Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Decision making”

03 Nov 2011

7 Lessons from Steve Jobs’ Career

Some takeaways from Steve Jobs’s career – and what other leaders can practice for success:

  1. Relentlessly pursue bold ideas – Organizations must have the patience, courage, and foresight to encourage, provide resources, and remove barriers for their “wild ducks” to pursue and realize break-out ideas.
  2. The customer rules – Organizations need to identify and accelerate the careers of high potential employees who are attuned to the marketplace in ways that drive products and/or services intended to always surprise and delight the customer.
  3. Ego serves the organization – Leaders can have big egos, but their efforts are fundamentally channeled in the service of making organizations successful.
  4. Don’t confuse activity with results – Successful leaders leverage competitive drive to maintain traction/deliver distinctive excellence. They are not distracted from achieving the organization’s strategy and primary objectives.
  5. The 3 Rs – Strong leaders ensure that the right people are in the right jobs and that the right conditions have been created for them to succeed.
  6. Truth-telling – Don’t tolerate mediocre ideas, and be willing to take decisive action when people are not cutting it in their assigned roles.
  7. Inspirational communication – Provide frequent and intensely motivational communication about compelling objectives, and the importance of speed to market.

Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Business, Communication, Creativity, Decision making, Leadership and tagged , | Leave a Comment
25 Oct 2011

How To Be The Jack Bauer Of Your Company

How can you be the Jack Bauer of your company?

Break process when necessary to get things done

Processes are well and good for many things, but not much remarkable was ever done as part of painting by numbers.  If you see opportunity to do something amazing outside your processes, do it.  Don’t waste time asking permission, just do what needs to be done.  If you break a process to achieve your objective and succeed, the right management team would never be upset.  If they are you’re with the wrong team.

Believe in what you’re doing (and bring emotion to the table)

A lot of people check their emotions at the door when starting their day.  You shouldn’t do this – especially if you are in a creative industry.  Your emotions, directed by the high road, can be a powerful tool of persuasion and allow you to execute far better than you would without them.  Believing in what you’re doing requires that you bring your emotions.

Fear nothing

I’ve previously promoted the notion you should fear nothing.  Just like Jack faced adversaries without fear, you too should embrace this in anything you do in your industry.  Fear is a dated emotion, having little relevance in modern society.  What’s the worst that can happen to you, really?

Strategist and tactician

It’s a potent combination to be able to not just develop effective strategic plays, but also put them into action yourself.  It is the rare strategist who is able to masterfully execute on the front lines and lead other tacticians to success.  Further, that individual will have greater respect from the execution team than anyone else on the management team who simply sits in their ivory tower.

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Posted in Action Orientation, Creativity, Decision making, Energy, Execution, Leadership, Stress | Leave a Comment
04 Jul 2011

Adaptive Group Coordination and Role Differentiation

Groups often struggle to balance incentives for individual members with incentives for the collective group. In standard common pool resource problems [1], [2], individuals are tempted to maximize individual resources, but this behavior destroys the resource and ultimately harms everyone. Conflicting incentives in real world situations such as pollution and harvesting of natural resources understandably stretch a group’s ability to coordinate for the common good, but it is still unclear how group members coordinate their actions in more constrained situations where only a shared goal exists.

Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone, and presumably groups must flexibly and adaptively coordinate members’ efforts in order to achieve shared goals. For example, research labs rely on the combined contributions of individuals to develop a research program and lab reputation that leads to grant funding, which may in turn benefit all of the lab’s researchers. Similarly, statistical analyses in baseball and basketball increasingly value players based on the team’s performance while the player is in the game, rather than individual statistics such as points scored [3].

via PLoS ONE: Adaptive Group Coordination and Role Differentiation.

Posted in Collective Intelligence, Decision making | Leave a Comment

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