Archive for category General
don’t give them an excuse
bill mccreary image from nhl.com
some nights in hockey — especially if your team has a reputation — referees will blow the whistle a little more than usual. it just happens that other games are merely called tight with little room to interpret the rules. whatever the cause, you never want to have your players cutting ruts to the penalty box.
on the bench during those kinds of games, there’s a common saying that gets passed around among coaches and players: “don’t give them an excuse to put you in the box.” it’s a simple message. even if what would normally not be called an infraction earns you a 2 minute trip to the sin bin, as a player you have to be smarter than that and adapt. you can’t give the referees any excuse to call you for it. keep the sticks down, keep both hands on your stick, and watch the play along the boards.
business can be much the same with clients instead of referees. some might love everything you develop for them or the kinds of services you provide, but others may be insatiable still and find flaws with anything you bring to bear. if you know you’re dealing with the latter, follow the same simple rule: don’t give them an excuse.
don’t give your clients a reason to question the validity of your statements; be sure to practice each and every one of your presentations and always perform the proper amount of due diligence in defining answers to their questions.
don’t give your clients a reason to believe that your products are broken; test, retest, and test some more until you’re absolutely certain that your products or services are programmed properly, or mathematically sound, or have multiple research studies to support them.
don’t give your clients a reason to feel like they can go elsewhere and get the same service; go out of your way to prove your organization’s commitment to them by answering their phone calls promptly, replying to their emails the same day, and generally making them feel like you give a damn about them as customers.
if you’re dealing with a difficult client, don’t complain if they’re bitchy or a hard-ass or they’re calling bad penalties. just don’t give them an excuse to call one in the first place.
the difference between apple and everyone is…
one need only watch television for an hour or so to see commercials for other smart phones, tablets, and computers to tell the difference betwen apple and everyone else.
a 30 second commercial of people running on rooftops, connecting cables together, and there’s a full 3 second that you actually see the product. yeah, i’m talkin about you, thunderbolt. compare that with apple’s iphone 4 commercial where 26 seconds is used to show the product and what it does.
or another 30 second spot showing a guy, taking some kind of device, sitting in an imaginary pod, and playing a game. because i’m sure that’s exactly what will happen when you get a motorola xoom. compare that with apple’s original ipad commercial which again highlights all of the various functions of the device and how it can be used for fun, or learning, and everything in between.
so what is the difference? for apple — even in their marketing — it’s all about the user. what is the user experience like? what is it like to own an iphone? what is it like to have an ipad? look at everything you can do. look at how differently you can see the world.
say what you want about apple’s business practices, but one thing is certain: apple focuses on user experience perhaps more than anyone else. it defines their company.
what if everyone focused more on user experience and less on ‘special effects’?
life without email
this post is being mirrored at my other blog: thisisjohnny’s posterous
monday morning was a morning like all the rest, for a little while at least. i woke up at my normal time — 6:40a — ate reese’s puffs for breakfast, and headed out the door to the office. (fear not; i did get showered, clothed, and brushed my teeth in between.) when i arrived at my desk and opened the screen on my laptop, that familiar “boop” from the internal speaker of my firm-issued lenovo thinkpad rang true just as it has every morning since 2009, and i quickly pulled up microsoft outlook to check my email.
as i scanned my inbox for unread items, i had an alarming feeling overwhelm me: “there’s not a single thing in here that i want to read.” that’s not to say that i don’t like my job — in fact, my current tasking is probably as rewarding as my current role has ever been and i’ve learned a great deal from it — but the emails clogging up my 675 megabytes of exchange server space really didn’t need to be there. i pondered for a moment: “how much of this is my own fault? how many of my emails are other people looking at right now thinking the same thing: ‘this is worthless’?” so right then and there i decided my goal for the week:
don’t send a single email.
one of my friends, astonished, asked, “…are you off all week?” nope. i just wanted to live more intelligently, so boom — i cured it with my brain. shortly after, my brother sends me an email about going to a phillies game in april and i promptly reply on my iphone. doh! i convince myself that was unfair, i mean… i just started this thing, so i pull a kramer, “alright. starting.. now!” and the rest of monday goes off without a hitch. one day in, this isn’t bad! i was able to coordinate what i had to do in work with some simple, more engaging, phone calls and face-to-face micro-meetings. any and all other communication happens via text message, yammer, twitter, facebook, and online forums.
