Weekly Download 15.4
Posted: March 5, 2015 Filed under: Leadership, Weekly Download | Tags: 80/20 Rule, emotional intelligence, Joseph Juran, Pareto Principle, Vilfredo Pareto 1 Comment
Here’s a recap of news and notes from around the Web that caught my attention over the past week or so.
How the 80/20 Rule Helps Us be More Effective. I always thought full credit for the concept of the 80/20 Rule (a.k.a. the Pareto Principle) was due to economist Vilfredo Pareto. Clearly, attribution must also be given to Joseph Juran, one of the key thought leaders in the Quality movement. “The vital few and trivial many” is a common way Juran referenced this principle.
How We Trick our Brains into Feeling Productive delves into the many ways we attempt to rationalize our decisions and actions. “Structured procrastination” is what my prioritized task list is all about. Forcing myself to do the most important item is the intent, but sometimes I substitute something that is further down the list. Now I know why.
The headline Signs That You Lack Emotional Intelligence is sure an attention-grabber. This topic has been around since the 1980s, but was popularized by Goleman’s book of this title in 1995. One section in the article that resonated with describes gaps that occur in the communications process between “Intent” (what the speaker means) and “Impact” (what the receiver hears). Here are a few examples:
What you say: “At the end of the day, it’s all about getting the work done.”
What others hear: “All I care about is the results and if some are offended along the way, so be it.”
What you say: “If I can understand it, anyone can.”
What others hear: “You’re not smart enough to get this.”
What you say: “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
What others hear: “I don’t really care how you feel.”
Recently I have been in conversations where I felt a very different impact than what I believe the speaker intended. Later, I mentally replayed the conversations to see if I could discover what was going on and why I felt that way. Now I have an explanation and can be mindful of this gap in the future. What are gaps are you creating?
Weekly Download 15.3
Posted: February 18, 2015 Filed under: Weekly Download | Tags: cynicism, HCL Technologies, Morning Star, net neutrality, optimism 1 CommentHere’s a recap of news and notes from around the Web that caught my attention over the past week or so.
Explaining Net Neutrality to My Dad. Revisiting this important concept to remember why it matters.
Seven Habits of Optimistic People. Optimism can be mastered like any other habit, yielding significant improvements in quality of life.
Some Thoughts on Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves. This story resonated from the beginning. It went down a slightly different path than expected but then came back together. I feel that I’ve been overly cynical lately and focusing too much on dysfunction. Having read this article, I will take the suggestion to better balance critical thinking with hope. In a nutshell:
“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
I have heard stories of the reinvention of India’s HCL Technologies. Here is the CEO telling the story. Consider the Value Zone, where “Value is created at the interface of our employees and our clients.” If this is true, what is the business of management?
Morning Star throws out the traditional org chart with its structure that has replaced manager-management with peer- and self-management. See The End of Bureaucracy: When Nobody (and Everybody) is the Boss.
Weekly Download 15.2
Posted: January 26, 2015 Filed under: Technology, Weekly Download Leave a commentThe annual Consumer Electronics Show was held a couple of weeks ago. While individual gadgets are not top priority for me (lots of shine and sizzle, too little substance), I enjoy observing general trends. Two categories stood out, that I confirmed on a recent visit to Best Buy.
#1: The connected home. This includes everything from thermostats, smoke/CO detectors (Nest Protect has caught a friend’s attention), lights, access control, home monitoring and sound/video/entertainment systems.
#2: Home entertainment. There still seems to be a quest for “bigger is better.” Now, there are 4K screens and curved screens, all targeted toward creating an in-home experience for large groups of people. We have a traditional colonial-style house, with no oversized great room to hold a dozen or more viewing guests. Fortunately for us, it also seems like demand is growing for tools to promote “cocooning” in your own home.
- The Intel® Compute Stick is a complete system on an old school USB stick-sized device that can transform any HDMI display into a fully-functioning computer.
- The HP Sprout is a combo PC, scanner and projector with a touch-sensitive projection surface. It’s too soon to tell if it will become the next great thing in home computing.
Here are a couple of other observations:
- 3-D printing continues to evolve to include food, clothing, parts and even entire cars!
- Watches are hot again, particularly when loaded with fitness and wellness capabilities. I’m not sure what to think about this category—I thought we gave watches up long ago.
- WattUp™ is a potential game-changer in the way we keep our myriad devices charged by creating wire-free charging zones.
ZMAB15 