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Here’s another blog idea that’s been “cooking” in the file cabinet for a few weeks. (By the way, it’s merely a coincidence that the first part is also based on a post by Shawn at Anecdote. I have been referencing his posts quite a bit lately. I swear, no money changed hands. Yet.)

Turn it Upside DownFrom the let’s-hang-the-situation-by-the-pant-legs-and-see-how-much-change-falls-out department, Shawn at Anecdote comes up with a truly great idea regarding the frustration of dealing with security consciousness and project files. Although I’ve read about, but not seen, Roger van Oech’s Creative Whack Pack, I imagine one of the cards must say something along these lines.Not being content to just point out an issue,

Shawn presents a very simple solution to the challenge of handling a project’s security concerns and the resulting tendency to stifle collaboration within an organization.

This is a necessary step on the road to collaboration in the project world. I like the RSS idea, too.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if everyone on the project team, including the client, knew what everyone was talking about regarding the state of their project? That way, whenever any documents are published, they need only to broadcast the link, not the document itself, potentially saving considerable bandwidth. (If you can sell it, be warned - the IT department may hold a parade in your honor.)Intellectual Property Fear vs. Collaboration

Ironically enough, I just read this morning on the Business Innovation Insider blog a brief interview with Joyce Wycoff, co-founder of the InnovationNetwork and author of two innovation blogs. When asked what she’d like to see regarding innovation in 2007, one of three trends she mentioned addressed this very subject:

“(2) More collaborative innovation between business units and separate companies and less intellectual property fear. Innovation means taking risks; however, it’s the job of the legal folks to reduce risk and therein lies the rub. As they say, you can’t steal second base with your foot firmly planted on first base.”

A Final Solution?If you’ve got the patience, perhaps there is another solution, as posted by randfish on the SEOmoz blog:

- Are a personal expression of subject matter
- Allow for a two-way conversation
- Build a connection between the readers and the blogger/company/brand
- When you have layers of communication control, you’re essentially shutting out all the things that make blogging valuable or worthwhile.

So what’s the solution?According to my new friend Beth – ‘we’ll just have to wait for them (the people who control corporate communication) to die.’”

OK, I didn’t say it was a great solution, just a solution. I’m sure there are at least a few other things worth trying first…

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

In what is sure to be a severe blow to those Blackberry and text messaging addicts (you know who you are; in fact, we ALL know who you are!), research conducted for Hewlett Packard by Kings College of London University has found that using email extensively can actually lower your IQ – significantly more than using drugs. Gee, thanks, guys!

This dramatic news comes to us via Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge, who quite wisely follows up with an excellent list of 7 reasons why managers should restrict their own use of emails:

1. You will get time to walk the floor (and sometimes even walk the talk) not to mention think and talk strategically.
2. Looking people in the eye tells you more than trying to make sense of emoticons, and an apology in the flesh is worth far more (in both directions) than any virtual communication.
3. You will get a chance to check for reaction before you press send, and to recover in real time if you make a mistake; before it becomes fatal.
4. The human brain is designed to see patterns, not process small chunks of information, but if you spend your time processing said chunks you will loose the patterning capability (the neurons will die out) and end up as an information processor. Another name for that function/capability is clerk not manager.
5. Its far more likely that you will pick up that something is going right/wrong by meeting people in their own environment; you will sense multiple audio and visual tools that are not available in email.
6. It is far too easy to come across as authoritarian using a keyboard, and it’s more difficult for people to say no to you face-to-face than it is in writing.
7. Your eyesight and general disposition will improve, not to mention your flexibility to negotiate a win-win result with your staff and to see them as humans not avatars.

If you think about it (please, I beg you!) I trust you’ll take note of the social dimension of each item above. I realize that being a manager sometimes means processing large amounts of information in ridiculously little time, but at the same time it’s up to us to make sure it’s not at the expense of our people skills. After all, even if managing is a bit like herding cats, your people are usually the ones doing the actual production work!

“Now I know that sometimes people live in different geographies and face to face contact is hard, but there is always the telephone. Yes email is better for things like organizing meetings etc. It may be easier to attempt to manage as if you were games master of some on-line simulation game, but it’s a damn sight more rewarding to treat people as people.”

