Ken Blanchard’s High Five is a blast from the past. It was published in 2001, on the heels of several popular management books like Raving Fans and The One Minute Manager and Gung Ho! They are all based around “common sense” ideas that might not be terribly common practice. High Five is about creating teams that perform at top levels, and there are plenty of folksy aphorisms peppered throughout the book.
When I heard about Dan Markovitz’ The Conclusion Trap, I knew it was right up my alley. the book gives us a straightforward guide to thinking better about "problems,” rather than jumping to the first solution that comes to mind.
Albert Einstein: “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.”
Trust impacts almost any initiative, whether that is relatively small local efforts or big organizational changes. Jamie Flinchbaugh has been thinking about the topic, and doing some of his own research recently. He’s come up with The 4Cs of Trust: Demonstration of Care, Communication, Competence, and Consistency.
Root causes on the mind, clearly. This time an article from the Farnam Street blog talks about the difference between proximate and root causes.
A lot of people struggle to identify the “real” problem they have. Some thoughts about the typical challenges with problem statements and ways around them.
All of our approval AND complaints about “modern life” are created by us - not by the pace or tools or requirements of modern life.
Not all decisions are slow. But if you want fast decisions, create the environment for those decisions to be fast.
I listen to the Gemba Academy Podcast, and a recent entry reflects back to a blog post from one of their contributors, Why Can’t We See the Financial Impact of Continuous Improvement? I love the list of mistakes people make that make CI efforts seem to vanish on the balance sheet.
Does perfectionism get in the way of getting stuff done for you? Maybe reframing the question to progress not perfection would help.
My review of Gene Kim’s upcoming book, The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data (due at the end of November). It’s an interesting read, describing a path to an amazing turnaround of a doomed technology inside a traditional business. The Five Ideals are a nice encapsulation of many of the ways people talk about continuous improvement with a notable addition of Psychological Safety.
Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby’s new book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams is a fairly quick read, loaded with guidance and recommendations for teams that aren’t co-located apply the Agile Software Development principles. They even carve out specific instances of the principles as applied to distributed agile teams.
Mike Dalton has been writing a series about “the growth equation” and innovation management at Innovation Week. The last one is The Growth Equation: Upping Your Market Impact (6 Steps for Focusing Your New Product Efforts on High-Impact Opportunities). In it he takes the questions for technology and adds some thinking about how financial measures might be added into the questions. It’s always those last questions that trip up change efforts though.
How about an article that tries to apply Theory of Constraints to the arena of hockey? A post on a New Jersey Devils blog describes the Five Focusing Steps and then applies them in a couple scenarios - one on the ice and another in scouting / recruiting.
No, I don’t want to give up on this topic. But I want to clarify something: Multitasking is an effect - a result of the system in which we find ourselves. In order to “stop multitasking”, the system has to change. And this is where we get to apply some thinking - what can we change in the system?
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow has been out for a while (published in 2011), and many of the topics within have been discussed in other books or in the wider popular media. But it was fascinating, if challenging, to read directly from the source.
An interesting video of a presentation from the Skype team on how they used the first of the Five Focusing Steps from Theory of Constraints to identify their constraint to delivering value.
I came upon Richard Sheridan and his writings only recently. He clearly loves what he does at Menlo Innovations, and this comes shining through in his book Joy, Inc (from 2013) that I devoured recently.
Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a solid set of thinking on the topic. And Lanier says that he knows of further reasons that he could have included.
Some thoughts on email inspired by a recent New York Times opinion piece by Adam Grant, “No, You Can’t Ignore Email. It’s Rude.” My favorite rule of thumb: To get less email, send less email. Other people will be less inclined to fill my mailbox with replies if I don’t send requests/replies to them in the first place.