The Human Factor

The Human Factor

Revolutionizing the way People live with technology

by Kim Vicente

from the back flap (I love this endorsement and summary of the book's message):

"This book can save lives. Strong words? Yes, but this is a strong book: engaging, easy to read, but carrying a powerful message. We have far too long neglected the human and social side of technology. The result is needless accidents in vehicles, hospitals, manufacturing plants and, worse, no way of learning to make life better, safer, more enjoyable. Instead, we rush to find blame, to sue, fire, and penalize people when it's the system that's at fault. THE HUMAN FACTOR can indeed revolutionize the way we live. Read this book." - Donald A. Norman, Author of The Design of Everyday Things, and co-founder of the Nielson Norman Group.

my flags (they aren't prolific, but the book held great value and is a source of influence for me)...

pg 41 As (Robert) Wright says: “Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether technology thrives. The number of technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.” The innovations that don’t pass this test get thrown on the scrapheap. But to be successful, candidate technologies need the support of social structures that foster cooperation and coordination amongst individuals or institutions. (Amanda’s note: think of the human factor in the LMS.)

pg 42 The important fourth part of this development cycle is the transitional instability that results as new technologies and social structures arise and are overthrown. This fluid phase is a transitory no-man’s land; the traditional way of thinking has lost its appeal and is leading to social chaos, but a new way of thinking that can lead to social progress has yet to appear on the horizon (sound familiar?). And just when you think things are at their worst and society is totally out of control, real advances are most likely to take place. As Wright put it: “Turbulence and chaos often turn out to be harbingers of new forms of order.” (Amanda’s note: this reminds me of the lyrics from He Got Game... ‘and a new world order…’.)

pg 45 And of course, we should ensure that the design of technological system is problem-driven, that it aims to fulfill a human or societal need, so that we avoid the Mechanistic tendency to design technology for its own sake. Rather than thinking about the Cyclopean abstractions of “technology without people” or “people without technology”, we can focus our attention on what matters most – the people-technology relationship as it affect human and societal needs.

Some readers will recognize what I’d advocating as an example of systems thinking – a holistic, problem-driven way of looking at the world, an approach that focuses on the relationships between system elements, whatever form those elements happen to take (in our case, people and technology). Rather than following the old Laplacian reductionist doctrine of carving things up into smaller and smaller pieces and examining each tiny element and in isolation – the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place – systems thinking focuses on the big picture, the interactions between the elements. … But systems thinking is still a minority view and many people have never heard of it. (Amanda’s note: I am curious if JA believes this comment about ‘minority view’.)

pg 51 So there you have it: a new, reader-friendly term for a new way of thinking that owes a nod to Adam Smith’s genius and has parallels with the systems thinking revolutions that are slowly transforming other areas of society. My deepest professional hope is that this simple word – Human-tech – will help to power a conceptual revolution, and tear down the roadblocks put in our way by antiquated Mechanistic and Humanistic ways of thinking. A Human-tech revolution would completely change how we live with technology, and would do away with the transitional instability that currently engulfs us.

pg 61 The Human-tech Ladder: Design should begin by understanding a human or societal need – and then tailoring the technology to reflect specific human factors.

Bottom: human or societal need e.g. the music revolution, the knowledge economy, transportation, counter-terrorism, public health, environment …

1. Human factor – physical. Technology (hard or soft) – Size, shape, location, weight , color, material
2. Human factor – psychological. Technology (hard or soft) – Information content / structure, cause/effect relations
3. Human factor – team. Technology (hard or soft) – Authority, communications patterns, responsibilities
4. Human factor – organizational. Technology (hard or soft) – Corporate culture, reward structure, staffing levels
5. Human factor – political. Technology (hard or soft) – Policy agenda, budget allocations laws, regulations

pg 90 This is where my own discipline, human factors engineering, comes most into play. One of the things my colleagues and I do is document the psychological properties of people and the design techniques that can be used to create a fit with those properties. The best-known book on the subject is Don Norman’s bestseller, The Psychology of Everyday Things.

pg 113 In an attempt to salvage the course, I tried to lessen their anxieties by pointing out that they didn’t have to cure all of the world’s problems in one fell swoop; just design a simple product that could make a modest dent in reducing a significant global problem. The key was to pick an environmentally unfriendly activity that was performed many times by many people and focus on the social aspects of the technology it employed. If they could design a product that would lead to a small social improvement, and that product was used frequently, then the benefits to the environment, and thus to quality of life, could slowly but surely add up over time. A tonne of feathers still weighs a tonne.

pg 137 …Nobody knew how many illegal items each inspector let go by undetected. Yet one of the things we know about human psychology is that it’s critical for people to receive timely feedback on their job performance. Doug Harris, a human factors engineer who has studied airport security came up with a vivid and compelling analogy to illustrate the psychological consequences of lack of feedback: “Consider… how little people would improve their bowling performance and how soon they would stop bowling altogether if there were no system of keeping score and no feedback on how many and which pins where knocked down with each roll of the ball.”

pg 140 Scientific research on other vigilance tasks has shown that people remain more attentive and performance improves if “false signals” are introduced periodically to stimulate people to remain alert. In the case of airport security, images of illegal objects superimposed or blended in with legal objects could occasionally be projected on the monitoring screen.

pg 149 As Dr. Lucian Leape noted, the road to progress and change is a clear, but difficult, one to follow: “Physicians and nurses need to accept the notion that error is an inevitable accompaniment of the human condition, even among conscientious professionals with high standards. Errors must be accepted as evidence of system flaws not character flaws. Until and unless that happens, it is unlikely that any substantial progress will be made in reducing medical errors.” In other words, unless and until a Human-tech Revolution occurs in health care, the idea of designing systems that recognize the human factor will have a hard time showing up on the radar screen, never mind have a positive impact on patient safety. But modifying an entire profession’s basic assumptions about how the world works – like any other conceptual revolution – will take time, patience and dedicated effort. (Amanda’s note: think ‘mental models’.)

pg 150 To learn more about how medical error contributed to patient injury and death in anaesthesia, Cooper used the “critical incident technique” – the same method that Paul Fitts and Richard Jones had used to understand threats to aviation safety during World War II. Anaesthesiologists were asked to remember and describe incidents that either could have led or did lead to a bad outcome, which might be anything from adding to the length of the patient’s stay in the hospital to permanent disability or death. The anaesthesiologists were then asked to recall the circumstances surrounding the critical incidents. These “incident reports” would then be used to provide other anaesthesiologists with a way to learn from experience, by understanding the reasons bad things had happened, or almost happened, and identifying problems with products (e.g. poor equipment design) or work systems (e.g. long hours) – potentially lethal “invisible hands” that were threatening patient safety. This understanding provided a solid basis for making changes and thus reducing error. (Amanda’s note: this is similar to Instructional Design’s critical error analysis.)

pg 190 Rather than provide engineers with management training, some organizations have hired graduates from business schools to oversee the design or operation of technical systems. Because these individuals don’t usually understand the underlying technology that they’ve been put in charge of and don’t usually consult with technical experts, they have little choice but to apply standard management procedures, regardless of the industry they’re managing. Organizations that use this approach to managing technological systems …. have an abysmal long-term performance record, revealing how important it is for effective management to have access to industry-specific technical knowledge. (Amanda’s note: this is applicable to my role in Instructional Design.)

pg 248 … we need to identify the system design levers at the political level that are relevant to the success of complex technological systems. Three levers identified by political scientists include policy aims, legal regulation, and budget allocations.

pg 269 The groundbreaking work of Professor Jens Rasmussen, a Danish engineer, gives us the conceptual tools to make this transition from descriptive understanding to prescriptive intervention. … The crowning achievement of Jen’s life work is a two-part, qualitative framework that aims to explain both how accidents occur and how they can be prevented.

