Just Seven Things

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

Archive for the tag “Business”

26 Jul 2008
4 Comments

The Balance between Focus and Multi-tasking

Out of Focus by Billy Alexander

Out of Focus by Billy Alexander

I commented yesterday on the challenging tension between multi-tasking and focus on GTD Times. I referenced how I use Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow methodology (see blogroll) to enable as much focus as possible during day to day working.

What’s been nagging at me has been catalysed by my reading of Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.  

In the book Guy argues that our ‘intelligent unconscious’ is a sophisticated nervous system that gets to know the world by the idiosyncrasies of our own experience: ‘a brain is plastic: it transmutes ignorance into competence….. categories and concepts are distilled from particular encounters so that, by a process of spontaneous analogy, ‘what I do next’ can be informed by records of ‘what happened before”.

It ‘registers its patterns and develops and coordinates skillful responses’

Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Business, Control, Focus, Habits and Routines, Mindfulness, Time Management and tagged , , , , , ,
01 Jul 2008

Goal Setting makes things less Scary

I’ve just come back from our six-monthly strategy away days with the Madgex shareholders. Now these are always good events. We get through a lot of stuff very productively.

This session was particularly productive because since we have tightened the focus of our mission to be the global leaders in job board software and services, our ‘flamenco dancing’ of innovation and creativity has significantly step-changed for the better.

Over the last two days we agreed a set of targets for the five years from 1.2.9. We’re into our fourth year of targets set four years ago which we’ve achieved in each of the years. Now this next set of targets should have ‘filled us with the fear’. We’re talking triple-digit millions. Yet it didn’t.

The reason why I think that it didn’t is that we’ve taken the time to plan the scenarios and imagine what it would be like. We’ve done the sales capacity modelling. We’ve got a big A3 map full of our ideas. We’ve allocated responsibilities and modelled in our heads what it will feel like when we’ve got there.

Read more…

Posted in Business, Focus, Leadership, Management, Vision and Goal Setting and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
23 Jun 2008

The Power of As If II

In my post on NLP and the power of using successful outcomes in business, I pulled together some thoughts on the power of acting ‘as if’ and ‘I am’. In relatively simplistic ways I considered the success to be achieved in modelling behaviours and also the impact on image to others.

What really struck me today while I’ve been preparing for a presentation on ‘The Behaviours of Managers and Leaders’ for Madgex‘s ideas and learnings programme was whether I’d missed a bit of my own point….

I wonder whether some of the power also lies in ‘the acting’ part of it. This observation comes from my realisation that my ability to learn and assimilate new information has much improved over the last few months of running nearly weekly presentations and workshops .There is the obvious explanation that if I’m not researching for a subject then I won’t be learning. Therefore in starting to swot-up on areas of interest for the presentations I’m putting more information in front of myself than I have done in the recent past.

Read more…

Posted in Business, Communication, Knowledge Management, Learning and tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Post Navigation

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →
%d bloggers like this: