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	Friday, April 29, 2005

To be Interrupted or Not To be Interrupted   ( on business) When I was studying management, the mantra has always been that as  a manager, you should always maintain an OPEN door policy.  That encourages employees and colleagues to  interrupt and see you at anytime to discuss their issues. In this day and age, you maintain more than open door.  You essentially have to maintain open communications.  Cell phone calls, cell phone texting, instant messaging and email all scream for your attention, and a survey found out that indeed half of all workers respond now to email within 60 minutes. But the same study, commissioned by Hewlett Packard,  also reveals that the IQ of a person who tries to juggle all these interruptions amidst work feel by 10 points - the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep, and more than double the four-point fall seen after smoking marijuana. These obsession to immediately check text, or answer email shows that it can damage performance severely by reducing mental sharpness. It validates that the use or abuse of technology does not always result to better productivity. Should you as a manager, then encourage interruption, and the 'always on and available' culture of today's workplace. I guess it would depend.   For me, I encourage my managers, or sales to flourish amidst the challenge of constantly being available.  After all, we always say, the customer is never an interruption.   I will have to accept the fate that when I sit in the office, I don't do work that demands requisite concentration, and if I need to think hard and deep, it will have to be somewhere else other than the office. And for other staff  who do creative work, like writing, or software development,  I have to see what we can do to  prevent interruption so people can have the concentration to do quality work.  I know early in Microsoft, and upto now, Bill Gates have always made it a policy that all developers will have their own office room which they can lock if they need to do concentrated work. This is more than just nuisance or courtesy.  As a manager, your policy on whether you allow interruption or not can be a key to whether your company will thrive or go down in flames. What do you think?   7:01:41 PM     comment []   trackback []

	Friday, April 22, 2005

How to Ruin your Career in 10 Easy Steps   ( on business) This is a great article on the practicalities of the work place, and in getting ahead.   3:06:18 PM     comment []   trackback []

	Saturday, April 16, 2005

Taking Charge of your Destiny  ( on business) The kids were playing nicely, when suddenly the youngest started to howl.  Apparently, the elder brother had hit him. "Hey, what happened?" I queried. "Dad, he made me hit him." my second eldest was apparently trying to justify his action. He made me hit him?  Isn't that an incredible story?  I can give an allowance since it came from a nine year old kid ( though I must slowly reorient him that taking responsibility for your own actions as well as its consequence is important) , because even in the workplace, and among adults, we hear this story.  He made me fail... - we hear this said or implied often. The knack is that we think and act like we succeed because of our own efforts, but we fail because of circumstances and people beyond our control.  Maybe we can have a better success rate if we believe we are responsible for our own success ... and failure. In the last few weeks, I have been sitting down with my department heads to try to quantify objectives and set goals.  I have also tried to nail hard as to why some initiatives were not progressing.   As a result, I have been getting a lot of emails sent by one department to another ( cc'd to me) trying to follow up.  The apparent reason for this is to let me know that they are not able to move their own objectives because of certain bottlenecks created by other people. Apparently, for many people, it is OK not to succeed as long as there is a good reason for failing. The first thing in managing when your team acts like that is to stop the fingerpointing, and start to change culture and attitudes towards being responsible in getting things done. For me, that means also setting clear guidelines, and I have set it at thus -- if you set your goal at 100%, and for some reason you hit only 85% to 90% of that goal, then it is OK to justify that certain people or circumstance is preventing you from hitting 100% or more. But if you are only hitting 30 or 50% of your goal, then the problem has to be you.  In short, I believe that other people and circumstance may make you less successful ( can also favor you sometime!) in the short term, but they cannot make you consistently fail in the long term.  What do you think?   8:27:45 AM     comment []   trackback []

	Saturday, April 02, 2005

Breaking it to Pieces ( on business) I got off the car and stretched. It has been a long drive.  In one day, we drove over 300 kilometers to visit a place and back.  I felt really bushed. Now, I do drive some. Probably over 1,500 kilometers a month. But it was more like a series of 6 to 8 short trips a day every day. Not in one stretch.  And  I started to think that driving so much, and never feeling so tired as driving that one stretch of 300 kilometers in one day was really because the task was broken into smaller pieces. And probably that is what accomplishing something is about -- break it into a series of steps. I never knew I talked over 18 hours on the cell phone a month until I reviewed my phone statistics.  It is amazing how a minute here and there can add up to so many hours. Consider a housewife.  How would she be daunted if looking forward, she had to wash 36,000 plates?  But if indeed, she washes 6 or 7 plates per meal, that would indeed be the number she would be washing in five years. Looking back it is amazing how much I have been able to accomplish a big task or project by breaking it into manageable tasks.  I graduated MBA while managing 5 companies by simply reading a chapter a week using a few minutes each day. And that is what I am doing to catch up with my reading.  And my writing ( by blogging regularly). I am trying to learn Japanese by reviewing some words in the morning at breakfast, and going over some words before going to sleep. We can never hope for the time or the resources to accomplish big things.  But going at it regularly on a disciplined manner might just do it. A faucet drip may add up to 15 galloons a day, or 5,400 gallons a year. Have big ambitions, but don't know where to start?   Start small. But keep at it!   4:02:55 PM     comment []   trackback []