pg 277 The only long-term solution to managing risk in a dynamic society like ours appears to involve first of all accepting that external stressors such as budget cuts and market competitiveness aren’t going to go away since they’re the result of persistent human factors. Then we can focus on deliberately building technological systems that can respond and adapt to these pressures without compromising safety. In other words, the goal is to allow systems to operated “at the edge” to maximize competitiveness or efficiency, but without actually breaking the envelope of safety and precipitating accidents. To “operate at the edge,” vertical alignment via feedback across all levels must be achieved so that each person and organization in the system can see the effect their actions have on safety, not just on the bottom line.

pg 286 Human-tech isn’t a household word yet, but it has already had a significant impact on our quality of life and some basic principles are in place to help bring it to the fore in practices. … Here’s a summary of some of the examples we’ve covered; and you’ll find they have wide application in many areas of life, business and industry:

- task analysis

- stimulus-response compatibility

- behaviour-shaping constraints

- feedback design principle

- shape coding

- Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS)

- Cockpit Resource Management (CRM)

- critical-incident technique

- Jen Rasmussen’s framework for risk management

pg 291 (What can you do to make a difference?) … if you want to live in a world that celebrates humanity and the human factor, then buy Human-tech products. Begin to distinguish poorly designed products. You’ll stop blaming yourself for being technologically incompetent. Tell your friends about them. Show them how much better a human-tech gadget is, such as a PalmPilot, than one dominated by 10 million features; your friends will thank you. They too will be more likely to buy products that have an affinity with human nature. And that, in turn, will make the Wizards listen. There’s nothing like market pressure to encourage companies to change the way they do business. Human-tech consumers will eventually drive out Mechanistic design.

pg 292 There doesn’t have to be a trade-of between market share and quality of life – the two can go hand in hand. But in most cases, a full recognition of this and what it might achieve requires profound changes in the way a company designs its systems as much as its products: people’s needs will have to be put ahead of technology for its own sake; potential users of the product need to be consulted and involved from the very start; prototypes built and tested with real users (not Wizards) to see what works and what doesn’t work – and the results from these tests need to iteratively used to improve the design of the product. (Amanda’s note – this reads like the definition of Google’s approach! Also loads of application to my ID world.)

(Interesting note about the author at the end of the book Kim Vicente, in 1999, was chosen by TIME magazine as one of 25 Canadians under the age of 40 as a “Leader for the twenty-first Century who will shape Canada’s future.”)

Catching the Big Fish

Catching the Big Fish
Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

by David Lynch

Amanda's note... I was anticipating more information on the practice of meditation (how to's etc). Nonetheless I enjoyed this particular quote:

pg 27 Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you're fishing in - your consciousness - you can catch bigger fish.

Here's how it works: Inside every human being is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness. When you "transcend" into Transcendental Meditation, you dive down into that ocean of pure consciousness. You splash into it. And it's bliss. ... If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf-ball sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball sized awareness; when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball sized inner happiness.

But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; and as you go about your day, more inner happiness.

You can catch ideas at a deeper level. And creativity really flows. It makes life more like a fantastic game.

The One Thing You Need to Know

The One Thing You Need to Know
... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success

by Marcus Buckingham

(I think the title is pretty self-explanatory!)

my flags...

g 5 What is the One Thing you need to know about great managing? To get the best performance from your people, you have to be able to execute a number of different roles very well. You have to be able to select people effectively. You have to set expectations by defining clearly the outcomes you want. You have to motivate people by focusing on their strengths and managing around their weaknesses. And, as they challenge you to help them grow, you have to learn how to steer them toward roles that truly fit them, rather than simply promoting them up the corporate ladder.

pg 22 ... this controlling insight can serve as the One Thing you need to know about happy marriage: Find the most generous explanation for each other's behaviour and believe it. Love begins with positive illusions, but in strong marriages, these positive illusions do not give way to a dispassionately accurate understanding of each other's strengths and weaknesses. Instead these positive illusions weave their strength into the fabric of the relationship, until they actually become the relationship. They make themselves come true. Simply put more bluntly, your positive illusions will make your love last.

... instead, when you notice a flaw, recast it in your mind as an aspect of strength. Thus "she's not impatient, she's intense." Or, "she's not narrow minded, she's focused." Initially this might feel like you're playing mind games with yourself, but you're actually doing something quite clever. Remember: the strongest relationships over time are those in which each partner finds a way to build on his/her idealized image of the other.

pg 40 ... all great managers excel ... at turning one person's talent into performance. This, in all its simplicity, is the role of great managers. At their best, great managers speed up the reaction between each employee's talents and the company's goals.

The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, or to ensure customer service, or to set standards, or to build high-performance teams. Each of these is a valuable outcome... but these outcomes are the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is each employee's talents. The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance. This is the job of the great manager.

pg 41 The manager's unique contribution is to make other people more productive. He may be charged with other responsibilities, such as selling or designing or leading, but, when it comes to the managing aspect of his job, he will succeed or fail based on his ability to make his employees more productive working with him than they would be working with someone else. And the only way to pull this off, they say, is to make your employees believe, genuinely believe, that their success is your primary goal.

pg 44 ... You won't waste your time pondering how to resolve the conflict between the needs of the company and the needs of the employee. ... Instead, you'll set to work getting to know each of your people and trying to figure out how, where, and when each of them can succeed. You'll find the time to watch each one's performance closely. You'll offer a suggestion here, a tip there, and then support them as they attempt to put your coaching into practice.

pg 59 From all my research, this is the only satisfactory definition I've found: Great leaders rally people to a better future. ... what defines a leader is his preoccupation with the future.

pg 69 (Amanda's note: warning! excellent debate topic ahead!) Are leaders born or are they made? They are born. A leader is born with an optimistic disposition or she is not. If she is not, then no amount of "optimism training" is going to make her view the world in an overwhelmingly positive light. Through repeated counseling and coaching, you might be able to make a person less pessimistic than she was before, but "less pessimistic" is not synonymous with "optimistic" any more than "less rude" is synonymous with "charming". T lead effectively, you must be unfailingly, unrealistically, even irrationally optimistic. Like it or not, this is not learnable.

pg 70 From all this, you can see the vital distinction between the role of the manager and that of the leader. Each is critically important to the sustained success of the organization, but the focus of each is entirely different.

The manager's starting point is the individual employee. He looks at her palette of talents, skills, knowledge, experience, and goals, and then uses these to design a specific future in which the individual can be successful. That person's success is his focus.

The leader sees things differently. He starts with his image of the future. This better future is what he talks about, thinks about, ruminates on, designs and refines. Only with this image clear in his mind does he turn his attention to persuading other people that they can be successful in the future he envisions. But, through it all, the future remains his focus.

You can play both roles, of course, but if you do, you must know when to change gears. When you want to manage, begin with the person. When you want to lead, begin with the picture of where you are headed.

pg 78 ... to bring out the best in our people we must carefully manage the consequences of their behaviours. If we want to see specific behaviours repeated, we must make sure that these behaviours meet with consequences that are certain, immediate, and positive. In short, we must come to be known as a manager who will recognize excellence immediately and praise it.

pg 81 Pick good people, set clear expectations, recognize excellence and praise it, and show care for your people: these are the four basic skills of good managing. Do each of these well and you will be unlikely to fail as a manager. However, do each of these well and you will not be guaranteed success. To succeed as a manager will require of you an entirely different skill.

pg 83 ... they believe that the job of the manager is to mold, or transform, each employee into the perfect version of the role. Great managers don't. They do the opposite. The One Thing all great managers know about great managing is this: Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it.

pg 94 Michelle could have spent untold hours coaching and cajoling Jeffrey to get better at remembering customers' names, smiling at them, and making friends with them, but she would have had little improvement to show for her efforts. Her time was much better spent determining how to change his role so that he could have to do less of this and more and more of those activities for which he displayed some natural ability.

pg 105 So if you want a person to achieve his utmost and to persist in the face of resistance, reinforce his beliefs in his strengths, even overemphasize these strengths, give him an almost unreasonable confidence that he has what it takes to succeed. Your job is not to provide him with a realistic picture of the limits of his strengths and the liability of his weaknesses - you're a manager, not a therapist. Your job is to get him to perform.

pg 106 Instead, to combat nonchalance, build up the size of the challenge. Having detailed the outcomes you want, tell him how hard it's going to be to achieve them. Emphasize their scope, their complexity, their "no one has ever pulled this off before" quality. Do whatever you can to get his attention and make him take his challenge seriously. In short, the state of mind you should try to create in him is one where he has a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge ahead of him, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it. ... And if this person succeeds, should you praise him for his hard work or for his unique strength? Always do the latter. Tell him he succeeded because his strengths carrie d the day.

pg 109 (on failure) The final strategy is the most extreme. If skills and knowledge training produce no improvement, if complementary partnering proves impractical, if no nifty technique can be found, you are going to have to rearrange the employee's working world so that his weakness is not longer in play.

pg 123 Strengths and weaknesses, triggers, and unique style of learning - these are the three things you must know about a person in order to manage him effectively. But how can you identify them? Well, there's no substitute for observation. The great manager spends a good deal of time outside his office, walking around, watching each person's reactions, listening, taking mental notes about what each person is drawn to ad what each person struggles with.

But initially, the best way to identify these levers is to ask a few simple questions and listen carefully to the answers. Of all the questions I've experimented with, these five have proven to be the most revealing.

For strengths:
1. What was your best day at work you've had in the last three months? What were you dong? Why did you enjoy it so much?
For weaknesses:
2. What was your worst day at work in the last three months? What were you doing? Why did it grate on you so much? (also insight on this from pg 217)
For triggers:
3. What was the best relationship with a manager you've ever had? What made it work so well?
4. What was the best praise or recognition you've ever received? What made it so good?
And for unique learning style:
5. When in your career do you think you were learning the most? Why did you learn so much? What's the best way for you to learn?

pg 132 So, while great managers discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it, great leaders do the inverse. The One Thing every great leader knows he must do is: Discover what is universal and capitalize on it.

pg 143 The job of a leader is to rally people toward a better future. ... The only one that deals explicitly with the future is the third one, our fear of the future. The first two are inherently static... will preserve the status quo. In contrast, if you can come to grips with the third universal, if you can grapple with our fear of the future and somehow neutralize it, even turn it into something positive, you will have positioned yourself to pull off something truly significant as a leader.

pg 155 This brings us up to 2003. Despite Best Buy's success, Brad decided that a further change was required. He's the kind of leader who views success as the art of leaping from one burning platform to the next and who, if he sees that the current platform isn't burning, will be more than pleased to set it on fire.

pg 174 If you want people to follow you confidently into a better future, take a leaf out of Preston's (Borax) book. Tell them clearly where their core strength lies, and thus focused, thus fortified, they will do everything in their power to make it come true.

pg 177 If you want to design a balanced scorecard, keep it to yourself and your fellow executives. Pull it out at board meetings. Refer to it at executive retreats. Use it on the performance scorecards of your direct reports if you wish. But don't broadcast it to us. ... If you want us to follow you into the future, you must cut through its complexity and give us one metric, one number to track our progress. Give us a score that we can do something about, or that measures how well we are serving the people you have told us we should be serving. ... A balanced scorecard is a device to help him manage, not lead. It will help him set expectations for one person, but it will not help him bring clarity to many people. Only something like his "our strength is our safety" can do this, and this is why he focuses on, publicizes, and celebrates one core score: number of lost-time injuries.

pg 179 Although Best Buy's success could be measured in a variety of different ways, Brad's bet was that if each store could increase the number of its engaged employees it would subsequently see an increase in the more traditional measures of corporate success. The numbers have borne him out. Today he can point to data that show that across the entire Best Buy enterprise an increase in employee engagement of 2 percent (as measured by the twelve employee survey questions) results in an additional $70 million in profitability. (Amanda's note - wow! direct financial impact from employee engagement results!)

pg 180 In highlighting the achievements of these leaders, my point is not that each of them picked the one "right" score. There is no "right" score. ... My point here is that by zeroing in on one score these leaders brought clarity to their people. This clarity made people more confident, more persistent, more resilient, and more creative, and these qualities then spilled over, or "rippled" to use Brad Anderson's word, into all areas of the enterprise.

If you want to match their achievements, you should do the same. Sort through all the scores available and pick one that fits whom your people are trying to serve, or that quantifies the strength you say they possess, and, most importantly, that they can do something to affect. Ideally this score will be a leading indicator of success, such as employee engagement or employee safety or crime, rather than a trailing indicator, such as sales or profit or tax revenues, but, from the perspective of your followers, what matters most is that it's clear.

pg 196 I am not suggesting that you strive to achieve the same rhetorical prowess as Dr. King. He was blessed with a talent for oratory that few of us will ever possess. But you can learn from his lesson. Discipline yourself to practice you descriptions of the future. Experiment with word combinations. Discard the ones that fall flat and keep returning again and again to the ones that seem to resonate and provide us with the clarity we seek.

... Effective leaders don't have to be passionate. They don't have to be charming. They don't have to be brilliant. They don't have to possess the common touch. They don't have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals - our need for security, for community, for authority, and for respect - our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.

Show us clearly who we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions must be taken today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

pg 202 "Remember, you said that according to Gallup research only twenty percent of people report that they are in a role where they have a chance to do what they do best every day, and that the rest of the working world feels like their strengths are not being called upon every day." Of course I remembered... On one level it is sad that so many people feel miscast, but, on another level, what a wonderful untapped resource for any manager or company insightful enough to use it. (Thus, the 'twenty percenters'.)

pg 217 ... what is it with the twenty percenters in your life? ... Either subliminally or consciously, they remembered the One Thing we all need t know to sustain our success: Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

pg 218 To bring this discipline to mind, stop reading for a moment and try to recall an event in which you struggled. ... Obviously, I have no idea what you are thinking about. But I can tell you that your sustained success depends on your ability to reflect on events such as these, to use them to identify those things that weaken you, and then, as efficiently as possible, to cut these out of your life. The more effective you are at this, the more successful you will be. Freed from the friction of these things that weaken you, you will then be able to unleash fully the power of your strengths. (Amanda's note: talk about the ultimate 'operational friction'!)

pg 224 Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time. ...How? .. The more of a commodity you are, the less successful you will be. Or, as Peter Drucker once said, "Something special must leave the room when you leave the room." (Amanda's note this reminds me of a colleague's coaching question: For what do you want to be known?)

pg 242 As an adult, where are you likely to learn the most, or, in biospeak, where are you likely to see the greatest growth in your synaptic connections? Since the least biolgically costly way to forge new connections is to piggyback on connections already in place, you will actually grow the most new connections in the area of your brain where you already have the most existing connections. ... Most of your learning should be targeted towards those areas where you have already achieved some level of mastery. If you have a natural ability to solve problems, or to build relationships, or to compete, or to anticipate the needs of others, you wil be the most bang from your learning buck from stretching, refining, and focusing these abilities. In these areas of mastery, your synaptic branches are already in place. Here new buds of learning will flourish. (Amanda's note: hence learning dirtbiking and snowboarding for me!)

pg 257 ... And yes, as you experience some measure of success, you should feel free to experiment, to try new roles and responsibilities and see how they fit. However, as you grow, as you experience success, you must keep your senses alert to those aspects of your role that bore you, or frustrate you, or drain you. Whenever you become aware of some aspect you dislike, do not try to work through it. Do not chalk it up to the realities of life. Do not put up with it. Instead, cut it out of your life as fast as you can. Eradicate it.

pg 260 The most successful people scuplt their jobs so that they spent a disproportionate amount of time doing what they love. This doesn't happen by accident. It happens because they stay alert to those activities that they don't like and cut them out as quickly as possible. They jealously guard their "doing what I love" time. ... the moment that you perceive you are spending less than 70 percent f your time on things you love to do, identify the activities getting in the way and take action to remove them. The more effective you are at this, the more creative, the more resilient, the more valuable, and thus the more successful you will be.

pg 284 To excel as a manager you must never forget that each of your direct reports is unique and your chief responsibility is not to eradicate this uniqueness, but rather to arrange roles, responsibilities, and expectations so that you can capitalize upon it. The more you perfect this skill, the more effectively you will turn talents into performance.

