A Welsh View: How Long Do You Spend Blogging?

A Welsh View: How Long Do You Spend Blogging?

A question to the bloggers who read my site? On average, how long do you devote to blogging each day? That includes finding/thinking of material to blog about and actually composing posts.

I spend far too much time blogging - probably around 3 hours plus a day - and it starts to become difficult when you have programming assignments to do and lectures to attend (who knows what things will be like when I start working again). I'm always looking for ways to streamline things but I guess it just takes a long time to read a load of different blogs/sites.

Bob Dylan: With God on Our Side

Bob Dylan: With God on Our Side

Quote of the day.

Franklin P. Jones

"Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his."

New Pope's old car on eBay

Cory Doctorow: Pope Ratzinger's Cardinalmobile -- the VW Golf he drove when he was a mere Cardinal -- is up for sale on eBay. Link (via Monochrom)

7m-high electrical garbage statue made from one Briton's lifetime's waste

Cory Doctorow: The Weee Man is a 7m-high, 3.3-tonne sculptural humaniod gracing London's South Bank, made entirely from waste electrical and electronic products (hence "weee"). The 3.3 tonne weight represents the total mass of WEEE that the average Briton junks in her or his lifetime, so it's not just pretty and awesome: it's also thought-provoking. Link

via Boing Boing

wanna look like a doll ? or have a doll's look ? the eyes .

 Tokyo teens have come to admire the outsize peepers on hand-drawn heroines. "The bigger the character's eyes, the cuter they look," says 15-year-old Yumi Koba. And now, thanks to Share Generate's Nadesicco Black, emulating Sailor Moon is no longer a dream. Because the lenses are nonprescription, schoolgirls can even order them - like everything else - via cell phone.  Link via Boing Boing.

Car Smashes into second floor of house.

David Pescovitz: Last night, a car flew from the street into the top floor of a house in Basingstoke, Hants, England and dropped back to the ground. The driver and passenger were seriously injured but are in stable condition. Police say the car hit a curb and "launched through the air."

Joyce Harman told BBC News how she and her husband Joe were woken by the crash.

"It was just horrendous," she said.

"My husband thought the dog had knocked something over downstairs but as he got to the bedroom door he could see the hole in the wall and all the furniture moved.

"That's when we came downstairs and saw the car there."

Link . via Boing Boing

Seven... the sins.

The thoughts that creep in the back of your head. you’ve heard yourself a million times. well, you’re not alone. some people even posted them. Not Proud.

JAS: Arabic Star Names

JAS: Arabic Star Names : Many star names are of Arabic origin, most of which were used by other nations in the past following almost the same Arabic nomenclature, and many of which have survived in modern scientific astronomical atlases. Link.

Quote of the Day :

Quote of the Day : "Sometimes when you look in his eyes you get the feeling that someone else is driving." David Letterman

PostSecret

Share your darkest secret, on a homemade postcard, for all to see. Link

Wealth-Lab Technical Analysis, Charting and Trading Systems : the first interactive trading system development laboratory on the web.  Develop and back test your own stock market trading systems, and explore the systems contributed by other members.  We rank all submitted trading systems monthly, so you see which strategies are working best in the current market conditions. Link

The Code Project - Stepper Motor Control through Parallel Port - VB / VBScript :  The article is on stepper motor, reaching ports, and controlling it. The article allows you to control speed, direction, and step size of a stepper motor. If you are interested in robotics, motion control, or just want to learn about this widely used motor in almost every electronic gadget like floppy drives, printer, scanner, robots, every device; then you should try building this versatile stepper motor control. Link

The Pricelessware list is a compilation of software collected through a yearly vote by the participants of the "alt.comp.freeware" newsgroup. It is a list of what people have voted as "the best of the best in Freeware". Link

Grant Robinson : Guess-the-google launcher : After creating Montage-a-google, several people wrote to me suggesting I make a game based on the same technology. Montage-a-google is a simple web app that uses Google's image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms) entered by the user. Guess-the-google reverses this process by picking the keywords for you, the player must then guess what keyword made up the image - it's surprisingly addictive…. Link

Just how upfront with you is the banking representative who helps you open an account? Chances are he or she tells you about the various products and services the bank offers. You may even receive a list of fees or be directed to the bank's Web site to see the list. We thought we'd fill you in on things you won't be told, but you might find out over time.

Link

Perfectionist, huh ?

The 80% solution

I'm always interested (since I want to be a Slacker Manager too) in what constitutes a "complete" job or project.  What I mean is - when is "done" done enough?

The best example I can give of this is an old sales mantra which instructs sales people to do just enough to win and no more.  Any more work or effort beyond what it takes to win is lost and cannot be recovered.  I look at this as a corollary to Pareto's rule.  His rule of course has usually been stated that 20% of the people do 80% of the work.  What I want to know is - how often does 80% of the work constitute enough of a solution to declare a project or effort complete?

This should be of great interest to people who have a passion for productivity, and for those who want to extend the minimum amount of effort to be successful in any endeavor.  I have a collaborator who can quite honestly take over an hour to write a 20 line email.  Now, that email is a humdinger of an email, but it leaves me wondering if that email couldn't have been written in 10 minutes, and my colleague have moved on to other work.  Was the additional 50 minutes of editing and re-arranging words really that valuable?

Don't get me wrong - I am not advocating cutting corners or doing less than a complete job on any piece of work - from an email to a major project.  But I am suggesting that we often lard up an effort with unnecessary and extraneous steps and meetings and documents that don't add much to the final product.  Part of this, I am sure, comes from the fact that too often we can't define with much certainty what the end goal or the deliverable should look like, so we are forced to toss in some other stuff just in case.  Additionally, I think many people believe they should be rewarded for giving 110% percent and demonstrating that by additional frills in a project. Finally, there's a real difference of opinion between the 80 percenters (like me) and the 110 percenters about what constitutes a completed assignment.

When people work for me, I encourage them to do the absolute minimum to achieve the best deliverable they can as quickly as possible, and no more.  I'd much rather have a good, quick, clean deliverable in a short time frame than a perfect one that never gets delivered.

What do you think?  I'd like to hear from the perfectionists who may disagree with this assessment.  Working with people who have a different take on this issue is probably one of the most challenging interpersonal issues in my workplace.  When can we declare a project "complete enough"?  What is gained by going further than necessary?  What's the best way to work with and manage a perfectionist?

One Throat to Choke

One Throat to Choke

I climb up on my soapbox today with a slightly different outlook and thoughts about productivity.  Coming into work today I was locked out of my building.  Not because I forgot my keys or my card key, but because it's Daylight Savings Time and the folks who manage our building did not program the card reader for Daylight Savings Time.  Now, this is not the first problem we've had with our building management firm, but it led me to think about working productively with others.

The biggest challenge to working with our building management firm, and with many other firms, is that there is not "One throat to choke".  This is another colorful phrase I picked up from my time in sales.  What it means is that the customer doesn't really care if there are several groups or business functions involved in providing a solution, as long as the customer gets to interact and beat up on one person who owns the problem of making the customer happy.

Our building management firm has one person responsible for security and grounds, one for janitorial, one for HVAC and so forth.  There is no multi-disciplinary account manager we can work with.  While this organization may be great for the building management firm, it stinks when we work with it, since there is no one overriding person worried about making us happy.

I don't think these guys are an isolated case.  Many businesses I work with are not organized to work successfully and productively with customers.  A good case in point is my bank.  There's a person responsible for checking, a person responsible for savings, a person responsible for investments and a different person responsible to work with me if I want loans.  No one person in that bank understands my value as a customer and the way they are organized gets in the way of doing business with them. In fact, sometimes their organization gets in the way of working with me, since the folks who managed my established accounts (like checking or investments) are worried that the folks who are trying to sell me new services (like an equity loan) will screw up the relationship.

What I want from organizations that I work with is one throat to choke.  I want them to organize in a way that treats my needs and requirements as a customer as paramount.  I frankly don't care how they are organized internally or what the bureaucracy or politics looks like.  What I want is one face to the customer and one person who owns my problems.  The challenge is that many firms look at an account management position such as this as "overhead".  What it provides to the customer is faster response, and the security in the knowledge that someone is working to represent your needs and interests.  This helps me work more quickly and efficiently, and hopefully get answers faster.

I've asked you to staple yourself to an order to see how your internal processes work.  How about the choke-ability of your firm?  What would your external customers say its like working with your firm?  How about internally?  Is it easy to find and share information across business units or functions?  Do people understand that "that's not my area or not my job" is not an acceptable answer?

