Learning | Just Seven Things

Archive for the category “Learning”

15 Sep 2008

Time Management Progress in Action

I was prompted by a comment on one of my posts from June (J7T was just 19 days old) about how hard time management was. It made me stand back and evaluate how far I’ve come in just over three months (and particularly after a 7/10 level day in terms of stress and task bittiness as I travelled between appointments):

I feel more relaxed control (and a clearly ring-fenced idea of where there is a diminishing pile of ‘stuff’ to clear through the GTD system
I am significantly better at locking down my focus to a task in hand. To switch and give it my full thinking attention. Ironically, writing this blog (with the aim of posting at least 5/7 days a week) has improved this ability
I have a more flexible approach to prioritisation based on trust of my systems and reaction to a gut response. This opposed to the constant prioritising and re-prioritising trap that it is sometimes easy to get into
My sense of ‘someday/maybe’ or just ‘ruthless task deletion’ has improved. I feel like I know myself better and cull those things that will just sit for years on front-of-mind task lists and create noise.
I (as posted on recently) am a lot better at just doing the action. Just getting on and starting without messing around.

And the main area for improvement?

As WorkLoadMaster states in his comment to my post on the ‘Stress of Time Management’ above: it’s all about keeping on top of the system. I feel like my report card would say:

‘Si has shown much improvement over the term. With continuing effort and focus he should continue to improve……’

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Psychology, Time Management and tagged Focus, Getting Things Done, GTD, Switching, Time Management | Leave a comment

10 Sep 2008

Google and Knowledge Management

Digging through some old articles (old! – last October 2007. Getting too hooked to webtime)

Eric Schmidt in October at Google’s annual analyst meeting gave an interesting view on a potential future of knowledge management. He said that social networks as a phenomenon were very real. Although it was ‘too early to say’ whether this would influence the underlying ‘information structure’ of the internet as users start to organise and access more information through the power of their social connections.

So a future where a further parameter to the Google search algorithms is based on your accumulated profile information as held by Google. Matched through your social network connections to the information snipped/ tagged or recommended by your ‘friends’?

Posted in Knowledge Management, Learning, Social Networks and tagged Google, Knowledge Management, Learning, Social Networks | Leave a comment

04 Sep 2008

Is Traditional Corporate Leadership Fundamentally Flawed?

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I was struck today with the thought that the traditional corporate structure has a fundamental flaw. This flaw relates to its ability to harness the power of its peoples’ ideas.

I may be wrong, but it seems that the traditional corporate structure is predicated on the workers doing the doing, the managers doing the managing and the CEO/ Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) (with Board consultation and expenditure on consultants) doing the thinking.

The flaw for me is that unless the CEO/ CSO spends time directly talking to the people doing the doing, they’ll only ever be hearing from the managers managing the same thing they’ve always managed (with the expected change/ transformation that all corporates go through)

Where are the structures for the CEO to actively ask the questions of the people who perform the company’s activities and (arguably) are the best people to advise on how things are done better?

Is bringing in a firm of consultants to ask your staff for the answers the best investment of shareholder funds? Will the consultants end up filtering the message to what they ‘corporately anticipate’ the Board want to hear? I do not (totally) mean to be unfair to consultants in this in terms of their value add and business model in strategic decision-making – thinking independently is always of benefit.

Further to this, I believe that the aggregation of the average messages or required actions is also a structural flaw. If you seek to hear the ‘noise’ of an issue and prioritise action/ change on that basis, you’re by definition missing the silent issues or improvement opportunities. It does not bear testing to assume that in a sophisticated organisation of client or process focused roles that any broader ‘noise’ can be heard past questioning the lowest levels of the organisation.

I run recurring six monthly reviews with every member of the company (granted only 75 now: scale will require solutions). We spend half an hour and I ask them whether, beyond things that they’re working on with their line manager, there are things that I could enable or effect change on that would increase their happiness/ role enjoyment/ enjoyment of the company. Even in a situation where they are completely happy, I push them on how I could make them even happier. I also take the whole team away every six months and similarly we work up (and on) the things that we should be stopping, starting or continuing. My senior managers are not involved in guiding these conversations. Just facilitating.

As you would expect from the tone of the rest of this post, the stuff that they come up with is brilliant. I end up with pages worth of actions. And why? Because each of them has time whilst doing their job to think about how they could improve the activities of the company that they are undertaking. Managers think about how they can get better managing. So in act the CEO and the front line team are the ones that should be having the regular 121 conversations.

…but how to practically do this?