Filed in Management
Ilya Pozin recently sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt and came up with these 7 Things Highly Productive People Do.
Here are his tips for staying productive:
Filed in Cloud computing | Management | Transparency
Mike Vizard, talks with Kent Christensen of Datalink about Cloud Sprawl and what companies can do about it. Christensen’s recommendation is to start with a private cloud.
One of the issues that many IT organizations are soon going to find themselves dealing with is “cloud sprawl.” Because it’s relatively easy to set up an account with any number of cloud computing service providers, IT organizations may soon find themselves managing application workloads across many different services.
At the same time, those organizations are just as likely to have an instance of private cloud computing under development, which may be running on premise or in a third-party data center. Continue Reading
Article source: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/vizard/gaining-control-over-cloud-sprawl/?cs=49139
Filed in Creativity | Management
Leonardo’s To-Do List looks like an early draft of a GTD list.
Filed in Management | Politics | Responsibility | Science | Technology | Transparency
A straight forward view of analyzing data and making your findings visual.
They didn’t mention the part about choosing only the statistics which support your position. Or the section on how to make the data look better or worse. Perhaps it would be a good idea for folks to stop doing that.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics.
Filed in Education | Management | Responsibility
jEM is a five-week camp intended to develop the students’ understanding of business fundamentals and entrepreneurship, with particular emphasis on problem-solving, teamwork, leadership, and communication skills. Other topics covered include ethics, social responsibility, and self-assessment. In addition to their hands-on learning experience, participants will also complete an ongoing service project: developing and maintaining a community garden at St. Olaf Community Campus, a senior living facility in North Minneapolis. This includes planning the layout of the garden, building compost bins and irrigation equipment, and planting and caring for all of the greenery.
The jEM program is jointly developed by the Office for Business Community Economic Development and the Gary S. Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management, in conjunction with the City of Minneapolis’ STEP-UP program. Support also comes from Synico Staffing, Ajasa Technologies, Select Source International, the Minnesota Twins, Dairy Queen, Bachman’s Floral, Gardens of Eagan, Quality Bicycle Products, and Rani Engineering.
If you are a local entrepreneur interested in sharing the story of your business, sponsoring this program in any way, or donating needed items for the program, 1255989103 please contact the Office for Business Community Economic Development B-Tech Center at 612-624-3404, or email the jEM program at jem@umn.edu. You can also find more about jEM online at bced.umn.edu/JEM
Article source: http://www.prlog.org/11500252-of-accepts-new-group-of-teens-to-third-annual-junior-entrepreneurs-of-minnesota-program.html
Filed in Management
At a dinner party several years ago, I found myself staring, completely dumbfounded by Carl (not his real name) across the table. He asked, “Why are you looking at me like I’m from outer space?” I had no answer and clumsily tried to recover from my faux pas with, “I’m trying to figure out if you are serious”. Yes, I was wondering if he was joking, but what I really couldn’t understand was why anyone with a choice would choose to work like that.
I was reminded of this when I read Randle Raggio’s article, Helping Employees Live the Brand, in HBRhttp://hbr.org’s The Conversation. You see, Altria’s employees are everything Carl wasn’t. They consistently live the company’s Values and all can quickly tell how their functions support the organization’s clearly stated Mission.
Raggio talked with Brendan McCormick, Altria’s V.P. of Communications, and came up with this list that helps them succeed.
Lesson 1: "Living the Brand" starts with the interview. Are your company’s mission, vision and values relevant to first-time job seekers and current employees as well as Wall Street analysts and other external stakeholders?
Lesson 2: Encourage conversations about values. Do your mission, vision, and values empower employees at all levels to actively engage in strategic conversations?
Lesson 3: Peer-to-Peer training allows formal internal communications to focus on "reminding" and "encouraging." Are your employees given opportunities to teach your mission, vision and values to peers?
Lesson 4: Missions, Visions and Values are business tools, not "branding" tools. Are your mission, vision and values something written on a card, or how your people work every day?
The day before this dinner party, Jack Daly had presented at the CEO Forum in Denver. (If you ever get a chance to see Jack in person, you should do it. He is both entertaining and has some good tips.)
I was sharing with the table Jack’s example of how to welcome a newly hired employee into a company. In summary, use this day to demonstrate the companies Values, make sure that person and her family know how important they are in the company’s mission, and make it an experience they want to tell to others. Sending a bottle of champagne, if appropriate, to the home for the couple to share that evening was one of several suggestions he included.
After sharing this story from Jack, I watched Carl shift into overdrive.
“That wouldn’t do a thing for me. I don’t buy into that corporate crap. I just show up at my office on time, get my work done, and go back to my life.” Carl replied. “My job doesn’t require me to work with others in the office, so why should I bother getting to know them? The company is just a means to a paycheck.”