OK, suppose you’ve managed to start walking around the office again, and you’re really starting to regain those personal connections with the people around the office. Productivity is up, people have stopped referring to you as “that recluse”, and you’re no longer under the tyranny of your inbox. You’re also learning to concentrate only on what we’ll call “legitimate” emails.

But what about those emails YOU send? After all, if everyone is doing what you’re doing, the question now is, how do you get their attention in that vast black hole called the inbox? Hey, you’re in luck! Sally McGhee, a “consultant and productivity expert” (whatever THAT means) has an excellent list of 7 guidelines to ensure your emails are read.

1. Make the purpose of the message clear.
2. Tell what action you want the recipients to take.
3. Provide the proper data and documents.
4. Write a subject line that relates to what you want.
5. Send the message only to relevant recipients.
6. Use the CC: line wisely.
7. Ask “final questions” before you hit “SEND”.

There you have it folks – a “pair of sevens” that, if well played, will win every time!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

And here I thought it was just me.

A recent article from Leigh Buchanan at Inc. magazine, The Imposter Syndrome, examines something most people experience at some time or other: feeling like a fake, despite their apparent success. It’s that nagging feeling that you’re not as smart, or as good, as other people think you are. (NOTE: This is not to be confused with the feeling that you’re OK but everyone ELSE is a fake. That’s called arrogance, and you’ve got a real problem there, my friend…)

“People who feel like fakes chalk up their accomplishments to external factors such as luck and timing, or worry they are coasting on charm and personality rather than on talent. Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds; other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like fakes at one time or another.”

What I find most amazing is the prevalence of this feeling, even among otherwise apparently successful people. It’s most prevalent among high achievers, and stems from an inability to internalize their accomplishments. If you’re reading this and you are, for instance, a successful entrepreneur, academic, or other management type, then chances are you’ve felt it too. Ironically enough, according to the article, research indicates that being an entrepreneur may actually enhance such feelings because of the lack of scrutiny from bosses.

That actually does make sense. When you’re the boss, you’re expected to know everything about everything; to be expert in all facets of your business. Unfortunately, few people are experts in many areas – after all, that’s why you hire other people to run the parts of your business you can’t run yourself. Other peoples’ expectations, combined with little or no upward management scrutiny, contribute to that nagging feeling that sooner or later, someone will find out you’re really NOT the expert they think you are.

A Google search for the phrase “Imposter Syndrome” yields 47,200 hits, including the first hit, Imposter Syndrome, the website of Dr. Valerie Young. Amid other interesting information, there’s a simple quiz you can take, reproduced (with permission) here:

• Do you secretly worry that others will find out that you’re not as bright and capable as they think you are?
• Do you sometimes shy away from challenges because of nagging self-doubt?
• Do you tend to chalk your accomplishments up to being a “fluke,” “no big deal” or the fact that people just “like” you?
• Do you hate making a mistake, being less than fully prepared or not doing things perfectly?
• Do you tend to feel crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your “ineptness?”
• When you do succeed, do you think, “Phew, I fooled ‘em this time but I may not be so lucky next time.”
• Do you believe that other people (students, colleagues, competitors) are smarter and more capable than you are?
• Do you live in fear of being found out, discovered, unmasked?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then not only are you NOT alone, but you’ve got some pretty good company (that’s other high achievers like yourself).

I guess never realized just how widespread and how debilitating this could be. Certainly I’ve experienced the feeling many times, despite my own qualifications, abilities, etc. Please, realize that help is available. As Richard Bach once said, “Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but that mark of a fake messiah.”

Sometimes, just knowing you’re not the only one is enough.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Dennis McMullin, Marketing Director at OYO Geospace and a good friend of mine, recently sent me a link to a blog that mentions yet another article about the value of failure, particularly in regard to innovation; this one happens to be from Business Week. As a matter of fact, in the last few months I’ve read dozens like it.

I and many others have blogged about how ideas like this can spread across the blogosphere like ripples on a pond, and that’s as it should be: one of the great wonders of the internet in general, and blogging specifically, is the absolutely awesome ability to communicate and exchange ideas with folks from literally across the planet, in real time.

