Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done (Ron Ashkenas)

I was recommended this book by a colleague in a work book club and could really see why.  I particularly liked the point that most of us, as managers, actually create our own waves of complexity through the organisation whilst simultaneously complaining about everyone else's.
On the positive side this means we can all do something about it, whatever our role we can make our lives easier and the same for those around us.
The book looks a four main categories of complexity and suggests ways to attack them (simply)



Locn. 80-81 Despite our recent economic struggles, the global economy is  not going to get less complex. If anything, it will grow more difficult  to understand. In addition, the pace of technological innovation  and breakthrough will continue to increase, which will also add to  complexity.
Locn. 137-41 Trying to get things done in organizations today often  feels like walking in quicksand. If you are a manager or an  executive who is anxious to get results, you know what I mean.  There are too many meetings, too many reports, too much information,   and too many stakeholders-all of whom have different views  on what should be done and how. Processes don't work or take too  long. Decisions are delayed or unclear. Presentations go on forever.  And the boundaries between home and work, online and offline,  have broken down with e-mails and cell phones and 24/7 availability.   Complexity is out of control and getting worse-and it compromises   our ability to be effective.
Locn. 211-12 to start developing   a simplification strategy, you need to understand the four  sources of complexity in organizations (figure 1-1): 1. Structural mitosis 2. Product and service proliferation 3. Process evolution 4. Managerial behavior
Locn. 587-89 The origin of the Lindex was an article Calhoun had read about  the organization structure of the Canadian civil service.' Calhoun  adapted this article's formula for assessing functional health (based  on the average length of communication chains from the top to the  bottom of a hierarchy) so that his managers could compute their  own Lindex scores.
Locn. 666-67 managing your organization's  product portfolio entails much the same challenge. It is difficult to  be selective and to choose between alternatives that all look good.  As a result, many organizations get caught up in the trap of trying  to manage far too many products and services.
Locn. 678-81 on the one hand,  managers are told to be entrepreneurial and creative and stay close  to their markets-in other words, drive growth through constantly  coming up with new ways of delighting customers. Many companies  in fact have incentives for new product ideas and set goals for  deriving a certain amount of revenue from new products. On the  other hand, managers are also told to increase the sales volume of  existing products and services, leverage the existing product and  expense base, and build the brand and image of current offerings.  So managers and employees (and customers) naturally develop emotional   attachments to current products. With these two sets of messages in mind, most companies avoid  making choices.
Locn. 714-16 System complexity is the extent to which your products and  services must integrate with those of other suppliers to create value for a customer. Obviously, some products or services are  stand-alone and don't need other products to function. But many  are components that need to be combined or used with others in  some way-and organizations need to pay attention to the complexity   that this can create.
Locn. 745-46 He suggests that product simplification   is a matter of "more is less"-fewer features, fewer buttons,   fewer distractions-so that the customer can get the most out  of the product.'
Locn. 886 • Local differences: As organizations evolve, the same  processes are often done differently in different places.
Locn. 887-88 • Multiplication of steps and loops: As they encounter  unique or recurring problems, processes tend to acquire  more steps, more controls, and more people in the pursuit  of solutions. Such solutions are rarely abandoned,
Locn. 889-90 • Informality of process: A third source of complexity is  lack of rigor about how a process really is supposed to be  carried out.
Locn. 891-92 • Lack of cross functional or cross-unit transparency:  People naturally tend to focus on their part of the process  rather than the whole,
Locn. 939-43 This focus on control is based on  the hierarchical notion that all information needs to flow up the  chain of command for approval. Often however, the more high-level approvals there are, the further the managers are from the real  data and the ability to actually add value. So not only are the  reviews and controls not worth much, but they also slow down the  process and reduce the empowerment and sense of accountability  of the people closer to the decision. In fact, when there are many  layers of approval, people on the ground may not give an issue the  proper attention, because they assume that someone further up the  line will catch anything they miss.
Locn. 1029-31 The main value of process mapping is to allow stakeholders-all   of whom see the process from different vantage points-to  develop a common view of what's currently being done and what  might be done differently.
Locn. 1086-88 The purpose of the rapid-results approach is to use people's  natural bias toward action as a catalyst for immediate process simplification.   In many situations, analysis and study can become  excuses for maintaining the status quo and avoiding real process  change: the "we can't do anything until we have all the data"
Locn. 1122-24 The key to using these tools to drive process simplification,  however, is to make sure to align the what, why, and how: what  processes are being addressed, why they have become overly complex,   and how best to tackle them.
Locn. 1183-86 Robert Kaplan and Rob Kaiser, leadership consultants who have  studied and worked with thousands of managers, contend that the  shortcoming of most managers often is not in what they do-but in  what they "over-do." I Managers succeed in their careers by applying certain behaviors and skills that tend to work for them, both in their  personal lives and in business. With the reinforcement of success in  mind, they continue these behaviors and build on them when moving   into new or more responsible positions. Over time, a manager  can become reliant on these behaviors as a core skill set
Locn. 1196-99 Consider the following question. Imagine that your CEO asks  you to take on a special one-day-a-week assignment working  directly with her. It involves interesting travel and some exciting  work-but requires you to do the rest of your job in the remaining  time. Would you take the assignment? I've asked this question of  thousands of managers over the years, and 99 percent of them say  they would take the assignment and figure out a way to do their  regular jobs more efficiently. And in discussing why, they acknowledge   that at least 20 percent of their time is regularly taken up with  things that keep them busy and comfortable, but that don't add  much value.
Locn. 1207-9 Much of the managerially generated complexity in organizations   comes from overdone behaviors-from too much of a good  thing and the associated avoidance of its opposite. This dynamic is  difficult to see because managers tend to think they are doing the  right thing in the right way. But too much of one right thing, coupled   with too little of its opposite, is often wrong.
Locn. 1349-50 a  RACI chart-which is a simple way of setting out who has responsibility,   who has ultimate accountability, who needs to be consulted,  and who needs to be informed.
Locn. 1382-84 you can build a request for feedback   into the end of your message. With individuals, you can simply  ask them to summarize the key points that they heard; in a group,  you can ask a few people to do the same; and with a presentation,  you can ask for written feedback or have a few volunteers speak  out.
Locn. 1389-90 So instead of clear and simple communication, presentations   too often become reports masquerading as slides, or cuteness  competitions, or ways of preventing instead of facilitating dialogue. To counter this trend, one firm instituted the "one-minute drill"  for presentations-forcing people to reduce their message to its  essence, in slides that could be presented in only a minute.
Locn. 1393-96 Meetings are not just a fact of life in organizations; they're a way  of life. Some managers can spend up to 80 percent of their time in meetings, particularly in organizations that are heavily matrixed,  global, and process focused. Unfortunately, as most managers will  attest, much of the time spent in meetings is unproductive, frustrating,   and wasteful.
Locn. 1412-13 E-mail might seem insignificant or innocuous, but inbox overload   is a serious source of organizational complexity.
Locn. 1415-17 For instance, when a manager sends large numbers of people a  message on issues that many of them don't need to know about, it  just burdens colleagues with low-value information that distracts  them from matters more important. A frequent culprit is the "reply  all" button, which can create hundreds of e-mails, often about  insignificant topics such as meeting schedules.
Locn. 1421-23 If you've read this far-and thoughtfully considered the twenty-two  specific behaviors described in this chapter-you now realize that  you may be a prime source of complexity in your organization. But  if these managerial behaviors and others like them are largely  unconscious and driven by psychological factors, how can they be  overcome?
Locn. 1440-41 To launch the effort, the managing directors sent  a note to all the vice presidents, asking them to identify ways that  they could be more effective both individually and collectively.
Locn. 1463-64 Here are a few  steps that you can take right now to drive simplicity in your own  leadership role: 1. Fill out the questionnaire in table 5-1, and use it to reflect  on your own behavior.
Locn. 1465-66 2. Share your questionnaire results and thinking with a  few other managers or colleagues who know you well.
Locn. 1468-69 3. From your own reflection and the feedback from colleagues  or a coach, select one or two specific ways that you can  experiment with making things simpler by changing your  own behavior.
Locn. 1469-71 These don't need to be huge changes-start  small and gain some confidence. For example, try to  change your e-mail patterns or the way that you plan and  run meetings. Once you have some success, share what  you've done with your colleagues or coach and identify  additional simplification opportunities.
Locn. 1471-72 4. If possible, recruit others to go through the same process  of reflection, experimentation, and learning-and meet  with them as a group to share progress and ideas.
Locn. 1473-74 5. Finally, if you are in a position to drive simplification on a  broader basis in your company, you can insist that your  management team go through the process of reflection,  experimentation, and learning together.
Locn. 1541-45 Lloyd Trotter, a former vice chairman of GE, describes the  thought process like this: "We teach managers that they need to  start with the `answer,' which is that their business needs double-digit   earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They  quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won't do it. So  they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don't complicate it: Material comes in the front  door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any  waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products   or services be more valuable for our customers."
Locn. 1699-1700 It might sound obvious, but simplification won't happen if  everyone approaches it differently. You need to create a common  framework and language for simplification, and then train everyone  on it. This not only gets everyone on the same page, but also creates   widespread capacity for action and multiplication of results.
Locn. 1704-5 In addition to being orchestrated from the center, these training   efforts had several other features that turn out to be critical for  sustaining simplification over time:
 • They propelled people into action to produce real  results.
 • They deliberately aimed at producing measurable  change in a few months or less.
 • They were rolled out quickly across the whole company  and run largely by in-house people.
 • They were so interactive as to be mind-bending.
Locn. 1722-24 In reality, however, organizational   performance and reward systems are usually not so  straightforward; they encompass multiple goals, measures that  don't always reflect real behavior, and incentives that are not  always directly linked to either the measure or the goals. The result  is the confused and counterproductive practice that my colleague  Steve Kerr refers to as "rewarding A while asking for B."    
Locn. 1771-72 Simplification doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be  difficult. You can do a lot today and the next day to make your  organization simpler for yourself, your colleagues, and your customers-even
Locn. 1777-80 most managers act as though they live in a box-a box that limits  what they can do. Obviously, part of the box is determined by official  limits set out in job descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and  formal work rules. But a large part of the box, perhaps even most of  it, is self-created and self-imposed. We work within our comfort  zones, doing what we think we should do or what we think other  people want us to do. But most of the time, we don't question, challenge,   or test those limits, which makes them self-perpetuating.
Locn. 1841-43 Most people in organizations want  simplicity-it's not a hard sell. If you can help them understand  how they can get better results while also making their lives easier,  they'll listen. And if you can move them into action, you'll be a hero.  The only limitation is you-your own definition of the box around  your job. Expand the box. Expand the impact.
Locn. 1863-65 Hold Up a Mirror Much of the complexity in organizations is unconscious and unintentional.   We tend to accept it and learn to live with it, and after a  while, we don't even see it anymore. That's why a mirror is a powerful   tool-it helps people see things about themselves that they can't  see on their own. The diagnostic instruments included in this book, particularly  the questionnaire in chapter 1, will help
Locn. 1868-70 Present a Business Case While complexity is often annoying and uncomfortable, the real  reason for attacking it has to be rooted in business results and outcomes.   Otherwise, simplicity will remain a value to aspire to, rather than a real driver of change and improvement.
Locn. 1878-79 Stimulate Fresh Thinking from the Outside In Remember the importance of designing your organization, your  products, and your processes with your customers in mind. Simplicity   often directly correlates with your ability to align with what  your customers want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Locn. 1888-89 Build a Coalition You can certainly have an impact on your organization by modeling  simplification in your own area. Other managers will take notice  and your innovations may spread organically,
Locn. 1901-4 Demonstrate That Simplicity Makes a Difference Perhaps implicit in the first four tactics is the idea that you actually  have to do something. Simplicity is great to talk about. Most people  find it cathartic to share their complexity war stories. But nothing  builds momentum for simplification as much as real success. If  you're looking for one takeaway from this book, this is it: the way to  make things simpler in your organization is to start simplifying.   Just do it.
Locn. 1910-11 tools and approaches (which were first introduced in  chapter 1) are listed here again as a reminder (table 7-1).
Locn. 1912-13 As a way of selecting which tool to use, consider the variables  pictured in figure 7-2.1 What is the business result that needs to be  achieved?

Who: The A Method for Hiring (Randy Street and Geoff Smart)

A thought provoking book on how to populate your team (or company) with top performing talent.  Not just about the selection process itself but it also covers techniques for filling the pipeline so you have candidates when you have vacancies to fill.

The basic premise is that as a manager, your role is to select the team (the who) who do the tasks (the what), not to do the tasks yourself.

The book lays out a structure for defining the characteristics of who you want to hire, then a very structured process to screen and interview and background check the candidates.

A definite must read for anyone hiring staff, or who wants to build a top-performing team.



Locn. 20-22 The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT

Locn. 28-30 Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.

Locn. 61-62 “Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”

Locn. 67-68 who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.

Locn. 107-8 One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”

Locn. 170-71 We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.

Locn. 177-78 We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

Locn. 199-201 In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.

Locn. 270-71 The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.

Locn. 323-24 Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.

Locn. 330-33 While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?

Locn. 345-46 Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

Locn. 522-31 HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters.

Locn. 556-57 The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates.

Locn. 574-77 You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.

Locn. 608-10 “We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”

Locn. 685-87 The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. A standing meeting on Monday or Friday will keep you honest by forcing you to call the top talent on your radar screen.

Locn. 687 plan for how to use the timr to best efffect

Locn. 907-9 Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Topgrading Interview.

Locn. 1350-52 Have you heard the riddle about the five frogs on a log? It goes like this: Five frogs are on a log and one decides to jump off. How many are left? If you answered “five,” you are correct. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.

Locn. 1463-67 George Buckley of 3M grants freedom by building trust with his employees. “A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.

Locn. 1483-85 Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth. Show them that both you personally and your organizational culture will support their need for freedom, and you’ll go a long way toward sealing the deal.

Locn. 1645-47 HOW TO INSTALL THE A METHOD FOR HIRING IN YOUR COMPANY You have to do ten things if you want to install the A Method for Hiring in your business: (you need to get the book to see the list)

Locn. 1817-19 When we met with General Clark, he said, “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” The scorecard changes the higher somebody climbs in an organization, which means how you think about a person’s capabilities must change.

Locn. 1866 Not everybody was good at everything. They just had to be exceptional at one thing.

Locn. 1902-3 Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.

Gamestorming (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo)

A fantastic book for anyone interested in facilitating sessions on innovation (or in fact facilitating many other types of teambuilding sessions too).  The book starts with the theory of how to construct effective sessions, don't be put off by the title it isn't about games - that's just the term the authors use for facilitated sessions.
Then there is a collection of many types of session to run based on the outcomes you want from your session.

Page 7

Loc. 908-9

A fuzzy goal is one that "motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey."

Page 8
Loc. 931-34

Innovative teams need to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it's a journey in the fog, where the case studies haven't been written yet, and there are no examples of where it's been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.

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Loc. 968-69

The opening is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism; it's the time for blue-sky thinking, brainstorming, energy, and optimism. The keyword for opening is "divergent":

Page 14
Loc. 1027-29

You are searching for something that you may not find. You will almost certainly find things you don't expect. You have only a vague idea of what you will encounter along the way, and yet, like a turtle, you must carry everything you need on your back.

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Loc. 1077-78

The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge.

Page 17
Loc. 1081-82

Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test.

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Loc. 1138-44

Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method (see Chapter 4). Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that "feel like they belong together" without trying to name the columns. It's important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns.

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Loc. 1184-90

I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects....     -- Leonardo da Vinci

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Loc. 1207-9

Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.

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Loc. 1257-58

You don't need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.

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Loc. 1330-32

There are two big questions that are worth asking whenever you come across something new. First, what is it? And second, what can I do with it? The first question has to do with examination, while the second deals with experimentation.

Page 29
Loc. 1299

Opening questions are intended to open a portal into the game world.

Page 29
Loc. 1301

The trick of opening is to get people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible.

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Loc. 1309-10

The focus of opening questions is to find things you can work with later.

Page 29
Loc. 1316-18

Navigating questions help you assess and adjust your course while the game is underway. For example, summarize key points and confirm that people agree to ensure that you understand and that the group is aligned.

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Loc. 1319-20

Is the team fatigued? Are they frustrated or sapped of energy?

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Loc. 1337-38

Examining questions narrow your inquiry to focus on details, specifics, and observable characteristics. They make abstract ideas more concrete by quantifying and qualifying them.

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Loc. 1348-50

Experimental questions invoke the imagination. They are about possibility. What can we do with it? What opportunities does it create? Experimental questions are concerned with taking you to a higher level of abstraction to find similarities with other things, to make unlikely and unexpected connections.

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Loc. 1363-65

Closing questions serve the opposite function from opening questions. When you are opening you want to create as much divergence and variation as possible. When you are closing you want to focus on convergence and selection. Your goal at this stage is to move toward commitment, decisions, and action.

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Loc. 1481-83

The Graphic Gameplan uses a precisely designed set of meaningful spaces to organize people's thinking and move from ideas to action. Challenges are represented as a rough landscape, actions as an arrow, success factors as wheels, goals as a target, and so on.

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Loc. 1575-78

Most people draw a stick figure by starting with the head and adding the body afterward. This way of drawing a stick figure will almost always result in a big-headed, stiff stick figure. When drawing a person, you will get a much better effect if you start with the center of gravity and work outward. Draw a rectangle to represent the trunk of the body, trying to keep it at approximately the same angle.

Page 44
Loc. 1594-95

The next most prominent feature is the legs; they connect the person to the ground and have the most impact on the body's position. Draw a line to represent the ground and add lines for the legs and feet to connect the body to the ground.

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Loc. 1597-1600

The next most important element to conveying attitude is the hands. We use our hands for nearly everything we do. Have you ever heard the advice given to public speakers to use their hands and to gesture to help them reinforce their meaning? The same principle applies to stick figures. Now try drawing the arms in position. A small circle is usually sufficient to represent the hands.

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Loc. 1602-5

Now take a look at the angle of the neck and head relative to the rest of the body. Notice that they are at different angles. Unless you are a soldier standing at attention, this is nearly always the case. We are constantly turning our heads to see better, to listen carefully, and so on. See if you can draw the head and attach it to the body with a single line at the right angle.

