Begin with the end in mind

I have been traveling a lot the past couple of weeks and was catching up on my reading today, when I learned that Stephen R. Covey died on July 17, 2012.  Apparently, he had a bicycle accident back in April and died of complications from the accident.  I am sad to see him go.

Back in the late 80's, I started to get into time management in an effort to be more productive.  Like many people at the time, I began with a Franklin Planner and even took a course on how to use it.  The Franklin method made a big impact on me and helped me begin my decades-long relationship with productivity methods.  In the 90's, I discovered Covey's book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which helped me re-frame why I did things and helped me more consciously work on more impactful activities.  This matrix is one I still think about as I plan what I want to work on:

From this book, I began to embrace the "Sharpen the Saw" concept and tried to spend more time in Quadrant 2, Important but Not Urgent.  I also learned the value of outcome-oriented thinking with his principle to "Begin With the End In Mind," and tried to create mutually beneficial results with his admonition to "Seek First To Understand."  Very powerful and motivating stuff.

Dr. Covey's work has influenced me quite a bit - in fact, my first post on this blog was a review of his book, "The 8th Habit."

I have since turned to other methods for the "how" part of productivity (such as David Allen's Getting Things Done, and my current favorite system, Michael Linenberger's Master Your Workday Now), but Stephen Covey's work is still my anchor for the "why" part of productivity.

Rest in peace, Dr. Covey - and congratulations on a fine legacy.

5 Ways Taking Classes Helps Improve My Skills

This week I was reminded of a great way to improve your skills:  hands on practice in a well-organized workshop or training program.  In my case, I took some "boot camp" courses in computer hacking at a security conference to brush up on my skills and learn about new tools.  I felt like I was getting rusty and wanted a refresher.  Boy, was it fun!  [Note: I don't hack things for malicious reasons - I help people secure things for a living, and a strong defense requires a deep knowledge of how the attackers will come at you.]

I try to keep up with things from online sources (blogs, discussion boards, etc.) but it is difficult to internalize some of this without sitting at the keyboard and trying some things.  In this regard, the workshops I was in had a few key advantages:

Access to experts who can help you learn

I am generally good at solving problems because I have a good mental process for figuring things out.  However, sometimes I know what questions to ask but not how to get the answers.  This happened a lot in my class.  

One of the instructors set the stage nicely for this by saying, "I won't tell you the answer, but if you ask me the right question I will tell you how to get the answer."  Essentially, he was testing for whether or not we grasped the concepts behind the problems we were trying to solve; if we understood well enough to formulate the right question, he would point us to the right tools, resources, or processes for us to research how to get the answer we were looking for.

Access to others with different approaches

Another aspect of the classes that I liked was how we compared solutions and approaches after each challenge.  Each student would independently solve the problems, then we'd talk through how we got to the solution at the end.  I learned a bunch of techniques from other people that helped me improve my own skills - in other words, when I saw a method that worked better than my approach I added it to my arsenal.

We also learned about tools and tricks to make things easier - typically leveraging a proven process, or automation, or resources we didn't know about before the classes.

A safe environment to try new things

We were all in the classes to learn new things, so there was no stigma attached to making mistakes, and no shame in asking for help.  

Also, the people who conducted the classes provided us with a fantastic assortment of systems to hack, each with different operating systems, different vulnerabilities, different kinds of target "prizes," etc.  This is very difficult to come by in the real world unless you have a pretty sophisticated lab setup. It felt kind of like a playground.

Competition fuels the fire

In a lot of classes, there are competitive exercises intermingled with the learning exercises.  My classes were no exception - we had several "capture the flag" scenarios that allowed us to compete with each other to see who could achieve the goal first.  This was a lot of fun, as it forced us to apply the things we'd been learning but put some time constraints on us.  That made it feel much more real, and not so academic.

Feed the thirst for knowledge

The other side effect?  I now want to learn even more about the topics I worked on in class.  I have a long list of things that I touched on in class, but want to research more deeply.  And I want to check out a few training classes that can help me get there faster.

There you have it - 5 ways classes helped me improve my skills.  There are other benefits (met some great people, got CPE credits, etc.) but these are the ones that will keep me coming back.  What about you?  Have you taken a course lately?  It might be a good way to get you into a new mode of learning and improve your skills.

Go pitch yourself

I get a lot of calls from various technology vendors in my day job.  Some of the "pitches" are good, but most are mediocre.  This week I got one I found to be particularly lousy - and it was a voice mail, which was intended to get me interested enough about the vendor to call them back.

What do you do?

Here are some of the problems I found with this particular message:

• I have no idea who this company is.  Their name was "cool sounding" but absolutely not descriptive.  This in itself is not a problem - the problem is that I listened to the pitch but it never told me anything about why I should call back.
• I have no idea what this company does.  The description - and this is a direct quote - was, "We deliver powerful capabilities through our platform, using  patented technology."  What?

I played this message for my wife and we laughed at how ridiculously vague this statement is.

Needless to say, they didn't get me to call back, which was their desired result.

At least you got that right...

Granted, they did get a few things right on the call:

• They did say their company name, clearly enough for me to understand it.
• They did provide their name and contact number, and even repeated the number slowly so I could write it down.

But that wasn't enough.

