Productivity Before the Cloud
I said to my friend, “I’m so happy!!! I have DropBox configured so I can access my important files from anywhere. What in the world did we do before the cloud?”
Then I stopped. I realized I was alive before the cloud. How did I access my important files back then? Oh, yeah. They were in a notebook. I popped it in my $29 knapsack and carried them around with me. All my important files, available everywhere I wanted to go.
These days, I pop my laptop into that knapsack. The laptop is heavier than the paper files used to be. Then I add the power cords. And the wireless USB dongle. And my headphones. Then I lug it all until I find someplace that has WiFi, pay $14.95 for the privilege of accessing their WiFi, and access my files that I can view 2/3 of a screen at a time. And by the way, I now pay a substantial monthly fee for my internet connection at home for all this convenience.
“But this way, you don’t have to think about what to put in your knapsack! Everything’s at your fingertips,” my rationalizing gadget-loving brain cries. Uh, huh. That sounds good, but when I watch my actual behavior, literally 30 seconds’ thought before I leave would be all it takes to figure out which files I need for a given day and pop them into my bag. In fact, I could do that faster than the time it takes me to pack up my power cord. And stopping to do that thinking would probably result in me doing more targeted, more important work, rather than just spazzing from thing to thing in a frenzy of mock-productivity.
Help me understand. Every individual step from there to here felt like progress. But I’m hard-pressed to consider the additional cost (in dollars, complexity, etc.) of the current state of affairs worth the additional output (mainly printing with proportional spaced fonts).
Progress? Or is there a high tech marketing person laughing her head off in some hidden back room, as she jots down notes in pencil, on her yellow pad, that fits neatly inside her thin, lightweight, fashionable backpack?
Entrepreneurial Culture: Creating it is the CEO's job!
Sometimes, we treat corporate culture as something that “just happens.” By the time we realize we want to influence it deliberately, it’s often too late to change it very much. An entrepreneurial CEO has no such problem, however. Culture begins to be set the moment a company gets formed, but an entrepreneurial CEO can influence it tremendously. Read how in my Harvard Business Review article on the Entrepreneurial CEO and Building Culture.
You can find the article on corporate culture and how it begins as entrepreneurial culture here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/07/advanced_entrepreneurship_your.html
Turn problems into opportunities
One of the most important skills you can develop in life is the ability to turn problems into opportunities. Let’s face it, life throws problems at us pretty much all the time. Some philosophies say that problems are the universe’s way of helping us learn to accept reality. Or perhaps they’re tests meant to give us the chance to show our strength and fortitude.
My take is a bit different. A problem is simply an opportunity by another name. Maybe it’s the old “God moves in mysterious ways” philosophy, or maybe it’s just that no matter what happens, if you survive, you’ll find a way to persevere. Either way learning to systematically find the opportunity within a problem is a key skill to going as far as your life circumstances will allow.
This week’s Get-it-Done Guy episode is all about turning problems into opportunities and how to find the opportunity beneath the problem. You can find it at http://getitdone.quickanddirtytips.com/how-to-turn-problems-into-opportunities.aspx
The secret to persuasion? Just ask!
How do you persuade? Questions! I wrote an article for Hotjobs on how to persuade someone and am hoping to produce a full audio podcast sometime in the next few weeks where we demonstrate the voice tone and affect needed to keep a genuinely open mind and ask questions, ready to listen to the answers.
Advanced Entrepreneurship: How to Approach Strategy
Even first-time CEOs often realize that they should be thinking about strategy. But what is strategy? Strategy is different from vision or tactics, but how? And how should the CEO approach strategy? My current HBR.ORG article helps you understand the entrepreneur’s job description and how an entrepreneur should approach strategy.
Does a business's falling stock price matter?
In a recent Facebook discussion, someone shared the notion that BP’s falling stock price would somehow translate into actual distress for the company. Will it?
Here’s how I understand it: The stock market is a secondary market. A company sells stock to the market to raise cash, but once that stock is sold, all future trading of those shares happens between parties unrelated to the business.
The operational cash flow of the business is completely separate. The business’s stock price only affects the business if they need to raise more capital by selling another stock offering.
It’s also true that the Board of Directors may fire the CEO over a low stock price and bring in a new one. But in a company the size of BP, that’s not likely to have any immediate impact on the company’s financial position, whether or not the market boosts share price in response.
It seems to me if BP’s stock price is tanking but the business is operationally strong. If their liability remains capped at $75 million (as it was by Congress), a tanking share price, far from indicating a business in trouble, may be an opportunity to buy shares in a solid, going concern, at a bargain basement price.
Time Management Tips Video by Stever Robbins
If you haven’t had a chance to check out my Time Management Tips video that I did as part of Harvard Business School Publishing’s Harvard Manage Mentor product, you can see it here. Click here to view my Time Management Tips video directly on YouTube.
How to Set Boundaries at Work
A critical part of getting work done is getting the rest of your life done, too! If you aren’t playing, having fun, and enjoying life, you won’t be able to get things done when you need to. You’ll just go through the motions, waiting for a freedom that never arrives.
This week’s Get-it-Done Guy podcast is all about how to set boundaries at work. Listen and enjoy!
The Entrepreneurial CEO's job description
Earlier this week, I began a series of articles on the Harvard Business Review blog site that will deal with the job description of the entrepreneur. The series arose because while people talk a lot about what qualities make up a good entrepreneur, the world is strangely silent on how an entrepreneur should actually spend their time. They always run around like the sky is falling, and they’re busy beyond belief. But doing … what? And how do they know what they’re doing is actually moving the company forward, versus just being whatever activity caught their eye at the moment.
Read my HBR.ORG blog post on Advanced Entrepreneurship: The Entrepreneurial Job Description.
Getting work done on airplanes
Today’s Get-it-Done Guy episode is about choosing how to be productive on airplanes. Most of us just assume that bringing as much work as we can is the way to go. Not necessarily. The airplane environment presents an increasingly rare opportunity to concentrate on certain kinds of task. You can find today’s Get-it-Done Guy episode by clicking the links in this message.