To excel as a leader requires the opposite skill. You must become adept at calling upon those needs we all share. Our common needs include the need for security, for community, for authority, and for respect, but, for you, the leader, the most powerful universal need is our need for clarity. To transform our fear of the unknown into confidence in the future, you must discipline yourself to describe our joint future so vividly and precisely. As your skill at this grows, so will our confidence in you.

And last, you must remember that your sustained success depends on your ability to cut out of your working life those activities, or people, that pull you off your strengths' path. Your leader can show you clearly your better future. You manager can draft you on to the team and cast you in the right role on the team. However, it will always be your responsibility to make the small but significant course corrections that allow you to sustain your highest and best contribution to this team, and to the better future it is charged with creating. The more skilled you are at this, the more valued, and fulfilled, and successful you will become.

... To learn more about The One Thing You Need to Know, please visit marcusbuckingham.com.

Best Info Ever on Worrying

I was cleaning out some old files and came across this article on the big topic of "worry". Great resource...

http://www.stresscure.com/relation/worry.html

Never Eat Alone

Never Eat Alone
And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship At A Time
by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz

From the flap… Do you want to get ahead in life? Climb the ladder to personal success? The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships – so that everyone wins.

my flags…

pg 8 I didn’t think of it as cold and impersonal, the way I thought of “networking”. I was, instead, connecting – sharing my knowledge and resources, time and energy, friends and associates, and empathy and compassion in a continual effort to provide value to others, while coincidentally increasing my own. Like business itself, being a connector is not about managing transactions, but about managing relationships.

pg 9 I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful. It was about working hard to give more than you get.

pg 21 Job security? Experience will not save you in hard times, nor will hard work or talent. If you need a job, money, advice, help, hope, or a means to make a sale, there’s only one surefire, fail-safe way to find them – within your extended circle of friends and associates.

pg 30 The tool I use is something I call the Networking Action Plan. The Plan is separated into three distinct parts: The first part is devoted to the development of the goals that will help you fulfill your mission. The second part is devoted to connecting those goals to the people, places, and things that will help you get the job done. And the third part helps you determine the best way to reach out to the people who will help you accomplish your goals.

pg 68 Before the meeting, I generally prepare, or have my assistant prepare, a one-page synopsis on the person I’m about to meet. The only criterion for what should be included is that I want to know what this person is like as a human being, what he or she feels strongly about, and what his or her proudest achievements are.

pg 82 In fifteen seconds, I used my four rules for what I call warm calling: 1) convey credibility by mentioning a familiar person or institution – in this case, John, Jeff and WebMD. 2) State your value proposition: Jeff’s new product would help Serge sell his new products. 3) Impart urgency and convenience by being prepared to do whatever it takes whenever it takes to meet the other person on his or her own terms. 4) Be prepared to offer a compromise that secures a definite follow-up at a minimum.

pg 106 The fact is, most people don’t follow up very well, if at all. Good follow-up alone elevates you above 95 percent of your peers. The follow-up is the hammer and nails of your networking toolkit. … Give yourself between twelve and twenty-four hours after you meet someone to follow-up. … I remind myself in a month’s time to drop the person another e-mail, just to keep in touch.

pg 110 Conferences are good for mainly one thing. No, it’s not the coffee and cookies at breaks. It’s not even pricey business enlightenment. They provide a forum to meet the kind of likeminded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals.

pg 111 Real, actionable insight mostly comes from experience, books, and other people. Roundtable discussions and keynote speeches can be fun, even inspirational, but rarely is there the time to impart true knowledge. But there may be no better place to extend your professional network and, on occasion, get deals done.

pg 112 Those who use conferences properly have a huge leg up at your average industry gathering. While others quietly sit taking notes, content to sip their free bottled water, these men and women are setting up one-on-one meetings, organizing dinners, and, in general, making each conference an opportunity to meet people who could change their lives.

pg 116 The point here is that the opportunity to speak exists everywhere, paid or unpaid. It’s fun, it can be profitable, and there’s no better way to get yourself known – and to get to know others – at an event. Study after study shows that the more speeches one gives, the higher one’s income bracket tends to be. … How do you become a speaker at a conference? First, you need something to say: You need content. You need to develop a spiel about the niche you occupy. In fact, you can develop a number of different spiels, catering to a number of different audiences.

pg 122 Most people think a conference is a good time to market their wares. They rush from room to room desperately trying to sell themselves. But a commando knows that you have to get people to like you first. The sales come later – in the follow-up discussions you have after the conference. Now is the time to begin to build trust and a relationship.

pg 125 During speeches, I’ll sit in the back and write follow-up emails to the people I just met at the previous break. Everyone you talked with at the conference needs to get an email reminding them of their commitment to talk again. I also like sending a note to the speakers, even if I didn’t get a chance to meet them.

pg 129 (Amanda add from email to Roanne!!)

pg 149 The message here is that we can go though life, particularly conferences and other professional gatherings, making shallow, run-of-the-mill conversations with strangers that remain strangers. Or we can put a little of ourselves, our real selves, on the line, give people a glimpse of our humanity, and create the opportunity for a deeper connection. We have a choice.

pg 155 If all else fails, five words that never do: “You’re wonderful. Tell me more.”

pg 157 (From Dale Carnegie)
- Become genuinely interested in people
- Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
- Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
- Smile.
- Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
- Give honest and sincere appreciation.

pg 177 To paraphrase Dale Carnegie: You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.

pg 187 The Pinging Staple: Birthdays. …Once you’ve cultivated contact with a new associate or friend, nurture it by pinging. It’s the Miracle-Gro for your blooming garden of friends and associates.

pg 208 Remember those wise words of Mark McCormack in his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: “Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.”

pg 211 Once a resonating pitch is perfected, getting attention is less of a problem. Journalists are hungry for ideas. Getting access to them is often as simple as calling the magazine or newspaper they work for, which can be found on their Web site, and asking to speak with the reporter who covers your beat. I’ve never met a journalist with a gatekeeper. Moreover, I’ve never had my calls go unreturned after leaving a message that said, “I’ve got the inside scoop on how the gaming industry is going to revolutionize marketing. I’ve appreciated your work for a long time now; I believe you’re the right person to break this story.”

pg 237 You have to start today building relationships with the media before you have a story you’d like them to write. Send them information. Meet them for coffee. Call regularly to stay in touch. Give them inside scoops on your industry. Establish yourself as a willing and accessible source of information, and offer to be interviewed for print, radio, or TV. Never say, “No comment.”

pg 288 Balance is a mind-set, as individual and unique as our genetic code. Where you find joy, you find balance.

pg 294 As noted author and speaker Rabbi Harold Kushner once wisely wrote, “Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured our how to live so that our lives mater so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it.”

pg 297 How had I – along with so many other perfectly capable and intelligent people I knew – allowed my life to get so far out of whack? By failing to ask ourselves the kinds of questions that are the most important: What is your passion? What truly gives you pleasure? How can you make a difference?

Wikinomics

Wikinomics
How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

from page 64 – an excerpt that captures the book’s summary… We call it the world of “wikinomics” – in which the perfect storm of technology, demographics, and global economics is an unrelenting force for change and innovation.

my flags…

pg 18 Whether designing an airplane, assembling a motorcycle, or analyzing the human genome, the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organizations is becoming the defining competency for managers and firms. And in the years to come, this new mode of peer production will displace traditional corporation hierarchies as the key engine of wealth creation in the economy.

pg 20 Conventional wisdom says companies innovate, differentiate, and compete by doing certain things right: by having superior human capital; protecting their intellectual property fiercely; focusing on customers; thinking globally but acting locally; and by executing well (i.e. having good management and controls). But the new business world is rendering each of these principles insufficient, and in some cases, completely inappropriate. The new art and science of wikinomics is based on four powerful new ideas: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

pg 38 The result is that today’s most exciting and successful Web companies and communities are stitching together their own services from shared databanks and Lego-style pieces of Web software. Rather than define the user experience and publish information for people to observe, they use Web services to create platforms for people to cocreate their own services, communities, and experiences. And when they built it, people came – usually by the tens of millions. In fact, 2006 was the year when the programmable Web eclipsed the static Web every time: flickr beat webshots; Wikipedia beat Britannica; Blogger beat CNN; Epinions beat Consumer –Reports; Upcoming beat evite; Google Maps beat MapQuest; Myspace beat friendster; and craigslist beat monster.

