A great book on how to get your message across effectively (and by that the author means remembered and acted upon).This should be prescribed reading for managers and team-leaders as most of our role is based on effective communications.
The book uses it's own techniques to get its message across with liberal examples of stories to engage you with real individuals who achieved a powerful communications success.
SIMPLICITY We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
UNEXPECTEDNESS For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.
CONCRETENESS Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
CREDIBILITY We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas.
EMOTIONS We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness.
STORIES Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. We engage mentally when we hear a story about another individual
Locn. 180-82 a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical.
Locn. 298-99 To summarize, here's our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.
Locn. 327-29 This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.
Locn. 419-21 plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI).
Locn. 448-49 The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents.
Locn. 721-23 We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It's a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
Locn. 819-22 We've seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren't valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you've got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what's already there.
Locn. 883-84 If a message can't be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
Locn. 991-92 The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns.
Locn. 1092-94 To be surprising, an event can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable." The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it's not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn't.
Locn. 1116-19 So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Locn. 1250-51 Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience."
Locn. 1303-5 In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
Locn. 1313-15 we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they're missing.
Locn. 1368-71 Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence. Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as "concept testing." Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.
Locn. 1432-35 Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. "Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing." Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It's no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we're close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
Locn. 1810-11 Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable.
Locn. 1842-44 Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years.
Locn. 2212-14 This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
Locn. 2574-75 These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people's charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
Locn. 2758-61 The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!). An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.
Locn. 2846-49 Here's the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.
Locn. 3131-33 How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be
Locn. 3252-54 Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.
Locn. 3273-75 Notice that these visualizations focus on the events themselves— the process, rather than the outcomes. No one has ever been cured of a phobia by imagining how happy they'll be when it's gone.
Locn. 3606-9 The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you're implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Locn. 3699-3702 If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with "It's the economy, stupid"—then we should humbly embrace the audience's judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn't whether people mimic our exact words, it's whether we achieve our goals.
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Monday, 18 April 2011
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (Al Ries)
A book recommended by a recent ACE group speaker on marketing. It turned out to be something of a marketing classic written a few decades ago but still containing quite a few truths we could apply today.
The biggest insight for me was to think not of how we can change the product but rather change the perception of the product to more effectively market it. Coupled with the thought that you do this by linking onto what is already in the mind of your potential customer.
Page 1 | Loc. 255-56 Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.
Page 2 | Loc. 261-63 In spite of its reputation, or perhaps because of it, the field of advertising is a superb testing ground for theories of communication. If it works in advertising, most likely it will work in politics, religion, or any other activity that requires mass communication.
Page 2 | Loc. 271-73 positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.
Page 5 | Loc. 306-7 The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.
Page 6 | Loc. 317-18 In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, “positioning.”
Page 8 | Loc. 343-44 In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.
Page 8 | Loc. 354-56 You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind. In other words, since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you ignore the sending side and concentrate on the receiving end. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect. Not the reality of the product.
Page 32 | Loc. 660-62 too many companies embark on marketing and advertising programs as if the competitor’s position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through.
Page 41 | Loc. 786-88 In truth, outright failure is often preferable to mediocre success. An also-ran can easily be tempted to think that the answer to the problem is trying harder. A company stuck with a losing position is not going to benefit much from hard work.
Page 51 | Loc. 942 Leaders should constantly use the power of their leadership to keep far ahead of the
Page 53 | Loc. 950-51 It’s not enough to be better than the competitor. You must introduce your product before someone else has a chance to establish leadership.
Page 55 | Loc. 986-87 Some brands base almost their entire product message on the high-price concept.
Page 63 | Loc. 1103-4 For a repositioning strategy to work, you must say something about your competitor’s product that causes the prospect to change his or her mind, not about your product, but about the competitor’s product.
Page 98 | Loc. 1593-97 When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it. The reason is obvious. A well-known name got well known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect’s mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder. The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new ladder. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.
Page 100 | Loc. 1627-31 In dealing with media, you must conserve your anonymity until you are ready to spend it. And then when you spend it, spend it big. Always keeping in mind that the objective is not publicity or communication for its own sake, but publicity to achieve a position in the prospect’s mind. An unknown company with an unknown product has much more to gain from publicity than a well-known company with an established product. “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol once predicted. When your 15 minutes arrive, make the most of every second.
Page 124 | Loc. 1980-87 So we offer some rules of the road that will tell you when to use the house name and when not to. 1. Expected volume. Potential winners should not bear the house name. Small-volume products should. 2. Competition. In a vacuum, the brand should not bear the house name. In a crowded field, it should. 3. Advertising support. Big-budget brands should not bear the house name. Small-budget brands should. 4. Significance. Breakthrough products should not bear the house name. Commodity products such as chemicals should. 5. Distribution. Off-the-shelf items should not bear the house name. Items sold by sales reps should.
Page 146 | Loc. 2252-54 Conceptually, this approach says to tourists that the things they travel a great distance to Hawaii for (natural beauty, big green mountains, beautiful beaches, wonderful year-round weather) can be found a lot closer to home, down in the Caribbean.
Page 152 | Loc. 2314-15 The solution to a positioning problem is usually found in the prospect’s mind, not in the product.
Page 158 | Loc. 2391-92 Your problem is not just one of developing a good strategy. Equally important is the courage you will need to keep hammering at the same theme, year after year.
Page 160 | Loc. 2413-16 “Mapping the prospect’s mind” is normally done with a research technique called “semantic differential.” This was the procedure used to develop a positioning program for the Long Island Trust Company. In semantic differential research, the prospect is given a set of attributes and then asked to rank each competitor on a scale, generally from 1 to 10.
Page 170 | Loc. 2518-19 When the bank’s performance matched the promises the advertising was going to make, the advertising started to make the promises.
Page 191 | Loc. 2791-93 So remember, the winningest jockeys are not necessarily the lightest, the smartest, or the strongest. The best jockey doesn’t win the race. The jockey that wins the race is usually the one with the best horse. So pick yourself a horse to ride and then ride it for all it’s
Page 196 | Loc. 2837-39 Prospects don’t buy, they choose. Among brands of automobiles. Among brands of beer. Among brands of computers. The merit, or lack of merit, of your brand is not nearly as important as your position among the possible choices.
Page 203 | Loc. 2934-35 people make up their minds and then find the facts to “verify” their opinion. Or even more commonly, they accept the opinion of the nearest “expert,” and then they don’t have to bother with the facts at all.
Page 206 | Loc. 2991-93 But the obvious isn’t always so obvious. “Boss” Kettering had a sign which he placed on the wall of the General Motors Research Building in Dayton: “This problem when solved will be simple.”
Page 208 | Loc. 3022-25 In positioning, smaller may be better. It is usually better to look for smaller targets that you can own exclusively rather than a bigger market you have to share with three or four other brands. You can’t be all things to all people and still have a powerful position.
Page 210 | Loc. 3050-52 The suicidal bent of companies that go head-on against established competition is hard to understand. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Nine times out of ten, the also-ran that sets out to attack the leader head-on is headed for disaster.
The biggest insight for me was to think not of how we can change the product but rather change the perception of the product to more effectively market it. Coupled with the thought that you do this by linking onto what is already in the mind of your potential customer.
Page 1 | Loc. 255-56 Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.
Page 2 | Loc. 261-63 In spite of its reputation, or perhaps because of it, the field of advertising is a superb testing ground for theories of communication. If it works in advertising, most likely it will work in politics, religion, or any other activity that requires mass communication.
Page 2 | Loc. 271-73 positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.
Page 5 | Loc. 306-7 The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.
Page 6 | Loc. 317-18 In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, “positioning.”
Page 8 | Loc. 343-44 In communication, as in architecture, less is more. You have to sharpen your message to cut into the mind. You have to jettison the ambiguities, simplify the message, and then simplify it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.
Page 8 | Loc. 354-56 You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind. In other words, since so little of your message is going to get through anyway, you ignore the sending side and concentrate on the receiving end. You concentrate on the perceptions of the prospect. Not the reality of the product.
Page 32 | Loc. 660-62 too many companies embark on marketing and advertising programs as if the competitor’s position did not exist. They advertise their products in a vacuum and are disappointed when their messages fail to get through.
Page 41 | Loc. 786-88 In truth, outright failure is often preferable to mediocre success. An also-ran can easily be tempted to think that the answer to the problem is trying harder. A company stuck with a losing position is not going to benefit much from hard work.
Page 51 | Loc. 942 Leaders should constantly use the power of their leadership to keep far ahead of the
Page 53 | Loc. 950-51 It’s not enough to be better than the competitor. You must introduce your product before someone else has a chance to establish leadership.
Page 55 | Loc. 986-87 Some brands base almost their entire product message on the high-price concept.
Page 63 | Loc. 1103-4 For a repositioning strategy to work, you must say something about your competitor’s product that causes the prospect to change his or her mind, not about your product, but about the competitor’s product.
Page 98 | Loc. 1593-97 When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to hang a well-known name on it. The reason is obvious. A well-known name got well known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect’s mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder. The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new ladder. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.
Page 100 | Loc. 1627-31 In dealing with media, you must conserve your anonymity until you are ready to spend it. And then when you spend it, spend it big. Always keeping in mind that the objective is not publicity or communication for its own sake, but publicity to achieve a position in the prospect’s mind. An unknown company with an unknown product has much more to gain from publicity than a well-known company with an established product. “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” Andy Warhol once predicted. When your 15 minutes arrive, make the most of every second.
Page 124 | Loc. 1980-87 So we offer some rules of the road that will tell you when to use the house name and when not to. 1. Expected volume. Potential winners should not bear the house name. Small-volume products should. 2. Competition. In a vacuum, the brand should not bear the house name. In a crowded field, it should. 3. Advertising support. Big-budget brands should not bear the house name. Small-budget brands should. 4. Significance. Breakthrough products should not bear the house name. Commodity products such as chemicals should. 5. Distribution. Off-the-shelf items should not bear the house name. Items sold by sales reps should.
Page 146 | Loc. 2252-54 Conceptually, this approach says to tourists that the things they travel a great distance to Hawaii for (natural beauty, big green mountains, beautiful beaches, wonderful year-round weather) can be found a lot closer to home, down in the Caribbean.
Page 152 | Loc. 2314-15 The solution to a positioning problem is usually found in the prospect’s mind, not in the product.
Page 158 | Loc. 2391-92 Your problem is not just one of developing a good strategy. Equally important is the courage you will need to keep hammering at the same theme, year after year.
Page 160 | Loc. 2413-16 “Mapping the prospect’s mind” is normally done with a research technique called “semantic differential.” This was the procedure used to develop a positioning program for the Long Island Trust Company. In semantic differential research, the prospect is given a set of attributes and then asked to rank each competitor on a scale, generally from 1 to 10.
Page 170 | Loc. 2518-19 When the bank’s performance matched the promises the advertising was going to make, the advertising started to make the promises.
Page 191 | Loc. 2791-93 So remember, the winningest jockeys are not necessarily the lightest, the smartest, or the strongest. The best jockey doesn’t win the race. The jockey that wins the race is usually the one with the best horse. So pick yourself a horse to ride and then ride it for all it’s
Page 196 | Loc. 2837-39 Prospects don’t buy, they choose. Among brands of automobiles. Among brands of beer. Among brands of computers. The merit, or lack of merit, of your brand is not nearly as important as your position among the possible choices.
Page 203 | Loc. 2934-35 people make up their minds and then find the facts to “verify” their opinion. Or even more commonly, they accept the opinion of the nearest “expert,” and then they don’t have to bother with the facts at all.
Page 206 | Loc. 2991-93 But the obvious isn’t always so obvious. “Boss” Kettering had a sign which he placed on the wall of the General Motors Research Building in Dayton: “This problem when solved will be simple.”
Page 208 | Loc. 3022-25 In positioning, smaller may be better. It is usually better to look for smaller targets that you can own exclusively rather than a bigger market you have to share with three or four other brands. You can’t be all things to all people and still have a powerful position.
Page 210 | Loc. 3050-52 The suicidal bent of companies that go head-on against established competition is hard to understand. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Nine times out of ten, the also-ran that sets out to attack the leader head-on is headed for disaster.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators (Patrick Lencioni)
A trainers guide on how to run sessions to develop team cohesiveness and effectiveness based on the Patrick Lencioni book 'The five dysfunctions of a team".
I liked the exercise to get the team to open up at the start of a program the personal histories exercise:
Each team member explains 3 things, where they grew up, how many kids in the family, most important or difficult challenge of their childhood. Starts factual enough to be safe but then can go onto something much more revealing.
I have used Myers Briggs before though not for this purpose and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was very productive when my previous team used it last year.
Page 7 | Loc. 55-56 The true measure of a team is that it accomplishes the results that it sets out to achieve. To do that on a consistent, ongoing basis, a team must overcome the five dysfunctions listed here by embodying the behaviors described for each one.