Page 45
Loc. 1606-9

Now that we have finished the figure we can think about the face. Think about the various smiley faces and other emoticons you can make on a computer keyboard. Those same combinations will suffice for nearly any facial expression you want. Adding a short line for the nose will help you show which direction the head is pointing.

Page 45
Loc. 1609-15

This can be especially important when you want to show two people interacting with each other. You can use the same principles you learned earlier to make the mailbox, by combining basic shapes from the visual alphabet. I live in the United States, where our mailboxes look like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame. Depending on where you live, yours may differ. I hope this short demonstration has convinced you that basic sketching skills are not out of your reach. Once you become comfortable with the preceding exercises, you can use them to help others become more comfortable with sketching

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Loc. 1615-17

In numerous workshops, I have found that you can get through these exercises with a group in about 10 to 15 minutes. In the time it takes for a brief coffee break you can familiarize a group with these concepts and get them comfortable enough to begin sketching out their ideas.

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Loc. 1686-89

The idea of bringing improv into a business context may seem intimidating, but the challenges are mostly in your mind. You're already improvising at work. In GameChangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, improv expert Mike Bonifer reminds us that all of life is improvisation: from a conversation at the dinner table to the way we respond to unexpected situations, improv is natural; we do it all the time.

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Loc. 1737-38

If you have ideas, comments, or questions you can join the ongoing conversation at http://www.gogamestorm.com.

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Loc. 1901-2

Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes.

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Loc. 1962-66

Empathy Map OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profile.

Page 66
Loc. 1981-84

Ask the group to describe—from this person's point of view—what this person's experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling. The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?

Page 68
Loc. 2021-24

Creating a forced ranking may be difficult for participants, as it requires they make clear-cut assessments about a set of items. In many cases, this is not the normal mode of operation for groups, where it is easier to add items to lists to string together agreement and support. Getting people to make these assessments, guided by clear criteria, is the entire point of forced ranking.

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Loc. 2094-97

WhoDo OBJECT OF PLAY The objective of this game is to brainstorm, plan, and prioritize actions.

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Loc. 2131-39

3-12-3 Brainstorm OBJECT OF PLAY This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group. Essential to this format is strict time keeping. The "ticking clock" forces spontaneous, quick-fire decisions and doesn't allow for overthinking.

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Loc. 2252-57

In a typical group setting, extroverts tend to dominate the verbal contributions. And while their contributions are certainly important, it can be difficult to hear from quieter players who also have something valuable to offer. Let the players know that this play is intentionally silent. It affords the quiet people the opportunity to generate ideas without having to verbalize to the whole group, and it gives you certainty that you'll hear from every player in the room. Brainwriting also allows ideas to emerge before being critiqued and creates a space for them to be co-created, with multiple owners, and therefore a greater chance of follow-through.

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This warm-up does not result in a problem definition that will satisfy an engineer; rather, it engages participants in defining the challenge in a simplified form. It is a first step in bringing a group together under a common purpose, elevating the problem above the noise to become something they care to solve.

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People are well versed in having conversations; what most of us aren't used to is listening, observing, and being accountable for our observations. The Fishbowl game, therefore, is about engaging skills that in many of us have become rusty. So, despite the fact that it may look as though the action happens in the players' conversation, the action in this game happens in the outer circle, with the observers.

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Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but it's also a useful game in itself. Visualizing abstract concepts supports logo development, presentation design, website design, metaphor development for e-learning, and so on. It exercises the visual part of our cortex—which accounts for 75% of our sensory neurons—and turns on parts of our minds that don't get much action in a typical business setting.

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History Map OBJECT OF PLAY Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today.

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Mapping a history should be an enjoyable experience for the meeting leader and the participants. It's a time for storytelling, reflection, and appreciation of the life and experience of the organization. While you're helping the group document the history, set a supportive tone and encourage camaraderie, storytelling, and honesty—even about the hard times.

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Low-Tech Social Network OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to introduce event participants to each other by co-creating a mural-sized, visual network of their connections.

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Pecha Kucha/Ignite OBJECT OF PLAY These fast, structured talks enable people to share ideas quickly and with a minimum of distraction. In addition, it puts the pressure on the person conveying the information to do so in a concise and compelling fashion.

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The rule of Pecha Kucha is 20 × 20: Presenters are allowed 20 slides, and they can spend 20 seconds per slide. Images are forwarded automatically—they are not under the control of the speaker.

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The goal of a poster session is to create a set of compelling images that summarize a challenge or topic for further discussion. Creating this set might be an "opening act" which then sets the stage for choosing an idea to pursue, or it might be a way to get indexed on a large topic. The act of creating a poster forces experts and otherwise passionate people to stop and think about the best way to communicate the core concepts of their material, avoiding the popular and default "show up and throw up."

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The participants' task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints: It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand? It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people's attention, or help them

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When creating their poster, participants may be helped by thinking about three kinds of explanation: Before and After: Describe "why" someone should care in terms of drawing the today and tomorrow of the idea. System: Describe the "what" of an idea in terms of its parts and their relationships. Process: Describe the "how" of an idea in terms of a sequence of events. Give participants 20 minutes to create their posters. When they have finished, create a "gallery" of the images by posting them on the wall. Instead of elaborate presentations, ask the group to circulate and walk the gallery. Some posters will attract and capture more attention than others. From here, it may be worthwhile to have participants dot vote (see Dot Voting in Chapter 4) or "vote with their feet" to decide what ideas to pursue further. STRATEGY As a variation, the posters may be created in small groups. In this case, it's important for the group to have decided ahead of time what their topic will be, and to give more time to come to a consensus on what they will draw and how they will draw it. On a smaller scale, a group may do this around a conference table. A small group of experts may create posters to explain their different points of view to each other at the start of a meeting, to make their models of the world, their vocabulary, and their interests clear and explicit. Twenty minutes spent in this way may save the group from endless discussion later in their process. The Poster Session game is based on academic poster sessions, in which authors of papers that are not ready for publication share their ideas in an informal, conversational group. Pre-Mortem OBJECT OF PLAY Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a "postmortem" to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming. A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful. NUMBER OF PLAYERS Any, but typically small teams will have the most open dialogue DURATION OF PLAY Depends on the scope of an effort; allow up to five minutes for each participant HOW TO PLAY

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A pre-mortem is best conducted at the project's kickoff, with all key team members present and after the goals and plan have been laid out and understood. The exercise starts with a simple question: "What will go wrong?" though it may be elevated in phrasing to "How will this end in disaster?" This is an opportunity for the team to reflect on their collective experience and directly name risks or elephants lurking in the room. It's a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it's too late.

