Seth Godin : Management and leadership, Ray Kroc and Henry Ford were pioneers of management. Frederick Taylor had a stopwatch and we got the phrase “human resources” from the idea of treating people like a machine. And if you’ve ever heard the phrase, “Being jerked around,” or calling someone a jerk, it comes from the…
Author: Josh Bulloc
Are We Working Hard Enough?
Those who do intense mental work like writers and professors typically have 2-4 good uninterrupted hours of this type of work in them each day before their capacity is used up. Then they need to go and do something else to recover for the next day of focus. What about us, we typically work 8-12…
Be Careful Getting A Company Phone
Sometimes when we are promoted to management we try to prove our worth by placing ourselves in the flow of activities to help make fast decisions (taking calls, responding to emails) and be aware of everything. This is one of the reasons someone will get a company cellphone at this time. Being a part of…
You Are Not a Machine or a Computer
Many of the tools we use to work assume we are either a machine, assembly line or a computer, believing that we should be able to process inputs unemotionally without thinking about the broader landscape of upcoming tasks. Consider email, others can pile tasks on your to-do list and that act of piling creates stress…
Get Really Good at The Basics
We seem to implement many process improvements to fix problems when we need to be doing the boring, hard, and tedious daily work.
False Perception of Control
We can measure tolerances and understand variables that we couldn’t in the past. This awareness makes us want to manipulate these variables in an attempt to control outcomes. Measuring a variable does not mean we understand its impact on the outcome when it is confounded. Furthermore, we have limited capacity to manipulate all of the…
Younger Generations Might Have More Stress
I am either a Gen X or a millennial depending on the source. I have always viewed work as something that had to be done, but the stress was always manageable. I am beginning to wonder if the younger generations experience stress that we older folks don’t realize or understand. It is like it is…
You Are Putting Too Many Words on Your Slides
When giving a presentation the goal is for YOU to tell a story, not the slides. The slides are to augment the story. The slides should not do double duty as a document that can tell the story alone, you are an integral part of the presentation. If your audience spends the presentation reading the…
I Got It Boss
Your goal is to become so dependable that you can say “I got it” to most any request and everyone trusts that you have the situation covered and followup is unnecessary. This will give you freedom in your job.
Endless Cycle of Meetings
My calendar is full of meetings. If someone wants to talk with me they have to schedule another meeting. This leads to even more meetings creating a perpetual cycle of continuous meetings. What if a whole organization is stuck with this problem?
Bigger Organization=More Process Control
scale and ubiquity demands complexity and requires efficiency – Howard Schulze The bigger your organization the more complex operations will become requiring more control of processes and standardization to reduce variability.
Scaling Communication: Standardization is Crucial as Teams Grow
A rule of thumb is that every time your team’s size doubles, the communication required is squared. So as the organization grows communication needs to be more standardized to reduce errors and variability. An example of this is communication over radio in the military. They use standard phrases we do not typically use over the…
Some Projects are a Slog
Some important projects will not move forward because the team members’ will is low in comparison to the effort required. Many may feel the problem is important and needs to be fixed but are unwilling to weather the project’s roadblocks. They may even encourage the project lead to continue working on the project even when…
Instant Messaging Does Not Make up More Productive
I have worked at several companies over my career. I started as an engineer in 2005, and messaging (Skype or Teams) was unavailable until 2012. Now, we use messaging all the time, but it does not seem like my company gets any more done than the companies I worked in before. We are just more…
Some Tasks Will Go Away
Building on last week’s post, be careful when planning your tasks too far in the future or believing that everything on your task list will need to be done. Over time, priorities change, and you cannot predict what will be important in the future. Many tasks will no longer be important, and you can remove…
Let Yourself Off The Hook
“I think Type A people have a Type B problem, and Type B people have a Type A problem.” -Chris Williamson Many of us have a days-long to-do list that we chip away at every day. We add a few minutes to each work day trying to get one more thing on the list checked…
The Administrator Class
I regularly wonder why we have so many additional projects and tasks on top of the business’s primary goal. Are all of these additional activities value-added or just noise over time? I believe part of this is the administrator class in an organization. These people in the business are responsible for managing and coordinating the…
Two Concepts on Delegation
I struggle with delegation. I feel that it is my responsibility, but my logical side realizes that I am hindering their development and my ability to produce in my role. Here are a couple of concepts that I have been considering. Consider the military; young adults are given enormous responsibility, even over other’s lives. They…
Two More Problems WIth Email
Two additional complications make asynchronous communication (email) contentious and inefficient. First, the participants have to remember the past discussion amidst all of the other thoughts and discussions they have had in between the replies possibly forgetting key pieces. Second, the amount of data transfer is lower than synchronous communication (phone, face-to-face) so the participants will…
Someone Should Do Something
Before I became a manager I felt confident in improving how my work was done. Now as a manager, people bring me problems they feel should be fixed. This is interesting to me because many of these problems were the ones I would fix for myself. I still would like to fix these problems but…