Posts Tagged ‘Business’

7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People

August 11, 2009

Many of us in the business community grew up with Stephen Covey’s excellent book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is both influential and insightful. Unfortunately, Mr. Covey never wrote an important follow-up identifying the traits that people should avoid.  Without further ado, I give you the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People:

  1. Be the smartest person in the room – You have all the right answers so why ask others. It is a terrible waste of of your important time to wait for people to follow your train of thought.  Chances are that you are absolutely right, so why bother?  When you are the smartest person in the room, take advantage of it and don’t waste time soliciting input or advice you don’t need.
  2. Avoid making decisions – Making decisions is very limiting. Things change, markets evolve, and trends emerge. If you make a decision and set yourself on a defined course of action, you may miss a big opportunity.  Plus, your organization doesn’t like having clear direction because it may stifle innovation.
  3. Maximize benefit for the present – The world is a turbulent place.  Saving for a rainy day is for suckers.  Spend your budget like every quarter could be your last.  Nobody ever got a big payout or kudos for anything by coming in third. There is a good reason why the most highly paid baseball players are the home run hitters.
  4. Be dramatic – Most effective people I know command a room just by walking through the door. Communicate as if every thing has life or death implications, even when they don’t. Anger, fear and embarrassment are great motivators. Plus, being dramatic gets all the cards on the table. Bring every petty thought and personal emotion to bear in all situations. People will really understand you.
  5. Don’t listen to your customers – Think of the old saying about Henry Ford that if he listened to his customers, he would have built a better horse.  Customers don’t know anything. They need to be led by the hand and require an enormous amount of overhead just to turn on their car.  Are you seriously going to waste time listening to these people?  They should be grateful that you are making products or services for them to buy.
  6. Interrupt people and talk loudly – Don’t be the person sitting on the sideline or in the corner with nothing to say.  Put yourself out there.  Interrupt people.  You are smart and have insightful things to add.  They will respect you for cutting them off. Also, it is very important to pitch your voice as loudly as possible to minimize any chance that someone doesn’t hear you.
  7. Why do something today when you can do it tomorrow – It is a very rare situation when something has to get done NOW. Most things are easily put off to another time.  Deadlines are arbitrary and milestones are contrived. You are much better off doing things on your terms and timeframe.

There are many more ways to be very ineffective in life, but if you can pull off these 7, you are sure to be a complete failure.  Did we leave anything off?

P.S. Thanks to Luke Ball for helping with this post.

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Posted in CMC, GroupSwim, Random | 3 Comments »

Organize business collaboration groups using tags

February 13, 2009

Nest folders

One question I get all the time is can we organize groups in nested folders.  We are all so accustomed to this way of thinking about organization, we assume it is the right way to do it.  For example, I want to create my Sales group and have East and West under it , and so on.  Or, someone uses GroupSwim for a project and wants all technical groups under one umbrella.  We can all relate to this habit.  The problem is it doesn’t make sense.  The minute you build a hierarchy for an organization or project, it becomes out-of-date or simply wrong.  There is a better way!

From the beginning, we designed GroupSwim to define relationships between groups through tags, not hierarchy.  The tags determine how groups are related. In the previous example, I could create three groups; Sales, West, and East; each one has the “sales” tag applied to them.  I can also tag the marketing group that works with sales. In this scenario, when I search for “sales”, I get all four groups.  The benefits are legion:

  1. Tags are dynamic, just like business and life
  2. You can have as many as you want
  3. You can change them at any time

By using tags as an organizational metaphor, we allow our collaboration sites and customer communities the opportunity to evolve over time.

The other important factor here is search; it is the great equalizer.  It doesn’t matter where you put stuff if you have a good search engine, which we do.  It also allows the ultimate freedom to organize because in the end, you can find what you need quickly regardless of where it is.

Frankly, the biggest barrier and con to this approach is habit.  People are simply so used to seeing nested folders, that it seems odd to them when they don’t see them.  While we aren’t the only technology using tags versus folders, we are going to stick to our guns on this one.  It does force to do some “evangelism” on this topic, but we can take it.  What do you think?  Miss those nested folders?

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Posted in CMC, GroupSwim, Methodology | Leave a Comment »

IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will Break

November 21, 2008

This is a blog post from ReadWriteWeb, where I occasionally contribute.

This current economic client is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive, year long implementations of behind-the-firewall software will be few and far between.

I recently attended a Forrester Briefing and listened to comments from Peter Burris, who is a very smart guy. They’ve done a host of studies showing that technology will be a growing part of how businesses compete and differentiate themselves in the future.

While systems and software used to be very “behind the scenes” and often transaction based, it is the case no longer. Consumers and businesses alike buy differently, consume differently, and recommend differently. Trends like social networking, video on demand, ecommerce will continue to force businesses to adapt to keep up with their customers. They cannot rely on systems that take years to implement and most don’t have the budgets to make large investments, at least for the next couple of years.

The growing focus on SaaS, cloud computing, application platforms, etc. are all responses to this growing trend in the market. There will be other solutions in the future for mobile, etc. that we haven’t even imagined. They all support the need for businesses to utilize systems that they can deploy, change and retire quickly. In my real job, I remember meeting with a venture capitalist who talked about how their firm looks for opportunities where they see lots of “wiggling”. He couldn’t describe what that really meant, or how one gets paid for wiggling; I thought he was a lunatic.

In retrospect, he does make one good point. Things happen quickly on the internet and in this changing global economy. When a business sees wiggling (or opportunities) either positive or negative, they need agile systems to respond. One size fits all software and packaging is going the way of the VCR. I think this will continue to grow in importance and focus as enterprises evaluate new systems and invest in new technology. What do you think?

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Posted in Enterprise, Random, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment »