Jewish Wisdom
posted by Ravi at 12:41 PM
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Thursday, March 09, 2006
Saturday, March 04, 2006
reference to interesting books by magee
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2006/02/27.html#a4734
A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers
(Cross posted at Future Tense)
This past weekend I gave a seminar at DePaul University on the topic of "Knowledge worker effectiveness in organizations" as part of the Master's Program in Applied Technology (MAAT). As I was heading out of the house Saturday morning, I decided to grab some of the key books that I thought were important if you were interested in becoming a better knowledge worker. It provoked some interesting discussion and I promised the students that I would send them a bibliography of the books I had brought along.
This is certainly my own idiosyncratic view, but it may be useful to others, if only as a starting point for discussion. Certainly, if you want to improve your skills as a knowledge worker, you are pretty much confined to some form of self-directed learning strategy. I added a couple of titles I didn't see as I was going out the door and decided to limit my suggestions to 25 titles and focus on books that were focused on the needs of the individual rather than the organization. I suspect that you could complete this reading in less than a year if you chose to.
Although I didn't do so on Saturday, I spent a little extra time to organize and categorize the list. I also imposed some sense of the order that I would recommend to attack these titles over time. As far as I can tell, most still appear to be in print or obtainable on-line. The links here go to Amazon.
Learning, Mindfulness, and Reflection
The starting point for getting better at anything, including knowledge work, is to increase your capacity for learning from experience. In organizational settings, this need for learning capacity is increased because organizational work rarely leaves time for practice and rehearsal. You need to develop the capacity to learn while you are engaged in performance and in those little moments of downtime. Here is where I would suggest you start.
Mindfulness
Langer, Ellen J.
Esther Dyson and Tom Davenport, among others, have argued that attention is the fundamental currency of the new economy. "Paying attention" has acquired new meaning and significance. In Mindfulness, Langer demonstrates what comprises attention and what the payoffs are when you direct it intelligently. Learning to be more mindful is an absolutely essential step in any effort to improve your capabilities and performance as a knowledge worker
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
Schon, Donald A.
Along with Chris Argyris, Schon was one of the scholars who defined the topic of organizational learning. Here he examines professions such as architecture and management where the fundamental task is to formulate and apply new solutions to new problems. To do that requires the skill of being able to reflect on and extract lessons from experience in a systematic and reliable way. The Reflective Practitioner contains his recommendations on how to develop that skill.
Teaching As a Subversive Activity
Postman, Neil
Still available and in print, I got my hands on this book just as I was starting college. Fortunately, I had gone to a private high school that fundamentally practiced what Postman was preaching, which was to equip students to question, evaluate, and interpret what they were told. I found Postman's thinking and arguments insightful and thought-provoking even when I found myself disagreeing with them.
Years later I had a chance to meet Postman during a seminar at NYU and we ended up in an unsatisfying discussion about how you could influence the development and use of technology in responsible and useful ways. I've built my career on that assumption and Postman essentially rejected it as even feasible. Regardless, this particular piece of thinking is one that I still return to from time to time to refresh myself on its advice on our responsibilities to be critical, self-directed, learners.
Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water
Vaill, Peter B.
Peter Vaill is an organizational theorist and consultant. In one of his other excellent books, Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change, Vaill introduced one of my favorite metaphors for the organizational world we can expect to occupy for the rest of our careers, "permanent white water." As much as we might wish to believe that the rapids we are in are simply a passing moment of thrill to be followed by calm waters, Vaill will convince you that the rapids are here to stay and that rather than simply hanging on until calm returns, we need to learn to navigate as best we can inside that reality. Learning as a Way of Being starts from that permanent white water assumption and explores why and how we need to build learning into the very fabric of who and what we are. Opportunities to coast on what we used to know will come less frequently and be shorter than ever. Most of our systems designed to support learning are not yet up to the task of properly preparing us for that reality; we must take on the responsibility ourselves. Vaill is one of the key handbooks to help discharge that responsibility.
Filters Against Folly : How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent
Hardin, Garrett
Garrett Hardin was a population biologist who became one of the leading thinkers and promoters of ecological approaches to problem solving. He was the person who succeeded in describing and popularizing the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" in dealing with many kinds of resource management problems. Although I had heard of the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" I had never linked it to Hardin or anyone else.
I first encountered Hardin's thinking in this small volume in the early 90s. It is a cleaned up version of a series of public lectures Hardin offered about the appropriate relationship between experts and the public and was an effort to offset the notion that experts are people whose expertise is to be automatically deferred to by those who are not expert.
Living in a world that continues to defer to those who claim expertise, this book remains an important antidote. First, no matter what our own expertise, we are always non-experts in many areas and fields that are consequential to us. All of us would do well to understand how to engage with and interpret the work and recommendations of experts in ways that force the experts to be clear about the limits of their expertise and proposals.
As non-experts we need to become more aware of how the "filters" that different sorts of experts use to make sense of their fields not only produce important expert insights but also blind experts to other potential insights that will more than likely bear on making an appropriately informed decision about the questions at hand. To make the general notion of filters concrete, Hardin takes a look at three basic filters that all of us encounter routinely as we engage in interactions between expert and non-expert, regardless of which role we are in today.
The first filter is the literate filter of language, which concerns itself with words and rhetoric. Hardin offers ways to listen to and think about the language employed in expert settings in order to recognize when the language is being used to advance thought and when it is being used to cut off or stop thought.
Hardin's second filter is the numerate filter, which reduces the richness and generalities of the literate filter to more precise efforts to quantify "how much," "how fast," or "how soon." The numerate filter lets us make distinctions about such notions as levels of risk and how much cost is worth how much benefit.
Hardin's third filter is about applying ecological perspectives to questions. He calls it an ecolate filter, but I prefer to think of it as a systems filter. In addition to thinking about questions of language and of numbers, a systems filter focuses attention on questions of what happens next; what are the consequences, both planned and intended versus those that are unplanned and, therefore, unintended that are likely to flow from a proposed change to some system. While some of the specific examples in this book have grown a bit dated with time, the underlying argument and the recommended habits of mind are both worth investing time in understanding.
Improv Wisdom : Don't Prepare, Just Show Up
Madson, Patricia Ryan
One of the peculiar aspects of knowledge work in most organizations is that there is never a time to practice or rehearse. In many other diverse fields, the value and importance of practice is understood and built in. Athletes, Actors, Singers, Soldiers, and Surgeons are all expected to practice their craft as a central part of their training and development. Many continue to practice in parallel with their performance.
In the settings that most knowledge workers operate in, it is always performance time.
If learning is an essential aspect of knowledge work, we must find and invent ways to practice while we perform and to extract lessons from future performance from past. One intriguing path to explore here is to look at another area where performance is unscripted--improvisational theater. This is one of several recent efforts to make this link between the world of improv and the world of work that most of us occupy. It sketches the world and practice of improv that shed light on how that craft might translate into other realms. It also offers pointers deeper into the world of improv should you find the path worth exploring more deeply.
How to Read a Book
Adler, Mortimer Jerome
You have to respect a book that is still in print after first being published in 1940. This one is well worth the time even if for no other reason than to make the point that reading is an active intellectual task not a passive one. Beyond that, however, Adler and Van Doren provide an overall scheme and a set of habits for getting the most out of what you read.
Writing
Although the quality of writing skills I encounter out of too many schools continues to decline, writing remains one of the core skills for the knowledge economy. Your skill matters both as a tool for cementing your own understanding and as a way to communicate what you know to those who would benefit from knowing what you know. If you are willing to work at it and willing to seek out critical feedback, writing is something that you can improve. These are books I've found helpful in my development as a writer and are ones that I return to again and again.
Writing Without Teachers.
Elbow, Peter
I've been writing for most of my life. This book introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing processes tremendously. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a finished result, they cannot work in parallel no matter how much we might like to think so.
Trying to criticize writing on the fly is possibly the single greatest barrier to writing that most of us encounter. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to capture a fleeting thought, the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand. You must learn to create first and then critique if you want to make writing the tool for thinking that it is.
The practice that can help you past your learned bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls "free writing." In free writing, the objective is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15-20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words flowing. As the words begin to flow, the ideas will come out from the shadows and let themselves be captured on your notepad or your screen.
Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you've persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the page as the deadline hurtles toward you.
Trust Elbow.
Instead of staring at a blank screen start filling it with words no matter how bad. Halfway through your available time, stop and rework your raw mind-dump into something closer to finished product. Alternate back and forth until you run out of time (and end on a critiquing cycle) and the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.
Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Lamott, Anne
Reading books about writing is always a safe escape from the act itself. The key is to limit yourself to the really good books about it. Lamott's "Bird by Bird" is clearly in Sturgeon's 10% of what's best. Her advice is consistent with what I've learned from multiple sources I trust and my own experience. She has an acerbic wit you would want muttering next to you at a cocktail party rather then muttering about you from across the room. She also has a collection of useful tips and tricks to add to my toolkit. Perhaps my favorite is "write shitty first drafts."
Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
Weinberg, Gerald M.
A frequent pastime for all writers and aspiring writers is to read books of advice on how to write. That briefly postpones the inevitable encounter with the blank page or blank screen we are trying to avoid. Most of these books are marginal, some are useful, and a handful prove to be essential. This has the markings of one that may become essential.
Weinberg has produced 30-plus books and 100s of articles over his career. He has also combined a career that started out dealing with technology and transformed to dealing with organizations and the behavior of the people in them. That mixture leads to a view about the practice of writing that is among the most actionable and most aligned with the world I find myself in than anything I have yet encountered. Weinberg is not concerned with the mechanics of writing or particularly with the low-level details. Instead, his focus is on how to integrate the process of writing into the rest of your daily world in a way that makes each better.
Design, Problem Definition, and Problem Solving
We are all exploring new territories. There are few maps and few reliable tools. All of us, then, are called on to take on responsibilities for blazing our own trails and developing the tools and techniques we need as we travel. That makes a deeper understanding of design, problem definition, and problem solving techniques something we all need to develop and continue to develop over time. Here is where I started and where I continue to draw insight.
