Ode to preparation

There's a short but interesting post on Mark Cuban's blog, Blogmaverick. He paraphrases former Indiana Hoosiers coach, Bobby Knight, "Everyone has got the will to win, it's only those with the will to prepare, that do win."
When you are working on business requirements, presentations or anything at all, good preparation will improve your performance. Words to live by.

Leadership styles

I remember taking a course developed by the Leadership Research Institute on leadership styles. The purpose of the course was to help identify the most appropriate way to interact with an employee given an understanding of an individual's:

1. Ability to perform a task.
2. Motivation level to perform a task.
   

Using these two factors to create a simple matrix you get a picture similar to the one below. For each quadrant a different approach is warranted for handling an employee.

1. High ability to perform the job but low motivation to do it. Convince the employee to persevere and outline the task's importance.
   
2. High ability to perform the job and motivated. Allow the employee to perform the task unhindered. There is no need to provide direct support or exert control.
   
3. Not able to perform the job and not motivated either. Basically you need to tell the employee exactly what to do to complete the task and monitor his (or her) progress.
   
4. Not able to perform the job but motivated to try. Provide support, feedback and guidance to help the employee complete the task.

These guidelines assume that you are able to determine the competence and motivation level of an individual.

Intuitively, this framework makes sense. When you understand how to perform a job well and are highly motivated to do it, you don't really appreciate someone looking over your shoulder, telling you what to do and asking for constant status updates.

The purpose of the course was to improve managing employees, however, I feel that these fairly simple guidelines can be used in any situation where you need a task performed by someone other than yourself.

How does your project contribute?

I recently attended a training session called Business Acumen. A good amount of the course's material was dedicated to understanding financial statements (the company providing the training was affiliated with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy.) The rest of the course's material was based on the book, What the CEO wants you to know: Using business acumen to understand how your company really works, written by Ram Charan.
The main point of the book was that all businesses, regardless of their industry have the same underlying principles.

• Cash - Money and near-money equivalents used to fund a company's operations.
  
• Margin - The amount of money left over after paying off expenses (for a product.)
  
• Growth - The rate at which a company's business expands.
  
• Velocity - The rate at which a company's assets can be used to make money. For example, inventory turnover is a measure of velocity in some industries.
  
• Customer - Consumers or potential consumers of your products and services.
  

The interesting part of the training session was trying to understand how your activities (or project) contributed to the well-being of your company. Basically, a project should be contributing to one of more of these elements. For example, a company setting up an e-commerce website would be trying to:

1. Increase the market for its products (especially if it did not have a web presence.)
   
2. Increase the growth rate for the business by increasing the potential sales opportunities.
   

If you or your project is not contributing to one or more of these principles, then you should reevaluate what you are doing.

Getting past the fog

There was an interesting article on Yahoo! recently titled, A Guide to the Latest Batch of Corporate Buzzwords. It's a short piece and examines the usage of corporate jargon and lingo.

A new crop of buzzwords usually sprouts every three to five years, or about the same length of time many top executives have to prove themselves. Some can be useful in swiftly communicating, and spreading, new business concepts. Others are less useful, even devious.

Delayering, rightsizing, unsiloing ... What do these terms mean? Step back and think about how much terminology you use each day that an outsider would not be able to understand.

Using inappropriate language will only further confuse and obfuscate your message. Simplicity and clarity should be valued above all else.

Power Within

On September 13, I had the opportunity to attend a Power Within speaking engagement being held in Toronto. The event looked very promising with speakers such as Micheal Eisner, Sir Richard Branson and Tim Sanders taking part. You can see the full details about the session here.

Micheal Eisner's speech on management was very interesting. He spoke about how Disney used inside-the-box thinking to spur creativity and innovation for their entertainment initiatives. This may sound contrary to the outside-the-box paradigm that is prevalent now, but what Mr. Eisner meant was that for a given project you must understand the size of the box (e.g., amount of resources and money you will devote to it) and innovate, manage and be creative within those confines. He used clips from movies such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Lion King, Outrageous Fortune and Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest to illustrate his points. The complexity concerning things one would not give much thought to was astounding. The example shown was the shading on Roger Rabbit's character while a overhead light swung back and forth (the picture is courtesy of Disney via Google.) This was something that was extremely challenging to perform at that time.
Tim Sanders was a former motivational coach at Yahoo! Mr. Sanders was an engaging speaker and talked about what he termed the, "likability factor." The basic premise is that people who are more likable are more prone to succeed versus an equally competent but less likable individual. He reasoning (backed up by lots of research) was as follows:

• People want to work with individuals they like.
• People will be more willing to assist someone they like. Such as give them information that will provide an advantage in a negotiation or a business deal.
• When choosing between two identical proposals, the one from the individual you like more will generally win.

Mr. Sanders pyramid of likability was as follows (I've stated it upside down):

1. Friendliness - Make people feel welcome and comfortable.
   
2. Relevance - Validate commonalities between yourself and others.
3. Empathy - Understand feelings are facts. Be a good listener. Don't judge or try to fix the problems.
   
4. Realness - (At the top of the pyramid) be genuine. When someone is talking to you, give them your complete attention.
   

The keynote of the event was Sir Richard Branson. I must admit that this part of the event was a little of a letdown. It was run as an interview session with questions from the audience. Mr. Branson has significant charisma, however I did feel he rambled and didn't necessarily answer questions the audience's questions.

The event itself was good on a whole. If you can find a session keynoted by someone like Bill Clinton, I'd definitely say to check it out!