Even though the idea that failure has value in innovation is not really new, at the moment it’s become the latest, well, fad. (For thoughts on how to determine which “new things” are truly new, I highly recommend Bob Sutton’s ChangeThis Manifesto.) You can almost see it now, can’t you? We’ll have a new crop of consultants, seminars and business school courses coming soon: Fail First, Fail Now, and Fail Often – How to Build a Business by Being a Complete Failure! (No doubt bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other merchandising are soon to follow.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with the validity of the concepts being presented – it actually makes sense that to get great innovations, you’re going to have (at least in my case!) great failures, and lots of them. I understand and agree that failure can be a great source of learning. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that lessons learned from failure are, for the most part, far more readily remembered than lessons learned from our successes.

The question I would like to have answered, though, is whether or not the real world is anything like the theory. It all sounds well and good to say that failure is just another process on the road to success, but how many “out there” still operate under the reality that failure is a good way to, shall we say, “manifest negative advancement” at your workplace?

If you believe the articles (and truly, there’s no reason not to), there are many companies out there who have literally built in the means to profit from failure. But what I’d like to see is a survey that distinguishes the types of companies (or in some cases, the divisions within a company) where this is actually true. Where is this most successful? What industries is it most likely to succeed?

When I brought it up, Dennis contributed this opinion:

“There is a “right” way to do things and there is the way things are done. This will NEVER happen in “public” companies on a wide scale until companies can demonstrate to their investors a direct link between failure and increased profits – investors are the most failure-adverse and strongest driver group in the mix. It has a better chance in privately held companies.”

While it’s true that investors tend to drive things in public companies, I do want to offer some other evidence. But before I go on, I’ll give you a little background, and then share a short but true story.

I work for a very large publicly-traded engineering firm, a pragmatic place to work if there ever was one. Now, most people don’t think of the engineering field as a hotbed of innovation, because what we do is mostly based on tried-and-true practices, known quantities, and proven technology. So we’re pretty typically risk-averse in the sense that failure is considered a bad thing.

Like other firms of our type, we have an arrangement with several of our clients in which my company provides the engineering expertise for their small to mid-cap engineering projects. This in turn allows them to avoid having to staff their own engineering department. The arrangement works very well because core competencies are maximized to the benefit of both parties.

Anyway, due to a combination of many events over a period of months, one of the projects I currently manage got into some real problems, to the point where the estimated costs became nearly triple the original estimate. Although we (meaning us AND the client) tried our best to keep things on track, it just got out of hand and finally the client called a halt. After an investigation of root causes, etc., the client redefined the project’s objectives to the point where we pretty much ended up with a completely different project. The project is currently in the process of being restarted.

Now by anyone’s definition, this project was, if not completely failed, then certainly on the road to failure. (Let’s be honest. It was a train wreck!) But here’s the interesting part. Not one time during the troubled last few months, through the investigation, and even today has there been any hint of blame, fault-finding or witch-hunting, neither from the client or my own managers.

We started a project. It failed. We identified the cause(s). We defined the solutions. We started over. Will this equate to project success? Only time will tell, but in this case we are confident it will.

In the real world, failure can be a positive experience or a negative one. What’s the defining factor? Culture. In an engineering firm, where failure can represent considerable lost dollars, or worst of all, people hurt or killed – our culture allows (but does not encourage) people to fail without recrimination. That’s because the ability to demonstrate learning from mistakes is a desired quality. The inability to demonstrate this might still result in “negative career advancement”.

So what’s it like for you? What happens when failure occurs in your workplace?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

For some reason the subject of anger seems to be on my mind today, so with a nod to Jack and Adam (I’ll never see the movie but I absolutely love the poster!) here’s a few thoughts on the subject.

It would be a rhetorical question to ask if you’ve ever been angry. It happens. A brief search on the internet yields a lot of information on the different types of anger, but this list of eight types of anger from Anger Resources seemed to be the most complete.