Page 7 | Loc. 56-57 Dysfunction #I: Absence of Trust: Members of great teams trust one another on a fundamental, emotional level, and they are comfortable being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors.
Page 7 | Loc. 58-59 Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict:... teams that trust one another are not afraid to engage in passionate dialogue around issues and decisions that are key to the organization's success.
Page 7 | Loc. 60-61 Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment ... teams that engage in unfiltered conflict are able to achieve genuine buy-in around important decisions, even when various members of the team initially disagree.
Page 7 | Loc. 62-63 Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability:... teams that commit to decisions and standards of performance do not hesitate to hold one another accountable for adhering to those decisions and standards.What
Page 7 | Loc. 64-65 Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results: ... teams that trust one another, engage in conflict, commit to decisions, and hold one another accountable are very likely to set aside their individual needs and agendas and focus almost exclusively on what is best for the team.They
Page 9 | Loc. 69-70 a team is a relatively small number of people (anywhere from three to twelve) that shares common goals as well as the rewards and responsibilities for achieving them. Team members readily set aside their individual or personal needs for the greater good of the group.
Page 18 | Loc. 134-35 For a team to establish real trust, team members, beginning with the leader, must be willing to take risks without a guarantee of success. They will have to be vulnerable without knowing whether that vulnerability will be respected and reciprocated.
Page 32 | Loc. 258-60 come prepared the next day to report on the three or four areas that they felt were particularly insightful about their style. We also ask team members to identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.
Page 37 | Loc. 287-88 When people who don't trust one another engage in passionate debate, they are trying to win the argument. They aren't usually listening to the other person's ideas and then reconsidering their point of view; they're
Page 42 | Loc. 334 Two other tools help teams identify their individual and collective conflict profile. One is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument-developed
Page 45 | Loc. 358-59 That's because people who don't like conflict have an amazing ability to avoid it, even when they know it's theoretically necessary.
Page 51 | Loc. 408 Waiting for everyone on a team to agree intellectually on a decision is a good recipe for mediocrity, delay, and frustration,
Page 52 | Loc. 415-17 Good leaders drive commitment among the team by first extracting every possible idea, opinion, and perspective from the team. Then, comfortable that nothing has been left off the table, they must have the courage and wisdom to step up and make a decision, one that is sure to run counter to at least one of the team members, and usually more.
Page 53 | Loc. 420-21 most people don't really need to have their ideas adopted (a.k.a. "get their way") in order to buy in to a decision. They just want to have their ideas heard, understood, considered, and explained within the context of the ultimate decision.
Page 54 | Loc. 434-35 With five minutes to go at the end of a meeting-any type of meeting-the leader of the team needs to call a question: What exactly have we decided here today?
Page 55 | Loc. 442-43 the leader must also engage in cascading communication. That means demanding that the team go back and communicate the decisions to their staff members within twenty-four hours of the meeting. And not by e-mail or voice mail but either live in person or on the phone, thus giving employees a chance to ask questions for clarification.
Page 87 | Loc. 691-92 If I'm a manager of the team, should I use an outside consultant or facilitator? The key to this question is whether you can find a really good consultant or facilitator. If not, then go it alone.
Page 97 | Loc. 762-63 it is just not realistic to expect people to be emotionally vulnerable, provide constructive feedback, and hold one another accountable for their behaviors over a T1 line. There is something uniquely powerful about being in a room together, and being able to read the body language, facial expressions, and other subtle behavioral cues.
Page 131 | Loc. 942-43 The Thomas-Kilmann Model describes five different approaches to conflict according to how people think about the importance of a task versus the importance of their relationship with people they are working with.
Page 132 | Loc. 945-46 To ensure that teams leave meetings with no ambiguity about what they've agreed upon. Time required: Five minutes. Instructions: 1. Toward the end of a meeting, the leader or facilitator should go to the white board and ask the team: "What have we agreed upon today?"
Page 133 | Loc. 949-50 After the Commitment Clarification Exercise has been completed, the team then decides which of the commitments and agreements should be communicated to the rest of the organization.
Page 133 | Loc. 951-52 Note that it is critical for cascading communication to occur either in person or live on the phone (that is, not via e-mail or voice mail) so that employees can ask questions
I liked the exercise to get the team to open up at the start of a program the personal histories exercise:
Each team member explains 3 things, where they grew up, how many kids in the family, most important or difficult challenge of their childhood. Starts factual enough to be safe but then can go onto something much more revealing.
I have used Myers Briggs before though not for this purpose and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was very productive when my previous team used it last year.
Page 7 | Loc. 55-56 The true measure of a team is that it accomplishes the results that it sets out to achieve. To do that on a consistent, ongoing basis, a team must overcome the five dysfunctions listed here by embodying the behaviors described for each one.
Page 7 | Loc. 56-57 Dysfunction #I: Absence of Trust: Members of great teams trust one another on a fundamental, emotional level, and they are comfortable being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors.
Page 7 | Loc. 58-59 Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict:... teams that trust one another are not afraid to engage in passionate dialogue around issues and decisions that are key to the organization's success.
Page 7 | Loc. 60-61 Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment ... teams that engage in unfiltered conflict are able to achieve genuine buy-in around important decisions, even when various members of the team initially disagree.
Page 7 | Loc. 62-63 Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability:... teams that commit to decisions and standards of performance do not hesitate to hold one another accountable for adhering to those decisions and standards.What
Page 7 | Loc. 64-65 Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results: ... teams that trust one another, engage in conflict, commit to decisions, and hold one another accountable are very likely to set aside their individual needs and agendas and focus almost exclusively on what is best for the team.They
Page 9 | Loc. 69-70 a team is a relatively small number of people (anywhere from three to twelve) that shares common goals as well as the rewards and responsibilities for achieving them. Team members readily set aside their individual or personal needs for the greater good of the group.
Page 18 | Loc. 134-35 For a team to establish real trust, team members, beginning with the leader, must be willing to take risks without a guarantee of success. They will have to be vulnerable without knowing whether that vulnerability will be respected and reciprocated.
Page 32 | Loc. 258-60 come prepared the next day to report on the three or four areas that they felt were particularly insightful about their style. We also ask team members to identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.
Page 37 | Loc. 287-88 When people who don't trust one another engage in passionate debate, they are trying to win the argument. They aren't usually listening to the other person's ideas and then reconsidering their point of view; they're
Page 42 | Loc. 334 Two other tools help teams identify their individual and collective conflict profile. One is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument-developed
Page 45 | Loc. 358-59 That's because people who don't like conflict have an amazing ability to avoid it, even when they know it's theoretically necessary.
Page 51 | Loc. 408 Waiting for everyone on a team to agree intellectually on a decision is a good recipe for mediocrity, delay, and frustration,
Page 52 | Loc. 415-17 Good leaders drive commitment among the team by first extracting every possible idea, opinion, and perspective from the team. Then, comfortable that nothing has been left off the table, they must have the courage and wisdom to step up and make a decision, one that is sure to run counter to at least one of the team members, and usually more.
Page 53 | Loc. 420-21 most people don't really need to have their ideas adopted (a.k.a. "get their way") in order to buy in to a decision. They just want to have their ideas heard, understood, considered, and explained within the context of the ultimate decision.
Page 54 | Loc. 434-35 With five minutes to go at the end of a meeting-any type of meeting-the leader of the team needs to call a question: What exactly have we decided here today?
Page 55 | Loc. 442-43 the leader must also engage in cascading communication. That means demanding that the team go back and communicate the decisions to their staff members within twenty-four hours of the meeting. And not by e-mail or voice mail but either live in person or on the phone, thus giving employees a chance to ask questions for clarification.
Page 87 | Loc. 691-92 If I'm a manager of the team, should I use an outside consultant or facilitator? The key to this question is whether you can find a really good consultant or facilitator. If not, then go it alone.
Page 97 | Loc. 762-63 it is just not realistic to expect people to be emotionally vulnerable, provide constructive feedback, and hold one another accountable for their behaviors over a T1 line. There is something uniquely powerful about being in a room together, and being able to read the body language, facial expressions, and other subtle behavioral cues.
Page 131 | Loc. 942-43 The Thomas-Kilmann Model describes five different approaches to conflict according to how people think about the importance of a task versus the importance of their relationship with people they are working with.
Page 132 | Loc. 945-46 To ensure that teams leave meetings with no ambiguity about what they've agreed upon. Time required: Five minutes. Instructions: 1. Toward the end of a meeting, the leader or facilitator should go to the white board and ask the team: "What have we agreed upon today?"
Page 133 | Loc. 949-50 After the Commitment Clarification Exercise has been completed, the team then decides which of the commitments and agreements should be communicated to the rest of the organization.
Page 133 | Loc. 951-52 Note that it is critical for cascading communication to occur either in person or live on the phone (that is, not via e-mail or voice mail) so that employees can ask questions
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World (Derek Hansen, Ben Shneiderman and Marc A. Smith)
A guide on how to use the NodeXL plugin for Microsoft Excel for analysing electronic social networks. I have used the tool on my email traffic and more extensively on our internal Saint-Gobain social network to analyse who are the key individuals, who are the bridges between various communities, which areas need more support etc.
A very useful tool and the book is a great guide with real world examples of how each analysis technique has been used to illuminate a situation in an organisation.
Locn. 299-300 Social media tools cultivate the internal discussions that improve quality, lower costs, and enable the creation of customer and partner communities that offer new opportunities for coordination, marketing, advertising, and customer support.
Locn. 308-10 The Gartner Group reported that social network analysis would prove to be a strategic advantage for a corporation, calling it an “untapped information asset.”
Locn. 335-36 Business leaders and analysts can study enterprise social networks to improve the performance of organizations by identifying key contributors, locating gaps or disconnections across the organization, and discovering important documents and other digital objects.
Locn. 778-82 Ostrom found that successful communities had clearly defined boundaries, largely to overcome problems associated with outsiders taking advantage of internally produced or maintained resources. Boundaries are also important in that they encourage frequent, ongoing interaction among group members. This is critical because repeated interaction is perhaps the single most important factor in encouraging cooperation
Locn. 1034-35 Billions of texts are exchanged each day among almost 3 billion users of mobile phones and other devices.
Locn. 1529-30 Network analysis argues that explanations about the success or failures of organizations are often to be found in the structure of relationships that limit and provide opportunities for interaction
Locn. 1814-15 centrality measures, of which there are many, capture how “important” (central) a vertex is within the network based on some objective criteria.
Locn. 1841-43 Density is a count of the number of relationships observed to be present in a network divided by the total number of possible relationships that could be present. It is a quantitative way to capture important sociological ideas like cohesion, solidarity, and membership.
Locn. 1843-46 Centralization is an aggregate metric that characterizes the amount to which the network is centered on one or a few important nodes. Centralized networks have many edges that emanate from a few important vertices, whereas decentralized networks have little variation between the numbers of edges each vertex possesses.
Locn. 1859-61 Degree centrality is a simple count of the total number of connections linked to a vertex. It can be thought of as a kind of popularity measure, but a crude one that does not recognize a difference between quantity and quality.
Locn. 1870-73 betweenness centrality is a measure of how often a given vertex lies on the shortest path between two other vertices. This can be thought of as a kind of “bridge” score, a measure of how much removing a person would disrupt the connections between other people in the network. The idea of brokering is often captured in the measure of betweenness centrality.
Locn. 1875-78 Burt provides compelling evidence that individuals who bridge structural holes are promoted faster than others 15. Social network analysis has many strategic applications when people in an organization can analyze their position and the position of others. Managers and leaders can recognize gaps or disconnections within organizations and devote resources to traversing the divide.
Locn. 1881-83 Closeness centrality takes a different perspective from the other network metrics, capturing the average distance between a vertex and every other vertex in the network.
Locn. 1891-92 Eigenvector centrality is a more sophisticated view of centrality: a person with few connections could have a very high eigenvector centrality if those few connections were themselves very well connected.
Locn. 1974-76 Thus weak ties proved particularly useful for finding novel information, such as information about job prospects. Because weak ties were less intense, they were also less costly to maintain in terms of time and attention. As a result, it is possible to have many weak ties but only a few strong ties.
Locn. 2164-65 a network graph can provide an overview of the structure of the network, calling out cliques, clusters, communities, and key participants.
Locn. 2196-99 Traditional participation statistics can provide important insights about the engagement of a community, but can say little about the connections between community members. Network analysis can help explain important social phenomena such as group formation, group cohesion, social roles, personal influence, and overall community health.
Locn. 2880-83 Tracking aggregate graph metrics over time can determine the effectiveness of interventions on the network as a whole. For example, you would expect the total number of edges to grow, increasing the “density” of the graph, after a photo sharing activity designed to introduce people to those they don’t know. Individual person-level metrics provide insights about a person’s
Locn. 2884-86 For example, network graph metrics can be used to identify those people in a network who are bridge spanners or who are popular. Once identified, analysts and managers can better know who to contact or influence or bring to the table when trying to implement new programs or gain broader understanding. Locn. 3018-19 Average geodesic distance. The average of all geodesic distances. This value gives a sense of how “close” community members are from one another.
