Average temperature ranges from 32 to 104 Fahrenheit. It has about twice the surface area and twice the gravity of earth, and it celebrates New Year’s Day once every 13 earth days. As soon as we can travel at the speed of light, trips to the planet, located in the constellation Libra, will only take about 20 years.
There is a full article on the World Science website.
I just read this article at cio.com. It had some excellent advice about how to give, and how not to give, feedback to others in the workplace. Feedback is one of the most powerful tools in a manager’s toolbox. Use it early; use it often. It is far better to give regular feedback than to save it up for performance review time.
Hillary and I went to an Area Breakfast Meeting (ABC) sponsored by the Institute of Management Consultants this morning. At 5:30 AM I wasn’t so sure that getting out of bed to go have breakfast at a seafood place was a good idea. As it turned out, Scott’s Seafood in Palo Alto provided a nice atmosphere and perfectly good breakfast fare.
While walking this morning, I listened to the HBR Ideacast #35, What it Means to Work Here. In it they mention a hiring practice used by Whole Foods, that I really like. New hires are on probation for the first 4 weeks. At the end of that time, their coworkers vote to keep them or let them go.
Managers, as well as engineers, are occasionally called on to give presentations. Preparation and practice are the biggest ingredients in a successful presentation. You don’t want the big day to be the first time you’ve given the presentation. Practice out loud, first by yourself and then in front of some friends or colleagues who can give you constructive criticism. Practice with the actual equipment that you will be using, preferably in the actual room where you will give the final presentation. The more you rehearse, the lower the chances of something going wrong. Sometimes, things still go wrong. John West tells the story of one such occasion, and how he did a respectable job recovering, in this post to Leading from the Trenches.
One of the podcasts that I enjoy is The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series from Stanford. The speakers tend to be smart, insightful, and inspiring. This morning I listened to the show from February 7th, which featured Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
Reid really grasps the differences between being an entrepreneur and being a manager. Listening to him compare and contrast the two will help you, no matter which you are. He also explains how even those who choose to have jobs are more and more entrepreneurial these days. You need to treat yourself as a product, and your career as your business. You even need a ‘business plan’ for your career.
If you want to network with me on LinkedIn, you can find my profile here.
From this article:
Next time you have a meeting, just survey the event. Who is talking? Who is really listening? Who is swimming in their own thoughts?
This post bemoans the ‘lost art’ of listening and recommends a book about active listening. I haven’t read this particular book, but I can attest to the power of active listening. It turns out that an excellent way to get someone to hear your point is to first convince them that you’ve really heard theirs. What’s more, sometimes other people’s ideas are better than yours!
Jackie Danicki posted the following quote here:
The key question in organizations is not the typical one — how do you motivate people or engage people? It’s how do you keep management from destroying motivation?
– David Sirota
Part of the managers’ credo should be “First, do no harm.” Many managers feel that they need to assert their authority right away by instituting new policies and making big changes as soon as they are assigned to the team. While there are rare occasions where this is called for, it usually isn’t. It is far better to spend a bit of time getting to know the team, as well as how and why they do things today. Even when radical change is called for, you are better positioned to implement radical change when the team feels that you understand them. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for morale and motivation busting fight with the team. This is especially true with bright creative types, such as engineers.
I ran across this post announcing a new competitor to WebEx, called ZOHO Meeting. The article is glowing; though ZOHO is an advertiser on the site, so bring your grain of salt along. The comments following the post are fairly useful, as several other alternatives are mentioned.
I remember how a similar product, Microsoft’s NetMeeting, changed my world. I was working on a team that included people in London, New York, Connecticut, and California. The ability to easily share a pc desktop made it much easier to collaborate. We used it all the time for one-on-one sessions between developers, internal demos, trouble-shooting, and during meetings.
It caught on all over the company and very quickly sales and support saw how valuable this functionality was. While NetMeeting worked well behind the firewall, it wasn’t the right solution for dealing with folks outside. We used WebEx for a while, and then we switched to another similar service. Both worked well and provided a ton of value.
If you have to work in distributed team, I highly recommend using this type of tool.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur yourself or just an entrevoyeur, there’s much to be gleaned from the musings of a distinguished group of business adventurers over at My Way, The Entrepreneur Collective, which aggregates feeds from a dozen individual entrepreneurs’ blogs. Blogging here are some really superb and entertaining folk, including Tom Evslin, whose post Why A Great Programmer is Worth 50 Good Ones is a classic all managers should read, the always brilliant Chris Yeh, and Ben Casnocha, whose Business Rules of Thumb wiki is full of gems like this:
First-rate men hire first-rate men…second-rate men hire third-rate
men…these third-rate men will then employ the bulk of your company’s
employees and they tend to select fourth-rate people. – Richard M. White.
Here be much wisdom.