What was the difference? The losers launched Web sites. The winners launched vibrant communities. The losers built walled gardens. The winners built public squares. The losers innovated internally. The winners innovated with their losers. The losers jealously guarded their data and software interfaces. The winners shared them with everyone.

pg 45 It’s all based on a principle the new generation of Web start-ups learned from the open source software community: There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside.

pg 49 The key point is that online social networking is uniquely attuned to the Net-Gen’s (1977 to 1996) cultural habits and will be part of the social fabric going forward. It signals how young people today are predisposed to connect and collaborate with peers to achieve their goals.

pg 50 TakingITGlobal is one of the world’s best examples of how N-Geners are using digital technologies to transform the world around them. Cofounder Jennifer Corriero calls TakingITGlobal “a platform to support collaboration among young people in developing projects, in understanding and grappling with issues, and influencing the decision-making processes, especially around those issues that are directly affecting young people.”

pg 68 So, how can loose networks of peers possibly assemble goods and services that compete head-to-head with those of a large, deep-pocketed company? For one, peering taps into voluntary motivations in a way that helps assign the right person to the right task more effectively than traditional firms. The reason is self-selection. When people voluntarily self-select for creative, knowledge-intensive tasks they are more likely than managers to choose tasks for which they are uniquely qualified. Who, after all, is more likely to know the full range of tasks you are best qualified to perform – you or your manager?

pg 80 “One of the things we learned early on,” says Frye, “is that people participating in open source communities as individuals. You are not employee X of company Y. You are a lone human being. The company you work for doesn’t impress the programmers in the community. And each of these communities is different, so every time you want to work on something new, you have to learn about that community in order to join it and be effective.”

pg 98 Werner Mueller and the story of InnoCentive points to a deep change in the way companies innovate. Companies can tap emerging global marketplaces to find uniquely qualified minds and discover and develop new products and services faster and much more efficiently than they have in the past. We call these marketplaces Ideagoras, much like the bustling agoras that sprung up in the heart of ancient Athens. Modern-day ideagoras such as InnoCentive serve a more specific purpose: They make ideas, inventions, and scientific expertise around the planet accessible to innovation-hungry companies.

pg 102 As P&G CEO A.G. Lafley put it, “Someone outside your organization today knows how to answer your specific question, solve your specific problem, or take advantage of your current opportunity better than you do. You need to find them, and find a way to work collaboratively and productively with them.” That’s what ideagoras are for.

pg 142 Of course, democratization is a scary word for those accustomed to ironclad control over the creation and distribution of music. “But at some point,” says Jim Griffin, the former head of technology of Griffin Records, “the music industry must come to a realization that they can hold a great deal more in an open hand than they can in a closed fist.” … Rather than build a bold new business models around digital entertainment the industry has built a business model around suing its customers. … The music industry – and all industries for that matter – must resist the temptation to impose their will on consumers as a matter of convenience, or worse, as a result of a lack of ingenuity and agility. Rather, music labels should develop Internet business models and offerings with the right combination of “free” goods, consumer control, versioning, and ancillary products and services. This includes new platforms for fan remixes and other forms of customer participation in music creation and distribution.

pg 145 Perhaps it’s because the mainstream media just don’t get it yet. Jarvis says mainstream news editors look at sites like dig and worry that second-rate stories will make it onto the front page. But are editors really in a position to best the collective judgement of their audience? Maybe they’re worried it will go a step further. We’ll let journalists post their stories directly and let the community decide which stories are newsworthy and important. After all, if the community is the best arbiter of relevance, do we really need editors?

In truth, serious news organizations will always require great reporters, writers, and editors to deliver top-notch content. Above all, they need individuals with the skills and experience to ferret out great stories and editors with the accuracy to uphold standards of independence, professionalism, and accuracy. Digg and Slashdot have the easy job by comparison – they aggregate, rate, and comment on the news, they don’t do the hard-core reporting.

pg 154 But in today’s networked economy, proprietary knowledge creates a vacuum. Companies that don’t share are finding themselves ever more isolated – bypassed by the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value. Conversely, evidence is mounting that sharing and collaborating, if done right, creates opportunities to hitch a ride on public goods and lift all boats in the industry.

pg 161 Scientists involved in OpenWetWare, an MIT project designed to share expertise, information, and ideas in biology, are heralding the arrival of science 2.0. Twenty labs at different institutions around the world already use the wiki-based site to swap data, standardize research protocols, and even share materials and equipment. Researchers speculate that the site could provide a hub for experimenting with more dynamic ways to publish and evaluate scientific work. Labs plan to generate RSS feeds that stream results as they happen, and use wikis to collaboratively author/modify reports. Others have suggested adopting an Amazon-style reader review function that would make the peer review process quicker and more transparent. (Amanda’s notes – ideas for ID here?)

pg 187 (about the PeopleFinder project / Hurricane Katrina) By Monday evening 50,000 entries had been processed, and the number continued to increase significantly, eventually reaching 650,000. Meanwhile, people looking for friends or relatives could enter a name, a zip code or an address into a search tool hosted on www.katrinalist.net to get an instant list of names matching their query. Over 1 million such searches were conducted in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

Tales of heroic volunteer efforts are not particularly unusual. Disasters of this magnitude tend to bring out humanities finer traits. What is remarkable is that the PeopleFinder project might have taken a government agency with loads of money a year or more to execute. Yet the PeopleFinder group rallied to pull it together in four days with absolutely no cost to the taxpayer. Mass collaboration at its finest.

pg 188 The notion that innovation proceeds through the recombination or existing ideas to form something new is not unique to the Web, or even the last century. In fact, it was Isaac Newton who famously said in a letter dated February 5, 1675, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” His modest explanation for how he achieved such incredible insight into natural phenomenon has come to represent the idea that all innovations are ultimately cumulative, with each generation of advances resting on the previous.

pg 217 We and our colleagues have argued for years that companies should treat their various functions and operations as component pieces that they can pull apart and recombine as necessary. Palmisano warns that, “these decisions are not about simply a matter of off-loading noncore activities, nor are they mere labour arbitrage. They are about actively managing different operations, expertise, and capabilities so as to open the enterprise up in multiple ways, allowing it to connect intimately with partners, suppliers, and customers.” In other words, companies should base their boundary decisions on strategic judgements about which operations they want to excel at and which they think are best suited to partners, suppliers, and customers. In recent years this new imperative has yielded some interesting new developments.

pg 224 Some companies think and act globally by playing the mergers and acquisitions game (M&A) – they buy up companies with the capabilities they require and manage much of their innovation internally. Even the best-laid M&A plans, however, come with well-known integration problems and considerable costs to day-to-day operations.