Locn. 3926-27 Today, an estimated 1.4 billion worldwide email users send nearly 50 billion nonspam emails each day.
Locn. 3943-46 These maps and reports may help you realize unappreciated or forgotten relationships, or identify a past working group that could be rekindled for a current project. They can help us overcome some of our memory biases such as weighing recent events more or remembering things we’ve initiated more than those initiated by others.
Locn. 4471-73 Despite these challenges, a number of companies have begun to create social network data that combine corporate email network data and corporate directory information, giving them a live window into their corporate communication patterns.
A very useful tool and the book is a great guide with real world examples of how each analysis technique has been used to illuminate a situation in an organisation.
Locn. 299-300 Social media tools cultivate the internal discussions that improve quality, lower costs, and enable the creation of customer and partner communities that offer new opportunities for coordination, marketing, advertising, and customer support.
Locn. 308-10 The Gartner Group reported that social network analysis would prove to be a strategic advantage for a corporation, calling it an “untapped information asset.”
Locn. 335-36 Business leaders and analysts can study enterprise social networks to improve the performance of organizations by identifying key contributors, locating gaps or disconnections across the organization, and discovering important documents and other digital objects.
Locn. 778-82 Ostrom found that successful communities had clearly defined boundaries, largely to overcome problems associated with outsiders taking advantage of internally produced or maintained resources. Boundaries are also important in that they encourage frequent, ongoing interaction among group members. This is critical because repeated interaction is perhaps the single most important factor in encouraging cooperation
Locn. 1034-35 Billions of texts are exchanged each day among almost 3 billion users of mobile phones and other devices.
Locn. 1529-30 Network analysis argues that explanations about the success or failures of organizations are often to be found in the structure of relationships that limit and provide opportunities for interaction
Locn. 1814-15 centrality measures, of which there are many, capture how “important” (central) a vertex is within the network based on some objective criteria.
Locn. 1841-43 Density is a count of the number of relationships observed to be present in a network divided by the total number of possible relationships that could be present. It is a quantitative way to capture important sociological ideas like cohesion, solidarity, and membership.
Locn. 1843-46 Centralization is an aggregate metric that characterizes the amount to which the network is centered on one or a few important nodes. Centralized networks have many edges that emanate from a few important vertices, whereas decentralized networks have little variation between the numbers of edges each vertex possesses.
Locn. 1859-61 Degree centrality is a simple count of the total number of connections linked to a vertex. It can be thought of as a kind of popularity measure, but a crude one that does not recognize a difference between quantity and quality.
Locn. 1870-73 betweenness centrality is a measure of how often a given vertex lies on the shortest path between two other vertices. This can be thought of as a kind of “bridge” score, a measure of how much removing a person would disrupt the connections between other people in the network. The idea of brokering is often captured in the measure of betweenness centrality.
Locn. 1875-78 Burt provides compelling evidence that individuals who bridge structural holes are promoted faster than others 15. Social network analysis has many strategic applications when people in an organization can analyze their position and the position of others. Managers and leaders can recognize gaps or disconnections within organizations and devote resources to traversing the divide.
Locn. 1881-83 Closeness centrality takes a different perspective from the other network metrics, capturing the average distance between a vertex and every other vertex in the network.
Locn. 1891-92 Eigenvector centrality is a more sophisticated view of centrality: a person with few connections could have a very high eigenvector centrality if those few connections were themselves very well connected.
Locn. 1974-76 Thus weak ties proved particularly useful for finding novel information, such as information about job prospects. Because weak ties were less intense, they were also less costly to maintain in terms of time and attention. As a result, it is possible to have many weak ties but only a few strong ties.
Locn. 2164-65 a network graph can provide an overview of the structure of the network, calling out cliques, clusters, communities, and key participants.
Locn. 2196-99 Traditional participation statistics can provide important insights about the engagement of a community, but can say little about the connections between community members. Network analysis can help explain important social phenomena such as group formation, group cohesion, social roles, personal influence, and overall community health.
Locn. 2880-83 Tracking aggregate graph metrics over time can determine the effectiveness of interventions on the network as a whole. For example, you would expect the total number of edges to grow, increasing the “density” of the graph, after a photo sharing activity designed to introduce people to those they don’t know. Individual person-level metrics provide insights about a person’s
Locn. 2884-86 For example, network graph metrics can be used to identify those people in a network who are bridge spanners or who are popular. Once identified, analysts and managers can better know who to contact or influence or bring to the table when trying to implement new programs or gain broader understanding. Locn. 3018-19 Average geodesic distance. The average of all geodesic distances. This value gives a sense of how “close” community members are from one another.
Locn. 3926-27 Today, an estimated 1.4 billion worldwide email users send nearly 50 billion nonspam emails each day.
Locn. 3943-46 These maps and reports may help you realize unappreciated or forgotten relationships, or identify a past working group that could be rekindled for a current project. They can help us overcome some of our memory biases such as weighing recent events more or remembering things we’ve initiated more than those initiated by others.
Locn. 4471-73 Despite these challenges, a number of companies have begun to create social network data that combine corporate email network data and corporate directory information, giving them a live window into their corporate communication patterns.
Monday, 7 March 2011
Drive - The surprising truth about what motivates us (Daniel H. Pink)
The central theme of this book is that for any task beyond the most mundane, giving an external reward actually reduces levels of motivation. The key is to unlock our internal reward mechanisms, our innate desire to master tasks.
Locn. 88-90 “The performance of the task,” he said, “provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
Locn. 157-60 “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote. Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.
Locn. 307-10 beneath the site is probably Apache, free open-source Web server software created and maintained by a far-flung global group of volunteers. Apache’s share of the corporate Web server market: 52 percent. In other words, companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.
Locn. 384-85 In short, we are irrational—and predictably so, says economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.
Locn. 428-30 external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. Those sorts of challenges—solving novel problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing—depend heavily on Harlow’s third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity,
Locn. 455-57 Nobody “manages” the Wikipedians. Nobody sits around trying to figure out how to “motivate” them. That’s why Wikipedia works. Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; non-routine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.
Locn. 457-58 “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.”
Locn. 510-12 If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.
Locn. 557-59 Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy. Like the gentlemen driving carriages for money instead of fun, they’re no longer fully controlling their lives. And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.
Locn. 630-33 How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes longer. Yes, three and a half minutes longer. (Whenever I’ve relayed these results to a group of businesspeople, the reaction is almost always a loud, pained, involuntary gasp.)
Locn. 714-17 Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
Locn. 736-38 Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
Locn. 823-24 “The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization.”
Locn. 840-41 Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.
Locn. 934-35 “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
Locn. 995-96 The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
Locn. 1011-13 First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”
Locn. 1022-24 In brief, for creative, right- brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering “if- then” rewards. You’re better off using “now that” rewards. And you’re best off if your “now that” rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.
Locn. 1062-65 SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.
Locn. 1187-88 Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
Locn. 1250-52 in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
Locn. 1288-90 Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.” TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO
Locn. 1304-6 researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
Locn. 1341-43 one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with.
Locn. 1713-15 As Fast Company magazine has noted, a number of companies, including Microsoft, Patagonia, and Toyota, have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.
Locn. 1736-38 Chen calls his game flOw. And it’s been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/index.htm).
Locn. 1792-93 “With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.”
Locn. 1807-9 Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters.
Locn. 1819-22 The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.
Locn. 1825-28 “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years.”11 Mastery—of sports, music, business—requires effort (difficult, painful, excruciating, all-consuming effort) over a long time (not a week or a month, but a decade).
Locn. 1840-42 As Carol Dweck says, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”
Locn. 1973-74 In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes.
Locn. 2004 “In a curious way, age is simpler than youth, for it has so many fewer options.”
Locn. 2080-83 “The value of a life can be measured by one’s ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.” BILL STRICKLAND Founder of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and MacArthur “genius award” winner
Locn. 2090-92 how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.
Locn. 2248-49 Here’s something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.
Locn. 2341-50 Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “almost none” and 10 meaning “a huge amount”): How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work— your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day? How much autonomy do you have over your time at work— for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day? How much autonomy do you have over your team at work— that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate? How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job? Make sure all responses are anonymous. Then tabulate the results. What’s the employee average?
Locn. 2372-74 Hand everyone a blank three-by-five-inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her one-sentence answer to the following question: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose?” Collect the cards and read them aloud. What do they tell you? Are the answers similar, everyone aligned along a common purpose? Or are they all over the place
Locn. 2410-12 Set aside an entire day where employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they’d like. Make sure they have the tools and resources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver something—a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process—the following day.
Locn. 2520-21 Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.
Locn. 2524 Make praise specific.
Locn. 2526 Praise in private.
Locn. 2527 Offer praise only when there’s a good reason for it.
Locn. 2536 Think of it as the fourth R: reading, writing, arithmetic … and relevance.
Locn. 2712-13 The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE
Locn. 2753-54 JIM COLLINS Who: One of the most authoritative voices in business today and the author of Built to Last (with Jerry Porras), Good to Great, and, most recently, How the Mighty Fall.
Locn. 2764-65 www.jimcollins.com, contains more information about his work, as well as excellent diagnostic tools, guides, and videos.
Locn. 2823-26 This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Locn. 2897-99 Results-only work environment (ROWE): The brainchild of two American consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in which employees don’t have schedules. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time or any time. They just have to get their work done.
Locn. 88-90 “The performance of the task,” he said, “provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
Locn. 157-60 “When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote. Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.
Locn. 307-10 beneath the site is probably Apache, free open-source Web server software created and maintained by a far-flung global group of volunteers. Apache’s share of the corporate Web server market: 52 percent. In other words, companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.
Locn. 384-85 In short, we are irrational—and predictably so, says economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, a book that offers an entertaining and engaging overview of behavioral economics.
Locn. 428-30 external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. Those sorts of challenges—solving novel problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing—depend heavily on Harlow’s third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity,
Locn. 455-57 Nobody “manages” the Wikipedians. Nobody sits around trying to figure out how to “motivate” them. That’s why Wikipedia works. Routine, not-so-interesting jobs require direction; non-routine, more interesting work depends on self-direction.
Locn. 457-58 “If you need me to motivate you, I probably don’t want to hire you.”
Locn. 510-12 If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.
Locn. 557-59 Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy. Like the gentlemen driving carriages for money instead of fun, they’re no longer fully controlling their lives. And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.
Locn. 630-33 How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes longer. Yes, three and a half minutes longer. (Whenever I’ve relayed these results to a group of businesspeople, the reaction is almost always a loud, pained, involuntary gasp.)
Locn. 714-17 Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
Locn. 736-38 Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
Locn. 823-24 “The very presence of goals may lead employees to focus myopically on short-term gains and to lose sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organization.”
Locn. 840-41 Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.
Locn. 934-35 “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
Locn. 995-96 The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
Locn. 1011-13 First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”
Locn. 1022-24 In brief, for creative, right- brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering “if- then” rewards. You’re better off using “now that” rewards. And you’re best off if your “now that” rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.
Locn. 1062-65 SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.
Locn. 1187-88 Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
Locn. 1250-52 in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
Locn. 1288-90 Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.” TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO
Locn. 1304-6 researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.
Locn. 1341-43 one of these essential features is autonomy—in particular, autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with.
Locn. 1713-15 As Fast Company magazine has noted, a number of companies, including Microsoft, Patagonia, and Toyota, have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.
Locn. 1736-38 Chen calls his game flOw. And it’s been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/index.htm).
Locn. 1792-93 “With a learning goal, students don’t have to feel that they’re already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all, their goal is to learn, not to prove they’re smart.”
Locn. 1807-9 Type X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals, and disdains effort as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes learning goals over performance goals, and welcomes effort as a way to improve at something that matters.
Locn. 1819-22 The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.
Locn. 1825-28 “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the results of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years.”11 Mastery—of sports, music, business—requires effort (difficult, painful, excruciating, all-consuming effort) over a long time (not a week or a month, but a decade).
Locn. 1840-42 As Carol Dweck says, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”
Locn. 1973-74 In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes.
Locn. 2004 “In a curious way, age is simpler than youth, for it has so many fewer options.”
Locn. 2080-83 “The value of a life can be measured by one’s ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.” BILL STRICKLAND Founder of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and MacArthur “genius award” winner
Locn. 2090-92 how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.
Locn. 2248-49 Here’s something you can do to keep yourself motivated. At the end of each day, ask yourself whether you were better today than you were yesterday.
Locn. 2341-50 Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “almost none” and 10 meaning “a huge amount”): How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work— your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day? How much autonomy do you have over your time at work— for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day? How much autonomy do you have over your team at work— that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate? How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job? Make sure all responses are anonymous. Then tabulate the results. What’s the employee average?