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Conducting a pre-mortem is deceptively simple. At the beginning of a project, the forward momentum and enthusiasm are often at their highest; these conditions do not naturally lend themselves to sharing notions of failure. By conducting a pre-mortem, a group deliberately creates a space to share their past learning, at a time when they can best act on it.

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Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to let players share their assumptions and associations around a topic. If you see multiple show pieces that don't exactly represent delight around a topic, that's a signal that the players may have some concerns that need to be addressed. Don't overanalyze the objects; pay more attention to the way the players describe the parallels to the topic. As the team leader, encourage and applaud honesty during the stories, and write down every point that players make that seem important to them. Keep the rest of the players quiet while someone is showing and telling.

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Show Me Your Values OBJECT OF PLAY Employees' perceptions of a company's values, whether they're conscious or not, contributes to their morale and their willingness to go the extra mile to support the mission. To get a sense of how employees perceive the values that drive an organization, an initiative, a system-wide change, or any other topic, play Show Me Your Values.

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Loc. 2987-88

Your job is to create a space in which people can say something that may be taboo but that everyone is thinking.

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Loc. 3042-43

Along with a RACI matrix and other "people + project" activities, stakeholder analysis is a basic framing tool for any project. For leaders and managers, it clearly scopes out who has what level of input and interest in a project, and can help to align decisions appropriately.

Page 134
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Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening.

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The mapping of an organization's existing business model, including its strengths and weaknesses, is an essential starting point to improve the current business model and/or develop new future business models. At the very least the game leads to a refined and shared understanding of an organization's business model. At its best it helps players develop strategic directions for the future by outlining new and/or improved business models for the organization.

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Loc. 3533-38

Employees spend hours sitting in training sessions, sifting through orientation manuals, and playing corporate e-learning games to learn the know-how for their new positions. But the reality is that the bulk of employee knowledge is gained through storytelling. Employees train each other by sharing their personal and professional experiences. Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

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The goal of this game is to improve a product or strategy by thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. By turning the exercise into a competition as well as a storytelling game, players are more likely to get engaged and immerse themselves in the scenarios. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy. It shouldn't feel like work.

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Customer, Employee, Shareholder OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to imagine possible futures from multiple perspectives.

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What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any new idea: writing the elevator pitch. When developing and communicating a vision for something,

Page 166
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To set up the generating phase, write these headers in sequence on flip charts: Who is the target customer? What is the customer need? What is the product name? What is its market category? What is its key benefit? Who or what is the competition? What is the product's unique differentiator?

Page 170
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Five-Fingered Consensus OBJECT OF PLAY Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.

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Give-and-Take Matrix OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors in this case may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.

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Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It assumes leadership can anticipate some questions and concerns but can't possibly anticipate them all. No one knows the questions employees have better than the employees themselves, so this game gives them a chance to externalize what's on their minds and have leadership be responsive in a setting outside the once-a-year leadership retreat. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players' questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something

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The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It's useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it.

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Open Space technology is a method for hosting large events, such as retreats and conferences, without a prepared agenda. Instead, participants are brought together under a guiding purpose and create the agenda for themselves in a bulletin-board fashion. These items become potential breakout sessions, and participants have the freedom to "vote with their feet" by moving between breakouts.

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Many decisions often boil down to one's basic choices between benefit and harm. By capturing these specifics for a key person, your group may uncover the most relevant points to bring up in presenting or influencing the key person's decision.

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Capture the answers on one side of the person: What does a bad day look like for him? What is he afraid of? What keeps him awake at night? What is he responsible for? What obstacles stand in his way? A persona's gains can be the inversion of the pain situation—or can go beyond. Capture these on the opposite side by asking: What does this person want and aspire to? How does he measure success? Given the subject at hand, how could this person benefit? What can we offer this person?

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Loc. 4229-30

Product Pinocchio is a game designed to establish, refine, and evolve the features of a product or service so that it becomes more valuable to the end user. By personifying it, we can better relate to it and better craft it into a "friend" that a consumer might want to take home.

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The object of this game is to quickly diagnose a group's level of understanding of the steps in a process.

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Through this exercise, the group will define an existing process at a high level and uncover areas of confusion or misunderstanding.

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Loc. 4332-34

Sometimes responsibilities aren't clear. Nothing erodes morale and performance faster than a difficult problem that belongs to someone else—or to everyone. When these situations raise their head, it may be necessary to call a group together to sort out who does what. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix,

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Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.

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Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product/service or what's standing in the way of a desired goal. As individuals trying to build forward momentum on products or projects, we sometimes have blind spots regarding what's stopping us. This game lets you get insight from stakeholders about what they think may be an obstacle to progress.

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Talking Chips OBJECT OF PLAY A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple "talking chips" as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.

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Understanding Chain OBJECT OF PLAY Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people. It can be tempting to try to explain "everything all at once" to an audience and fail in the process. In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.

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Value Mapping OBJECT OF PLAY The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something—it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box,

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The Virtuous Cycle OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to discover opportunities to transform an existing, linear process into a more valuable and growing process by taking a different viewpoint. This is useful in examining processes that are deemed "worth repeating," such as the customer experience.

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20/20 Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way.

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Employees are human beings, and every human being likes to be acknowledged. To appreciate employee contributions, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members, a Memory Wall works wonders.

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Loc. 5135

Plus/Delta

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Make two columns: one for "plus" and one for "delta" (the Greek symbol for change).

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This feedback method can apply to any activity, idea, work product, or action. By focusing on change as opposed to direct negatives, the group will be more likely to share its true assessment

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Prune the Future OBJECT OF PLAY People who work in large organizations know that most change doesn't happen immediately or in broad sweeps. It happens incrementally by taking small, strategic steps. Prune the Future uses a tree as a metaphor to show how the future of anything can be shaped, one leaf at a time.

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Loc. 5241

On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a matrix that outlines WHO / WHAT / WHEN.

