Bas de Baar's shared items in Google Reader

Ow.

2009-11-10T12:11:49Z

So Selma and I are at Barbara Sher’s retreat in North Carolina.

It’s about biggifying your work through writing and speaking, and it’s fabulous because Barbara is even more Barbara in person than you think she’s going to be.

Man. That is one smart, loony, insightful, creative, magnetic lady. With sharp, sharp eyes and a dirty, dirty mouth.

And I love her.

If I’m that cool when I’m seventy-freaking-four, the world will be a good place. She’s hot.

And this thing happened that I really need to talk about with you guys.

We did a very interesting series of exercises yesterday.

The first part involved embodying someone who totally disagrees with our message in a loud, obnoxious way.

Channeling Dr. Laura, as Barbara so perfectly put it.

So we each stood up in turn, on camera, and gave a shout-ey fist-shaking rant — a rant about why anyone who teaches the stuff we’re trying to put out into the world is a moron, a reckless maniac and a selfish bastard who should be ashamed to be alive.

Fun.

You really got to feel the essence of what Barbara calls the anti-message. And it just makes what you know that much more clear and powerful. Good schtuff.

And then?

The second part was an opportunity to refute everything your evil preachy Anti-You has said.

To talk back to those arguments. To speak your truth and all that stuff.

Each person gets up (again, on camera) and imagines that the room is filled with his or her people. Well, the people who need their specific message the most.

Except that — oh no! — your people have been listening to the bitchy, authoritative doomsayers and assorted loud-mouthed “experts” who have been convincing them how wrong they are to want whatever it is they want.

And now your people need you to show up so you can say it like it is and remind them why it’s okay to be themselves.

Powerful, right?

But that’s when it all went weird. For me, at least.

So I’m thinking, oh this will be brilliant.

This is where we get to speak to our people and meet their pain.

To be the antidote. To show them what is false about this anti-message and to remind them about what they really need.

To turn it around so that their people get to be met where they are again. You know, bring the compassion back. The empathy. The love.

Awesome.

And I know people have different approaches, blah blah blah, so of course I figured that my version would be probably include more of a hippie-ass thing than most people’s.

I mean, my whole thing is about meeting the pain first, so yes, I’d probably end up acknowledging the stuck before getting around to talking about why not to listen to the dream-killers.

Fine.

But I was not even slightly prepared for what actually happened when it came time for us to speak to the people — our people — who have just gone through some really crappy brainwashing.

What actually happened.

People did show up with their messages, yes — with power and conviction.

But then somehow they stayed in the role of the yelling, accusatory, finger-wagging authority figure.

Once they stood up to talk to their people, they dished out the same kind of abuse they’d delivered in the Dr. Laura role — just with the message flipped around.

So, example:

Instead of the (fake) message being “you’re wrong and your dreams should curl up and die”, the (real) message became “you’re wrong and the people who try to kill your dreams should curl up and die”.

Instead of the message being “it’s not okay to be yourself, who do you think you are, anyway”, the message became “it’s not okay to not trust yourself and how dare you listen to anyone who says otherwise”.

When people in the audience (still in character) raised tentative questions, fears and what-ifs, they were pushed aside with sarcasm and maybe even derision.

It was as if taking on a Dr. Laura persona automatically shut off all possibilities except for “I’m right and you’re wrong“. Like, the sweetest people in the world were totally yelling at their people.

And I got scared and ran away.

Here’s my thought on this.

I absolutely get why we have this desire to just shake someone until they get it. To “spit the truth in their face” as we say in Hebrew.

It makes sense. You have a message. You want to get it to the people who need it before they lose themselves.

Double especially when you’ve seen the people you want to help most — your people — be abused like that by someone whose advice is not only not helping, but actively harming them.

That is a scary, sucky, frustrating feeling (I have it too) — you just want to set things straight. Completely legitimate.

And at the same time, I really, truly believe that it’s up to us to meet them where they are — where they are now.

Think about what someone goes through when, instead of meeting their pain, we push it aside.

We negate their experience.

And if we’ve done that, the essence of our smartnesses is lost in the rant.

It’s not helpful at all.

Not. Effective. Trust me.

You don’t actually get anywhere by being mean to your Right People. Well, that’s not completely true.

You do if you’re a dominatrix. You do if your Right People happen to love being ranted at. That could totally be a great fit. And if that’s the case, awesome. Yell away.

But let’s assume for now that your Right People are in pain because of where they are right now, and you’re screaming at them for not doing the thing you want them to do that will resolve that pain.

As far as I can tell, that’s not giving them a much different experience than the one they got from the people who burdened them with abusive advice to begin with — or that they’re getting from themselves.

I really, truly believe this:

Our various Right People aren’t there to be yelled at and chastised.*

*Unless, again, they’re consenting adults and they’ve told you that this is what they really want — and you’re okay giving it.

Bottom line: there’s really nothing wrong with respecting the pain of the person who happens to be in it.

Your Right People are the ones you want to help.

Obviously your dream, whatever it is, is born of truly wanting to help people who have or have had your pain.

So your Right people are the ones who share that pain. They’re the ones who need your ways of interacting with that pain and moving through it.

You’re not really going to make them see the light by yelling at them for having pain.

But even if that worked? Even if that were the most effective approach in the entire world? It still makes you look a lot like the abuser. Even when you’re totally not.

The whole point of giving the world what we know is that we get to be the ones who meet their pain and honor their pain.

It’s pretty freaking hard to give people ways to recover and heal from that pain if you’re inflicting more of it by insisting that they’re stupid for not understanding that you’re right.

Finding the way to your Right People.

So yeah. The key thing about meeting people where you are is (annoyingly!) … meeting yourself where you are.

So … instead of talking about that, I’m just going to do it.

This is me, meeting myself where I am.

I feel tired. That’s where I am. Permission to feel tired.

I feel disoriented because I’m a huge introvert, and spending three days in a row with people and practically no alone time is tearing me apart. That’s where I am. Permission to feel disoriented.

I feel frustrated and helpless when I see people yelling at their supposed Right People (even in an exercise) when those people express their pain, because I need my environment to reflect the things that are important to me. Like support, kindness, patience.

I feel anxious when I see some of the people I’m retreating with yelling at their Right People because they (my fellow Retreaters) have such amazing, loving things to give to the world and totally deserve to be all biggified.