Locn. 2372-74 Hand everyone a blank three-by-five-inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her one-sentence answer to the following question: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose?” Collect the cards and read them aloud. What do they tell you? Are the answers similar, everyone aligned along a common purpose? Or are they all over the place
Locn. 2410-12 Set aside an entire day where employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they’d like. Make sure they have the tools and resources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver something—a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process—the following day.
Locn. 2520-21 Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence.
Locn. 2524 Make praise specific.
Locn. 2526 Praise in private.
Locn. 2527 Offer praise only when there’s a good reason for it.
Locn. 2536 Think of it as the fourth R: reading, writing, arithmetic … and relevance.
Locn. 2712-13 The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization BY PETER M. SENGE
Locn. 2753-54 JIM COLLINS Who: One of the most authoritative voices in business today and the author of Built to Last (with Jerry Porras), Good to Great, and, most recently, How the Mighty Fall.
Locn. 2764-65 www.jimcollins.com, contains more information about his work, as well as excellent diagnostic tools, guides, and videos.
Locn. 2823-26 This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
Locn. 2897-99 Results-only work environment (ROWE): The brainchild of two American consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in which employees don’t have schedules. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time or any time. They just have to get their work done.
Monday, 28 February 2011
Alex's Adventures in Numberland (Alex Bellos)
A relatively lightweight dip into a number of aspects of mathematics and how they impact on our lives today. You don't need to remember much school maths to enjoy the book (but you do need an interest in it). Full of interesting facts and quirks - the best has to be a drill bit that drills square holes!
Locn. 469-70 the study found a strong correlation between a talent at reckoning and success in formal maths. The better one’s approximate number sense, it seems, the higher one’s chance of getting good grades.
Locn. 1496-1500 The Menger sponge is a brilliantly paradoxical object. As you continue the iterations of taking out smaller and smaller cubes the volume of the sponge gets smaller and smaller, eventually becoming invisible – as though the woodworm have eaten the whole lot. Yet each iteration of cube removal also makes the surface area of the sponge increase. By taking more and more iterations you can make the surface area larger than any area you want, meaning that as the number of iterations approaches infinity, the surface area of the sponge also approaches infinity.
Locn. 2633 Pi exhibits randomness non-randomly – which is fascinating, and weird.
Locn. 2686-88 One useful property of a Reuleaux triangle is that it can be rotated inside a square so that it touches all four sides of the square at all times. This property was exploited by Harry James Watts, an English engineer living in Pennsylvania, in 1914, when he designed one of the most bizarre tools in existence: a drill that can drill square holes.
Locn. 4560-63 The mathematical reason why the golden angle produces the best leaf arrangement around a stem is linked to the concept of irrational numbers, which are those numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions. If an angle is an irrational number, no matter how many times you turn it around a circle you will never get back to where you started. It may sound Orwellian, but some irrational numbers are more irrational than others. And no number is more irrational than the golden ratio.
Locn. 5480-82 Adolphe Quételet has good claim to being the world’s most influential Belgian. (The fact that this is not a competitive field in no way diminishes his achievements.) Locn. 5495 In Brussels in 1853 Quételet hosted the first international conference on statistics.
Locn. 5557 the quincunx. The word’s original meaning is the pattern of five dots on a die,
Locn. 469-70 the study found a strong correlation between a talent at reckoning and success in formal maths. The better one’s approximate number sense, it seems, the higher one’s chance of getting good grades.
Locn. 1496-1500 The Menger sponge is a brilliantly paradoxical object. As you continue the iterations of taking out smaller and smaller cubes the volume of the sponge gets smaller and smaller, eventually becoming invisible – as though the woodworm have eaten the whole lot. Yet each iteration of cube removal also makes the surface area of the sponge increase. By taking more and more iterations you can make the surface area larger than any area you want, meaning that as the number of iterations approaches infinity, the surface area of the sponge also approaches infinity.
Locn. 2633 Pi exhibits randomness non-randomly – which is fascinating, and weird.
Locn. 2686-88 One useful property of a Reuleaux triangle is that it can be rotated inside a square so that it touches all four sides of the square at all times. This property was exploited by Harry James Watts, an English engineer living in Pennsylvania, in 1914, when he designed one of the most bizarre tools in existence: a drill that can drill square holes.
Locn. 4560-63 The mathematical reason why the golden angle produces the best leaf arrangement around a stem is linked to the concept of irrational numbers, which are those numbers that cannot be expressed as fractions. If an angle is an irrational number, no matter how many times you turn it around a circle you will never get back to where you started. It may sound Orwellian, but some irrational numbers are more irrational than others. And no number is more irrational than the golden ratio.
Locn. 5480-82 Adolphe Quételet has good claim to being the world’s most influential Belgian. (The fact that this is not a competitive field in no way diminishes his achievements.) Locn. 5495 In Brussels in 1853 Quételet hosted the first international conference on statistics.
Locn. 5557 the quincunx. The word’s original meaning is the pattern of five dots on a die,
Saturday, 5 February 2011
Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Mr. Ken Robinson)
Whilst at times the book tends to veer a little too far towards science & technology education bashing, especially in the early chapters, by the time you have read the whole book he does present a more balanced argument. His central thrust is that we need a more holistic view of education that encourages a love of learning right across the population and doesn't try and force everyone through a narrow academic route. My point would be that we do need some to follow the academic route (just as we have always done).
The book is more of an argument that we need to do something different rather than providing the solutions as to what we should be doing.
The chapters on culture and creativity and innovation within organisations definitely chimed with my personal experience.
Locn. 218-19 We won’t survive the future simply by doing better what we have done in the past. Raising standards is no good if they’re the wrong standards.
Locn. 346-47 Creative insights often occur by making connections between ideas or experiences that were previously unconnected.
Locn. 355-56 Creativity prospers best under particular conditions, especially where there is a flow of ideas between people who have different sorts of expertise. It requires an atmosphere where risk-taking and experimentation are encouraged rather than stifled.
Locn. 359-60 If ideas are discouraged or ignored, the creative impulse does one of two things. It deserts or subverts the organisation. Creativity can work for you or against you.
Locn. 530-31 The essential problem is that many governments and organisations seem to think that the best way to prepare for the future is to do better what we did in the past - just to do more of it and to a higher standard. The fact is we have to do something else.
Locn. 698-99 It has been estimated that each year something in the order of 10^17 microchips are being manufactured. This is roughly equivalent to the world population of ants.
Locn. 1080-81 In these circumstances, employers aim for exactly the same elite they would have taken on 20 years earlier : they just raise the bar and develop different techniques for selecting the people they want and add new criteria.
Locn. 1434-37 Theories develop in response to questions. And a question, as Susan Langer notes, can only be answered in a certain number of ways. For this reason the most important characteristic of an intellectual age is the questions it asks - the problems it identifies. It is this rather than the answers it provides that reveals its underlying view of the world.
Locn. 2110-15 To promote creativity it is essential to understand the main elements and phases of the creative process including: • the importance of the medium; • the need to be in control of the medium; • the need to play and take risks; and • the need for critical judgment.
Locn. 2418-21 So what’s involved in the process of being creative? 1 want to focus on three crucial features: • the importance of finding the right medium for your own creative strengths; • the necessity of being able to control the medium; and • the need for freedom to experiment and take risks.
Locn. 2481-83 They reach a stage where their creative ambitions have outrun their technical abilities. This is hardly surprising. Children don’t develop these abilities just by getting older, any more than they wake up on their 16th birthday to discover they can drive a car.
Locn. 2496-99 Creativity involves a dynamic interplay between generating ideas and making judgements about them. Getting the balance right is critical. Imaginative activity is the process of generating something original: providing an alternative to the conventional or routine. It’s a form of mental play that is essentially generative, in which we attempt to expand the possibilities of a situation, to look at it from a new perspective.
Locn. 2568-69 Creativity is not a separate faculty so much as an attitude: a willingness to reconsider what we take for granted.
Locn. 2602 Locn. 2602-4 Goleman describes this as emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent people are self-directed, self-starters, highly motivated and excellent communicators. As such they are likely to emerge at the top of organisations.
Locn. 2857-60 This is why ideas often come to mind without our thinking about them: why it’s often better to sleep on a problem or put it, as we say, to ‘the back of our minds’. There we can let the non-rational processes of thought mull it over and deliver a solution unbidden to us. Our best ideas may come to us when we’re not thinking about them.
Locn. 3114-15 We all live in two worlds: a world that exists whether or not we exist and a world that exists only because we exist, the world of our own thoughts, feelings and consciousness.
Locn. 3133-34 We are laced together in networks of knowledge. In large communities and organisations, these networks are highly complex. The creativity of a culture depends on how open these networks are and how easily we can access the knowledge of other people.
Locn. 3149-51 The store of human knowledge is now doubling every ten years and the rate of expansion is accelerating. One result is increasingly intensive specialisation in all disciplines: a tendency to know more and more about less and less.
Locn. 3158-61 As knowledge expands, greater specialisation is inevitable. The risk is that we lose sight of the larger picture, of how ideas connect and can inform each other. In these circumstances we need more than access to information and ideas: we need ways of engaging with them, of making connections, of seeing principles and of relating them to our own experiences and identities. This too has important implications for the culture of organisations.
Locn. 3298-3300 Cultural change is not a strictly logical process. New ideas take root not just because they are new or haven’t been thought of before. In fact this is often not the case. They take root when they do because they capture a mood. They appeal to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the ghost in the social system,
Locn. 3334-36 The common-sense view is that human knowledge moves forward confidently on the basis of new theories building systematically on the old. This is not what happens at all. In practice, theories are as subject to social movements and fashions as the length of skirts or the cut of lapels.
Locn. 3358-59 • Creativity is not a purely personal process. Many creative processes draw from the ideas and stimulation of other people. Creativity flourishes in an atmosphere where original thinking and innovation are encouraged and stimulated.
Locn. 3360-62 If ideas are not encouraged, or when encouraged they are ignored, the creative impulse does one of two things. It goes out, or it goes maverick. It deserts the organisation or it subverts it. Creativity can work for you or against you.
• Creativity is a dynamic process and can involve many different areas of expertise. The exponential growth of knowledge has led to increasing levels of specialisation. In organisations, these often result in large numbers of separate departments and in the division of responsibilities to more and more specialist roles. But new ideas often come from the dialogue between different disciplines,
• Creativity is incremental. New ideas do not necessarily come from nowhere. They draw from the ideas and achievements of those that have gone before us or are working in different fields.
• Cultural change is not linear and smooth. It can be tumultuous, complex and drawn out. New ways of thinking do not simply replace the old at clear points in history.
• Cultural change is not strictly logical. Creativity and innovation should be seen as functions of all areas of activity and not only as confined to particular people or processes. The challenge is to promote processes of systemic innovation rather than of isolated specialist achievement.
Locn. 3431-32 Edward de Bono has developed a series of thinking tools including the Six Thinking Hats method and CORT, a suite of practical thinking techniques.
Locn. 3495-96 Everyone who works at our place has to work on at least two projects. In our organisation, we manage people’s commitment we don’t manage their time. In a research lab, time doesn’t mean anything.’
Locn. 3498-3500 Creativity relies on the flow of ideas. This happens best in an atmosphere where risk is encouraged, playfulness with ideas is accepted and where failure is not punished but seen as part of the process of success.
Locn. 3525-29 The processes of creativity can be stifled by a sense that innovation is unlikely to travel upwards through an organisation or that it won’t be welcomed if it emerges from the wrong places. It can be stifled by pressure from above to deliver the wrong sort of results over the wrong timescale: by demands for the wrong sort of accountability. In a practical sense, loosening hierarchies also means that those who run organisations should be accessible to those who work in them. They should encourage a flow of ideas and make it clear that ideas are welcomed and valued.
Locn. 3567-72 ‘Every single person in business needs to acquire the ability to change, the self-confidence to learn new things and the capacity for helicopter vision. The idea that we can win with brilliant scientists and technologists alone is absolute nonsense. It’s breadth of vision, the ability to understand all the influences at work, to flex between then and not be frightened of totally different experiences and viewpoints that holds the key. We need every single pressure from business at the moment to make clear that the specialist who cannot take the holistic view of the whole scene is no use at all.’ Sir John Harvey Jones
Locn. 3584-85 Productivity in a research laboratory means nothing. Creativity means everything, because most of what you do isn’t going to turn out how you thought it would.’
Locn. 3587 Organisations that make the most of
Locn. 3587-88 Organisations that make the most of their people find that their people make the most of them.
The book is more of an argument that we need to do something different rather than providing the solutions as to what we should be doing.
The chapters on culture and creativity and innovation within organisations definitely chimed with my personal experience.
Locn. 218-19 We won’t survive the future simply by doing better what we have done in the past. Raising standards is no good if they’re the wrong standards.