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this approach starts with the "WHO" (the people who will be taking the actions). Put every participant's name into the matrix in this column. Ask each participant what concrete next steps they can commit to. Place this in the WHAT column.

ReWork (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)

Although this book is primarily written for those starting their own business there is loads of great thought provoking ideas that can be used by leaders in any organisation.

There are lots of ideas to spark innovation, and to manage the innovation process, I particularly like the ones about embracing constraints and resource limitations as it forces you to be creative and pare down your idea to the very core and to DO SOMETHING!

It is also short, punchy and to the point - it makes you think "Hey I could apply that".  In fact the authors explained that they reduced the final text of the book by 50% at the final proof stage in order to ensure it was focussed on getting the message across.

I really liked the description of toxic meetings


Locn. 214-21 There’s a new reality. Today anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few bucks or even free. One person can do the job of two or three or, in some cases, an entire department. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is simple today. You don’t have to work miserable 60/80/100-hour weeks to make it work. 10–40 hours a week is plenty. You don’t have to deplete your life savings or take on a boatload of risk. Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need. You don’t even need an office. Today you can work from home or collaborate with people you’ve never met who live thousands of miles away.
Locn. 242-43 Learning from mistakes is overrated
Locn. 247-51 Other people’s failures are just that: other people’s failures. If other people can’t market their product, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t build a team, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t price their services properly, it has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t earn more than they spend … well, you get it.
Locn. 256-60 Failure is not a prerequisite for success. A Harvard Business School study found already-successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again (the success rate for their future companies is 34 percent). But entrepreneurs whose companies failed the first time had almost the same follow-on success rate as people starting a company for the first time: just 23 percent. People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all.* Success is the experience that actually counts.
Locn. 264-67 Planning is guessing Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.
Locn. 278-81 Now this isn’t to say you shouldn’t think about the future or contemplate how you might attack upcoming obstacles. That’s a worthwhile exercise. Just don’t feel you need to write it down or obsess about it. If you write a big plan, you’ll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet.
Locn. 314-18 Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.
Locn. 333-34 Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.
Locn. 350-58 Make a dent in the universe To do great work, you need to feel that you’re making a difference. That you’re putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you’re part of something important. This doesn’t mean you need to find the cure for cancer. It’s just that your efforts need to feel valuable. You want your customers to say, “This makes my life better.” You want to feel that if you stopped doing what you do, people would notice. You should feel an urgency about this too. You don’t have forever. This is your life’s work. Do you want to build just another me-too product or do you want to shake things up? What you do is your legacy. Don’t sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see. And don’t think it takes a huge team to make that difference either.
Locn. 404-11 Think your idea’s that valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those. Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”* Kubrick knew that when you’re new at something, you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.
Locn. 436-38 Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.)
Locn. 617-20 Embrace constraints “I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.
Locn. 642-48 You can turn a bunch of great ideas into a crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once. You just can’t do everything you want to do and do it well. You have limited time, resources, ability, and focus. It’s hard enough to do one thing right. Trying to do ten things well at the same time? Forget about it. So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole. Most of your great ideas won’t seem all that great once you get some perspective, anyway. And if they truly are that fantastic, you can always do them later.
Locn. 660-66 The way to find the epicenter is to ask yourself this question: “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” A hot dog stand isn’t a hot dog stand without the hot dogs. You can take away the onions, the relish, the mustard, etc. Some people may not like your toppings-less dogs, but you’d still have a hot dog stand. But you simply cannot have a hot dog stand without any hot dogs. So figure out your epicenter. Which part of your equation can’t be removed? If you can continue to get by without this thing or that thing, then those things aren’t the epicenter. When you find it, you’ll know. Then focus all your energy on making it the best it can be. Everything else you do depends on that foundation.
Locn. 703-7 It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going. Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now—while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.
Locn. 708-14 Be a curator You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse. What makes a museum great is the stuff that’s not on the walls. Someone says no. A curator is involved, making conscious decisions about what should stay and what should go. There’s an editing process. There’s a lot more stuff off the walls than on the walls. The best is a sub-sub-subset of all the possibilities. It’s the stuff you leave out that matters. So constantly look for things to remove, simplify, and streamline.
Locn. 737-41 When things aren’t working, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More people, time, and money. All that ends up doing is making the problem bigger. The right way to go is the opposite direction: Cut back. So do less. Your project won’t suffer nearly as much as you fear. In fact, there’s a good chance it’ll end up even better. You’ll be forced to make tough calls and sort out what truly matters.
Locn. 799-801 Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T’s into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America.*
Locn. 811-16 Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You suddenly realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need. And what you do need seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It’s the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, “We don’t need this.” Put off anything you don’t need for launch. Build the necessities now, worry about the luxuries later. If you really think about it, there’s a whole lot you don’t need on day one.
Locn. 864-92 Here are some important questions to ask yourself to ensure you’re doing work that matters:

• Why are you doing this? Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It’s pretty common, actually. That’s why it’s important to ask why you’re working on
• What is this for? Who benefits? What’s the motivation behind it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you better understand the work itself. 
• What problem are you solving? What’s the problem? Are customers confused? Are you confused? Is something not clear enough? Was something not possible before that should be possible now? Sometimes when you ask these questions, you’ll find you’re solving an imaginary problem. That’s when it’s time to stop and reevaluate what the hell you’re doing.
•  Is this actually useful? Are you making something useful or just making something? It’s easy to confuse enthusiasm with usefulness. Sometimes it’s fine to play a bit and build something cool. But eventually you’ve got to stop and ask yourself if it’s useful, too. Cool wears off. Useful never does. 
• Are you adding value? Adding something is easy; adding value is hard. Is this thing you’re working on actually making your product more valuable for customers? Can they get more out of it than they did before? Sometimes things you think are adding value actually subtract from it. Too much ketchup can ruin the fries. Value is about balance. 
• Will this change behavior? Is what you’re working on really going to change anything? Don’t add something unless it has a real impact on how people use your product.
• Is there an easier way? Whenever you’re working on something, ask, “Is there an easier way?” You’ll often find this easy way is more than good enough for now. Problems are usually pretty simple. We just imagine that they require hard solutions. 
• What could you be doing instead? What can’t you do because you’re doing this? This is especially important for small teams with constrained resources. That’s when prioritization is even more important. If you work on A, can you still do B and C before April? If not, would you rather have B and C instead of A? If you’re stuck on something for a long period of time, that means there are other things you’re not getting done. 
• Is it really worth it? Is what you’re doing really worth it? Is this meeting worth pulling six people off their work for an hour? Is it worth pulling an all-nighter tonight, or could you just finish it up tomorrow? Is it worth getting all stressed out over a press release from a competitor? Is it worth spending your money on advertising? Determine the real value of what you’re about to do before taking the plunge.

Locn. 928-41 Meetings are toxic The worst interruptions of all are meetings. Here’s why: • They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things. • They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute. • They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in a snowstorm. • They require thorough preparation that most people don’t have time for. • They frequently have agendas so vague that nobody is really sure of the goal. • They often include at least one moron who inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense. • Meetings procreate. One meeting leads to another meeting leads to another . . .
Locn. 953-62 If you decide you absolutely must get together, try to make your meeting a productive one by sticking to these simple rules: • Set a timer. When it rings, meeting’s over. Period. • Invite as few people as possible. • Always have a clear agenda. • Begin with a specific problem. • Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes. • End with a solution and make someone responsible for implementing it.
Locn. 1015-17 Keep in mind that the obvious solution might very well be quitting. People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that’s exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.
Locn. 1077-83 And a quick suggestion about prioritization: Don’t prioritize with numbers or labels. Avoid saying, “This is high priority, this is low priority.” Likewise, don’t say, “This is a three, this is a two, this is a one, this is a three,” etc. Do that and you’ll almost always end up with a ton of really high-priority things. That’s not really prioritizing. Instead, prioritize visually. Put the most important thing at the top. When you’re done with that, the next thing on the list becomes the next most important thing. That way you’ll only have a single next most important thing to do at a time. And that’s enough.
Locn. 1125-29 Decommoditize your product If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. It’s just a fact of life. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.
Locn. 1218-21 If you’re planning to build “the iPod killer” or “the next Pokemon,” you’re already dead. You’re allowing the competition to set the parameters. You’re not going to out-Apple Apple. They’re defining the rules of the game. And you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. You need to redefine the rules, not just build something slightly better.
Locn. 1233-35 If I’d listened to customers, I’d have given them a faster horse. —HENRY FORD
Locn. 1238-40 Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.
Locn. 1253-56 If you’re not willing to yield to a customer request, be polite and explain why. People are surprisingly understanding when you take the time to explain your point of view. You may even win them over to your way of thinking. If not, recommend a competitor if you think there’s a better solution out there. It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.
Locn. 1314-21 Don’t write it down How should you keep track of what customers want? Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said. Seriously. There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They’ll keep reminding you. They’ll show you which things you truly need to worry about. If there’s a request that you keep forgetting, that’s a sign that it isn’t very important. The really important stuff doesn’t go away.
Locn. 1369-71 Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them.
Locn. 1395-97 So emulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? This book is our cookbook. What’s yours?
Locn. 1441-43 If you want to get someone’s attention, it’s silly to do exactly the same thing as everyone else. You need to stand out. So why issue press releases like everyone else does? Why spam journalists when their inbox is already filled with other people’s spam?
Locn. 1463 Lifehacker, a productivity site.
Locn. 1467-72 Drug dealers are astute businesspeople. They know their product is so good they’re willing to give a little away for free upfront. They know you’ll be back for more—with money. Emulate drug dealers. Make your product so good, so addictive, so “can’t miss” that giving customers a small, free taste makes them come back with cash in hand. This will force you to make something about your product bite-size. You want an easily digestible introduction to what you sell. This gives people a way to try it without investing any money or a lot of time.
Locn. 1501-2 You will not be a big hit right away. You will not get rich quick. You are not so special that everyone else will instantly pay attention. No one cares about you. At least not yet. Get used to it.
Locn. 1597-1603 We’ve all seen job ads that say, “Five years of experience required.” That may give you a number, but it tells you nothing. Of course, requiring some baseline level of experience can be a good idea when hiring. It makes sense to go after candidates with six months to a year of experience. It takes that long to internalize the idioms, learn how things work, understand the relevant tools, etc. But after that, the curve flattens out. There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.
Locn. 1656-61 If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.
Locn. 1830-33 You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.
Locn. 1857-62 Instead of thinking about how you can land a roomful of rock stars, think about the room instead. We’re all capable of bad, average, and great work. The environment has a lot more to do with great work than most people realize. That’s not to say we’re all created equal and you’ll unlock star power in anyone with a rock star environment. But there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance.
Locn. 1869-73 When you treat people like children, you get children’s work. Yet that’s exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees. Employees need to ask permission before they can do anything. They need to get approval for every tiny expenditure. It’s surprising they don’t have to get a hall pass to go take a shit. When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers. You create a boss-versus-worker relationship that screams, “I don’t trust you.”
Locn. 1898-1906 The second something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to create a policy. “Someone’s wearing shorts!? We need a dress code!” No, you don’t. You just need to tell John not to wear shorts again. Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy—one scar—at a time. So don’t scar on the first cut. Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. 
Locn. 1928-30 And when you’re writing, don’t think about all the people who may read your words. Think of one person. Then write for that one person

The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande)

A wonderful example of taking an idea from one domain (flying aircraft) and applying it in another (surgery) to make a dramatic impact in terms of reliability of outcomes for complex processes - ie a greatly reduced death rate.

Contains some gory stories of what can go wrong in hospitals and how implementing simple checklists and requiring communications can help to prevent them.

The book explains how you cannot force central control in complex unpredictable situations but that checklists avoid the simple repetitive parts of a process getting forgotten.  The defined breaks for communications and the shifts in power to allow the whole team to speak up with concerns improve both teamwork, motivation and outcomes.



