The Long View

Ever heard of WILB?

A study by the University of Melbourne reveals that WILB can be a productivity booster.

WILB is Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing.

The study, which is also available as video and audio downloads shows some intriguing facts:

70% of Internet users engage in WILB. This increases their productivity by an average of 9%, as long as they spend less than 20% o their time on the net. 

The increase in productivity is attributed to the brain's need for a rest after about 20 minutes' concentration. (When did you last doze off last during a long presentation?). Then, refreshed and restored, it can take up a full workload again.

However, don't use the argument to justify your Internet addiction: too much time online has the adverse affect and kills productivity. A new Internet Addiction Center opened specifically for this purpose. Check if you already got it: Internet addiction creates irritability and stops you from taking breaks when the time is right…

Nice excuse, though.

Bring in the creatives!

We humans have funny thought patterns.

Just when we thought we had it all figured out with our superiour rational brains, just when we thought we had understood the world, evolution, and the galaxies, just when we thought we had reached the end of history (sort of after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the early nineties), it got all muddled up again.

What seemed simple, clear and, possibly somewhat boring, broke apart and fragmented into millions and millions of inscrutable nano-parts, uncountable amounts of gigabytes and seemingly endless strands of sequenced genomes.

We thought that we were on top of the world, and the horizons receded into the farthest distance. We thought we were pulling the strings of history and are now beginning to realise that there are far too many of them.

To make sense of it all, we need to, and have always needed to, tell ourselves stories. In that sense, in spite of the dialectic waltz we have been dancing, nothing has changed since the dawn of time:

1. The ancient peoples told stories of gods and how they created the world, our destinies and the weather.

2. Then, collectively, we decided to take destiny into our own hands and demystify the universe. Renaissance man and his descendants told the story of the superiority of rational man. It created the modern world with its industries, its technologies and its pollution. 

3. More and more signs point into the direction that we have now entered (or are at the brink of) a new era, or should I say of an infinite number of new eras, where the collective story telling takes on a completely different life - one of tis own: it will be non-linear, pattern based, non hierarchical, multi-cultural, and not least, utterly unpredictable.

This will go against the grain of the our recent left-brain mechanistic generations. But after the reductionist (and, lets face it, highly effective in construction and destruction alike) last five centuries, the realities, complexities and challenges of our world(s) demand a thoroughly improved set of tools.

In comes the right brain. In comes the web paradigm. In comes creativity as an asset and not something reserved to a bunch of quirky eccentrics.

Artistry takes on an entirely new meaning: it's the multidimensional expansion of multiple intelligences, spurned on by rapid technological advances and possibilities. 

Welcome to the business man as artist.

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

BN Quote of the week

"Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead."

Tom Peters

->: What are you doing to stay ahead?

Creativity killers

Don sends me the link to this video.

It is a 20 minute exceptional TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson. A refreshing interpretation on how our school systems (worldwide) reflect the needs of 19th century industrial societies for left-hand brain power. 

Time to move on, says Sir Ken. Time to invent new education paradigms more in line with our current and future realities. Time to let flourish the artist in everyone.

The film is short, it is poignant, and it is also very funny.

A few Peter Drucker quotes

Here a few quotes that may seem familiar - all by Peter Drucker (and we might not know it):

About strategy:

• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different..
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change,responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 

• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plan. 
• Plans are only good intentions unless they degenerate into hard work.

About customers: 

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.

• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.

About process:

• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

About leadership:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. 

• For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets examples and is imitated.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

The Socrates of modern management thinking

Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.

When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown. 

Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).

Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.

In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:

1. If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
2. What are you going to do about it? 

Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.

And this is how Drucker described himself:

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.

The long road to Twitter paradise (1)

I thought that after about two months of tweeting (my first tweet was on 14 February to be precise), it would be good to give a brief update on how this social networking beginner is doing.

Now my first remark is that already I seem to be in a very different place from two months ago: once you have spent some time in the twittersphere it seems uncanny that still not everyone knows what Twitter is exactly. (it even seems there are some people who have never heard of it all).

So for the untwittered among you: Twitter is a social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time with what is happening in any of the areas you want to be connected to. Twitter aims to help you kill two birds with one stone: building a social network and keeping you informed about the topics you are interested in. It is instant information 24 hours a day. (Unless you turn it off, a bit like email, really just at multiple times the volume). 

Unlike Facebook, you can only send and receive short messages of up to 140 characters (including any URL links you want to include.

Some even say that Tweeting can be bad for you, but so can many other things…

So, how has it been going for me? In a nutshell: well, but slow. 

I have not been the most assiduous of tweeters (about 100 updates since the beginning), and after two months have now reached the 200-followers mark - some assiduous twitters count in the hundreds of thousands, just ot give you an idea. (Experienced twitterers will by now have detected my beginner’s language and naive mindset - but hey, we are all learning, not?)