And I feel concerned because I suspect that it’s not going to work. Maybe because the kind of people who need their messages most aren’t going to be open to a violent message (even if it’s about something cuddly like self-love or whatever).

Anyway. That’s where I am. Permission to feel frustrated, helpless, anxious, concerned.

Permission to not want to feel frustrated, helpless, anxious, concerned.

Permission to take my time to work through this, to find out what I need, to ask for what I need, to take it to the Whine Bar.

And to practice cursing like a sailor because I want to be like Barbara when I grow up. Only me. And with a duck.

If this kinda seemed like your thing, you might like these too:

Join us on Facebook

2009-11-09T15:00:00Z

Stepping into Project Management is now in Facebook, join us here now.

Upside vs. downside

2009-11-09T10:22:00Z

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

At the hospital, it's probably 5% on the upside (the doctor who puts in the stitches, say) and 95% on the downside (all the avoidance of infection or lawsuits, records to keep, forms to sign). Most of the people you interact with in a hospital aren't there to help you get what you came for (to get better) they're there to help you avoid getting worse. At an avant garde art show, on the other hand, perhaps 95% of the effort goes into creating and presenting shocking ideas, with just 5% devoted to keeping the place warm or avoiding falls and spills as you walk in.

Which is probably as it should be.

But what about you and your organization? As you get bigger and older, are you busy ensuring that a bad thing won't happen that might upset your day, or are you aggressively investing in having a remarkable thing happen that will delight or move a customer?

A new restaurant might rely on fresh vegetables and whatever they can get at the market. The bigger, more established fast-food chain starts shipping in processed canned food. One is less reliable with bigger upside, the other—more dependable with less downside.

Here's a rule that's so inevitable that it's almost a law: As an organization grows and succeeds, it sows the seeds of its own demise by getting boring. With more to lose and more people to lose it, meetings and policies become more about avoiding risk than providing joy.

Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management

2009-11-06T18:56:10Z

Here’s the latest version of my storytelling for knowledge management in projects presentation. Enjoy!

Recorded Presentation via Vimeo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Don’t want to listen to me drone on and on? You can view just the slides on Slideshare:

Anti-Social Media: The Dark Side of Authenticity

2009-11-05T08:25:17Z

A couple of hours ago – it’s 2 am right now — as I was getting ready to close up shop for the night, I went onto Twitter one last time before heading for bath and bed. I tweeted this.

For those of you whose bosses don’t let you on Twitter, it read:

Getting ready for a hot bath and glass of wine with @chrisbrogan and @julien. Well, their book, anyway. #illtakewhaticanget

I went. I had my bath. As I was getting ready to go to bed, I remembered I was waiting on something, so I logged back on. I had a handful of DMs from someone I know who didn’t like what I said. Not a troll. Someone I know.

I’m not going to tell you what was said because my mother reads this blog and we’ll leave it at that.

Anti-Social Media

The Social Media Big Shots are out there talking about how fantastic it is to get out there and be social. To connect. To be authentic. To be yourself. To show a human face. And I’m on board. Social media is cool and has real benefits and can connect your business with customers in a way people five years ago couldn’t have dreamed of. Awesome.

But here’s the problem. When the Social Media Big Shots talk about showing the human side of business, what often fails to get translated is that they’re really speaking to Big Business. They’re speaking to businesses that previously did not have a human face.

As an ittybiz owner, you’re all human face. Your human face is all you’ve got.

When Ford gets in the social media game, they meet some of their potential customers on the customers’ home turf, and it’s great. They have very little to lose. Brandon the Intern chills out on Twitter all day, liaising with people, handling customer service issues, maybe messing around with the search function to see who’s talking. He gets to listen in when people say “I love my new F-150” and he gets to murmer sympathetically when they say, “Man, the F-150 is overpriced.”

But if somebody says something really, really awful to Brandon, they’re not saying it to Brandon. They’re saying it to Ford. Brandon is not the business. Brandon gets to go home.

You are your business. You can’t go home from being yourself.

When you get involved in social media, if you do it right, you open up a vein. You become vulnerable. To be authentic, you have to be really authentic.

In this example, I was being exactly who I would be in person. A little silly. Mildly flirtatious. Not quite appropriate. Authentic.

The Big Shots are so busy telling people like you and me about all of the people who are going to love us for being ourselves that they neglect to mention the people who are going to hate us for being ourselves.

When Penelope Trunk tweeted, from a meeting, that she was in the middle of miscarrying an unwanted baby, there was a public outcry. I guess that was a little too authentic.

No time to reflect

With in-person relationships, there’s time to reflect. When people aren’t your Right People, you have the time and the space and the power to get them out of your circle before they can do much damage. Usually, they don’t want to be in your circle in the first place, so you don’t even have to deal with it at all.

Online, where we reply to emails from strangers in a heartbeat and send @ replies on Twitter and “friend” people we couldn’t pick out of a police line-up, there is no time to think. There isn’t enough information to evaluate whether this person is nice or not nice. You can’t do any due diligence. You can’t even read body language.

We have to let people in before we know if it’s safe.

Having people say nasty shit to you sucks. Human psychology does not change just because we’ve found a shiny new medium. It doesn’t matter how much nice stuff people say about you, the bad stuff still really smarts. It’s damn hard to let it roll off my back when someone says something mean in person, and the invention of the internet doesn’t make it any easier.

So what’s the solution?

I don’t know if there is one. Now it’s 305 am. I’m guessing Jack will be up in about half an hour for his standard middle of the night “where the fuck is my mother?” I can’t sleep. I’m not tired. I’m confused. I’m hurt. I’m upset that I’m not saying all this right. But I don’t want to put it off until tomorrow because by tomorrow, I’ll be back to wearing my business hat. I’ll be back to saying don’t feed the trolls and telling myself to keep a tight budget on my emotional currency.

But right now, I’m feeling like I’m standing here shouting all alone.

I feel like our colleagues have abandoned us. (Not Scott and Elizabeth, from above. At least they’re talking about it.) I feel like, in order to look strong, they’re not telling the whole truth. I feel like the Big Shots stop listening when it stops being Kumbaya and unicorns. I feel like my fellow bloggers aren’t talking because they don’t want to appear weak.

The public rule for the nasty comment or wall post or tweet or DM is “don’t get riled up” and “don’t let it bother you”. OK. I’m okay with that. It’s good advice, as far as it goes. But it’s in line with the weight loss article that says, “to lose weight, eat less food”. Gee. Thanks.

Basically, I think there’s something missing in this whole authenticity thing.

If we were REALLY being authentic, we’d admit it hurts like hell.

Wiring Up Business- Two Channel Social

2009-11-04T06:14:20Z

Let’s imagine you’re a small or medium sized business and looking to use social software to improve communications on many fronts: support, service, marketing, etc. If you chose to use a service like Twitter, for instance, for some of this communicating, I can see the need to have a two-channel mindset: one public and customer-facing and the other private and business-facing. On the public channel, you’d talk with customers and prospects about the business, including everything from support help to promotional opportunities, to general good will. On the other channel, you’d communicate with people about the business itself, such as directing attention to important matters, or keeping track of employee activities, etc.

These could be all within a public system like Twitter, with the private channel activities being performed via Direct Message only, or the private conversations could be via a private platform like Socialcast or Yammer. The benefits to keeping them all in Twitter is a simple user experience for employees of the business. The downside would be the potential to spill private business into the public channel in error.

Now, where this gets interesting is when you think of either b2b additions to this, or affinity relationships. What if all the people up and around Jay Peak in Vermont, like Steve Wright all kept a Twitter list of local related businesses. Maybe Steve’s list would have alternative lodging and dining options, some medical professionals, massage therapists, ski repair shops, etc, all wired together in a Twitter list, so that he could monitor their public conversation for potential crossover opportunities. Suppliers to Steve could see his needs easily. Steve could assist in directing customers to related businesses while being up to the minute with what the situation is at their establishment (this all assumes that everyone’s keeping their channels updated).

The only thing missing is some kind of “memory” for the system. For instance, if Steve finds out that Boyd from the ski repair shop is going away for two days, how will he alert the next day’s crew to this information? And how will the overall “system” stay aware of such logistical changes? It would probably require some kind of alternative platform, like either a Facebook fan page that relates to that wired up group, or maybe a group blog. Either way, it’s not too hard to add it on.

What makes this different than email? Brevity, for one. For another, it’s a more flexible sharing option requiring less duplication of effort. For another, it serves many purposes in the public-facing channel mode, and helps speed up processes on the private in-business mode.

Squint a little, and you’ll see a few other ways to design these experiences for a business. Can you see the value?

Consultants – do we need them?

2009-11-03T23:55:52Z

I ran across an interesting post today titled “Why you don’t need Social Media Consultants” on the Brains on Fire Blog. The main thesis of the post is: “social media consultants provide little value…they do nothing more than you already know how to do so you don’t need them”.

In the article, Spike Jones says:

If you listen REALLY closely to their [social media consultant's] advice, you start to realize that most of it you already know. Because you have all the basic tools you need: Your humanity. Your ability to communicate with people around you. And your intuition. Because when you think about it, using social media is just a natural extension of yourself. Asking questions. Listening. Responding. And remember, social media apps are tactics. And tactics are tools. Sure, you might need some guidance on how to use that bandsaw, but you picked up a hammer and pretty much got the gist after you hit your thumb a few times.

In other words, we’re getting all worked up about (wait for it, wait for it) common sense. Common courtesy. And the best way to find that is to take off your marketing hat and use the hat you were born with – being a person.

Emphasis mine.

I have an issue with this statement. Most organizations don’t know how to be human anymore.

Before I continue…I wholeheartedly agree with the premise of Spike’s argument (i.e., we already know how to be human) but I would argue that most companies have removed much of humanity from business. Many organizations have been built to remove the human side of the business and have replaced it with processes and management…I’ve written about this before in a post titled Humanity and Business“…jump over and read that post for more on the subject of bringing humanity back to business.

Take a look at Jay Baer’s comment on the above article. In the comment, Jay makes a few valid points…one of them is:

What social media consultants do best – at least those focused on tactical agnosticism – is to help companies connect the dots, align internal resources, and understand not that social media is about more than tools and pressing buttons, but about a cultural shift that manifests itself up and down the organization.

Amen. Re-read that (and Jay’s entire comment)….did you catch the powerful stuff there?

A good social media consultant should help an organization bring about cultural change. That’s exactly what any good consultant should do….help the organization understand how to change to adapt to new realities. Whether that reality is purchasing a new software platform or using social media to build relationships with clients.

Back to my original question: Do you need consultants? Hell yes you do.

Why? Here’s a few reasons:

Consultants bring an external view
Consultants bring experience
Consultants bring expertise
Consultants bring relevance
Consultants bring authority

Whether you like it or not, consultants are a necessity. Perhaps most organizations don’t need a social media consultant…but most organizations do need help understanding how to be more human.

That’s what a good consultant (social media or otherwise) sh0uld bring to the table. A good SM consultant should help organizations understand how to be more human while building relationships with their clients. A good IT consultant should help organizations bring humanity back to the IT organization by helping the organization understand that IT is more than processes, workflows and reasons ‘not to’.

Do you need consultants – yes you do. If you’re looking for a consultant, find one that ignores the technology, buzzwords and tools (at the beginning) and talks about your organization, your needs and hopefully they will also talk about being more ‘human’. Find a consultant that talks about ‘humanity and business’ and hire them on the spot. You’ll not regret it.

Social Media and Social Proof: On Twitter Lists, Metrics, Mammals and Marketing

2009-11-02T10:00:37Z

First, I’ll give you some background before I get into my screaming, raging rant. Cool? (Oh, and please do not take this explanation as endorsement, OK? Some people have never heard of Twitter and I want them to be able to experience the full force of my rancor just as much as you can.)

Twitter is a social media site. The people who choose to be alerted to your updates (tweets) are called followers. For a long time, your worth as a human being was calculated by subtracting the amount of people you follow from the number of people who follow you.

This little junior high clique-stravaganza was ruined when some enterprising people discovered that, with most Twitter users, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back. So I could wreck the whole hierarchy by following 10,000 people, getting followed back by 7,000, drop all my original 10,000 except for 16, and look like a celebrity. (7,000 people deem me worth listening to, but I only return the favor to a very special 16. Aren’t I elite?)

All this bullshit made Twitter look lame, and it resulted in people following WAY more people than they could ever reasonably connect with. How can you track 10,000 people? You can’t.

Now, in the last several days, Twitter has rolled out a new function called lists. Lists allow you to… make lists.

You could have lists of fellow Etsy sellers or tech geeks or comedians or Torontonians. You could also have lists called A Listers, My Heroes, or Rockstars.

This is about where everybody’s shit got tragically lost. Most people voiced their opinions in the 140 characters Twitter allows for their updates, but a few people have written some interesting blog posts.

Chris Brogan doesn’t dig lists because they’re inherently exclusionary. He’s right. He’s a celebrity in his niche and including Dude A but excluding Dude B puts him in the position of making a statement he doesn’t want to make. If he participates at all, he’s going to hurt some feelings and he’s a nice guy who doesn’t want to do that.

Robert Scoble thinks Chris Brogan is being Mr. Namby Pamby Pants. He says lists are functional sorting tools and if people want to sit in the corner and pout because they didn’t make a Big Shot list, well, man the fuck up. He is also right, except for the Mr. Namby Pamby Pants Thing. (Have you met Chris Brogan? I have, and the man is built like a brick shit house.)

Dave Troy says that lists have permanently changed the economics of Twitter, and has questions about how Twitter is going to deal with derogatory lists (Top 50 Douchebags In Social Media or Worst Fucking Posers In The NHL) and the effect this might have on what people are willing to do to “get listed”.

Ryan Rancatore thinks lists are the bomb because they allow us to follow everyone who follows us. Cause you don’t have to read the tweets, see? You just put everybody you WANT to hear from on a list (public or private) and then you can safely ignore the noise from everybody else. Everybody gets to feel good because you followed them. There’s some merit here, although following everybody who follows you gets you more spam than an Okinawa mess hall.

Here’s what you need to know and it has nothing to do with Twitter

If you sell anything, you are a marketer. And marketers are very, very concerned with social proof.

As human beings, we operate on two levels, the ape level and the Homo sapiens level. The ape lives in a group and has a difficult time functioning outside the alpha beta hierarchy. The Homo sapiens learns how to count before he’s three. Given those two factors, is it any wonder we really dig things like lists?

We need a framework. We need to know where we stand. We need to know where we fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.

More importantly, YOUR CUSTOMERS need a framework. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you stand. YOUR CUSTOMERS need to know where you fit in relation to everybody else. Numbers are a handy way to do that.

When Shoemoney first showed a photograph of himself with his $132,994.97 Adsense check, people went nutso. Much more nutso than they would have had he said, “I support myself and my family quite comfortably with Google Adsense ads.” When Darren Rowse calls himself a problogger, you believe him when you see he has 129,000 RSS subscribers. And when I put that big shiny number in the top right of your screen, I got 4,000 new readers in a month. I guess I get to be taken seriously now that the writing’s on the proverbial wall.

People really like social proof. The social media consultant with 112 Twitter followers and 9 Facebook fans dies broke. Doesn’t matter that she’s actually just above this petty cliquishness. Doesn’t matter that she really knows her shit. The public cares about her numbers and if she wants to eat, she has to care too.

Should we act this way? Should we judge people like this? Should we assign such a high value to arbitrary numbers?

It doesn’t fucking matter what we SHOULD do. As a marketer, ALL you care about is what we DO.

SHOULD we decide not to date a guy because he lives with his mother? SHOULD we reject a job applicant because they smell like dog food? SHOULD we balk when our daughter’s new boyfriend shows up with hair down to his ass and a face full of tattoos?

Irrelevant. We do. And that’s all that matters.

Am I in favor of lists? It doesn’t matter. They’re here, and people are going to use them as another measure of your (and my) success. If we didn’t use lists as a metric, we’d find something else.

People like numbers. Get used to it.

Project managers on Twitter

2009-11-02T13:29:02Z

Who are the project managers on Twitter? This video was shot at the PMI Global Congress North America, where I met some of the project managers behind the ‘@’ signs.

You can follow us all by searching for #pmot on Twitter.

Orlando here we come! I’m busy preparing for the PMI North America Congress in a few days, at which me and my fellow PMI New Media Council members will...
Video diary: Congress highlights This video has highlights from all three days: bits I couldn’t fit into the daily diaries from the PMI Global Congress North America in...
Redesign project: complete (well, almost) I can now understand how the people I met at Google had an unrelenting approach to work: coding is addictive. I got up this morning...

Discussions on Programmer Efficiencies

2009-10-31T12:54:00Z

On a typical 8 hour day, how many hours do your programmers spend programming as opposed to other required/necessary activities. Some of these other activities might include non task or project related meetings & phone calls, time lost due to interruptions, training, research not directly connected to a particular task, reporting requirements, etc....I know, I know, there's no such thing as a

Management and leadership

2009-10-28T06:16:00Z

Do projects need leaders more than managers?

Here is a definition of management

Management is the process of achieving organizational goals through engaging in the four major functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling (Bartol & Martin, 1998 in Management).

Here is a definition of leadership (in the enterprise context.)

The process of influencing others to achieve organizational goals (Bartol & Martin, 1998).

Are they mutually exclusive things? Can you lead without management? Can you manage people without leadership?

To be an effective leader you need to have some semblance of organisation. You need to be able to plan your work, understand the outcomes you are trying to achieve lead and motivate others on the way and clear impediments out of the way.

In enterprise project management you need to be able to manage stakeholders, and manage people through a project’s processes. You need to be organised to manage the complexity that comes with the territory. If you aren’t organised you won’t get the respect and trust you need to lead people.

To be an effective manager of people, either reports or stakeholders, you need to be able to lead. Leadership is not technical expertise, and it isn’t having a vision for the product. Leadership is engendering trust in your decisions and confidence in your ability to get things done. Leadership is part of management.

Management without leadership is poor management. Leadership without management is movement seeking a purpose.

The thing is that leadership and management aren’t binary attributes. It isn’t as if you either have it or you don’t. Both of these skills grow as you study and practice them. Actively seeking feedback and reflection speeds up that growth.

So, yes there are some people who are way off the mark, but most, even many of us have great potential.

I was listening to part of a Noam Chomsky interview the other day and he said something like ‘…corporations aren’t run by bad people, they are run by smart people optimising bad systems.’

Maybe a lack of forethought and a lack of big picture thinking is the problem. This thinking falls into the management role of planning, doesn’t it?

And if you need to break out of your current system? That takes leadership.

The art of control without controlling, doing without doing

2009-10-26T10:01:01Z

As a leader — in business, education, or design — how much control do you need? How much can you give up? Is control even the right word? Is it possible to lead without leading? Here is a great TED talk that will get you thinking that has applications for leaders of all types. Former conductor Itay Talgam today runs workshops to help people develop a musician's sense of collaboration, and a conductor's sense of leadership. In this excellent talk at TED Oxford, Itay touches on the art of creating perfect harmony without saying a word by showing the unique styles of six great 20th-century conductors. I point to this presentation for the content, but the delivery and smooth use of video clips to illustrate his points is a good example of how to connect with an audience and get them to think differently.

Questions to consider

Can you lead with less control or a different kind of control?
Must "control" be a zero-sum game?
Is there joy in leading by helping other people tell their own stories?
Is leadership only about technique or is it more about meaning?
Are we using team members, employees, or students as instruments for our own ends or are they viewed as partners, where their development is a central consideration for us?
Is not leadership also about creating the processes, structure, and conditions that allow team members to perform autonomously? Can you still be "in control" and let people be/feel free? Can the structure create the conditions for that freedom?

The best line of the talk: Apparently when Strauss was 30, says Itay Talgam, he wrote the "10 commandments for conductors." My favorite commandment? "Never look at the trombones; it only encourages them." As someone who played trombone in the orchestra all through my school years, I greatly enjoyed that line.

Related
• Benjamin Zander on music and passion

Change Series 1

2009-10-24T20:11:00Z

Watching Chris Brogans overnight success series and it’s a lesson learnt.

We like the brand and the glory that comes with it but most of the time we forget, how hard the work is! So, if you are on your couch and think how cool it is to be Chris Brogan, watch the videos.

Interacting with some of these successful people through my blog and following them on social media, I realize that it’s all hard work. You will be surprised how much of “giving up” is involved in the process. You travel, your work on weekends, you update, read more than average, be innovative to find out ways to keep your readers coming on for more and cut out on the fun and movies most of the time!

Its all work and you can have the fun – working. There’s no shortcut.

I just realized that I’m nowhere near to these people, so amongst all the 3 calls that I took today, I realize that all of them are working today. On a Saturday!

Like you dear newbie; I prefer not working on weekends, but things will change very soon. They already have, while I work on my blog post now and write another for a posting in middle of the week.

Weekends from today will be more work and relaxations happen while working!

(Pic Courtesy)

Interview with Shawn Futterer

2009-10-25T11:42:39Z

Shawn Futterer is a certified project management professional with a broad range of experience. He started his career in 1992 managing quality control projects for a small manufacturing company and has worked on projects in a variety of industries including Healthcare, Education, Construction, Retail and more. Shawn currently works in a PMO for a Fortune 50 Telecom company where he supervises a team of project managers. Over the course of his career, Shawn has managed projects of all shapes and sizes with budgets both large and small. Shawn has a keen interest in the methodologies, strategy, planning and operations. He has over fifteen years of hands-on project management experience and has led, consulted on or contributed to: process development efforts, various methodologies and multiple training programs. Shawn attributes a project managers success to their ability to provide a strategic view and a demonstrated ability to interact and communicate effectively with all levels of an organization. Shawn is also the founder and managing director of the International Community for Project Managers. Find out more about the ICPM at http://www.theicpm.com

Josh: Thank you so much for sharing your background and experience with the pmStudent community Shawn! How did you get your start in Project Management?

Shawn: I started in a small manufacturing company supervising quality control projects. This set the ground work for developing the skills I needed such as attention to detail, time management, schedule management and more. Later I found myself in a project support role for a fortune 100 company. My duties were more of a coordinator than that a PM. I performed this role for roughly 2 years before accepting a promotion to “project manager”. I functioned as a project manager for about 5 years learning our methodology inside and out, apply and developing best practices and learning from others. During that time I became a consistent top performer. Next I accepted a promotion to supervise a team of project managers. In this role I revised out of date policies, enhanced best practices and developed additional methodology strategies focused on scalability and performance that benefit both the individual PM and the overall organization.

My advice to anyone just starting out as a PM = Pay attention, don’t be afraid to suggest ways to improve and most importantly know now that eventually you will fail. When you do I encourage you to learn from it and apply it to future projects. Failure isn’t a 1 time thing, it’s iterative, so mentally prepare yourself for the ups and downs.

Josh: Who do you look up to and have learned a lot from in relation to project management?

Shawn: I’ve found fantastic mentors both in and out of the work place. In the work place I sought a mentor in my PMO director and Vice President. Outside of the job I found industry mentors such as Cornelius Fichtner, Jerry Manas, Tom Mochal, Josh Nankivel, Margaret Meloni and many others. Mentors come in many shapes and sizes they can be people senior to you, peers or people just learning the trade. Pay close enough attention and you can learn a little something from just about anyone.

Josh: What are the top personal attributes that lend themselves to project management?

Shawn: I’ve found that Attention to detail, time management, negotiation and conflict resolution and generally good interpersonal skills (i.e. how you interact with others) can get you places.

Josh: What are the top skills a new project manager needs?

Shawn: If you struggle with managing time or your people skills are lacking, project management may not be your thing. The good news is, both can be learned.

Josh: What are the biggest challenges a new project manager faces?

Shawn: Leave your ego at the door. The job of a Project Manager is only glamour and glory about 1% of the time. As a beginning PM you will undoubtedly face uncertain circumstances, you will second guess your decisions and most importantly you will , at some point, step on some ones toes. You will learn to deal with ambiguity, laziness, ignorance, broken promises and a plethora of other stressful things. Before long you will formulate a strategy for handling these nuisance items. It’s easy to complain about these things, the challenge for a project manager is learning how to embrace and learn from these troubling circumstances.

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Is it Selfish to Follow Your Passion?

2009-10-24T03:59:04Z

Young SoCal business dude Jun Loayza wrote a post on his blog a few weeks ago called Why I Can’t Do What I’m Passionate About. He also recently wrote a comment over on Thrilling Heroics (both are excellent blogs you should check out). His original post got me thinking and his recent comment got me thinking some more.

Jun seems to find the whole ‘follow your passion’ type lifestyle appealing, but he worries about the future and wonders how he will be able to afford a house and a wedding, how he will be able to look after his family financially and how he will put his kids through school if he spends his life chasing his passion. He wonders whether quitting a lucrative job to chase a dream is the responsible thing to do or if by doing this he’s turning his back on his responsibilities.

Reading about Jun’s struggles with these issues got me thinking about them myself, probably for the first time. I like to plan and to be prepared but, to be honest, looking forward to anywhere beyond a few years is a stretch for me. Does the fact that I’m not thinking about the future and concentrating on me make me a selfish person? I’m not sure.

I don’t feel like my parents will have a terrible life if they don’t have my financial support when they’re old and grey. If my kids have to pay for their own tuition, it’s not really that bad… so did I and it’s not the end of the world. In fact, I think it builds character not to have your life handed to you by your parents and even if I were loaded I would still make the kiddies slog it out for a few years at McDonald’s. Wedding? I’m not too concerned about impressing people with a lavish wedding and would much prefer something small, simple, and non-traditional surrounded by people who don’t care about the type of flowers I put on the dinner tables. House? I’m not sure I want a house in one place just yet but, even if I did, there’s no reason to assume that I would be able to save more money working a ’steady’ job that I would working on my own business, especially if I’m able to keep my living costs down by living in cheap countries.

Having thought about these potential problems that will arise 10, 20 or 30 years from now for the first time, none of them really seem that bad to me. Making it through any of the above mentioned scenarios on a modest or even a low income is certainly possible, especially if I don’t have any debt and live my life simply as I expect to.

Having worked 20 years in a great job and having $200,000 in the bank by the time the kid is ready for college might work for some people but for me, I would much rather see where my life takes me and cross those bridges when I come to them. Saving money for a child I don’t have seems crazy to me. If and when I ever have one, my tune might change but I will worry about it then, not now.

I think it’s wonderful to think about the future of your family and I admire people who are able to give so much of themselves. For me though, I prefer to live in the moment and get through life’s big hurdles as they present themselves. Besides, right now is the best time to be selfish and irresponsible: healthy parents, no kids, no wedding plans, no mortgage. From here on in things will just get more complicated. If I can’t enjoy myself now, I guess I’ll need to wait until my parents are dead and gone, the kids have moved out and the house is paid off and suddenly I’m 55. No thanks.

What about you guys? Whether you’re just taking a year or two off to travel or if you’re trying to start a business and follow your dreams, do you feel you’re being selfish? Do any of you stress about the future and try to do everything in your power now to make life easier later or do you just take things as they come? Let me know what you think.

Road Rules, Not Road Rage

2009-10-23T22:44:01Z

I had the opportunity to speak at the PMI Congress this year. My presentation, called Expected Behaviors for Project Team Performance: Road Rules, Not Road Rage introduced a set of ‘good behaviors” for teams to consider and an easy way to enable team members to reduce the “noise” which occurs among team members.

Determining the “right” set of behaviors to support productive teamwork is never easy, as team dynamics are intricate and difficult. Defining a set of behaviors to best support teamwork must be articulated in a universal language, ideally because these behaviors need to be owned by the entire organization, not just project teams. When set at the enterprise level, the introduction of expected behaviors sets the framework for ensuring these behaviors are a means of conducting business, not just a set of words hung along corporate walls. Ideally, the entire organization must believe in the power of teamwork and to experience improvements in project outcomes and project performance as a result of strong teamwork. If the company as a whole isn’t quite on board, start without them –introduce the behaviors to your project team.

These Expected Behaviors have universal appeal, regardless of company size or corporate culture. In other words, this set of team behaviors appeal to a broad audience because they are clear, easy to understand, and are comprehensible to diverse project teams, regardless of member position or title.

The set of expected behaviors that have universal appeal to project teams are:

Treat others with dignity and respect
Support and promote intra- and inter-departmental teamwork
Understand and consider the needs and impacts of your own work on others
Demonstrate an ability to problem-solve and make timely decisions
Actively seek and receive feedback for improvement
Consistently share knowledge and information

Introducing Expected Behaviors to project teams has a simple premise: Project work is conducted through groups; groups tend to be complex challenges from a management and communications point of view; if project teams come up with some ways to improve group dynamics, they can enhance group performance.

Conducting a Rules of Engagement exercise will allow team members to develop an initial contract that describes how they will treat each other with dignity and respect. Since the meaning of “treating others with dignity and respect” varies from individual to individual, this tool will help the team identify and discuss the various elements of behavior that are critical to the success of ongoing interactions. The Rules of Engagement exercise focuses on six key areas of behavior:

Basic Courtesies
Operating Agreement
Problem-Solving and Decision-Making
Accountability
Conflict Resolution
Leader’s Role

In a team meeting, schedule extra time to focus on this. If a team does not dedicate time to this exercise, it will never happen. Many teams schedule a special session dedicated solely to Rules of Engagement. In this meeting, team members brainstorm and record a list of key behaviors that are important to them and that best support operating agreements. Consider asking such questions as, How do you like to work? What is your work style? What strengths do you bring? What type of behaviors annoy you? What kinds of behaviors take us off track or reduce our effectiveness? Allow time for discussion of the key areas and behaviors that the team wants to adopt. Ensure all voices are heard.

Run through each of the six key areas; all are important. However, teams may find that not all have equal weight. For example, Conflict Resolution may be more important to the group than Operating Agreement. Focus on getting through all areas while seeking common ground for consensus. Be sure to confirm that each area is complete before moving on. A team leader may need to solicit input from quiet team members; not everyone will have the same voice. As facilitators, it is important that team leaders acknowledge others’ contributions to the discussion before relating their own remarks. Never distort others’ views in order to advance your own. To be successful, the results of this exercise must represent the team’s collective input. It is not unusual to invite an external party to facilitate this discussion; having a non-biased, unattached person lead the Rules of Engagement discussion often frees participants to share opinions freely.

Once the group decides on the key areas of behavior, they document and post their Rules of Engagement at every meeting as a reminder. Depending upon the duration of the team, the group can decide if the agreement needs to be refreshed; often teams do not return to their agreement unless there are challenges in a particular area or significant turnover in project team membership.

For skeptics who perceive this activity as nonsense and a waste of time when there is constructive and important project work to deliver, keep this in mind: Teams who conduct this exercise indicate their teams are positively impacted by the experience. Communication and working relationships improve; team members become more aware of behaviors toward others, more aware of others’ roles, and better at seeing different points of view. Team who adopt Expected Behaviors say the exercise creates a more comfortable working environment, meetings are more productive, and teams are more efficient in meeting deliverables. The big surprise for most team leaders is the realization that the activities are not time-consuming, do not slow down work, nor do they stifle team energy or limit lively and productive discussion.

According to organizations who have introduced Expected Behaviors on project teams, participants say it has made a difference. Follow-up survey results suggests the Expected Behaviors Team Survey tool very easily identifies team strengths and weaknesses and the Rules of Engagement exercise enables project teams to flag and fix team behavior smoothly. Taken together, this is an effective preventive course of treatment for successful team dynamics.

Lisa DiTullio, Principal, Lisa DiTullio & Associates, LLC

More Jargon Monoxide: A Lovely BBC Story Adds to the Pile

2009-10-22T18:02:51Z

One of the themes I can't resist posting about is the horrible language used in business. It has been especially fun since I heard Polly LaBarre call the whole mess, "Jargon Monoxide," one of the best phrases I have ever heard in my life. I wrote a later post on terms that make me squirm, where I complained about value added, leverage, and core competence. Most recently, we had some fun, and expressed some disgust, talking about euphemisms for layoffs, which -- thanks to your comments -- produced such gems as "fitness plans," "offboarded" (I see a picture of someone walking the plank in mind's eye), "He got the box," and the differences between management language "Your position is redundant" or "rationalizing," versus employees language like "He got shit canned" or "he got whacked."

The ever helpful Dave sent me a great BBC article today that continues the tradition of cataloging jargon monoxide. It is called 50 Office Speak Phrases You Love To Hate. I don't want to spoil your fun by listing too many, but I especially loved to hate "ideas showers," "we need a holistic cradle-to-grave approach," "granularity," and a truly wonderful sentence that a university sent out to its staff after a round of layoffs "We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders."

I believe the translation of that sentence is "We are trying to figure out what the hell to do next."

Let me know if you have any new favorites that might be added to the BBC article.

P.S. Dave, thanks again.

Turbulence, IT and The New CIO

2009-10-22T14:00:43Z

The New CIO is a weekly article about the challenges facing today’s CIO as well as what can be done to prepare for future challenges.

I just completed reading The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World. Great book. Go buy it…the link above is an affiliate link or just go grab one from your favorite bookseller.

The book does an excellent job of discussing the world of business and the role that turbulence has played in shaping it. Donald Sull does a great job describing how to embrace turbulence and seize the opportunities that turbulence can bring.

How do you embrace turbulence? By being agile.

Before we continue, don’t confuse ‘being agile’ with the agile development methodology….while they may be similar, for the purposes of this article, I’ll be talking about a different ‘agile’.

That said, let me clear up what I mean when I saw agile (and what Donald Sull means when he uses it): Agile isn’t about speed. Agile has to do with the ability to change course when needed. Being agile means taking a look at your organizational landscape (strategy, operations, etc) and breaking up the long-term view into smaller samples of time to make it easier to see and respond to opportunities.

Dr Sull defines agility as:

“the capacity to identify and capture opportunities more quickly than rivals” (p. 138).

In addition, he uses the concept of air warfare to help tell the story of how agility can provide tremendous benefits. Out of these stories of air warfare, Dr Sull introduces John Boyd, a military strategist who helped with a lot of the science behind the F-16 and F-18 fighter jets, and Boyd’s OODA Loop.

John Boyd's OODA Loop (Courtesy of Jeff McNeill's Flickr stream)

What is the OODA loop? It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

What does it have to do with IT? Everything.

In order to be an effective IT group and CIO in the world today, you’ve got to have some flexibility (i.e., be agile) so you can move quickly when opportunities arise.

As we all know, we are being asked to do more with less. The only way to do that, is to remain flexible (as well as have a good team and not overwork them). In addition to being agile, you’ve got to have a strategic plan and know how to execute that plan.

By using the OODA model, you might be able to be agile, plan and react as necessary. Let’s look at how you might incorporate the OODA model into your business life.

Observe

To use the OODA model, the first (and perhaps most important) step is to continuously observe.

Observe your situation. Look at your organization, team and the competitive landscape. What can you and your IT team do to help move the company forward?

In addition, observe how your team operates. Do you have enough people? Do you have the right people?

Is your strategic plan still valid based on these observations? What are the politics of your organization?

Orient

While observing, you’ll need to orient yourself to your landscape. Orientation (in the OODA model) is all about positioning yourself.

Is your organization changing direction? Are your competitors doing something differently that previously? Is your team becoming overloaded? Do you have the right people on board to make your plans successful?

Decide

You are observing your situation and have oriented yourself to the climate….now all you have to do is decide to do something. Can you make a decision? You better be able to.

In a turbulent world, you don’t have time to wait or over-analyze…you’ve got to decide quickly and move on. In the world of air warfare, if you wait you die and in today’s world your fate and your organization’s fate might just hang on your ability to decide.

Act

You’ve decided on a plan of action. Now you need to execute it. If you’ve observed, oriented and made the right decision, you can act with ease…but do you have the right people in place?

Many organizations plan well but very few ACT well. The ability to act and react after observing & orienting is a major reason that some organizations succeed and others don’t.

The New CIO & The Loop

The OODA model is built with feedback loops. Each action is fed back to the observation stage to review for tweaks. I’ve found that most organizations are missing this feedback mechanism…strategic plans are made and ‘rolled out’ without any feedback nor any way to change course quickly.

Dr Sull introduces his own version of the OODA loop…he calls it the ‘agility loop’. The agility loop has four stages:

Make sense of situation
Make choices
Make it happen
Make revisions

I like what Dr Sull has to say about the agility loop…whether you use the OODA loop or Sull’s Agility loop, you’ll be in a position to improve your agility.

To succeed in the future, The New CIO has to remain agile. Using the OODA loop (or Dr Sull’s agility loop) helps you keep your mindset right. Remember to observe, orient, decide & act. Then repeat.

Sharing Corporate Tribal Knowledge

2009-10-22T10:25:54Z

Creating content is never easy. Whether we're talking text, images, audio or video, you have to have a passion for the industry you serve, and you have to also have a passion (or, at least, a knack) for creating some kind of content.

If there's one major complaint that businesses have when they first dip their toes into the raging river that is social media, it is that they often "run out of things to say." When these communication and publishing platforms were more nascent, the choices were much more limited. All you could really do was blog. And, if writing wasn't your thing, you can well imagine how hard it was to truly engage and nurture any sort of community.It should come as no surprise that even though Technorati is currently tracking over 130 million blogs, it's only a very small percentage of those that are updated frequently (defined as about once a week).

The choices are now endless. You can take pictures and upload them to Flickr, you can shoot your own videos and promote them on YouTube (or even Facebook), you can create your own audio programs (podcasts) and push them out to the world via iTunes, and you can even simplify your apprehension to writing a blog and build your own community using only 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

Creating content is definitely getting easier.

And there are many more platforms (with newer ones coming online every day). Businesses can even forgo all of these choices and edge out even further by creating their own iPhone, BlackBerry or other smartphone mobile apps. The opportunities and potential are limited only by your imagination, appetite for experimentation, and resources for getting it done and keeping it going.

There is a simpler way to not only make your mark using social media, but to get ever-more comfortable with new media: You can simply start sharing content.

It's often the most overlooked strategy, but it's the one that will really bring out adoption throughout your entire organization. Just think about "sharing" in terms of your business's tribal knowledge. Wikipedia defines "tribal knowledge" as, "any unwritten information that is known within a tribe but often unknown outside of it. A tribe may be a group or subgroup of people that share a common knowledge."

Your business is a tribe as well.

Think about your employees and how most communication in the past was passed down from senior management to teams - or from long-time employees to the new cadets. Usually, it was done either orally or in communication channels like email, post-it notes and voice-mail messages. So, when those employees either move on (or up), that tribal knowledge does not get passed on.

It's one of the key reasons why hiring (and even firing) employees is both expensive and time consuming.

Company Intranets attempted to resolve some of these issues, but it's only recently that there has been a huge upsurge in implementing many of the social media sharing tools and platforms to keep all of this corporate tribal knowledge alive, updated and available. When many business people think about how to best use a wiki, they think of Wikipedia. Imagine transferring all of your internal corporate documentation over on to a wiki platform - making everything a webpage (or document) that anyone in the company can edit, update and comment on? Imagine how that one simple act of making your content more shareable might affect and improve your corporate culture? Imagine how much easier it will be to bring in new employees (and get over the loss of some others) by having everything about the company in a much more shareable format.

What about news, information and industry trends?

Why not use some of the amazing (and free) bookmarking services like Delicious or Google Bookmarks to share anything and everything with your teams? You can use these tools and share this information privately (meaning only with the people you give permission to) and you can create/choose tags (or words used to describe the content you're sharing) that your whole team can start adopting - this way, it's not just you sharing with everybody, but now it's everybody sharing with everybody.

Your most loyal brand evangelists are the people whose cheques you sign and who walk out the door every day at 5 p.m.

Don't forget that. Being successful by using the online channels is less about how quick you are to join Twitter and more about how much smarter you can make your team by using these tools to grow your business. Always remember that one of the easiest ways to grow your business will be in how well you help your teams share, grow and build their talents.

Don't be quick to jump into the latest online social network just because everyone else is, but move as fast as you can to start using these tools to capture and document your tribal knowledge.

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation. I cross-post the article here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

- Vancouver Sun - Sharing corporate Tribal Knowledge.
- Montreal Gazette - Wading in to Social Media? Get a comfortable start by sharing content.

Tags: app blackberry blog brand evangelist business business column business section canwest communication community content corporate culture delicious email facebook flickr google bookmark intranet iphone iphone app itunes mobile montreal gazette newspaper online bookmarking online social network online video podcast post it notes publishing share sharing social media strategy tag talent technorati tribal knowledge twitter vancouver sun voice mail wiki wikipedia youtube

Totally And Completly Wide Open

2009-10-21T05:00:12Z

: Image via Wikipedia

Something is happening right now, and that something is a big deal that I want you to know about.

Peter Kim recently wrote about the Dachis Group opening up all of their internal communications into a feed called the Dachis Collaboratory. You can subscribe to it here. He talks about it in this post called, How open are you?

So what?

Let Me Tell You

After participating in opening up our board room at my day job, I know that this is a really big deal and another step toward true social business design. Here’s what being totally open gets you:

more communication I read a quote somewhere along the way, that I can’t find now, warning to never put in writing what can be said over the phone, and to never say something over the phone that can be said in person… I think the point of the quote was misaligned with openness, but it can be applied openness. Making everything public will more than likely force some people to pick up the phone and talk to one another, or get out of their cube and talk to one another and that is a good thing for any business.

less junk-mail Think of all the pointless E-mails you get on a daily basis at work. When everything is public, people will begin to scrutinize before they hit send. It won’t happen right away, and there will be embarrassments along the way but we will get there eventually and collectively. If you recall, over time, people learned that it was faux pas to reply all to E-mail chains. We will learn the intricacies of this new convention as well, and we will all be better for it.

more time I had the fortune of sitting across from Rick Klau, Google’s Product Manager for Blogger, during a dinner last week at BlogWorld Expo and he mentioned that every Google employee has real time access to every metric for every Google product available. The idea of this is both a dream come true and unimaginable to me, so I asked him what having all of that access is like… And he responded that it’s a big time saver. He doesn’t have to wait for somebody to answer any of his questions. He can find them himself, and save time. I can imagine searchable public streams of consciousness providing similar benefits.

reporting Who’s working on the company’s biggest project for fiscal year 2009, and what’s going on with it? You won’t have to wonder anymore, because that information will be at your fingertips. I don’t know that there are any huge disadvantages to open reporting, either, by the way. Let’s take sports for example. Scouts watch and report on the opposing team’s offensive and defensive strategies, they even film it, but the two teams still have to play the game. Is it really that big of a deal for a competitor to know that your company is: remapping it’s sales territories, upgrading internal systems, or promoting somebody to the executive team? If that information becomes public anyway, does it matter when it is released?

What Do You Think?

So that’s my take… what do you think about it? Is it the worst idea since American Idol, or are you on board the open digital work environment train with me? Have I hit on all the pluses with rose colored glasses? Is there anything I missed? Let me know in the comments below.