warm-up tasks,” her writing was horrible.

The lesson: Unproductive time is not necessarily unproductive. It may be an essential step in “tuning up” your mind for the high-level tasks it needs to do. If you cut it out, you may find that your productivity decreases rather than increases.

If you find this to be true in your case, embrace it. Don’t go overboard, but don’t try to change yourself. If you can get 4 hours of work done in 4 hours of straight work, that’s great. But if you “waste” the first hour, but then in the remaining 3 hours get the equivalent of 4 hours of tasks done, more power to you.

The New Nine-to-Five

by

Good statement from the ROWE blog:

We shouldn’t be judging people for how they decide to approach their work.  It’s that simple. As long as the work is getting done, and as long as people have the freedom to operate in the best way to get that work done, then there is no crazy. And nine-to-five is not a badge of honor, but just one of many options.

I’ll be posting more about the nature of a results-only-work-environemnt (ROWE) in the future.

Mitigated Speech and Plane Crashes

by

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses what linguists call “mitigated speech.” Mitigated speech is when we speak in a deferential way in order to be polite or show deference to authority.

For example, “If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don’t say, ‘I’ll need this by Monday.’ You mitigate. You say, ‘Don’t bother if it’s too much trouble, but if you have a chance to look at this over the weekend, that would be wonderful.'”

In most situations, mitigation is a very good and polite thing. But there are some situations where it creates a problem. The cockpit of an airplane on a stormy night is one such instance.

Gladwell points out that there are six ways for a first officer to persuade a captain to change course. These reflect the six levels of mitigation in speech:

1. Command: “Turn thirty degrees right.” That’s the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable. It’s zero mitigation.

2. Crew Obligation Statement: “I think we need to deviate right about now.” Notice the use of “we” and the fact that the request is now much less specific. It’s a little softer.

3. Crew Suggestion: “Let’s go around the weather.” Implicit in that statement is “we’re in this together.”

4. Query: “Which direction would you like to deviate?” That’s even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he’s not in charge.

5. Preference: “I think it would be wise to turn left or right.”

6. Hint: “That return at twenty-five miles looks mean.” This is the most mitigated statement of all. (Outliers, p 195)

These six levels of mitigation are helpful. Mitigation is a good way to show courtesy and respect to others. Teaching mitigation is even a key part of raising kids. For example, we teach our children not to say to us, “Give me some orange juice.” They need to say, “Please may I have some orange juice?”

So it is good manners to use mitigation in our communication, and this seems to come naturally to most people.

But sometimes this can get tricky. There are times to use less mitigation than others. For example, I don’t like it when people give me hints. As Gladwell says so well, “a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.” A lot of times, if someone is giving a hint about a course of action to take, it is too easy to interpret them as simply making an observation. Not until after the fact do I realize, “Oh, they really mean that I should have turned left there.”

The worst example of all comes in situations where lives are at risk and clear, decisive actions need to be taken. Those are instances where mitigation creates problems.

It is mitigation, in fact, which “explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes.” The anomaly is this: crashes are far more likely to happen when the captain — that is, the more experienced pilot — is in the flying seat.

Why?

The reason is mitigation. The first officer wants to show deference to the authority of the pilot. So if the pilot is making a mistake, he mitigates. If things have gone wrong, the captain is low on sleep, and other complexities abound, the captain can fail to pick this up and decode the fact that the first officer is actually saying that a critical action needs to be taken. Gladwell gives several instances of how this became the decisive issue in commercial airline crashes. As a result, it is ironically the case that “planes are safer when the least experienced person is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up” (p. 197).

Fortunately, in recent years “combating mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years.” Crew members are taught how to communicate clearly and assertively with a standardized procedure to challenge the pilot if it appears that he or she has overlooked something critical.

The result? “Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years.”

The lesson? The way we communicate matters. Be respectful and be polite. That is crucial to preserving the human element of our interactions. But know when times call for increased directness, and how to be tactful in spite of having to use less mitigation. And, above all, be clear.

David Brooks on the Problems with GM

by

Good column by David Brooks in the NY Times on why the Obama restructuring plan for GM won’t work. Chief among them: the problem is in the company culture.

G.M.’s core problem is its corporate and workplace culture — the unquantifiable but essential attitudes, mind-sets and relationship patterns that are passed down, year after year.

Over the last five decades, this company has progressively lost touch with car buyers, especially the educated car buyers who flock to European and Japanese brands. Over five decades, this company has tolerated labor practices that seem insane to outsiders. Over these decades, it has tolerated bureaucratic structures that repel top talent. It has evaded the relentless quality focus that has helped companies like Toyota prosper.

As a result, G.M. has steadily lost U.S. market share, from 54 to 19 percent. Consumer Reports now recommends 70 percent of Ford’s vehicles, but only 19 percent of G.M.’s.

The problems have not gone unrecognized and heroic measures have been undertaken, but technocratic reforms from within have not changed the culture. Technocratic reforms from Washington won’t either. For the elemental facts about the Obama restructuring plan are these: Bureaucratically, the plan is smart. Financially, it is tough-minded. But when it comes to the corporate culture that is at the core of G.M.’s woes, the Obama approach is strangely oblivious. The Obama plan won’t revolutionize G.M.’s corporate culture. It could make things worse.

Read on to see why Obama’s plan will likely make things worse.

And I’ll go ahead and add another thing to my list of things that should not exist.