Here are some of the things I really like bout Twitter as well as some that I intensely dislike.

Likes:

1. Ease of set up and use and the instant communication it provides to people and areas on the net
2. Discovery of entirely new industries, interests and mindsets
3. Ability to connect to a wide range of people, without prejudice or discrimination; to relate directly to people you did not know that existed 3 minutes ago
4. The general respect and politeness of the exchanges
5. Real-time updates on what is happening out there. While it may not always be the truth necessarily, it can come quite close to it on occasions
6. Creation of my own personal newsfeed in realtime
7. Ease of following and unfollowing - unlike facebook, there is no sense of ego loss. Easy come, easy go
8. The sense of expansion that comes with the growing network - it has already had an impact on my blog traffic, as well
9. Some good iPhone interface applications help keep up when on the move Twteety, Twitterphone (both on the Apple iTunes store) to keep you abreast
10. A new toy to play with. This should never be underestimated.

Dislikes

1. Cumbersome interface despite the apparent simplicity
2. Site can be quite slow and unreactive
3. To become really powerful, you need to master additional tools (more time, energy, learning - surely all for a good cause)
4. The amount of self-proclaimed social media gurus and twitter specialists that in reality are not much into sharing - except for their share of your wallet
5. Time required. Don’t get me wrong  - i enjoy spending time, and even think it is worthwhile - but on a busy day, I find it difficult to switch to Twitter and tend to turn it off
6. A vague sense of frustration about all that great stuff that you miss out on when you are not watching
7. Not sure today that the time invested is really beneficial - although this hesitation alone seems to tell me otherwise.  

So these are some first impressions. Overall, a good start. I am now celebrating my 200th follower (@N3W_Media), so the mass twitterers may still deride my early efforts. However, Twittergrader puts me at 92/100 this morning, up from 24 a few weeks ago.

Twitter paradise cannot be that far  away. Thank you to all those that follow me: @jeanmarcrommes.

(To be continued)

Fragmentation, convergence, contribution

The world is becoming more and more abstract. Certainties of the past are dwindling; we are moving in an ever escalating spiral of innovation, change and, more recently, turbulence.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this: cautious withdrawal and open embrace. 

Whichever you "chose" (and a lot could be said about that conscious or unconscious choice) will have an impact on our individual and collective outcomes and futures (yes, with a plural s). 

Yet there is more to it: the fragmentation of the traditional monoliths (state, company, society, family) is not just a breakup of cherished habits. It is also a powerful invitation to connect with people"other" side with the "other" context, with the people we do not usually do business (or buddiness) with. 

The opening of new intellectual and social portals produces and generates vast opportunities to talk to people of varying backgrounds, knowledge levels and semantic fields and linguistic jargons. Organisations, well established, like Ted, or more recent ones like Mindshare, highlight the growing desire to converge and exchange field notes with people from different scientific backgrounds.

In this interactive mash-up between social sciences, cognitive discoveries, business priorities and fractal movement, each of us can make a contribution. 

What we sometimes forget today, in the fearful chatter of recession an depression, is the basic fact that we still live in an economy of abundance, as measured in terms of available information, accelerated creativity and opportunities to shape and create the new paradigms for the century, while helping those around us that may be struggling today.

I am fundsmentally convinced that the sucess stories of the future will be written not by those who ask "What do I have to lose?" but by those who act on the question "How can I help you succeed?" 

The How of the What, in the context of the Why

This week I had a lot of conversations around leadership. There is lots of great literature available on the subject, and I will create a list of the most important one of these days.

One comment I got this week was along the lines that "sometimes these books cloud the issue instead of clarifying it for me. The author's thinking process looks great on paper, makes lots of sense, but then when I have to apply it to real life situations, it turns into quite a different animal." 

Readers get lost in models, definitions, principles and graphics. Managers don't know if they should use a different theory at the beginning of the week and then end, in the morning and the evening.

What the entire leadership discussion might just come down to is three things: the What, the How and the Why.

The What: management roles - objectives, responsibilities, targets, directions, tasks,  deadlines, deliverables… This is what managers get hired for in the first place. It is their job.

The How: leadership roles (and styles) - personal credibility, accountability, inspiration, motivation, communication, handling of (own and others') emotions… This is how each person builds up the work culture in and around him, how she relates to her staff and what environment they chose to work in (Yes there is a choice element in that as well…).

The Why: What do we want to achieve in the end, why are we making all these efforts - vision, mission, values… The Why provides the context, background and the ultimate reason for our actions. Without it a vital piece is missing and this makes the manager's job virtually impossible.

The consistency and overall effectiveness of the manager (in managing others or/and themselves) lies in the careful reflexion on and mutual balancing of the What, the How and the Why.

And if you look closely, that works for pretty much everything in life.