Understanding that not only was he serious, very serious, he was downright proud of his corporate detachment. As our conversation to recreation, I continued thinking how much time most of us spend working and how horrible it must be to go somewhere you don’t want to be most days of the month. I hope you help build a place where your values line up with those of your co-workers.
Filed in Finance | Management | Technology
It was 1996 and the head of CKS Group was impressed enough with a young, brash guy from Los Angeles to give him a bit of Angel Funding. Eric Greenberg took that money, grabbed a few folks to get going, and put together a plan that attracted capital from Bill Davidow, Vinod Khosla, and Venetia Kontagouris, VCs from Mohr Davidow, Kleiner Perkins, and Trident Capital, respectively.
3 and a half years later, Viant (without Greenberg) and Scient (Greenberg’s next startup) had created a new way of providing consulting in the Internet age and were carrying public market caps of over $1B. CKS’s investment of about $40,000 was cashed in during Viant’s follow-on offering for a bit over $1,000,000.
The leader of CKS at that time, Mark Kvamme, is now taking a leave from Sequoia Capital to help lead Ohio’s business development in a public service role. He’ll be receiving $1 in compensation. Can he find more straw to spin into gold?
Filed in Economy | Finance | Management | Politics
The international financial crisis has thrown the forward march of globalization into question. If the United States and others can learn from the crisis and control borrowing, then the positive potential of global trade and finance may be restored.
Filed in Management | Transparency
Joseph Fuller and Michael C. Jensen are suggesting that managers begin discussing their business’ strategy and get out of the earnings guidance game. In their recent paper, Just Say No to Wall Street: Putting A Stop to the Earnings Game, they tell managers to stay away from earnings guidance and provide information about strategic goals, main value drivers, the risks associated with these drivers and how management intends to address these risks.
They see earnings guidance often results in a no-win game, with expectations met only by abandoning long-term strategy and destroying value in search of short term EPS goals set by folks outside the corporate halls.
Filed in Energy | Environment | Management
With an oil slick that is 80 miles across and 42 miles north to south just a few dozen miles from the Louisiana Coast, BP certainly has created a mess. Now the only question more important than how to stop the bloody thing from leaking is what will BP do about it.
They can take the Exxon route after Valdez which was too slow, too little and too eager to head to a courtroom. Or BP can take the necessary precautions sooner rather than later, avoid what is possible, clean quickly what was not and stay around to finish the full job. Well BP, what’s it gonna be?
Filed in Management
Some important Brain Functions Improve with Age according to findings presented in HBR’s Conversation blog.
In areas as diverse as vocabulary and inductive reasoning, our brains function better than they did in our 20s. As we age, we more easily get the “gist” of arguments. Even our judgment of others improves. Often, we simply “know” if someone — or some idea — is to be trusted. We also get better at knowing what to ignore and when to hold our tongues.
It’s important to understand your strengths and the strengths of those around you. I find it encouraging that not only do reasoning and therefore decision making skills getting better, the all important ability to determine the people with the right skills to compliment your own abilities grows as well. But just like the 40 year old quarterback who thinks he’s still in his prime – Oh, that’s right, he had a record breaking year, didn’t he? Well, there are always exceptions, right? -, we have to know when it’s time to pass the torch for some activities to others. Here is how one manager does it:
When gathered to discuss a problem, he keeps his “mouth shut” and listens. Even though — more often than not — he has a good solution, he waits. He does not speak.
“I find it works best if I let the younger workers talk first, wrestle with the problem in their own way,” he told me. “Then after a while, I say what I think might work. I’m not sure why, but this seems to work best and to help us all learn and solve the problem better.”
In fact, though he did not realize it, the executive was using the best parts of his calmer and more experienced middle-aged brain to help him manage his situation — and get better results.
It’s true that by midlife our brains can show some fraying. Brain processing speed slows down. Faced with new information, we often cannot master it as quickly as our younger peers. And there’s little question that our short-term memories suffer.
Filed in Management
We’ve all seen it where lots of information compiled to make a decision did little to suggest an obvious course. And that was 20 years ago, when it took leg work to gather that information, not just a few keystrokes in your browser. Getting stuck in analysis was a problem thousands of years ago and Stibel’s article in the Harvard Business Review blog – The Conversation reminds us to avoid it.
I have to admit, when I read the head line I chuckled thinking, “Wow, I’ve worked with some really wise people and I bet when they see this they’ll think the same about me”.
Filed in Energy | Environment | Management
In The Carbon Productivity Challenge, McKinsey & Company focuses on two objectives — stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and maintaining economic growth — and proposes the world has 50 years to increase the GDP per unit of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) tenfold. A task the authors equate to the productivity improvement delivered during the 100 years of the industrial revolution.
A daunting task for sure, yet the study highlights that current technology allows us to get there provided investments, significant investments, begin soon.