Locn. 486-88 Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all.
Locn. 531-33 The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the ICU create their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.
Locn. 597-99 Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average ICU outperformed 90 percent of ICUs nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175 million in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for several years now—all because of a stupid little checklist.
Locn. 638-41 Four generations after the first aviation checklists went into use, a lesson is emerging: checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.
Locn. 703-6 So as I looked up at this whole building that had to stand up straight even in an earthquake, puzzling over how the workers could be sure they were constructing it properly, I realized the question had two components. First, how could they be sure that they had the right knowledge in hand? Second, how could they be sure that they were applying this knowledge correctly?
Locn. 1015-20 the giant discount retailer’s chief executive officer, Lee Scott, issued a simple edict. “This company will respond to the level of this disaster,” he was remembered to have said in a meeting with his upper management. “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.” As one of the officers at the meeting later recalled, “That was it.” The edict was passed down to store managers and set the tone for how people were expected to react.
Locn. 1029-32 Senior Wal-Mart officials concentrated on setting goals, measuring progress, and maintaining communication lines with employees at the front lines and with official agencies when they could. In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked.
Locn. 1051-55 the real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. People need room to act and adapt. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either—that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation—expectation to coordinate, for example, and also to measure progress toward common goals.
Locn. 1162-63 The volume of surgery had grown so swiftly that, without anyone’s quite realizing, it has come to exceed global totals for childbirth—only with a death rate ten to one hundred times higher.
Locn. 1165-67 Worldwide, at least seven million people a year are left disabled and at least one million dead—a level of harm that approaches that of malaria, tuberculosis, and other traditional public health concerns.
Locn. 1442-45 It felt kind of hokey to me, and I wondered how much difference this step could really make. But it turned out to have been carefully devised. There have been psychology studies in various fields backing up what should have been self-evident—people who don’t know one another’s names don’t work together nearly as well as those who do.
Locn. 1449-1645 The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an “activation phenomenon.” Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These were limited studies and hardly definitive. But the initial results were enticing. Nothing had ever been shown to improve the ability of surgeons to broadly reduce harm to patients aside from experience and specialized training. Yet here, in three separate cities, teams had tried out these unusual checklists, and each had found a positive effect. At Johns Hopkins, researchers specifically measured their checklist’s effect on teamwork. Eleven surgeons had agreed to try it in their cases—seven general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, and two neurosurgeons. After three months, the number of team members in their operations reporting that they “functioned as a well-coordinated team” leapt from 68 percent to 92 percent. At the Kaiser hospitals in Southern California, researchers had tested their checklist for six months in thirty-five hundred operations. During that time, they found that their staff’s average rating of the teamwork climate improved from “good” to “outstanding.” Employee satisfaction rose 19 percent. The rate of OR nurse turnover—the proportion leaving their jobs each year—dropped from 23 percent to 7 percent. And the checklist appeared to have caught numerous near errors.

 When you’re making a checklist, Boorman explained, you have a number of key decisions. You must define a clear pause point at which the checklist is supposed to be used (unless the moment is obvious, like when a warning light goes on or an engine fails). You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory 
Locn. 1648-50 The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory. Boorman didn’t think one had to be religious on this point.
Locn. 1724-27 It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives.
Locn. 2100-2106 In the beginning, most had been skeptical. But by the end, 80 percent reported that the checklist was easy to use, did not take a long time to complete, and had improved the safety of care. And 78 percent actually observed the checklist to have prevented an error in the operating room. Nonetheless, some skepticism persisted. After all, 20 percent did not find it easy to use, thought it took too long, and felt it had not improved the safety of care. Then we asked the staff one more question. “If you were having an operation,” we asked, “would you want the checklist to be used?” A full 93 percent said yes.
Locn. 2250-58 When he first introduced the checklist, he assumed it would slow his team down, increasing the time and work required for their investment decisions. He was prepared to pay that price. The benefits of making fewer mistakes seemed obvious. And in fact, using the checklist did increase the up-front work time. But to his surprise, he found they were able to evaluate many more investments in far less time overall. Before the checklist, Cook said, it sometimes took weeks and multiple meetings to sort out how seriously they should consider a candidate investment—whether they should drop it or pursue a more in-depth investigation. The process was open-ended and haphazard, and when people put a month into researching an investment, they tended to get, well, invested. After the checklist, though, he and his team found that they could consistently sort out by the three-day check which prospects really deserved further consideration and which ones didn’t. “The process was more thorough but faster,” he said. “It was one hit, and we could move on.”
Locn. 2308-9 Smart published his findings more than a decade ago. He has since gone on to explain them in a best-selling business book on hiring called Who.
Locn. 2372-78 Here are the details of one of the sharpest checklists I’ve seen, a checklist for engine failure during flight in a single-engine Cessna airplane—the US Airways situation, only with a solo pilot. It is slimmed down to six key steps not to miss for restarting the engine, steps like making sure the fuel shutoff valve is in the OPEN position and putting the backup fuel pump switch ON. But step one on the list is the most fascinating. It is simply: FLY THE AIRPLANE. Because pilots sometimes become so desperate trying to restart their engine, so crushed by the cognitive overload of thinking through what could have gone wrong, they forget this most basic task. FLY THE AIRPLANE. This isn’t rigidity. This is making sure everyone has their best shot at survival.
Locn. 2475-96 We’re obsessed in medicine with having great components—the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists—but pay little attention to how to make them fit together well. Berwick notes how wrongheaded this approach is. “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,” he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment of trying to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo. “What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car; we get a pile of very expensive junk.” Nonetheless, in medicine that’s exactly what we have done. We have a thirty-billion-dollar-a-year National Institutes of Health, which has been a remarkable powerhouse of medical discoveries. But we have no National Institute of Health Systems Innovation alongside it studying how best to incorporate these discoveries into daily practice—no NTSB equivalent swooping in to study failures the way crash investigators do, no Boeing mapping out the checklists, no agency tracking the month-to-month results. The same can be said in numerous other fields. We don’t study routine failures in teaching, in law, in government programs, in the financial industry, or elsewhere. We don’t look for the patterns of our recurrent mistakes or devise and refine potential solutions for them. But we could, and that is the ultimate point. We are all plagued by failures—by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems and clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber—a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could fly it. They too could have decided just to “try harder” or to dismiss a crash as the failings of a “weak” pilot. Instead they chose to accept their fallibilities. They recognized the simplicity and power of using a checklist. And so can we. Indeed, against the complexity of the world, we must. There is no other choice. When we look closely, we recognize the same balls being dropped over and over, even by those of great ability and determination. We know the patterns. We see the costs. It’s time to try something else. Try a checklist.