Locn. 346-47 Creative insights often occur by making connections between ideas or experiences that were previously unconnected.
Locn. 355-56 Creativity prospers best under particular conditions, especially where there is a flow of ideas between people who have different sorts of expertise. It requires an atmosphere where risk-taking and experimentation are encouraged rather than stifled.
Locn. 359-60 If ideas are discouraged or ignored, the creative impulse does one of two things. It deserts or subverts the organisation. Creativity can work for you or against you.
Locn. 530-31 The essential problem is that many governments and organisations seem to think that the best way to prepare for the future is to do better what we did in the past - just to do more of it and to a higher standard. The fact is we have to do something else.
Locn. 698-99 It has been estimated that each year something in the order of 10^17 microchips are being manufactured. This is roughly equivalent to the world population of ants.
Locn. 1080-81 In these circumstances, employers aim for exactly the same elite they would have taken on 20 years earlier : they just raise the bar and develop different techniques for selecting the people they want and add new criteria.
Locn. 1434-37 Theories develop in response to questions. And a question, as Susan Langer notes, can only be answered in a certain number of ways. For this reason the most important characteristic of an intellectual age is the questions it asks - the problems it identifies. It is this rather than the answers it provides that reveals its underlying view of the world.
Locn. 2110-15 To promote creativity it is essential to understand the main elements and phases of the creative process including: • the importance of the medium; • the need to be in control of the medium; • the need to play and take risks; and • the need for critical judgment.
Locn. 2418-21 So what’s involved in the process of being creative? 1 want to focus on three crucial features: • the importance of finding the right medium for your own creative strengths; • the necessity of being able to control the medium; and • the need for freedom to experiment and take risks.
Locn. 2481-83 They reach a stage where their creative ambitions have outrun their technical abilities. This is hardly surprising. Children don’t develop these abilities just by getting older, any more than they wake up on their 16th birthday to discover they can drive a car.
Locn. 2496-99 Creativity involves a dynamic interplay between generating ideas and making judgements about them. Getting the balance right is critical. Imaginative activity is the process of generating something original: providing an alternative to the conventional or routine. It’s a form of mental play that is essentially generative, in which we attempt to expand the possibilities of a situation, to look at it from a new perspective.
Locn. 2568-69 Creativity is not a separate faculty so much as an attitude: a willingness to reconsider what we take for granted.
Locn. 2602 Locn. 2602-4 Goleman describes this as emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent people are self-directed, self-starters, highly motivated and excellent communicators. As such they are likely to emerge at the top of organisations.
Locn. 2857-60 This is why ideas often come to mind without our thinking about them: why it’s often better to sleep on a problem or put it, as we say, to ‘the back of our minds’. There we can let the non-rational processes of thought mull it over and deliver a solution unbidden to us. Our best ideas may come to us when we’re not thinking about them.
Locn. 3114-15 We all live in two worlds: a world that exists whether or not we exist and a world that exists only because we exist, the world of our own thoughts, feelings and consciousness.
Locn. 3133-34 We are laced together in networks of knowledge. In large communities and organisations, these networks are highly complex. The creativity of a culture depends on how open these networks are and how easily we can access the knowledge of other people.
Locn. 3149-51 The store of human knowledge is now doubling every ten years and the rate of expansion is accelerating. One result is increasingly intensive specialisation in all disciplines: a tendency to know more and more about less and less.
Locn. 3158-61 As knowledge expands, greater specialisation is inevitable. The risk is that we lose sight of the larger picture, of how ideas connect and can inform each other. In these circumstances we need more than access to information and ideas: we need ways of engaging with them, of making connections, of seeing principles and of relating them to our own experiences and identities. This too has important implications for the culture of organisations.
Locn. 3298-3300 Cultural change is not a strictly logical process. New ideas take root not just because they are new or haven’t been thought of before. In fact this is often not the case. They take root when they do because they capture a mood. They appeal to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the ghost in the social system,
Locn. 3334-36 The common-sense view is that human knowledge moves forward confidently on the basis of new theories building systematically on the old. This is not what happens at all. In practice, theories are as subject to social movements and fashions as the length of skirts or the cut of lapels.
Locn. 3358-59 • Creativity is not a purely personal process. Many creative processes draw from the ideas and stimulation of other people. Creativity flourishes in an atmosphere where original thinking and innovation are encouraged and stimulated.
Locn. 3360-62 If ideas are not encouraged, or when encouraged they are ignored, the creative impulse does one of two things. It goes out, or it goes maverick. It deserts the organisation or it subverts it. Creativity can work for you or against you.
• Creativity is a dynamic process and can involve many different areas of expertise. The exponential growth of knowledge has led to increasing levels of specialisation. In organisations, these often result in large numbers of separate departments and in the division of responsibilities to more and more specialist roles. But new ideas often come from the dialogue between different disciplines,
• Creativity is incremental. New ideas do not necessarily come from nowhere. They draw from the ideas and achievements of those that have gone before us or are working in different fields.
• Cultural change is not linear and smooth. It can be tumultuous, complex and drawn out. New ways of thinking do not simply replace the old at clear points in history.
• Cultural change is not strictly logical. Creativity and innovation should be seen as functions of all areas of activity and not only as confined to particular people or processes. The challenge is to promote processes of systemic innovation rather than of isolated specialist achievement.
Locn. 3431-32 Edward de Bono has developed a series of thinking tools including the Six Thinking Hats method and CORT, a suite of practical thinking techniques.
Locn. 3495-96 Everyone who works at our place has to work on at least two projects. In our organisation, we manage people’s commitment we don’t manage their time. In a research lab, time doesn’t mean anything.’
Locn. 3498-3500 Creativity relies on the flow of ideas. This happens best in an atmosphere where risk is encouraged, playfulness with ideas is accepted and where failure is not punished but seen as part of the process of success.
Locn. 3525-29 The processes of creativity can be stifled by a sense that innovation is unlikely to travel upwards through an organisation or that it won’t be welcomed if it emerges from the wrong places. It can be stifled by pressure from above to deliver the wrong sort of results over the wrong timescale: by demands for the wrong sort of accountability. In a practical sense, loosening hierarchies also means that those who run organisations should be accessible to those who work in them. They should encourage a flow of ideas and make it clear that ideas are welcomed and valued.
Locn. 3567-72 ‘Every single person in business needs to acquire the ability to change, the self-confidence to learn new things and the capacity for helicopter vision. The idea that we can win with brilliant scientists and technologists alone is absolute nonsense. It’s breadth of vision, the ability to understand all the influences at work, to flex between then and not be frightened of totally different experiences and viewpoints that holds the key. We need every single pressure from business at the moment to make clear that the specialist who cannot take the holistic view of the whole scene is no use at all.’ Sir John Harvey Jones
Locn. 3584-85 Productivity in a research laboratory means nothing. Creativity means everything, because most of what you do isn’t going to turn out how you thought it would.’
Locn. 3587 Organisations that make the most of
Locn. 3587-88 Organisations that make the most of their people find that their people make the most of them.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust (Chris Brogan and Julien Smith)
A great book that actually relates to far more than just how to interact using Web 2.0 tools. In fact it, many of the ideas can just as easily be applied to life in general. Not too bogged down with the specific tools and technology (as the authors say that is always changing anyway), the book draws out general points on how to successfully relate to others in a highly interconnected world.
Definitely a book for those who are trying to carve out a presence in such communities, plenty of encouragement and vision of where all this is heading.
Locn. 354-56 They (Trust Agents) operate under the assumption that everything they do will eventually be known online. Realizing they are unable to hide anything, they choose not to try. Instead, they leverage the way the Web connects us and ties our information together to help turn transparency into an asset for doing business.
Locn. 377-78 customers are one Google search away from the truth. Further, they join activist groups to stay informed about new practices, so they are often one step ahead of the people trying to profit from them.
Locn. 425-26 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds studied spend more than two hours online per day, compared to only 48 percent of the same group who spend two hours watching television.
Locn. 605-6 ACTION: Answer Whatever Questions You’re Willing to on Your Blog. Get Credit More Than Once.
Locn. 733-36 Don’t be better at following the guidelines and constraints that accompany a common label—be different and call yourself such. If the concept or category you create catches a foothold, you’re the first to mindshare. Let the rest of the world that follows be compared to you. Particularly in a world where power is often measured in links, this puts you in pole position.”
Locn. 791-93 When you conclude that talent, though not quite a myth, is certainly overrated, you start to realize that you never need to see yourself as below anyone. Instead, you should only believe that you don’t yet have the experience that person does, then find a way to get it.
Locn. 850-52 Playing Games Is Fun. Okay, business is business and work is work. But truly, if you don’t accept this detail, that games are meant to be fun, you’re probably reading the wrong book. Try Jim Collins’s Good to Great instead. Excellent book. The rest of us, let’s agree that if we can figure out a way that work can be fun, it just goes better for everyone involved.
Locn. 924-26 Comments and blog posts and articles found “in the wild” are likely to be a more accurate reflection of a customer’s opinion. You can do the same for yourself, for your business, for a product, and so on—that is, if people are talking about you.
Locn. 945-46 As Wayne Gretzky once said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” We try to do the same.
Locn. 1049-52 Hacking Life. An entire movement has sprung up around the notion of improving productivity and effectiveness by engaging in life hacking. How can you do things differently to make life go better? Examples range from ways to capture and process information, like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, to learning how to keep your e-mail in-box empty with Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Parenthacks.com. There are great web sites, such as Lifehacker .com and Parenthacks.com,
Locn. 1112-13 Do something. Try something small and finite, and then larger and finite, and then complex and finite. See what comes of it. It will soon become clear that failures are just as important as victories.
Locn. 1126-28 Understand that failure is an inevitable part of the game, but that the chance of success is much greater the more often you roll the dice. You shouldn’t fear it; you should embrace it.
Locn. 1283-85 The Importance of Being Human Gaining the trust of another requires you be competent and reliable. It also requires you to leave someone with a positive emotional impression, which is something the Web has the potential to do quickly and well.
Locn. 1292-93 YouTube has over 5 billion videos, one for almost every human on the planet.
Locn. 1318-28 T, of course, is trust, and all the other elements are what makes it happen): (C × R × I)/S = T C = credibility, or the signals people send out to show that they are who they claim to be and as good as they say they are. The higher this is, the more you can trust someone. R = reliability. The more they show up on time, the more you’ll trust them to do so in the future, for example. I = intimacy, one of the most powerful emotional factors in trust. The feeling you get from individuals is important, and it shouldn’t be discounted just because it’s emotional. Do you feel comfortable around them? Could you tell them a secret? That’s intimacy. S = self-orientation, and this is the only negative; the higher this is, the less we tend to trust a person. An example of a low self-orientation would be someone specifically recommending a better competitor instead of themselves. An example of high self-orientation would be the smarmy, self-interested company sycophant who’s always looking for a sale instead of making people feel comfortable.
Locn. 1452-53 Find friends along lines of mutual interests more than via geography or any other factor.
Locn. 1498-1503 Maybe what you want to know instead is, aren’t the people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks being antisocial? In a word, the answer is no. In the past few years, the people who have started using the Web have become closer and closer to the average person you know. The question may have been valid in 1996, but in 2009 and onward, the social aspects of the Web mean that the people interacting within these networks are interested in social activities. In fact, in a lot of cases, they talk online between in-person events and share pictures of stuff they did together.
Locn. 1555-58 People have very sophisticated bullshit sensors, and if not immediately, your intentions will be exposed later. But as long as you’re not considering only the bottom line, taking the first step to initiate an interaction says to people that you want to establish a relationship, that you’re interested in being involved. So step forward and take that step, over and over again. Trust us, as long as you have something to really offer, the benefit will come.
Locn. 1612-13 The better strategy for a trust agent is to develop relationships with up-and-coming individuals in a space. The time spent developing relationships with many up-and-comers beats time spent courting the few big names.
Locn. 1628-29 “givers get.” In the online world, being present and commenting on other people’s work and engaging in general connectedness are just as important as any direct marketing initiatives or other traditional business strategies.
Locn. 1656 Leave 10 comments today and then 10 tomorrow, even if some are just thank-you notes.
Locn. 1791-93 If you take one lesson away from this chapter, take this: Don’t be That Guy. We don’t mind companies in our space, and we need good people working with us, but we can’t stand another one of those people trying to sell us stuff. We’re sick of it, and so is everyone else.
Locn. 1828-29 There’s a programmer’s saying that “the lazy ones are usually the best.” It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Programmers want a little bit of code to do a lot of work, so the lazy programmers usually do the most thinking and the least writing.
Locn. 1915-18 Whatever your industry, it is important to meet a lot of people online, if only superficially. You can do this by connecting with them through tools like Facebook and Twitter or by commenting on their sites. Then find ways to meet face-to-face—whether at industry conferences or in one-on-one meetings—to cement those relationships. By doing so, you make yourself more “real” than the competition
Locn. 2006-7 If you’re thinking somewhere in your head that you need permission to learn how to start building the ability to leverage the resources for your corporation, hand this book to someone else. You’ve already lost the game.