Other companies, like Boeing, are moving in the opposite direction: shedding noncore assets and choosing instead to collaborate across global and loosely coupled value webs. Rather than old hierarchical producer-supplier relationship, lead companies (prime systems integrators, in technical jargon) and their partners share the costs and risks of large development projects across the life cycle of new products and collaborate on everything from design to manufacturing, and even to long-term maintenance and support. The collaborative approach allows companies to tap best-in-class capabilities without the headaches accompanying the need to manage a full-blown merger or acquisition. Lead companies engage in less and less manufacturing and concentrate instead on designing systems and processes and orchestrating collaboration. (Amanda’s note: Is this Dr. T’s vision for Coast U? ID? Think of his ideas around resourcing…our value add… etc).

pg 226 Deepening supplier involvement has significantly boosted the efficiency of the design process. Bair explains that when Boeing sent the specifications to the electronic supplier for the 777 (the predecessor to the 787) the document was twenty-five hundred pages long. “There wasn’t a lot left to their imagination,” he said. “We told them exactly what we wanted in excruciating detail.” The equivalent specification document for the 787 is a mere twenty pages long.

pg 227 Altogether, it’s a massive technological and human challenge to bring together such a diverse and globally distributed team of designers and manufacturers into a highly complex and structured development project. Underlying this complex network is a real-time collaboration system created by Boeing and Dassult Systemes called the Global Collaborative Environment. This cutting edge system links all of the various partners to a platform of product life-cycle management tools and a shared pool of design data. No more need to send engineering drawings back and forth between engineering and design teams. Any member of the team, anywhere in the world, at any time, can access, review, and revise the same drawings and simulations while the software tracks the revisions. Nonengineering managers can get in on the action too. Lightweight viewers enable everyone from marketing execs to cost accountants to review and comment on the plans as they progress, ensuring that the final design comes to fruition in the broadest possible context.

pg 236 If you’re in the aerospace industry, you’ll find that controlling costs and decreasing the time required to get large-scale projects to market is more important than owning all of the requisite capabilities and engineering knowledge that contribute to the end product. Regardless of the industry, however, a new golden rule is emerging: Always strive to be the best at what your customers value most and partner for everything else. (Amanda’s note: what do Coast U’s customer’s value most? Insight into what skills we can partner with…)

pg 245 Now that the “agent culture” has taken root, Stephens says there is no telling where it will go. One thing is certain, however. When it comes to orchestrating employee collaboration, Stephens has a new rule: First observe, and then implement. “I’m deathly afraid of wasting time and energy trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. So next time, before I build that shiny new playground, I’m going to think about who Geek Squad agents are already organizing – it’s just much more efficient that way.” (Amanda’s note: LMS insights here? How else are people already collaborating around learning in the organization?)

pg 251 Some business thinkers claim that the bottom-up approach to collaboration and innovation is often counterproductive. They warn that “letting a thousand flowers bloom” ends up giving companies a lot of weeds, diluting their focus on the few big ideas that are going to “move the needle” in multibillion dollar companies. But Anderson (from BestBuy) counters that without these systematic, cross-company forums much valuable knowledge inside the organization would go unutilized. “Getting other points of view and other pieces of knowledge into our learning system that might otherwise have escaped is key to our success as an organization,” said Anderson. (Amanda’s note: think of some that you know that hold this view!)

pg 251 BestBuy demonstrates how drilling holes through the hierarchy of an organization can produce great results. But what happens when you mesh Brad Anderson’s philosophy with a powerful new infrastructure for collaboration that includes wikis, blogs, and RSS? To find some answers, we talked to Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, one of a growing number of startups that have emerged to supply social computing technologies (especially wikis) to enterprises.

pg 253 This “in the backdoor” approach t o technology adoption is not particularly new in the workplace. It happened with email, and especially with instant messaging – a technology that many organizations found threatening at first. Now email and instant messaging are workplace standards, and the same thing is happening with wikis. According to Tim Bray at Sun Microsystems, this is a lesson we ought to have learned by now. “The technologies that come along and change the world are simple, unplanned ones that emerge from the grassroots rather than the ones that come out of corner offices of the corporate strategists,” he says.

pg 253 When DKW CIO JP Rangaswami learned of the process, he was intrigued by the technology’s versatility. The company went ahead with more pilots, and after just six months of usage, the traffic on the internal wiki exceeded that on the entire DKW intranet. Today the wiki has more than two thousand pages, and is used by more than a quarter of the company’s workforce. Lead users have decreased email volume by 75% and cut the company’s meeting times in half. Rangaswami says, “We recognized early on that these” tools would allow us to collaborate more effectively than existing technologies.

pg 254 Many wiki users and aficionados say the benefits are linked to the ease and efficiency which collaboration takes place. Tantek Celik, Technorati’s chief technologist, uses wikis for everything – his work, his social life, his volunteer activities, and for staying in touch with friends and family. He says wikis distribute the burden of organization across a collaborative network instead of making an individual project manager a choke point. “Now everyone can make incremental progress without having to wait for everyone else,” he said. “It’s like a parallel processing for people rather than computers.” Celik goes so far as to suggest, “The ability to use wikis will be a required job skill in five years. (Amanda’s note: big ideas for ID here!!)

pg 256 In a traditional workplace, this decentralized approach to problem solving might be worked out in the lunchroom, while leaning over a colleague’s cubicle, over a pint after work, or increasingly though a long thread of emails. The problem is that this casual approach to problem solving leaves no organizational memory of the event, with the risk that only the people involved in creating the solution walk away with any new insights. Problems can persist like a bad cold, and solutions will be reinvented every time the problem reoccurs. … “You release early and often,” says Mayfield, citing the open source dictum. “When you come across a bug in the workplace, you have an ethic of fixing it right then and there so you have these tight little iteration cycles. Wikis compel teams to engage in a constant state of rapid prototyping.” … “In the end, nothing is in an end state,” says Mayfield. “Even with Wikipedia, the best you could say today is that it’s better that it was yesterday, and tomorrow it’s going to be even better. The project is never going to end.”

pg 260 If you work at Google, what are you required to do with 20 percent of your time? Goof off! The company directs employees to dedicate 20 percent of their time to personal projects – projects that interest employees but needn’t slot neatly into Google’s predefined product roadmaps. In keeping with its belief in collaboration and encouraging self-organization, the company tracks the pet projects that employees conjure up.

Company officials reason that although Google employees are only a small fraction of the programming talent in the world, they are among the brightest programmers in the world. So in addition to leveraging the insights of external developers, Google allows its employees to pursue their own interests. This not only makes them happy, it boosts creativity and can surface unplanned innovations that may one day evolve into successful business ventures.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt told us he hadn’t had a product idea in years. “Virtually all of the product ideas in Google,” he says, “come from the twenty percent of the time employees work on their own projects.” One such innovation is Orkut, a social-networking service named after its inventor Orkut Buyukkokten, a Google software engineer who developed the project during his allotment of personal time.

pg 262 Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathon Schwarz has been blogging for years. He may even be one of the first corporate executives anywhere to engage regularly in online conversations with employees, partners, shareholders, and customers. When we asked Schwarz why he blogs he gave us an unexpected answer. He wasn’t blogging for PR or to impress customers, or even to stroke his own ego. No. Blogging was just a more effective, more personable, and more transparent way of communicating with employees than sending an all-Sun-emails. … Not everyone is comfortable with the new dynamic, networked forms of communication. “It is definitely alienating the old guard,” said Schwatz. “They would like to believe that their groupwide email is the exclusive vehicle for communicating direction.” At the same time, Schwatz says blogging is definitely attracting a new guard at Sun. “It’s yielding pace and transparency into our decisions and it’s helping dissolve the boundaries between what Sun is and what is the market. And this in turn brings more and more people into Sun’s ecosystem.”

pg 263 If an army marching in lockstep to tightly arranged military music is a metaphor for yesterday’s workplace, the workplace of the future will be more like a jazz ensemble, where musicians improvise creatively around an agreed key, melody, and tempo. Employees are developing their own self-organized interconnections and forming cross-functional teams capable of interacting as a global, real-time workforce.

pg 264 Is there a danger that too much openness and self-organization in the workplace could lead to disorganization, confusion, and lack of focus and direction? Google CEO Eric Schmidt admits, “If you have worked in a traditional company, a place like Google doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like you have the kind of control over the way in which decisions are made that you might have had in a traditional environment.” And yet, Schmidt is convinced that self-organization is better. “You talk about the strategy, you get people excited, you tell people what the company’s priorities are, and somehow it works out,” he says.

pg 277 The starting point for any manager is personal use of the new collaborative technologies, preferably in conjunction with a Net Generation youngster. Ask your college son or daughter to show you Facebook. Join Myspace. Edit a page in Wikipedia. Create a video clip for You Tube. Get a taste for how these open communities work.