Filed in Management
Is the world smaller? Maybe so or maybe good ideas stick regardless of the time and distance they travel to their location. In any event, you can find the latest business thinking in far away places. If you follow Robert Cialdini, then you will want to read this story about a rug business in Turkey using the powers of influence.
Filed in Management | Technology
The folks at Pragmatic Marketing have put together a great book describing their process for creating products and services that customers want and more importantly will buy.
Tuned In is a quick read and should prove to be a valuable reference guide as you turn to your potential customers to define the products and services someone is most likely to buy.
Filed in Management | Science
“Why do people feel pressure to have an answer for every question?” Even when they don’t know Jack, they make it up on the fly. Ten years ago our training courses included a short video clip of college students at some of the more prestigious universities speaking at length with great confidence about a subject which they obviously knew very little. One episode had students suggesting summer’s were warmer because the Earth had moved significantly closer to the Sun. This video claimed we have been programmed from a very early age to know the answer or make it up. Apparently, some people take to this training better than others. If you really want to know the cause, you’ll need to ask someone else, because I simply do not know.
Filed in Management | Venture capital
No, it’s Conviction and Discipline according to Fred Wilson, “Conviction and discipline are two sides of the same coin.” I like the view. Similar to a great strategy with weak execution, conviction without discipline will often lead you into the ditch and will never get you to the mountaintop.
Filed in Economy | Management
Berkshire Hathaway’s Shareholder Letter
is a must read and this one is no exception. Continuing last year’s scolding of the sub-prime mortgage banking industr, my favorite lines included these:
John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo, aptly dissected the recent behavior of many lenders: “It is interesting that the industry has invented few ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine.”
You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight.
Filed in Management | USA politics
Another high profile company going public has decided to maintain control while selling a majority of the economic stakes in the company to the public. This time it is Al Gore as a founder of Current Media.
I certainly agree, the company’s shareholders have a right to decide the control structure they want to have after a public offering. At the end of the day, people can always choose not to be a party to it. And the average investor (not the same as the average dollar invested) has little voice in the actions of a company. But I still don’t like it. I guess it comes down to creating value for all shareholders and when you remove options – and putting control in the hands of a few reduced options – you lower the value to the group as a whole.
In this case the interesting thing will be how Gore is viewed in this debate (not that I’m trying to pull Barak and Hillary into this). In Al Gores Convenient IPO the comparision with Google focused on Gore’s holding public office and being a voice for many of the institutions who are currently fighting against these type of control structures. I don’t think we should hold Gore or any other ex-public official to any higher standard than we hold each other. And he should not try to tell us to do what he thinks is better for others unless he is willing to do that or more himself.
Filed in Colorado | Economy | Management | Venture capital
Speaking of the TXU purchase, Mr. Bonderman said the company was adept at running a profitable company and equally bad at politics from price increases to ecology to labor relations. These shortcomings lead tothe opportunity which focused on addressing these public concerns.Opportunities for private equity include exploiting public investorsfocus on short term focus, their dislike for debt or leverage, fixingbroken companies and putting companies together that changes thecompetitive landscape.His advice to students wondering which classes to take for a career inprivate equity, which job to take this summer, which classes to takenext year is to “Just relax”.In looking at the public policy of the US, Bonderman says ourlawmakers are thinking like it is 1975 when the US represented 50% ofthe world’s GDP. Now that we are less than 30% and falling the rest ofthe world has choices and will not play by any US tax code.Best run companies are those which build value over long periods oftime. However, fund managers often are looking for short term gains.This makes creating proper incentives for publicly traded companies’managers sub optimal if not downright harmful.
Filed in Economy | Management
The 4 hour work week is an interesting and educational book, even for those who would not choose to work only half a day each week. It pushes you to think about different ways to get your job done and to think differently about which activities you keep inside and which you push to others. And at the same time think differently about careers, yours and that of other workers in your company.
Filed in Management
Day two included another round of interesting speakers. We began with a horse of a different color as Paul Orfalea, Founder of Kinkos, shared his store, advice and leadership style (close the door and let the kids run the store). Then we moved on to customer satisfaction and the Net Promoter Score as described by Fred Reichheld, auther of The Ultimate Question. That question being. “Would you enthusiastically recommend our company to a friend?” That’s it. Get them to rate this on a scale of 1 to 10 and if you get a 7 or lower ask them if it is ok for someone to call them. Kaihan Krippendorf, auther of The Art of the Advantage then walked us all through the famous 36 Strategems of eastern warfare. The key to using these is to master the patterns in order to quickly apply the appropriate strategem as you confront different competitive and negotiation situations in your business and personal life. The day concluded with a magical addition to the schedule. Literally, we were entertained by a magician who suggested we should not forget to enjoy the ride and remember the kid in all of us.