What would happen if employees pressed managers for results as often as managers required them from employees? What would happen if you defined success as creating solutions, rather than completing tasks? What would happen if everyone in your organization stopped making excuses and started demanding results?
This is the Power of If.
It isn’t a pipe dream or a desperate plea for some long lost capitalist utopia. It’s what separates the best organizations from the crowd, and the best parts of every organization from the surrounding status quo. The great thing is, building on the Power of If in your company is easier than you think.
Continue reading “The Power of If”
I fell in love with Getting Things Done about two and a half years ago. I was planning for an extended, six-month stay abroad in Germany, and I had too much to do and too little time to do it. The simplicity of disecting projects at the action level and sorting those actions by context helped me minimize stress and maximize productivity. Although I thought I knew how to work the system, I didn’t keep up with it after my trip. Now, after reading David Allen’s new book, Making It All Work, I finally understand that weekly reviews are the secret to keeping it all together.
Whether you use GTD or not, spending an hour or two each week on a weekly review will save you significant amounts of time and effort, and it will help you stay on track with your goals and avoid distractions. What makes the weekly review work so well its ability to give you perspective. Here’s a breakdown of how to conduct a weekly review and why the weekly review process works so well. I’ve included the template I use, so you can try (or retry) the weekly review yourself without too much effort.
Continue reading “An Ounce of Perspective: How and Why to Complete a Thorough Weekly Review”
Whether you’re a low-level analyst or a C-Suite executive, everyone has a boss. Even CEO’s have to answer to the board and shareholders, and miscommunication and differing expectations can make interactions difficult, especially during times of crisis. If you find yourself in a situation with an abrasive investor, board member, or boss in the coming days, here are some tips for dealing with them and improving the situation:
Continue reading “How to Deal with Difficult People in Power”
It may seem basic to many of us, but it always surprises me how few people actually do their homework before going into a meeting, let alone launching a product or starting a business. Whether you’re meeting with the CEO of a potential client, planning a launch of a new service, or trying to figure out how to solve an internal process problem, it’s important to have some background and know what you don’t know. That said, here’s The Upwardly Mobile’s quick and dirty guide to doing your homework:
Continue reading “Homework: It’s Not Just for School Children”
Seth Godin wrote a great little post last Friday on the differences between fitting in and standing out. Although Seth doesn’t state it explicitly, the differences in mind set of those who seek to fit in and those who seek to stand out make up a significant portion of a company’s culture and have startling implications to productivity and the bottom line. Let’s examine three global companies to see the impact of this corporate culture ideal on a firm’s outlook:
Continue reading “Do What Works”
This is an advertisement I saw on CNN.com today. It reads, “Obama is the New President! $133,000 Mortgage for Under $679/Month!” I’m not one for pointing out the obvious, but those two sentences have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In addition to the fact that the ad doesn’t seem to make much sense, it states almost nothing about what the advertiser actually does, with the exception of the ominously vague “Calculate New House Payment” line that appears in tiny font at the bottom of the frame. If you do decide to click on the advertisement, you quickly learn that LowerMyBills.com, an Experian company, will offer you “free” lender matches after filling out a quick, two-minute form. Some of you may remember Experian as a company that recently got in trouble several times for misleading advertising and received a grade of “F” for customer service. What Experian won’t tell you, of course, is that “Britain’s most invasive company” hasn’t changed its practices much in the United States, and that your name, email, and contact information will be sold without regard to your privacy. All of this for something you could get for free by calling a few banks. So why am I telling you this?
Continue reading “Don’t Insult Your Customers, Stupid.”