The next step is to start a planning process with a comprehensive map of your innovation ecosystem that positions your value creation and assesses the interdependencies that will determine the flow of benefits and your ability to capture a share of them. This is not a traditional competitive landscape or value-chain analysis, but an analysis of the participants creating knowledge pertinent to your existing and future business. While this includes business partners and competitors, it extends to academia, public research institutes, think tanks, creative communities or communities of practice, and contract research organizations. The map needs to be global and cover all relevant disciplines that intersect with your strategy. (Amanda’s note: wow! This is the roadmap for networking/collaboration ideas for ID!)

pg 280 Any company seeking to open source a product or participate in peer-production communities must devise control points and collaborative processes for weeding out poor contributions and assembling end products.

pg 286 So how should leaders go about applying the principles of wikinomics in their businesses? Knowledge management theorist David Snowden says you should throw away some of your detailed plans. He thinks effective leaders manage chaos the way a kindergarten teacher managers her students. “Experienced teachers allow a degree of freedom at the start of a session, then intervene to stabilize desirable patterns and destabilize undesirable ones,” he says. “And when you are very clever, they seed the space so that the patterns they want are more likely to emerge.”

… there are several additional design principles that are common to most if not all of them.
- taking cues from your lead users
- building critical mass
- supplying an infrastructure for collaboration
- take your time to get the structures and governance right
- make sure all participants can harvest some value
- abide by community norms
- let the process evolve
- hone your collaborative mind (learning new skill sets that emphasize building trust, honouring commitments, changing dynamically, and sharing decision making with peers)

pg 290 Winning companies today have open and porous boundaries and compete by reaching outside their walls to harness external knowledge, resources, and capabilities They’re like a hub for innovation and a magnet for uniquely qualified minds. They focus their internal staff on value integration and orchestration and treat the world as their R&D department. All of this adds up to a new kind of collaborative enterprise – an ecosystem of peers that is constantly shaping and reshaping clusters of knowledge and capability to compete on a global basis.

www.wikinomics.com

The Art of Woo – Persuasion Styles Assessment

The Art of Woo – Persuasion Styles Assessment

Step 1: Mark Each Statement Below as Follows:

0 = Rarely true for me
1 = Sometimes true for me
2 = Equally true and not true for me
3 = Usually true for me
4 = Always true for me

___E. Other people often comment on how balanced I am.

___A. I am known for saying exactly what is on my mind.

___B. I am an enthusiastic, assertive person.

___E I seek compromises when opinions are sharply divided.

___C. I have insights into others’ feelings and needs that often surprise them.

___E. I am equally assertive or restrained as the situation requires.

___D. I let others do the talking at meetings.

___A. I express my point of view, even if it means upsetting people.

___C. I cultivate a wide network of contacts and relationships.

___E. I am equally skilled at being candid and circumspect depending on the situation.

___B. I am told I am very assertive.

___D. I am quietly effective.

___E. If need be, I can just as easily be blunt and diplomatic.

___B. I like to be out front, leading the charge.

___A. I devote more time to understanding ideas than to understanding people.

___E. I am equally likely to be assertive and reserved.

___D. I prefer a quiet conversation to interacting with big groups.

___C. I excel at understanding other people’s feelings.

___E. I am good at both managing relationships and being forceful.

___B. I have an outgoing personality.

___A. I get right to the point without a lot of small talk.

___C. I can easily sense the other person’s mood.

___D. People tell me I am reserved.

___E. I press my point of view but not to the point of endangering relationships.

___A. I concentrate on my message more than on the audience.

___B. I am outspoken and expressive.

___E. I give equal weight to what I think and what others think.

___C. I read other people’s feelings accurately.

___D. When I speak, I do so forcefully but quietly.

___E. I can easily adapt my style to be assertive or restrained.


Step 2: Add Up Your Scores

Add up the total numbers you put next to letter “A”. Do the same for letters “B” through “E”. Your total scores for letters “A” through “D” should fall between 0 and 20. Your score for letter “E” should fall between 0 and 40.


A = _____(out of 20) This is a measure of your focus on your own point of view.

B = _____(out of 20) This is your social assertiveness score.

C = _____(out of 20) This is a measure of your focus on your audience’s feelings.

D = _____(out of 20) This is your socially reserved score.

E = _____(out of 40) This is your Advocate score.


Step 3: Discover Your Persuasion Styles

Add your letter scores from Step 2 using the system below to translate your scores into styles.


Style / Letter Scores / Total / Rank: highest to lowest # 1 - #5

Driver
____A + ____B =

Commander
____A + ____D =

Chess Player
____C + ____D =

Promoter
____B + ____C =

Advocate
____E =

My styles: Vision channel preference
Rank: Promoter, Advocate, Driver, Chess Player, Commander

Better Writing at Work: 10 Techniques for Concise Writing

May 2008 Issue (published mid-month)
Written by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, Syntax Training

10 Techniques for Concise Writing

It's a fact: long, wordy writing annoys and frustrates readers. It makes them work too hard to find the essential message. Here are 10 techniques for pleasing your readers with concise yet clear communications.

1. Cut unnecessary words. Many words we use in conversation are not necessary, but they don't distract from our message because our tone of voice complements them. Those same words get in our readers' way. Can you spot the unnecessary words in these sentences?

We will be meeting on Monday morning at 10 a.m.
We get together to share our ideas on a quarterly basis.

These words can be cut from those sentences with no loss of clarity:
be, -ing, on, morning / our, on a, basis

Tip: When you finish a piece, read it in search of words that add nothing to the tone or meaning. Cut them.

2. Cut introductory words unless your readers need them. These sentences begin with excess words that slow the pace:

It is a known fact that reviewing lessons increases learning retention.
It goes without saying that Margery is an excellent webmaster.

3. Choose shorter words. Although these sentences have the same word count, readers plod through one of them and skate through the other:

Condense your documents by eliminating unnecessary verbiage.Shrink your writing by cutting extra words.

4. Say things just once. In speech, we often say things two different ways to make a point. In writing, that habit leads to redundancy:

I would like to be a more concise writer, to use fewer words in my writing. The consultant must be dependable, someone we can rely on.

5. Use fewer examples. You can make a strong argument with two or three powerful examples. Including additional weak examples adds only length--not strength.

Tip: Feel free to include lots of examples, benefits, and reasons in the first draft of your document. Then edit, asking yourself which of those are weighty evidence and which are just extra weight.

6. Avoid repeating phrases. Structure bullet points so they start with fresh content, not repeated words.
This list is repetitive:

--We need to approve the artwork for the postcards.
--We need to laminate the posters.
--We must decide which materials to distribute to visitors.

This list is concise:
We need to:
--Approve the artwork for the postcards.
--Laminate the posters.
--Decide which materials to distribute to visitors.

6. Use headings rather than sentences for content that works in a column format. Wordy paragraph version:
The conference center coordinator is Sylvia Hernandez. Her office is in the Lake Street Building on the second floor. You may email her at sylvia.hernandez@ourcompany.com or phone her at Ext. 2040.

Concise heading format:
Conference Center Coordinator: Sylvia Hernandez
Office: Lake Street Building, 2nd floor
Email: sylvia.hernandez@ourcompany.com
Phone: Ext. 2040

Concise format without headings when content is obvious:
Conference Center Coordinator: Sylvia Hernandez
Lake Street Building, 2nd floor
sylvia.hernandez@ourcompany.com
Ext. 2040

7. In instructions, avoid using transitional phrases to connect steps. Each step should stand on its own.The opening clauses in Steps 4 and 5 should be cut:

Step 4. Once you have completed Step 3, reboot the computer.
Step 5. When you have rebooted, log in using your new password.