Leadership is situational

Leadership is situational

I realized after my post yesterday that I had more to write about leaders and managers.  My point in all of this is the press and the American public tend to praise "leaders" and ignore or put down managers.  Both are crucial, yet almost all we read about are the Enron types or the Jack Welch types.  Do we really need another Jack Welch book?

Anyway, I thought I would add to my differences list from yesterday.

1.  Leaders worry about WHAT should be done, managers worry about HOW it should be done.  Leaders often don't understand what it takes to actually accomplish something.  In many cases this is good, since they overcome what had been perceived to be roadblocks.  Managers are usually the people who figure out how to accomplish something once the direction is set.  A leader without effective managers is constantly pointing to the future but never getting anywhere. 

2.  Leadership is situational while management is a core discipline.  There is no one effective leadership "style" but all good managers work to some common core principles.  It's been suggested that leadership is innate, something we are born with, yet there are many successful leaders with very different styles.  Compare George Bush and Bill Clinton, or Eisenhower or Patton.  Many different styles of leadership can be successful given the circumstances.  Look to Krispy Kreme.  The new CEO there is a "turn around specialist".  I think leadership is demonstrated differently in different situations and contexts.  Managers, however, have common tools and goals.  A good manager defines the work for his team, ensures everyone is aware of the goals and expectations, builds project plans to help people manage the work, and constantly seeks to provide the help and support the team needs to be successful. 

3.  Leaders are the bull horns but managers are the translators.  Leaders talk a lot, to customers, to shareholders, to partners and to the financial community.  Most leaders of businesses today have defined their roles as Mr or Mrs Outside - talking to the press and building the visibility of the business.  Managers hear and understand what the leaders are saying and try to translate that into actions for their teams.  Managers attempt to parse the instructions and goals, breaking down the larger vision into actions that people can actually begin to do. 

In my mind, leaders and managers in an organization are important, but I can run a business with three or four competent managers and no real "leader", but I certainly can't run a business with several "leaders" and no managers.  After the downsizing of the eighties and nineties, we've eliminated a significant portion of mid-management.  The attention we pay to the CEO has escalated while the pay scale has gone through the roof.  Yet quietly and efficiently, the folks who get stuff done everyday are still not given the credit or attention they deserve, and the pay has not increased much at the manager level - at least not anywhere near the way we compensate CEOs or other well-publicized leaders.

OK - off my soapbox and back to more productivity and innovation focused posts in the near future.  Just had to get that off my chest.

When is a team not a team

When is a team not a team?

Here's a quick joke for context - When is a door not a door?  When it's ajar.

When is a team not a team?  When the goals, objectives and expectations of the members of the team aren't the same.  Then, the "team" is merely a collection of people who have different agendas.

We are working with one such "team" right now.  The dynamics are very interesting.

This team was nominally brought together to investigate some shortcomings in their current systems and to recommend new applications and systems to improve productivity.  However, rather than adopt a common goal and set of expectations, each person has brought their own ideas and biases to the table. 

One person is convinced that there is no problem with the current way of doing things.  One person is convinced that all the team needs is to do what he suggests and that all other discussion is useless.  One person has locked on to a large and expensive software application because the vendor told him it would meet his needs, which aren't the needs of the group.  Another person in the team wants to implement several applications or custom solutions to solve several point problems and is not worried about integration.  None of these folks has the vision to define the goals beyond their own special interests or needs.

Now, this may be a team in name, but it's not a team in spirit or outcome.  Everyone is out to defend turf, to take on as few new responsibilities as possible and to get only what they want out of any new system with as few compromises as possible.  No, this is not a kindergarten class but an actual example of a set of professionals who were supposed to be a team, but have not decided to work together yet for the common good.

Before you laugh or point fingers, ask yourself - are teams in our organization really that different?  What common visions and goals do teams in our organization share?  Are teams united for success across all members and functions of the team? 

Successful teamwork is about getting everyone on the team, as much as possible, to work for the common good of the team and the organization, leaving aside as much as possible their personal or functional biases and "wins" to get what's best for the team and organization as a whole.  Teams function very well when they have common goals and ideals, and not at all when they don't.

What we have in the team we are working with right now is simply a collection of individuals who are seeking to optimize their own personal agendas and goals rather than improve the working environment for the organization as a whole.  The leadership of this organization is going to have to step in soon to force some goodwill and corporate goals on this group, or this will become a circular firing squad.

When is a team not a team?  When it has no common objectives or goals.