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Archive for 2018

My Holiday Vacation

Friday, December 21st, 2018

I haven’t taken more than a few days off here and there since I started writing this blog in 2006 and that’s a long time.

I’ve also written numerous times that unwired vacations are critical to productivity and creativity.

The unwired part is especially critical — whether they are vacations or staycations.

Thus, from now until January 2 Mapping Company Success will go dark and I’ll indulge my staycation doing all the tuits I haven’t gotten ‘round to, which includes a clean, organized office.

Wow! I’m excited! (No sarcasm, I really am.)

That said, I do want to wish you a very special holiday before I unwire, so I looked for something special to share and I found it.

Something that fully embraces all my ambivalence of the season.

Take care and I’ll see you next year!

Video credit: David Gurney

Miki’s Rules To Live By: Choice of Friends

Wednesday, December 19th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36434088@N00/2851182048

 

Last year I shared a couple of pretty good Rules at the start of the holiday season.

This year I have another that may ease some of your holiday stress.

Ethel Watts Mumford said, “God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.”

The first part is the root of stress for those people who believe that family should be a constant source of all things good. They twist themselves into pretzels to effect that outcome and tear apart their psyches when it doesn’t materialize.

Worse, they completely ignore the second part of the quote, thus losing the sweet solace of good friendships.

Hugh Kingsmill, a contemporary of Mumford, provided the corollary that many need to let go of the stress of missed expectations and embrace the solution.

Friends are God’s apology for relatives.

Enjoy your friends this holiday season and all year ‘round and, if you are lucky, those relatives who also qualify as friends.

Image credit: briiiiiiiiin

 

Personal Tuit Culture

Tuesday, December 18th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/14370809353/

 

Yesterday we revisited why tuit culture is bad for companies and I commented that it even worse when it grabs you personally.

Round tuits are the visual symbol of procrastination, something I have intimate knowledge of and experience with — years ago I was even crowned Queen of procrastination by a delegation of friends and family.

While it is possible to tame the tuits in your life, it’s important to be aware when the ROI changes from positive to negative.

I posted this mantra around my home years ago that helped — Do it when you think about it; Don’t think about doing it.

I forgot to put it back up when I moved 15 years ago and I seem to have backslid badly.

Something else I learned long ago and previously wrote about. It applies to the tuits that sabotage your best efforts of prioritization and it goes like this, why do today what doesn’t need to be done at all?

Back then it referred to so-called busy work, but these days the worst offending tuits that don’t need to be done involve the constant alerts, social media, FOMO, and TMI.

In other words, all the stuff we convince ourselves must be done to keep the sky from falling.

Which it won’t.

Tuits are much like dragons, you can’t slay all of them at once and some don’t need slaying; they can just be ignored.

Some need only a little kick to disable them, as opposed to the concentrated effort required to slay them, and some can even be flipped, making social media stuff into round tuits.

Image credit: brett jordan

Golden Oldies: Ducks in a Row: Tuit Culture is BAD!

Monday, December 17th, 2018

 

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Are you familiar with tuits? More specifically round tuits?

Round tuits are extremely dangerous. They are disappointing, disruptive, and even destructive.

And they don’t just attack in the workplace; they can cause even worse damage in your personal life, as we’ll discover tomorrow.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Have tuits invaded your team’s culture?

Have they seeped into your personal culture and infected your values?

Tuit culture is insidious; it usually starts with small inconsequential stuff and then quietly spreads.

If not dealt with immediately it can delay projects, impact vendors, damage customer relationships, substantially increase turnover, especially among your best and brightest, and ruin your street rep.

Are you familiar with the warning signs, so you can take action before tuit culture takes root?

Be warned if you notice any of the following:

  • Small tasks aren’t done on time or just aren’t done.
  • One or more of your team are slow to respond to requests.
  • Individuals and teams find ways of bypassing one or more of their members or bosses.

The best antidotes to tuit culture are vigilance, awareness, transparency and open communications.

Image credit: RampUp Solutions

If The Shoe Fits: Startups, Millennials and the Future

Friday, December 14th, 2018

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

For years the media has been proclaiming that the great majority of young people want to be entrepreneurs or work for a startup, as opposed to a larger/older company, because startups were “cool.”

Now it looks like their ardor is what’s cool, as in cooled off.

Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. (…) Two years ago, EIG’s president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”

What changed?

Maybe they learned that wanting to and doing it are very different. That they will work far harder for themselves, even if they are well-funded, or that startups fail  far more often than they succeed (90% vs 10%).

A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one.

But maybe there is something else going on.

Maybe they have figured out that the world doesn’t need another social network / dating app / review site / etc.

Maybe investors have realized that monetizing through ads isn’t a good road to sustainable profitability, considering the push for more European-style privacy.

Or maybe, just maybe, reality has reared its ugly head and they’ve figured out they don’t have enough experience or know enough to create enterprise solutions for real-world needs.

Matt Krisiloff, the former Y Combinator executive, added that the opportunities “to start compelling start-ups,” for college students without industry-specific knowledge, “has vastly shrunk.”

Maybe they aren’t all looking for a safe harbor in the next downturn (there aren’t any), but for the experience that will ground their startup in their 40s, 50s and beyond.

What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.

Maybe our media-inspired view of entrepreneurs is a reflection of the warped views of Silicon Valley as engendered by VCs.

VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it.

Maybe the entrepreneurs of the future will look more like our real world in all its diverse, messy glory.

And a final “maybe.”

Maybe there is room to hope.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Why Disruption Gets Ignored

Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gleonhard/3410999213/in/photostream/

 

A few days ago CB insights shared a link to their collection of quotes about disruption from big name corporate leaders; they called it Foot In Mouth.

I sent it to my “list” with the following comment.

Ignorance? Idiocy? Arrogance?
All of the above?

The replies I received, one from my sister, a retired IT head, and the other from KG, were far more insightful than the queries I sent.

I thought both were worth sharing, so here they are.

From my sister.

Do you know of Joel Barker, the futurist?  He’s been around since the mid-70s. I saw a video of his at a conference once, where he talked about paradigm shifts. His example then was Swiss watch makers. When two young kids brought the quartz watch to the Swiss watchmaking community for funding, the Swiss said, “No one will ever want a watch that doesn’t wind.” The kids went to the Japanese and the rest was history. Barker says that when humans have a paradigm, they automatically filter OUT anything that doesn’t support their paradigm. The Japanese had no watch paradigm and so could see the potential. I think those examples from CB are as much paradigm lock-in as stupidity. Or put another way, paradigms lead us to make dumb choices sometimes.

From KG

Upton Sinclair famously stated, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We may call it stupidity, but it really is vested interests. That’s why innovation comes from those who have little to lose or have no other alternative. No one thinks of vested interests when they work in our favor, only when (usually in hindsight) they are show to have caused loss are they called stupid.

In a time of proven global warming, the US has chosen, as the only nation in the world, to reject the potentially cataclysmic consequences of a warmer globe and have invested $4 trillion to develop the domestic oil & gas industry rather than investing these monies in future technologies that can save the planet. These vested interests are causing an existential crisis, and all the systems we’ve built.

There are so many areas that we are struggling with as a species due to vested interests — things that threaten our survival. These range from the ones that are commonly spoken about, like global warming and environmental destruction. They also include synthetic chemicals and nano materials that are giving us cancer and making us sterile, an economic system that ignores externalities and the tragedy of the commons, and our challenges with making sustainable decisions in an increasingly complex World.

What are your thoughts?

Image credit: Gerd Leonhard

Ducks in a Row: Hiring with Adam Grant

Tuesday, December 11th, 2018

 

Do you hire based on grades and/or the college attended?

If so, give yourself an F — for being a hiring dinosaur and ignoring the data.

Way back in the 1980s, when I was a tech recruiter, one of the best/smartest engineering vps I ever worked with told me he didn’t care about GPAs or college attended. He said that the value of a technical degree lost approximately 20-25% of its value each year, because the tech world changed so fast.

He also said that grades were more the result of a good memory and the ability to regurgitate information on demand than actual knowledge.

Fast forward to Adam Grant’s most recent column. Grant is one of the smartest people I read and I read a lot. Not because he has a PhD, but because he has more common sense than almost any other three (four? five?) combined.

The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. (…)

Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence.

Take a good look at that list. It encompasses all the skills that bosses, no matter their level, claim they want, but frequently pass on.

Why? Because candidates with those qualities don’t as easily “fit” into rigidly framed jobs.

Whereas one thing that can be said for straight A students is that they are expert at coloring inside the lines, so are usually easier to manage.

Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.

“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Moreover, hiring with the assumption  that you can reshape their embedded code when it is convenient for you is totally unfair and sets you both up for frustration, at the least, or outright failure.

This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.

So the when you go to fill your next opening give serious thought to what you are really looking for.

Image credit: Adam Grant

Golden Oldies: Raise Productivity; Whole-Ass Your Efforts

Monday, December 10th, 2018

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

This post dates from 2013. I think it’s a safe bet that the number of half-assed things being done now vs then have increased by several orders of magnitude. The year is nearly over, so this may be a good time to take a step back and ask yourself, “am I whole-assing  my life or…”

Read other Golden Oldies here.

LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.

Some of what’s included

  • Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
  • How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
  • The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
  • Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination

I’m sharing the video, but the accompanying article is worth your time.

I especially like Ciotti’s closing line,Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”

Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.

YouTube credit: Asap SCIENCE

Defeating Cognitive Bias

Friday, December 7th, 2018

(click to enlarge)

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Bias is in our heads. Bias is in our MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Bias totally permeates us and the rest of society.

It’s embedded in our schools, our religions and all forms of AI.

Experts, educators, gurus, and pundits analyze it, write about it, consult about it, and coach on it.

And often contradict each other.

If bias is this pervasive, the experts so ineffectual and management so ambivalent, what can one person do on their own?

You can access your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where bias lives.

No one else can, only you.

That means you can change your MAP.

No one else can, only you.

One bias at a time.

Image credit: School of Thought

 

 

Recognizing Cognitive Bias

Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Everybody is biased one way or another. Some biases are minor and have little impact, while some can overpower rational thought/action.

Before you can choose which you want to adjust/change/disable you need to know what the choices are.

So I found fairly comprehensive list for you to review.

I’ve also found there is one thing you can do that is very effective.

It’s one of those things that is simple to understand, but takes resolve and effort to put into practice.

I’ll explain more on Friday.

Image courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

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