What's your pitch?

That got me thinking - when I leave messages about my company, am I any better?  I came up with a good little "exercise" that I'd like to share here:

• Call and leave yourself a voice mail, as if you were "cold calling" someone about your business, with the goal of having them call you back to find out more.
• Listen to the message and see if you would call yourself back.  
• Is it clear what you have to offer?
• Is the message short and to the point?
• Is it clear why what you do would be valuable to someone who doesn't know about your company?
• Is it clear who you are and how to get back in touch with you?
• Bonus points: Did you give them the option of calling you back or emailing you?
• If you missed the mark, adjust your pitch, call back, and try again until you are happy with your message.
• Now that you're happy with it, recruit a friend or relative that isn't "close" to your business, and ask them to critique your message based on the same kind of criteria.  Once again, use their input to adjust and tune your message.

I found some rough edges in my own pitch, for sure.  Not as bad as that guy who told me, "We deliver powerful capabilities through our platform, using  patented technology," but I had some room for improvement.

 Give it a try - pitch yourself - and see what you learn.

Accountability and granularity

Lately, I've been involved in a debate about accountability  What's at the heart of the debate? Clarity regarding how much detail is required  for someone to feel like they have enough information to hold another person accountable.  

In my particular debate, the question revolves around accountability for some longer term goals.  The person making the commitment, let's call them Mr. Committer,  has made some bold declarations (more directional in nature, although there are some measurable aspects that are clear enough to give a "pass / fail" grade).  These declarations won't be complete for at least a year.

Starting with these bigger picture goals, Mr. Committer created a sort of "work back" list - in other words, they began to break the larger commitment down into smaller steps and arranging them in a sensible order, to create an execution plan.

When this person presented their plan to two other people for review, there was a lot of consternation from one of the managers (let's call her Ms. Stickler) along the lines of, "Hey, I don't have enough here to hold you accountable," or "I don't know what to hold you accountable for."  

Break down the breakdown

As we began to disect the situation, we discovered that the issue was primarily one of detail:

• Ms. Stickler wanted a fully-fleshed out plan with way more detail than had been presented.
• Mr. Committer complained that he wanted to be held accountable for his results - the "big commit" - and not the specific steps followed to achieve the results.
• Ms. Stickler asked, "How can I hold you accountable over the next few months if I don't have a specific set of steps you'll be following?"
• Mr. Committer retorted, "A lot can change as I learn along the way and I don't want to be locked in - how can I innovate with you bearing down on me about specific steps so early in the process?!?"
• and so forth…

Shift the focus

So how can we break this conflict?  In our case, we are trying to focus less on the detailed steps along the way and, instead, have been brainstorming some interim indicators that must be met regardless of the detailed steps we choose to follow.

This, in itself, is still a difficult discussion, but it is far more productive (and far less stifling) than a debate about what specific steps will be taken.  In other words, I think we've successfully shifted the emphasis away from the activity, and toward a focus on the desired results.

This transition has been difficult, because we are fighting human nature and personalities in the process (detailed/control-oriented personalities vs. big picture/don't micromanage me personalities).

Any tips or techniques I can steal from you?

I'm sure we didn't get to this point in the easiest way possible.  Have you seen this kind of situation before?  Have you cracked the code (or at least come up with best known methods to make this easier)?

I'd love to hear your proven techniques for dealing with this kind of issue - please share!

Sharpen your saw with THINKBook

A while back, I bought a THINKBook, which was developed by my old friend Rajesh Setty.  The problem?  I got busy and forgot I had it, so I just got around to using it a few weeks ago.  I am very impressed with this unassuming little notebook.

What the heck is a THINKBook?

In simple terms, a THINKBook is a hard-bound red notebook, about the size of a Moleskine notebook.  But it's way more than that; sure, it has ruled paged you can use for writing, but it is more than just a general purpose notebook.. This is a thinking person's journal, for challenging your thinking.  

The thinking challenges are framed by "prompters" on various topics interspersed throughout the THINKBook (see the example on the right).  There are a bunch of topics relevant to both business and personal introspection, and I like them very much.  Full disclosure, I didn't think I'd like them at first, but I surrendered to the process, tried a couple and found that they were very useful.

The structure of the prompter exercises in the book really pushes you to think at a fairly deep level, and definitely promotes "out of the box thinking."  It feels very soothing to follow this process and begin writing journal entries in the THINKBook - this is all about crystallizing your thoughts and devoting some time for your own improvement.  That's something a lot us us don't take time out to do, and I think we'd all be better off with some periodic deep thinking.

Spread the Thinking

I really like one of the suggestions from the THINKBook web site, which is to use the THINKBook as a personal and professional gift.  I particularly like the thought of giving it as a business gift, and I just may try that to see how people react.

I like the framing of the "why" behind the THINKBook, according to Rajesh:

THINKBook makes it easy to pull your people’s own best advice out of them. It can be used to super-charge group brainstorming sessions or as a trusted advisor to help you improve the brilliant idea keeping you awake at 3am.

Pretty cool, don't you think?

If you could use some time working on your own creativity and mental health, I encourage you to  grab a THINKBook and give the process a chance.  And, if you like it why not give one as a gift to someone you like (a new one, not your old used one)?