Locn. 2048-58 Here are just a few tools of the trade for a time-starved trust agent: • Spinvox.com: Why listen to voice mail when you can have it transposed and sent to you as text? You can read faster than you can listen. • Jott.com: Speak into your phone and you can receive an email of your transcribed words. Easy leverage. • Kayak.com: Check several airlines and hotels at the same time for prices from a single screen. • SMS: Use this for e-mail. It makes the message and response more concise. It cuts down e-mail clutter. • Podcasts: As learning tools, we can consume these during travel/transit. • RSS reader: Instead of going to blogs directly, we read them quickly via an RSS reader. • Keyboard shortcuts: For most every application we use, we learn the keyboard shortcuts. This time does add up.
Locn. 2097-99 The trick is to come up with something you could tell people at a party, to be able to differentiate between what you think is interesting about what you do and what the average person thinks is interesting.
Locn. 2141-43 The key lesson here is to spend as much time doing what you and your company do best and to delegate everything else that you can. This is true both because it’s not profitable to do everything yourself and because, let’s be honest, you’re not that great at all those other tasks, are you?
Locn. 2173-77 The real secret of the most successful people on the Web is that they are always trying new things. A lot of the time it’s just for fun, because they are passionate about it and like to see how things work. But the benefit is that it’s there for business, too. Early adopters always know more about what’s coming up, and that leads to advantage, over and over again. The company that doesn’t see how it should innovate will always lose over the one that knows how, because it leverages that information to dominate its marketplace. And so should you.
Locn. 2369 As you now know, if you have no Google results, you don’t exist.
Locn. 2444-45 The process of finding new, exciting, and profitable information is difficult, precisely because popularity of any one piece of information reduces its value.
Locn. 2553-54 The value of bringing people in is the value of expanding the potential of the network overall. It’s a simple effect. It’s not far afield from Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, where having more than one voice adds to the experience.
Locn. 2551-52 People working in this space collaborate, they connect, they build business relationships without asking for outright favors or payment. Trust agents build networks, then build circles, and then include others in those circles.
Locn. 2569 try the one-sentence response: “How, exactly, did you want me to help with this?”
Locn. 2576-78 The rule of “multitouch” is important here. Send out small messages. Comment on blogs. Leave notes on Facebook or Flickr or wherever your community spends time. By reaching out and keeping relationships warm, opportunities flow more freely. If you’re not working to maintain your network, it dwindles and shrivels up from lack of use.
Locn. 2653 Six Tools for Reputation and Competition Management
1. Google Alerts:
2. Rank Checker:
3. Technorati:
4. Compete.com:
5. Twitter Grader:
6. Search.Twitter.com:
Locn. 2718-20 ACTION: Get LinkedIn Dust off your LinkedIn.com profile. Refresh it and start connecting to potential business partners, prospects, and friends.
Locn. 2794-96 There’s a tidal wave coming, and it’s made of people. Some will run and some will ignore it, but others will be ready and find a way to roll with it. Those who win are the ones who are always prepared; while some people are hiding their heads in the sand, the winners are anticipating change and finding a ton of opportunities.
Locn. 2825-27 Our first impressions of you strongly resonate with us on an emotional level, so they stick around for a while (and they stay on the Web forever). Take some time to think about how you want to do this before doing it, because that impression will last.
Locn. 2969-71 It’s better to ignore some things than to argue back, because you cannot change people’s minds about everything, and you can’t be everyone’s friend. You’ll try your hardest to help, put in a lot of hours trying to make things right, but at some point, it just ain’t worth it. Some people will never be happy.
Locn. 2984-85 When a customer complains about something, follow the three A’s: Acknowledge, Apologize, Act.
Locn. 3041-42 Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor, calls this “throwing sheep,” because it’s fun and seemingly unproductive, but translates into a deeper sense of belonging.
Locn. 3213-15 reliability is one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself. Be on time perpetually for your work, your meetings, and your emails. If you can’t be on time, tell people early, not at the last minute. And whatever the case, offer constant updates as to your progress instead of long periods of (virtual) absence. You’ll have already beaten out 75 percent of the competition.
Locn. 3648 No matter what the situation, in improv the intention is always “yes, and.” Understanding improvisational comedy has made an actual business difference in our lives. One great book on the subject is Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madson. The lessons put forth in that book might very well help you understand how improv applies to being a trust agent, and how that might help with your business.
Locn. 3680-84 So if you were to retain one piece of information, one tip, about the social side of trust, it should be this: You need to be liked, and you start becoming likable by being worthy of being liked. Be kind. Be patient. Be humble, on time, and generous. Be that person you would like to be friends with. Likability and the related trait, intimacy, is one of the biggest factors in trust, and it’s also one of the easiest to develop with people online. So work on that first with people, before you try to create transactions or take things further. It makes a world of difference.
Locn. 3803-5 Be helpful. Just for the sake of doing it, be helpful. It’s the act that keeps on giving. Since so many people are in it for them, this one idea is worth more than you’d imagine. Doing very simple things without the emphasis on any kind of quid pro quo makes it much more meaningful, and the ways you can do this are endless.
Locn. 3843-45 At this point, the web sites people pay the most attention to (besides search engines) are YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and primarily the social networks. They’ve surpassed porn as the types of sites people spend the most time using on the Internet (we know, we were shocked, too).
Locn. 3872-76 Often with experimentation, the downside is very small, while the possible reward is very large. So trying something new could do you worlds of good. You could hit upon small, new ways to connect or whole worlds of benefit and profit. So give it a shot. Try something new today. It may just revolutionize what you do. Trust us.
Definitely a book for those who are trying to carve out a presence in such communities, plenty of encouragement and vision of where all this is heading.
Locn. 354-56 They (Trust Agents) operate under the assumption that everything they do will eventually be known online. Realizing they are unable to hide anything, they choose not to try. Instead, they leverage the way the Web connects us and ties our information together to help turn transparency into an asset for doing business.
Locn. 377-78 customers are one Google search away from the truth. Further, they join activist groups to stay informed about new practices, so they are often one step ahead of the people trying to profit from them.
Locn. 425-26 71 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds studied spend more than two hours online per day, compared to only 48 percent of the same group who spend two hours watching television.
Locn. 605-6 ACTION: Answer Whatever Questions You’re Willing to on Your Blog. Get Credit More Than Once.
Locn. 733-36 Don’t be better at following the guidelines and constraints that accompany a common label—be different and call yourself such. If the concept or category you create catches a foothold, you’re the first to mindshare. Let the rest of the world that follows be compared to you. Particularly in a world where power is often measured in links, this puts you in pole position.”
Locn. 791-93 When you conclude that talent, though not quite a myth, is certainly overrated, you start to realize that you never need to see yourself as below anyone. Instead, you should only believe that you don’t yet have the experience that person does, then find a way to get it.
Locn. 850-52 Playing Games Is Fun. Okay, business is business and work is work. But truly, if you don’t accept this detail, that games are meant to be fun, you’re probably reading the wrong book. Try Jim Collins’s Good to Great instead. Excellent book. The rest of us, let’s agree that if we can figure out a way that work can be fun, it just goes better for everyone involved.
Locn. 924-26 Comments and blog posts and articles found “in the wild” are likely to be a more accurate reflection of a customer’s opinion. You can do the same for yourself, for your business, for a product, and so on—that is, if people are talking about you.
Locn. 945-46 As Wayne Gretzky once said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” We try to do the same.
Locn. 1049-52 Hacking Life. An entire movement has sprung up around the notion of improving productivity and effectiveness by engaging in life hacking. How can you do things differently to make life go better? Examples range from ways to capture and process information, like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, to learning how to keep your e-mail in-box empty with Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Parenthacks.com. There are great web sites, such as Lifehacker .com and Parenthacks.com,
Locn. 1112-13 Do something. Try something small and finite, and then larger and finite, and then complex and finite. See what comes of it. It will soon become clear that failures are just as important as victories.
Locn. 1126-28 Understand that failure is an inevitable part of the game, but that the chance of success is much greater the more often you roll the dice. You shouldn’t fear it; you should embrace it.
Locn. 1283-85 The Importance of Being Human Gaining the trust of another requires you be competent and reliable. It also requires you to leave someone with a positive emotional impression, which is something the Web has the potential to do quickly and well.
Locn. 1292-93 YouTube has over 5 billion videos, one for almost every human on the planet.
Locn. 1318-28 T, of course, is trust, and all the other elements are what makes it happen): (C × R × I)/S = T C = credibility, or the signals people send out to show that they are who they claim to be and as good as they say they are. The higher this is, the more you can trust someone. R = reliability. The more they show up on time, the more you’ll trust them to do so in the future, for example. I = intimacy, one of the most powerful emotional factors in trust. The feeling you get from individuals is important, and it shouldn’t be discounted just because it’s emotional. Do you feel comfortable around them? Could you tell them a secret? That’s intimacy. S = self-orientation, and this is the only negative; the higher this is, the less we tend to trust a person. An example of a low self-orientation would be someone specifically recommending a better competitor instead of themselves. An example of high self-orientation would be the smarmy, self-interested company sycophant who’s always looking for a sale instead of making people feel comfortable.
Locn. 1452-53 Find friends along lines of mutual interests more than via geography or any other factor.
Locn. 1498-1503 Maybe what you want to know instead is, aren’t the people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks being antisocial? In a word, the answer is no. In the past few years, the people who have started using the Web have become closer and closer to the average person you know. The question may have been valid in 1996, but in 2009 and onward, the social aspects of the Web mean that the people interacting within these networks are interested in social activities. In fact, in a lot of cases, they talk online between in-person events and share pictures of stuff they did together.
Locn. 1555-58 People have very sophisticated bullshit sensors, and if not immediately, your intentions will be exposed later. But as long as you’re not considering only the bottom line, taking the first step to initiate an interaction says to people that you want to establish a relationship, that you’re interested in being involved. So step forward and take that step, over and over again. Trust us, as long as you have something to really offer, the benefit will come.
Locn. 1612-13 The better strategy for a trust agent is to develop relationships with up-and-coming individuals in a space. The time spent developing relationships with many up-and-comers beats time spent courting the few big names.
Locn. 1628-29 “givers get.” In the online world, being present and commenting on other people’s work and engaging in general connectedness are just as important as any direct marketing initiatives or other traditional business strategies.
Locn. 1656 Leave 10 comments today and then 10 tomorrow, even if some are just thank-you notes.
Locn. 1791-93 If you take one lesson away from this chapter, take this: Don’t be That Guy. We don’t mind companies in our space, and we need good people working with us, but we can’t stand another one of those people trying to sell us stuff. We’re sick of it, and so is everyone else.
Locn. 1828-29 There’s a programmer’s saying that “the lazy ones are usually the best.” It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. Programmers want a little bit of code to do a lot of work, so the lazy programmers usually do the most thinking and the least writing.
Locn. 1915-18 Whatever your industry, it is important to meet a lot of people online, if only superficially. You can do this by connecting with them through tools like Facebook and Twitter or by commenting on their sites. Then find ways to meet face-to-face—whether at industry conferences or in one-on-one meetings—to cement those relationships. By doing so, you make yourself more “real” than the competition
Locn. 2006-7 If you’re thinking somewhere in your head that you need permission to learn how to start building the ability to leverage the resources for your corporation, hand this book to someone else. You’ve already lost the game.
Locn. 2048-58 Here are just a few tools of the trade for a time-starved trust agent: • Spinvox.com: Why listen to voice mail when you can have it transposed and sent to you as text? You can read faster than you can listen. • Jott.com: Speak into your phone and you can receive an email of your transcribed words. Easy leverage. • Kayak.com: Check several airlines and hotels at the same time for prices from a single screen. • SMS: Use this for e-mail. It makes the message and response more concise. It cuts down e-mail clutter. • Podcasts: As learning tools, we can consume these during travel/transit. • RSS reader: Instead of going to blogs directly, we read them quickly via an RSS reader. • Keyboard shortcuts: For most every application we use, we learn the keyboard shortcuts. This time does add up.
Locn. 2097-99 The trick is to come up with something you could tell people at a party, to be able to differentiate between what you think is interesting about what you do and what the average person thinks is interesting.
Locn. 2141-43 The key lesson here is to spend as much time doing what you and your company do best and to delegate everything else that you can. This is true both because it’s not profitable to do everything yourself and because, let’s be honest, you’re not that great at all those other tasks, are you?
Locn. 2173-77 The real secret of the most successful people on the Web is that they are always trying new things. A lot of the time it’s just for fun, because they are passionate about it and like to see how things work. But the benefit is that it’s there for business, too. Early adopters always know more about what’s coming up, and that leads to advantage, over and over again. The company that doesn’t see how it should innovate will always lose over the one that knows how, because it leverages that information to dominate its marketplace. And so should you.
Locn. 2369 As you now know, if you have no Google results, you don’t exist.
Locn. 2444-45 The process of finding new, exciting, and profitable information is difficult, precisely because popularity of any one piece of information reduces its value.
Locn. 2553-54 The value of bringing people in is the value of expanding the potential of the network overall. It’s a simple effect. It’s not far afield from Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, where having more than one voice adds to the experience.
Locn. 2551-52 People working in this space collaborate, they connect, they build business relationships without asking for outright favors or payment. Trust agents build networks, then build circles, and then include others in those circles.
Locn. 2569 try the one-sentence response: “How, exactly, did you want me to help with this?”
Locn. 2576-78 The rule of “multitouch” is important here. Send out small messages. Comment on blogs. Leave notes on Facebook or Flickr or wherever your community spends time. By reaching out and keeping relationships warm, opportunities flow more freely. If you’re not working to maintain your network, it dwindles and shrivels up from lack of use.
Locn. 2653 Six Tools for Reputation and Competition Management
1. Google Alerts:
2. Rank Checker:
3. Technorati:
4. Compete.com:
5. Twitter Grader:
6. Search.Twitter.com:
Locn. 2718-20 ACTION: Get LinkedIn Dust off your LinkedIn.com profile. Refresh it and start connecting to potential business partners, prospects, and friends.
Locn. 2794-96 There’s a tidal wave coming, and it’s made of people. Some will run and some will ignore it, but others will be ready and find a way to roll with it. Those who win are the ones who are always prepared; while some people are hiding their heads in the sand, the winners are anticipating change and finding a ton of opportunities.
Locn. 2825-27 Our first impressions of you strongly resonate with us on an emotional level, so they stick around for a while (and they stay on the Web forever). Take some time to think about how you want to do this before doing it, because that impression will last.
Locn. 2969-71 It’s better to ignore some things than to argue back, because you cannot change people’s minds about everything, and you can’t be everyone’s friend. You’ll try your hardest to help, put in a lot of hours trying to make things right, but at some point, it just ain’t worth it. Some people will never be happy.
Locn. 2984-85 When a customer complains about something, follow the three A’s: Acknowledge, Apologize, Act.
Locn. 3041-42 Tara Hunt, author of The Whuffie Factor, calls this “throwing sheep,” because it’s fun and seemingly unproductive, but translates into a deeper sense of belonging.
Locn. 3213-15 reliability is one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself. Be on time perpetually for your work, your meetings, and your emails. If you can’t be on time, tell people early, not at the last minute. And whatever the case, offer constant updates as to your progress instead of long periods of (virtual) absence. You’ll have already beaten out 75 percent of the competition.
Locn. 3648 No matter what the situation, in improv the intention is always “yes, and.” Understanding improvisational comedy has made an actual business difference in our lives. One great book on the subject is Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madson. The lessons put forth in that book might very well help you understand how improv applies to being a trust agent, and how that might help with your business.
Locn. 3680-84 So if you were to retain one piece of information, one tip, about the social side of trust, it should be this: You need to be liked, and you start becoming likable by being worthy of being liked. Be kind. Be patient. Be humble, on time, and generous. Be that person you would like to be friends with. Likability and the related trait, intimacy, is one of the biggest factors in trust, and it’s also one of the easiest to develop with people online. So work on that first with people, before you try to create transactions or take things further. It makes a world of difference.
Locn. 3803-5 Be helpful. Just for the sake of doing it, be helpful. It’s the act that keeps on giving. Since so many people are in it for them, this one idea is worth more than you’d imagine. Doing very simple things without the emphasis on any kind of quid pro quo makes it much more meaningful, and the ways you can do this are endless.
Locn. 3843-45 At this point, the web sites people pay the most attention to (besides search engines) are YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and primarily the social networks. They’ve surpassed porn as the types of sites people spend the most time using on the Internet (we know, we were shocked, too).
Locn. 3872-76 Often with experimentation, the downside is very small, while the possible reward is very large. So trying something new could do you worlds of good. You could hit upon small, new ways to connect or whole worlds of benefit and profit. So give it a shot. Try something new today. It may just revolutionize what you do. Trust us.
Monday, 10 January 2011
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable (Patrick M. Lencioni)
I'm not too much of a fan of the books that attempt to package a training message or technique into a story or fable. At least the read time on this was not too long - around 3 hours. Anyway it was the first title in a book club started where I work so I will be interested to hear what the rest of the group thought.
The four key lessons were:
Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
Create organisational clarity (Identity, Purpose, Values, Goals, Roles, Responsibilities)
Overcommunicate (repeat, repeat, repeat the identity and direction)
Reinforce through human systems
Locn. 1055-56 DISCIPLINE ONE: BUILD AND MAINTAIN A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM.
Locn. 1063 DISCIPLINE TWO: CREATE ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.
Locn. 1151 The third discipline is ‘Over-communicate the identity and direction.’”
Locn. 1154-55 in order to communicate something adequately, it has to be communicated so many times that the people doing the communication think they’re beating a dead horse.”
Locn. 1277-78 DISCIPLINE FOUR: REINFORCE ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY THROUGH HUMAN SYSTEMS.
Locn. 1280-83 BE COHESIVE. BE CLEAR. OVER-COMMUNICATE. REINFORCE.
Locn. 1335-37 Great idea for a simplified appraisal review: “The questions were, ‘What did you accomplish?’ ‘What will you accomplish next?’ ‘How can you improve?’” “That’s it?” “Not quite. The question on the back was, ‘Are you embracing the values?’”
Locn. 1474-75 Finally, cohesive teams fight. But they fight about issues, not personalities. Most important, when they are done fighting, they have an amazing capacity to move on to the next issue, with no residual feelings.
Locn. 1476-78 In those instances when a fight gets out of hand and drifts over the line into personal territory—and this inevitably happens—the entire team works to make things right. No one walks away from a meeting harboring unspoken resentment.
Locn. 1500-1503 Personal histories. Although it might sound like a “touchyfeely” exercise, I have found that it is remarkably helpful for members of a leadership team to spend time talking about their backgrounds. People who understand one another’s personal philosophies, family histories, educational experiences, hobbies, and interests are far more likely to work well together than those who do not.
Ideas for ways to clarify the identity:
Locn. 1579-85 • Why does the organization exist, and what difference does it make in the world? • What behavioral values are irreplaceable and fundamental? • What business are we in, and against whom do we compete? • How does our approach differ from that of our competition? • What are our goals this month, this quarter, this year, next year, five years from now? • Who has to do what for us to achieve our goals this month, this quarter, this year, next year, five years from now?
Locn. 1618-20 think about the two or three employees whom they believe best embody what is good about the firm. These would be people whom they would gladly clone again and again, regardless of their responsibility or level of experience. Then I ask them to write down one or two adjectives that describe the employees they selected.
Locn. 1621-24 identify the one or two employees who have left the firm, or should leave the firm, because of their behavior or performance. Coming up with these names never seems to take long. Again, I ask them to write down one or two adjectives that describe the people they chose. Almost without fail, the same adjectives appear on most team members’ lists, and these often embody the antithesis of the company’s fundamental values.
Locn. 1734-35 effective communication requires repetition in order to take hold in an organization. Some experts say that only after hearing a message six times does a person begin to believe and internalize it.
Locn. 1773-74 take five minutes at the end of staff meetings and ask the question, “What do we need to communicate to our people?”
Locn. 1827-30 Decisions about bonuses and other compensation are based on the same criteria used in hiring and managing performance. This helps employees understand that the best way to maximize their personal rewards is to act in a way that contributes to the company’s success, as defined by organizational clarity.
Locn. 1861-63 there is no substitute for discipline. No amount of intellectual prowess or personal charisma can make up for an inability to identify a few simple things and stick to them over time.
The four key lessons were:
Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
Create organisational clarity (Identity, Purpose, Values, Goals, Roles, Responsibilities)
Overcommunicate (repeat, repeat, repeat the identity and direction)
Reinforce through human systems
Locn. 1055-56 DISCIPLINE ONE: BUILD AND MAINTAIN A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM.
Locn. 1063 DISCIPLINE TWO: CREATE ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY.
Locn. 1151 The third discipline is ‘Over-communicate the identity and direction.’”
Locn. 1154-55 in order to communicate something adequately, it has to be communicated so many times that the people doing the communication think they’re beating a dead horse.”
Locn. 1277-78 DISCIPLINE FOUR: REINFORCE ORGANIZATIONAL CLARITY THROUGH HUMAN SYSTEMS.
Locn. 1280-83 BE COHESIVE. BE CLEAR. OVER-COMMUNICATE. REINFORCE.
Locn. 1335-37 Great idea for a simplified appraisal review: “The questions were, ‘What did you accomplish?’ ‘What will you accomplish next?’ ‘How can you improve?’” “That’s it?” “Not quite. The question on the back was, ‘Are you embracing the values?’”
Locn. 1474-75 Finally, cohesive teams fight. But they fight about issues, not personalities. Most important, when they are done fighting, they have an amazing capacity to move on to the next issue, with no residual feelings.
Locn. 1476-78 In those instances when a fight gets out of hand and drifts over the line into personal territory—and this inevitably happens—the entire team works to make things right. No one walks away from a meeting harboring unspoken resentment.
Locn. 1500-1503 Personal histories. Although it might sound like a “touchyfeely” exercise, I have found that it is remarkably helpful for members of a leadership team to spend time talking about their backgrounds. People who understand one another’s personal philosophies, family histories, educational experiences, hobbies, and interests are far more likely to work well together than those who do not.
Ideas for ways to clarify the identity:
Locn. 1579-85 • Why does the organization exist, and what difference does it make in the world? • What behavioral values are irreplaceable and fundamental? • What business are we in, and against whom do we compete? • How does our approach differ from that of our competition? • What are our goals this month, this quarter, this year, next year, five years from now? • Who has to do what for us to achieve our goals this month, this quarter, this year, next year, five years from now?
Locn. 1618-20 think about the two or three employees whom they believe best embody what is good about the firm. These would be people whom they would gladly clone again and again, regardless of their responsibility or level of experience. Then I ask them to write down one or two adjectives that describe the employees they selected.
Locn. 1621-24 identify the one or two employees who have left the firm, or should leave the firm, because of their behavior or performance. Coming up with these names never seems to take long. Again, I ask them to write down one or two adjectives that describe the people they chose. Almost without fail, the same adjectives appear on most team members’ lists, and these often embody the antithesis of the company’s fundamental values.
Locn. 1734-35 effective communication requires repetition in order to take hold in an organization. Some experts say that only after hearing a message six times does a person begin to believe and internalize it.
Locn. 1773-74 take five minutes at the end of staff meetings and ask the question, “What do we need to communicate to our people?”
Locn. 1827-30 Decisions about bonuses and other compensation are based on the same criteria used in hiring and managing performance. This helps employees understand that the best way to maximize their personal rewards is to act in a way that contributes to the company’s success, as defined by organizational clarity.
Locn. 1861-63 there is no substitute for discipline. No amount of intellectual prowess or personal charisma can make up for an inability to identify a few simple things and stick to them over time.
How to Talk to Anyone (Leil Lowndes)
Some ideas were new in this book but mainly it was a rehash of the standard techniques you can find elsewhere. Some of them I pleasantly found I have been using for years - so it can't all be bad.
Locn. 429-35 TECHNIQUE #1 THE FLOODING SMILE Don't flash an immediate smile when you greet someone, as though anyone who walked into your line of sight would be the beneficiary. Instead, look at the other person's face for a second. Pause. Soak in their persona. Then let a big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes. It will engulf the recipient like a warm wave. The split-second delay convinces people your flooding smile is genuine and only for them.
Locn. 694-700 TECHNIQUE #5 THE BIG-BABY PIVOT Give everyone you meet The Big-Baby Pivot. The instant the two of you are introduced, reward your new acquaintance. Give the warm smile, the total-body turn, and the undivided attention you would give a tiny tyke who crawled up to your feet, turned a precious face up to yours, and beamed a big toothless grin. Pivoting 100 percent toward the new person shouts "I think you are very, very special."
Locn. 741-46 TECHNIQUE #6 HELLO OLD FRIEND When meeting someone, imagine he or she is an old friend (an old customer, an old beloved, or someone else you had great affection for). How sad, the vicissitudes of life tore you two asunder. But, holy mackerel, now the party (the meeting, the convention) has reunited you with your long-lost old friend!
Locn. 830-35 TECHNIQUE #7 LIMIT THE FIDGET Whenever your conversation really counts, let your nose itch, your ear tingle, or your foot prickle. Do not fidget, twitch, wiggle, squirm, or scratch. And above all, keep your paws away from your puss. Hand motions near your face and all fidgeting can give your listener the gut feeling you're fibbing.