tuesday comes along with its own challenges (namely the fact that it isn’t friday yet). now people are asking me for tangible things! ‘that file’ and ‘that sql statement’. woof! even still, with people asking for powerpoint presentations and txt files, i’m able to use our corporate enterprise 2.0 system — based on microsoft sharepoint — to upload and store files on our team site and verbally tell folks, or drop an instant message, about where to go in order to get to it. four phone calls, two uploads, a handful of face-to-face conversations, and a circumvention of the rule by asking a coworker to email one particular file for me instead (hey, i still didn’t send it.. delegation of duties ftw!) and i’m through my second day of the week. confidence grows. i can do this.
on wednesday, this article about reply-all storms from the wall street journal crosses my yammer feed (thanks, nathan!). i’m convinced now more than ever that what i’m doing isn’t just good for me, but good for the whole company. i also convince myself that being able to fly is probably the one superpower i’d really like to have if i could only have just the one. i spend the vast majority of my time at client site for the rest of the week where email isn’t really available to me in any normal capacity. the vast majority of my work continues to use shared network services, face-to-face, and telephone calls. my personal communications are strictly through facebook, micro-blogging, lunch with a friend and colleague at taco bell, text messaging, and xbox live.
and here, as i type this on sunday evening, i have yet to send a single email since the one i sent to my brother on monday morning. so to the question, “what’s it like to live life without email?” let me just answer with one word:
awesome.
in sum…
pros: it’s far more engaging to work with actual people and not an inbox; not having to worry about “how is this going to come across?” or “does this make sense?”; it actually takes less time to call someone than to email them; using shared resources and e2.0 platforms (a) keeps version control, (b) lets everyone connect, not just those folks on the to: line, (c) keeps everything organized.
cons: some information doesn’t need to be persistent but for a while. using a wiki or other 2.0 tool is overkill, and a phone call or face-to-face meetup doesn’t provide the kind of fall-back reference needed; i miss signing my emails “- dino”.
overall: i’m not saying that email is completely worthless, but it’s mostly worthless. 
there’s not much value you get from email that you can’t get from any other means. i won’t say that i’ll never send another email again, but i’m certainly going to keep moving forward with this new perspective on the ageless tool of the digital age: less is more. why don’t you join me? do what i did.. just try it out for a week.
hunting and pecking never works (efficiently)
image by jnarin, flickr artist
you’ve seen people hunt and peck when they’re typing; those guys that use only two fingers and have no understanding of how to navigate around a qwerty keyboard. it’s incredibly inefficient, and sometimes pathetic.
sometimes it’s so bad that you actually remove the keyboard from a person’s control and type in whatever needs to be said yourself because it’s just faster than the alternative. well if you wouldn’t put up with someone’s typing that way, why would you put up with hunting and pecking in your business processes?
a lot of our tools now-a-days have become really powerful. you don’t have to wait long — if at all — to see results in your work. your elaborate spreadsheets update in real time, email and instant messaging dominate our daily communications, and hundreds and even thousands of lines of code compile in mere seconds. it’s easy to let this ‘instant-on’ functionality dictate how we approach our problems.
spreadsheet not working? tweak this formula. code not compiling? make a quick edit and try again. end users having problems with the system? run another backend data load.
what we really need to be doing, however, is assessing the problem at the core of whatever it is we’re talking about. let’s go back to basics. what is it that your spreadsheet really needs to be doing? what are all the inputs for your formulas? what’s the progression from one calculation to the other? write these things down. make a flowchart, baby! if you fully understand what you need to get done, you’ll have an easier time getting there.
it won’t give you an instant answer, but chances are you’ll save yourself a lot of aggravation (and multiple rounds of work and rework) in the long run. hunting and pecking is for rookies; it’s time to graduate to a more efficient approach.
a little bit of vision, please
there’s a distinct difference between being flexible and adaptable, and being reactionary and lacking vision.
make sure you’re not caught on the wrong side of that line.