1. Chronic anger — ongoing resentment toward others and life in general
2. Volatile anger — comes and goes, builds to rage, explodes as physical or verbal aggression
3. Judgmental anger — critical statements are made which belittle, shame, or correct other, done with disdain
4. Passive anger — expressed indirectly through sarcasm, or being late, or avoiding a situation
5. Overwhelmed anger — arises when people can’t handle their life circumstances, and lash out to relieve stress or pain
6. Retaliatory anger — directed to a person to get back at them for something that they did or said
7. Self-inflicted anger — may result in hurting oneself emotionally or physically — negative self-talk, starvation, eating or drinking to excess
8. Constructive anger — using anger to make some positive difference, such as becoming involved in a cause or movement for positive change

Most people are probably susceptible to one or more (rarely all) of the above list. What I find most interesting is that only ONE (the last one) actually has a positive result. All of the others can produce destructive behavior. Sadly, that destruction often extends far beyond the angry person; if sustained, it can spread like a flame among family, friends, and co-workers.

So what DO you do? Glad you asked! Julie Fleming Brown’s excellent Life at the Bar article, “Controlling Anger” addresses how to handle situations where you find yourself getting angry. By all means read the article for details, but here’s the list:

1. Keep your attention on the motivation behind the provocation – why is this person provoking you?
2. Breathe – not only is this good stress management, but the ensuing pause give everyone, including yourself, time to regroup
3. Speak softly – probably the hardest to master but always the best way to respond
4. Vent – go somewhere safe and let it out
5. Exercise – not only good for the body, but good for the soul to release the adrenaline that anger generates
6. Selective release of anger – occasionally this turns out to be the best course, but only when coupled with all of the above; always consider the consequences because there will be plenty

Allow me to add that getting angry is not the issue. Humans are emotional beings, and it’s normal to experience a range of emotions all the time. People around you will get worried if you aren’t showing emotion. What is at issue is what you do with your anger.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Can you quantify the effect of “Word of Mouth”? Maybe you can.

Alain Thys over at Marketing Profs has come up with a workable formula that may help quantify the value of word of mouth effects on markets. A short but interesting read that may have wide implications for nearly everyone.

OK, OK, I can hear already hear the chorus of voices out there saying, “Who cares? After all, I’m not in marketing.” Well, my answer to you is two little words:

You are!

“Word of Mouth”, in my opinion, affects practically everything. Are you a job seeker? What about if you have an innovative idea? Looking for venture capital? Want your New Year’s Eve party to be the best ever? All of the above, and more, can benefit from a good “buzz”.

Getting people talking is a good thing, but don’t forget, it needs be the right kind of buzz. Take what steps you can now to manage the buzz about whatever YOU want to accomplish (you might want to review some of my previous posts on managing your internet presence).

The fact is, virtually ANY endeavor requires support from other people. In many cases, the more support, the more likely it is realized. No matter how good it is, without a huge amount of the right kind of buzz, NO endeavor succeeds. Manufacturers, marketers and people in the business world know this well. Remember the Sony BETA? New Coke vs. Classic?

Face it: you want something to happen? Start a buzz!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Will Blog for Project Management

OK, so maybe I’m late to this particular party, but I just recently ran across this 2005 posting from Tim Duckett: 10 Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects. (It’s a short read. Go ahead; I’ll wait.)

The 10 ways:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicizing project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up to date
10. Providing an automatic audit trail

I wonder: How many of these reasons would resonate with large organizations? How do you sell the idea to management?

What I think is the key thought is actually contained in the opening sentence, quoted above. Focus on desired outcomes (or, keep your eye on the trophy); namely, improved information flow, easily accessible shared knowledge, and up-to-the-minute updates. By clearly articulating what you want to accomplish, it becomes less about the tools and more about the goal: improved efficiency in execution.

One Hundred This and That

Jerry Madden, Associate Director of the Flight Projects Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, collected a list of principles known as “100 Rules for NASA Project Managers”. Certainly a great “handbook”, and pretty much timeless as well. After his retirement in 1995, he followed it up with “100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers”. (Strangely enough, there are actually 128.)

But what I’d really like to see is his list of “unwritten” rules, one of which is, “Show up early for all meetings; they may be serving doughnuts.”

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!