8. Use tables and charts rather than paragraphs. Tables and charts can communicate data instantly. The same data communicated in words could require several dull sentences. Although a table or chart often takes time to create, it saves time for readers.

For an amazing variety of formatting options, see the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

9. Cut whole chunks of text that aren't important to your readers.Things that seem important to you may not interest your readers. Think twice about paragraphs of background, history, implementation steps, explanations, and closing summaries. When you read through them, ask "So what?" If the content is not important to your readers, cut it.

10. Link to additional information rather than including it. For example, rather than writing more about conciseness, I am including these links to my relevant blog posts:
--Write Concisely? Just Do It!
--Sixty-Four Thousand Dollar ($64,000) Question
--Starting Off on the Wrong Foot

Enjoy saying more with less!

Save Your Sanity - Emotionally Toxic People

Save Your Sanity

Keep emotionally toxic people from ruining your mood by setting limits, speaking up for yourself, and standing your ground

by Susie Cushner (from Real Simple, March 2007)

Why Feelings Are Contagious

Emotions — both good ones, like excitement and enthusiasm, and lousy ones, like sadness, fear, and anger — spread primarily because of a monkey-see, monkey-do phenomenon that's hardwired in human beings. During conversation, people tend to mirror other people's facial expressions, postures, body language, and speech rhythms without being consciously aware of it. As you talk to your companion, "the neurons in your brain are activated as if you were making the expressions that you are observing," says John T. Cacioppo, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. "This response sets up a cascade of events in your body — you might actually make the same expression yourself — which creates empathy for your companion and makes you more susceptible to catching their emotions."

All this happens "faster than Muhammad Ali could throw a punch," says Hatfield, who is also a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii. In a study conducted at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, researchers showed people photos of happy or sad faces on a computer, then asked them questions to gauge their emotional responses. Subjects reported feeling the emotions they had been exposed to even when the pictures lasted only fractions of a second.

Recent research conducted at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, found that during conversation people tend to match their companions' word choices — using negatively charged words, such as hate and worthless, or positive words, such as love and happy — which, the researchers theorize, also causes moods to become contagious.

For the most part, this infectious phenomenon is useful, healthy, and adaptive. Catching other people's moods lets you pick up the nuances of their feelings and behavior, figure out what makes them tick, and gain valuable information about your circumstances. "It's fundamental to communication," Cacioppo says. "It allows people to share knowledge and develop cohesiveness as a group." It can help us accomplish more, too. Researchers at California State University in Long Beach found that when business leaders were in a good mood, members of their work groups experienced more positive moods and were more coordinated and productive than groups whose leaders were in a bad mood.

Are You a Transmitter or a Receiver?

Some people are more likely to be transmitters of emotions, while some are more likely to be receivers, readily becoming infected by other people's moods. Transmitters are often highly expressive in both words and gestures. "It's easy for others to see how they feel," Cacioppo says. Those who have the upper hand in a relationship, such as a boss, may be more likely to transmit emotions, since people in subordinate positions pay more attention to those they perceive to be above them.

There is also a breed of people who, consciously or not, want to make you feel as they do, because they're emotional bullies, and inflicting their moods on others makes them feel powerful. Then there are energy vampires — the drama queens and the chronic complainers of this world — who can suck the life out of you with their crises and negativity, often without realizing it. People who are primarily receivers, by contrast, often have strong internal reactions to emotional events. Their heartbeats may speed up or they may get butterflies in their stomachs when they're nervous, Cacioppo says. You probably know if you're one of them because your hands get clammy or your heart races before you give a presentation at work. People who are highly attuned to others' emotions and adept at reading expressions are also more susceptible to catching emotions.

Women are especially sensitive to absorbing others' moods, says Ross W. Buck, Ph.D., a professor of communication sciences and psychology at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Socialization has something to do with it, since women are raised to tune in to others' feelings, Buck says. Recently researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in Galveston, studied 553 couples to see how one spouse's emotional state affected the other's. Although a husband's depression had a profound impact on his wife's well-being, the converse wasn't true.

How to Protect Your Boundaries

You can learn, however, to be more self-protective when you’re around those you find emotionally draining. It requires a little practice and a lot of fortitude. Here are some actions you can take (avoid one-on-one interactions, for example), helpful phrases you can say (“Why don’t we change the subject?”), and calming ideas to focus on (“I’m not going to let this get to me”) when you feel other people’s unpleasant moods dragging you down once again.

Actions You Can Take

Mind your body language. Make an effort to break eye contact and to display body language that’s different from your companion’s. If you’re in a meeting with an angry supervisor, adopt an open, neutral facial expression and a relaxed pose to counter the tension and hostility in your boss’s face and body. Take a few deep breaths, which will help release tension in your body.

Visualize a wall. When toxic emotions are heading your way and you can’t exit the scene or do anything to stop them, imagine that there’s a shield or a wall around you, advises Judith Orloff, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of Positive Energy (Three Rivers, $14, www.amazon.com). You’ll still hear what the other person is saying, but the emotions behind the words won’t get under your skin.

Schedule social balance. Plan your day so you don’t meet a bunch of negative people in succession. If you have to give evaluations to a group of employees, intersperse difficult people with pleasant ones. After an intense afternoon of shopping with your anxious sister, try to be around nurturing, positive people that evening.

Seek safety in numbers. If you know that a certain friend tends to infect you with her negative moods, plan a group get-together instead of a twosome. Or arrange to do something — see a movie, go shopping, visit a museum — rather than just hanging out and talking, suggests Jane Adams, Ph.D., a social psychologist in Seattle and the author of Boundary Issues (Wiley, $25).

Phrases You Can Say

“Excuse me — I need to use the restroom.” No one questions the need for a bathroom break, so nobody is offended. Orloff suggests trying a mini meditation: Close your eyes and allow yourself time to shake off the unpleasant emotions.

“Let’s talk about what’s going on at the office for 15 minutes, then let’s talk about something else.” If your partner comes home venting about cutthroat office politics, his paranoid boss, and other poisonous subjects, give him a set amount of time to get it off his chest.

“Let’s talk about solutions.” If your best friend starts complaining yet again about the dearth of decent men, say that you want to help but that it makes you feel frustrated to constantly hear these complaints. Then offer to swing into problem-solving mode with her. If she clearly doesn’t want to do anything about her problems — except complain and moan about them — it’s best to say, “That’s too bad, but what are you going to do about it?” says Albert J. Bernstein, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Emotional Vampires (McGraw-Hill, $13, www.amazon.com). “This sends the message that it’s their problem and you’re not going to take responsibility for it.”

“I’d really like to help, but this is starting to upset me.” Or try: “You know I really care about you, but I’m feeling overwhelmed right now, and I’d prefer to talk about something else.” Be honest yet kind. “Your tone is very important,” Orloff says. “You should keep it even and light. And be prepared to repeat yourself. They’re not likely to honor your request just because you’ve said it once.”

“Do you think that the late winter we’re having will hurt the cherry blossoms?” When you start to feel your companion’s pain or rage, change the subject and respond with a non sequitur, Adams suggests. “When you change the subject with something so out of left field,” she says, “it stops them right in their tracks.”

“Tell me why this is so important to you.” Bernstein says this question often silences boundary pushers on the spot (or at least causes them to stop and reflect on what they’re saying), helping you regain a sense of control.

Ideas to Focus On

It’s probably not you. When you get upset, it’s easy to think the fault is all yours, that you’re too sensitive. But if you feel uncomfortable with someone, you need to trust your intuition, Orloff says. He is probably doing something to push your buttons.

Don’t make someone else’s problems your own. Try to distance yourself mentally from a negative person. For instance, if both you and your friend are single but she is despairing about men, remind yourself that you’ve had plenty of relationships and will have another. This technique can help you stop identifying with her and her feelings, preventing her emotions from getting to you.

You can handle this. Take a deep breath, then silently repeat a mantra, such as “I’m not riding her emotional roller coaster.” You’ll remind yourself that you’re fully capable of protecting your boundaries without making your friend feel emotionally abandoned.