Locn. 1068-70 Before opening your mouth, take a "voice sample" of your listener to detect his or her state of mind. Take a "psychic photograph" of the expression to see if your listener looks buoyant, bored, or blitzed. If you ever want to bring people around to your thoughts, you must match their mood and voice tone, if only for a moment.
Locn. 1308 No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.
Locn. 1371-77 TECHNIQUE #17 NEVER THE NAKED INTRODUCTION When introducing people, don't throw out an unbaited hook and stand there grinning like a big clam, leaving the newlymets to flutter their fins and fish for a topic. Bait the conversational hook to get them in the swim of things. Then you're free to stay or float on to the next networking opportunity.
Locn. 1464-70 TECHNIQUE #19 THE SWIVELING SPOTLIGHT When you meet someone, imagine a giant revolving spotlight between you. When you're talking, the spotlight is on you. When the new person is speaking, it's shining on him or her. If you shine it brightly enough, the stranger will be blinded to the fact that you have hardly said a word about yourself. The longer you keep it shining away from you, the more interesting he or she finds you.
Locn. 1509-13 TECHNIQUE #20 PARROTING Never be left speechless again. Like a parrot, simply repeat the last few words your conversation partner says. That puts the ball right back in his or her court, and then all you need to do is listen.
Locn. 1920-28 TECHNIQUE #27 KILL THE QUICK "ME, TOO!" Whenever you have something in common with someone, the longer you wait to reveal it, the more moved (and impressed) he or she will be. You emerge as a confident big cat, not a lonely little stray, hungry for quick connection with a stranger. P.S.: Don't wait too long to reveal your shared interest or it will seem like you're being tricky.
Locn. 1987-94 TECHNIQUE #28 COMM-YOU-NICATION Start every appropriate sentence with you. It immediately grabs your listener's attention. It gets a more positive response because it pushes the pride button and saves them having to translate it into "me" terms. When you sprinkle you as liberally as salt and pepper throughout your conversation, your listeners find it an irresistible spice.
Locn. 2112-15 speakers do. They collect bon mots they can use in a variety of situations—most especially to scrape egg off their faces when something unexpected happens. Many speakers use author's and speaker's agent Lilly Walters's face-saver lines from her book, What to
Locn. 2153-62 TECHNIQUE #31 USE JAWSMITH'S JIVE Whether you're standing behind a podium facing thousands or behind the barbecue grill facing your family, you'll move, amuse, and motivate with the same skills. Read speakers' books to cull quotations, pull pearls of wisdom, and get gems to tickle their funny bones. Find a few bon mots to let casually slide off your tongue on chosen occasions. If you want to be notable, dream up a crazy quotable. Make 'em rhyme, make 'em clever, or make 'em funny. Above all, make 'em relevant.
Locn. 2277-83 TECHNIQUE #35 THE BROKEN RECORD Whenever someone persists in questioning you on an unwelcome subject, simply repeat your original response. Use precisely the same words in precisely the same tone of voice. Hearing it again usually quiets them down. If your rude interrogator hangs on like a leech, your next repetition never fails to flick them off.
Locn. 2356-61 TECHNIQUE #37 NEVER THE NAKED THANK YOU Never let the phrase "thank you" stand alone. From A to Z, always follow it with for: from "Thank you for asking" to "Thank you for zipping me up."
Locn. 3131-36 TECHNIQUE #49 THE PREMATURE WE Create the sensation of intimacy with someone even if you've met just moments before. Scramble the signals in their psyche by skipping conversational levels one and two and cutting right to levels three and four. Elicit intimate feelings by using the magic words we, us, and our.
Locn. 3676-80 TECHNIQUE #61 NAME SHOWER People perk up when they hear their own name. Use it more often on the phone than you would in person to keep their attention. Your caller's name re-creates the eye contact, the caress, you might give in person.
Locn. 3745-51 TECHNIQUE #62 "OH WOW, IT'S YOU!" Don't answer the phone with an "I'm just sooo happy all the time" attitude. Answer warmly, crisply, and professionally. Then, after you hear who is calling, let a huge smile of happiness engulf your entire face and spill over into your voice. You make your caller feel as though your giant warm fuzzy smile is reserved for him or her.
Locn. 3240-45 TECHNIQUE #51 GRAPEVINE GLORY A compliment one hears is never as exciting as the one he overhears. A priceless way to praise is not by telephone, not by telegraph, but by tell-a-friend. This way you escape possible suspicion that you are an apple-polishing, bootlicking, egg-sucking, back-scratching sycophant trying to win brownie points. You also leave recipients with the happy fantasy that you are telling the whole world about their greatness.
Locn. 3858-64 TECHNIQUE #65 WHAT COLOR IS YOUR TIME? No matter how urgent you think your call, always begin by asking the person about timing. Either use the What Color Is Your Time? device or simply ask, "Is this a convenient time for you to talk?" When you ask about timing first, you'll never smash your footprints right in the middle of your telephone partner's sands of time. You'll never get a "No!" just because your timing wasn't right.
Locn. 4355-61 TECHNIQUE #75 TRACKING Like an air-traffic controller, track the tiniest details of your conversation partners' lives. Refer to them in your conversation like a major news story. It creates a powerful sense of intimacy. When you invoke the last major or minor event in anyone's life, it confirms the deep conviction that he or she is an old-style hero around whom the world revolves. And people love you for recognizing their stardom.
Locn. 4908-12 TECHNIQUE #87 ECHO THE EMO Facts speak. Emotions shout. Whenever you need facts from people about an emotional situation, let them emote. Hear their facts but empathize like mad with their emotions. Smearing on the emo is often the only way to calm their emotional storm.
Locn. 5154-57 Remember, repeating an action makes a habit. Your habits create your character. And your character is your destiny. May success be your destiny.
Locn. 429-35 TECHNIQUE #1 THE FLOODING SMILE Don't flash an immediate smile when you greet someone, as though anyone who walked into your line of sight would be the beneficiary. Instead, look at the other person's face for a second. Pause. Soak in their persona. Then let a big, warm, responsive smile flood over your face and overflow into your eyes. It will engulf the recipient like a warm wave. The split-second delay convinces people your flooding smile is genuine and only for them.
Locn. 694-700 TECHNIQUE #5 THE BIG-BABY PIVOT Give everyone you meet The Big-Baby Pivot. The instant the two of you are introduced, reward your new acquaintance. Give the warm smile, the total-body turn, and the undivided attention you would give a tiny tyke who crawled up to your feet, turned a precious face up to yours, and beamed a big toothless grin. Pivoting 100 percent toward the new person shouts "I think you are very, very special."
Locn. 741-46 TECHNIQUE #6 HELLO OLD FRIEND When meeting someone, imagine he or she is an old friend (an old customer, an old beloved, or someone else you had great affection for). How sad, the vicissitudes of life tore you two asunder. But, holy mackerel, now the party (the meeting, the convention) has reunited you with your long-lost old friend!
Locn. 830-35 TECHNIQUE #7 LIMIT THE FIDGET Whenever your conversation really counts, let your nose itch, your ear tingle, or your foot prickle. Do not fidget, twitch, wiggle, squirm, or scratch. And above all, keep your paws away from your puss. Hand motions near your face and all fidgeting can give your listener the gut feeling you're fibbing.
Locn. 1068-70 Before opening your mouth, take a "voice sample" of your listener to detect his or her state of mind. Take a "psychic photograph" of the expression to see if your listener looks buoyant, bored, or blitzed. If you ever want to bring people around to your thoughts, you must match their mood and voice tone, if only for a moment.
Locn. 1308 No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next.
Locn. 1371-77 TECHNIQUE #17 NEVER THE NAKED INTRODUCTION When introducing people, don't throw out an unbaited hook and stand there grinning like a big clam, leaving the newlymets to flutter their fins and fish for a topic. Bait the conversational hook to get them in the swim of things. Then you're free to stay or float on to the next networking opportunity.
Locn. 1464-70 TECHNIQUE #19 THE SWIVELING SPOTLIGHT When you meet someone, imagine a giant revolving spotlight between you. When you're talking, the spotlight is on you. When the new person is speaking, it's shining on him or her. If you shine it brightly enough, the stranger will be blinded to the fact that you have hardly said a word about yourself. The longer you keep it shining away from you, the more interesting he or she finds you.
Locn. 1509-13 TECHNIQUE #20 PARROTING Never be left speechless again. Like a parrot, simply repeat the last few words your conversation partner says. That puts the ball right back in his or her court, and then all you need to do is listen.
Locn. 1920-28 TECHNIQUE #27 KILL THE QUICK "ME, TOO!" Whenever you have something in common with someone, the longer you wait to reveal it, the more moved (and impressed) he or she will be. You emerge as a confident big cat, not a lonely little stray, hungry for quick connection with a stranger. P.S.: Don't wait too long to reveal your shared interest or it will seem like you're being tricky.
Locn. 1987-94 TECHNIQUE #28 COMM-YOU-NICATION Start every appropriate sentence with you. It immediately grabs your listener's attention. It gets a more positive response because it pushes the pride button and saves them having to translate it into "me" terms. When you sprinkle you as liberally as salt and pepper throughout your conversation, your listeners find it an irresistible spice.
Locn. 2112-15 speakers do. They collect bon mots they can use in a variety of situations—most especially to scrape egg off their faces when something unexpected happens. Many speakers use author's and speaker's agent Lilly Walters's face-saver lines from her book, What to
Locn. 2153-62 TECHNIQUE #31 USE JAWSMITH'S JIVE Whether you're standing behind a podium facing thousands or behind the barbecue grill facing your family, you'll move, amuse, and motivate with the same skills. Read speakers' books to cull quotations, pull pearls of wisdom, and get gems to tickle their funny bones. Find a few bon mots to let casually slide off your tongue on chosen occasions. If you want to be notable, dream up a crazy quotable. Make 'em rhyme, make 'em clever, or make 'em funny. Above all, make 'em relevant.
Locn. 2277-83 TECHNIQUE #35 THE BROKEN RECORD Whenever someone persists in questioning you on an unwelcome subject, simply repeat your original response. Use precisely the same words in precisely the same tone of voice. Hearing it again usually quiets them down. If your rude interrogator hangs on like a leech, your next repetition never fails to flick them off.
Locn. 2356-61 TECHNIQUE #37 NEVER THE NAKED THANK YOU Never let the phrase "thank you" stand alone. From A to Z, always follow it with for: from "Thank you for asking" to "Thank you for zipping me up."
Locn. 3131-36 TECHNIQUE #49 THE PREMATURE WE Create the sensation of intimacy with someone even if you've met just moments before. Scramble the signals in their psyche by skipping conversational levels one and two and cutting right to levels three and four. Elicit intimate feelings by using the magic words we, us, and our.
Locn. 3676-80 TECHNIQUE #61 NAME SHOWER People perk up when they hear their own name. Use it more often on the phone than you would in person to keep their attention. Your caller's name re-creates the eye contact, the caress, you might give in person.
Locn. 3745-51 TECHNIQUE #62 "OH WOW, IT'S YOU!" Don't answer the phone with an "I'm just sooo happy all the time" attitude. Answer warmly, crisply, and professionally. Then, after you hear who is calling, let a huge smile of happiness engulf your entire face and spill over into your voice. You make your caller feel as though your giant warm fuzzy smile is reserved for him or her.
Locn. 3240-45 TECHNIQUE #51 GRAPEVINE GLORY A compliment one hears is never as exciting as the one he overhears. A priceless way to praise is not by telephone, not by telegraph, but by tell-a-friend. This way you escape possible suspicion that you are an apple-polishing, bootlicking, egg-sucking, back-scratching sycophant trying to win brownie points. You also leave recipients with the happy fantasy that you are telling the whole world about their greatness.
Locn. 3858-64 TECHNIQUE #65 WHAT COLOR IS YOUR TIME? No matter how urgent you think your call, always begin by asking the person about timing. Either use the What Color Is Your Time? device or simply ask, "Is this a convenient time for you to talk?" When you ask about timing first, you'll never smash your footprints right in the middle of your telephone partner's sands of time. You'll never get a "No!" just because your timing wasn't right.
Locn. 4355-61 TECHNIQUE #75 TRACKING Like an air-traffic controller, track the tiniest details of your conversation partners' lives. Refer to them in your conversation like a major news story. It creates a powerful sense of intimacy. When you invoke the last major or minor event in anyone's life, it confirms the deep conviction that he or she is an old-style hero around whom the world revolves. And people love you for recognizing their stardom.
Locn. 4908-12 TECHNIQUE #87 ECHO THE EMO Facts speak. Emotions shout. Whenever you need facts from people about an emotional situation, let them emote. Hear their facts but empathize like mad with their emotions. Smearing on the emo is often the only way to calm their emotional storm.
Locn. 5154-57 Remember, repeating an action makes a habit. Your habits create your character. And your character is your destiny. May success be your destiny.
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