business as a video game
image from softsupplier.com
there has been a bit more attention paid to video games since it became a multi-billion dollar industry. and even though sales were down last year, those figures don’t include many of the emerging facets of the industry such as downloadable content (game add-ons and such) or mobile gaming (angry birds alone raked in $12m). with that much money flowing around, it’s hard to ignore it.
but what if we didn’t just analyze video games as a business and instead thought about how business can be more like a video game? jane mcgonigal gave a fantastic talk at TED in 2010 pointing out what gamers are good at, and why they spend so much time playing them. why not try shaping our businesses to engage and leverage these ‘virtuosos’ as jane calls them?
every team needs a superstar
image by vittonettophoto, flickr artist
it’s true. every team needs a superstar.
balance is important to a winning formula, and i think we all know that. people have to complement each other, make up for each others faults, and bring a certain set of skills to the table — even if those skills aren’t going to make many people stand up and take notice. you hear it many times, “someone has to do the work.”
but there is such a thing as having too much balance.
we’ve become enamored with utility players in our businesses. people that we feel we can take and throw into any situation and they’ll still produce dividends for us (and for our shareholders). we want everyone to be able to do everything. we’re even groomed as such, going all the way back into our childhoods and early adult lives.
2010 year in review
as it is the final week of 2010, i thought it would be a great (read: cliché) way to end the year with a recap of my favorite posts from the past 12 months. so here they are, in no particular order, my top picks for 2010:
- “the common man goes nowhere” – herb brooks. originally posted in march, this post was a retrospective on my first year at booz allen and how i see myself progressing through life and my career.
- don’t box me in: enterprise 2.0 employees working in an enterprise 1.0 world. posted in october (my birthday, actually), this is an expression of my feelings of being so young and being in a line of work that’s not generally known for being very progressive.
- case study: the @zoowithroy brand. posted in september, i wanted to highlight how one man — zoo with roy — has been able to grow such a cult following in such a short amount of time, and what we can learn from that.
- what if your phone calls were like your social media? posted in february, this was meant to start a conversation about people and organizations that use social media sites and services, but forget about the ‘social’ part.
- what can we learn from the beautiful game? originally posted in june during the world cup, i found a few results to be completely shocking and also found an underlying lesson beneath it all.
i do want to say thank you to all my readers for checking out these things i write each week. you make what i do here more meaningful. i hope you had a fantastic holiday season, and wish you all the best for 2011.
in bocca al lupo
losing the team: when leaders should call it quits
image by MPR529, flickr artist
coaches — especially head coaches — are vitally important to a team’s success. they’re the ones that provide the vision, strategies, and leadership for a team. if the players don’t buy into that vision or if they don’t understand the strategies, undoubtedly you’re going to experience problems on that team.
just look at the philadelphia flyers and their performance under john stevens in his last year. just 13-11-0-1 through 25 games, the flyers were near the bottom of the nhl’s eastern conference. this, after 2 straight seasons with nearly 100 points and a playoff appearance in each, including a trip to the conference finals in 2007-08.
as a head coach, there are many ways that you can lose a team: changing routines mid-season without warning or providing purpose, working players too hard, openly calling them out in front of their teammates, not being responsive to your players’ feedback and suggestions, and dozens more. but you don’t generally lose a team in a gradual fashion; typically it’s not a slow, building process. there’s usually a tipping point with a very sharp decline afterwards. the problem is there’s not much you can do to bring your players back around once they’re gone.
answering the call
image by billy v, flickr artist
when you’re working on a project — of any scale — you’re going to have to accept risk at some point in time. the client is going to make demands that seem unreasonable. you’re going to burn through the wiggle room that you’ve built into your project schedules. you’re going to be doing work that no one has ever done before.
it’s in these times that leaders really need to answer the call.
“there’s only one outcome here: we’re going to succeed. that’s the bottom line. we’re absolutely going to get this done, and we’re going to do it the very best way we know how. i don’t care how difficult it is or how difficult it is going to be; look at everything we’ve accomplished to date. why would you believe in any other outcome? we’re going to do this.
“now… what do you need to knock this thing out of the park? because i’m going to go out and get it for you.”
the phone’s ringing. you might want to answer that one.