The Mind Map Book : How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential
Buzan, Tony
The term is a bit "new-agey" for my tastes, but the technique should definitely be in your bag of tricks. Others call mind-maps "spider charts" or "chunking." Whatever the term,it's one of those "coloring outside the lines" kind of insights and this is the definitive book on the technique. Don't get too wrapped up in the artistic advice. You can get 80% of the value from mind-maps out of simple black and white.
Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas Fourth Edition
Adams, James L.
I discovered one of the early editions of this book many years ago. As you might suspect of any book that has reached a fourth edition, Conceptual Blockbusting is full of practical advice on how to set up and think about problems in ways that increase the chances of finding or inventing not only a solution but generally several good to excellent solutions. Adams also has lots of insight about how our habits of mind interfere with generating ideas and advice on how to replace those habits with ones that contribute to better ideas.
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Alexander, Christopher
Christopher Alexander is a mathematician turned architect. Over the years his work has gathered something of a cult following both in architecture circles and in systems design and development circles. The work that initially grew of of this little book grew to a wide-ranging discourse on the notion of Pattern and Pattern Languages that Alexander developed to help him better understand how people shape their environment to their needs in ways that are both functional and emotionally satisfying.
Like most of his work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form can often be dense. On the other hand, I have found Alexander's thinking to be something I always find worth the effort. This was one of the first books I read that started me on the path of considering both the central role of "design" in matching technology, people, and environment and the notion that all of us should think of ourselves as designers rather than allow design to become the province of yet one more category of experts.
Are Your Lights On? : How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is
Gause, Donald C.
Almost all of our training and experience is focused on how to get the answer; how to find a solution to a well-defined problem. In real life, most of our time is spent trying to fit the current mess around us into something that looks like a problem we might know how to solve. In Are Your Lights On? Gause and Weinberg offer one of the few books (and fortunately one of the best) on ways that you might go about investigating, understanding, and defining what you are dealing with to turn the present mess into a problem that can, in fact, be solved.
The Design of Everyday Things
Norman, Donald A.
We live in a designed world. 90% or more of what we encounter on a daily basis consists of objects, structures, and processes designed by someone else intended to influence our behavior in a particular direction. Sometimes our encounters with the designed world or benign and even pleasant. The designs make our experience easier or more satisfying. All too often, though, our encounters with the world around us are a source of frustration and exasperation, whether we are dealing with a voice mail system from hell or trying to figure out which funny symbol on a sign will lead us to the appropriate restroom.
Norman is a cognitive scientist who began to study and explore how designed objects connect with us as human beings and how choices made in their designs either help or hinder their effective use. This book will help you understand how design impacts your daily life and suggest how you might want to think as a designer in your own knowledge work.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
Tharp, Twyla
For me a recurring theme in developing skill as a knowledge worker is that we all need to take whatever talent for creativity we were gifted with and develop it as far was we can. We live in a world that demands on insight and creativity from all of us. We cannot sit back and wait for someone else to frame the question and design a solution for us to implement. We all have to contribute to the earliest stages of the creative processes and stay connected and engaged with the process through to the end. Tharp is among the most creative choreographers alive today and this book is a remarkable blend of practices, tricks, techniques, perspectives, and personal reflections on what it means to accept the responsibility to turn creative talents into creative habits.
For Tharp, being creative is her job and she shares insights and advice about what that translates too in terms of disciplines and habits of work and preparation that deliver creativity when you need. Tharp cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the creative muse to strike. In her world, that is simply an excuse to stall and avoid responsibility. Whether we like it or not, or know it or not, we now live in that same world and we would all do well to listen to and act on her experience and advice.
Management and Consulting Skills
As knowledge workers we are all consultants at some level. We must take responsibility for managing our own work and we must work with our clients (whether they are inside or outside of our organization) to collaboratively agree on what must be done by when. This requires skills for project planning and management that few of us are called on to develop and skills for operating adroitly within complex organizational settings. These titles will help, whatever your current level of knowledge and skill.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Allen, David
There are hundreds of books on the topic of time management. David Allen goes beyond them in a significant and useful way. He focuses on a coherent and fundamentally simple system for getting work done. The fundamental insight? Get everything out of your head and written down. Identify all of the projects on your plate and the outcomes you intend to accomplish. Figure out the one next physical action that needs to be done to advance each project. Organize your lists of things to do by the place or context where they can be done.
Developing the discipline takes time (at least for me), but the payoff is high. Also check out David's website at The David Allen Company. Think of this as one of the key process building blocks for a personal knowledge management system
Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (Second Edition)
Block, Peter
Fundamentally, regardless of what other knowledge work job we might hold, we are all called on to be consultants at one time or another. Your expertise is valued to the extent that others understand it and make use of it. That makes you a consultant and understanding how to do it well is important to your ultimate effectiveness as a knowledge worker.
Talk to just about any consultant who has been at it for more than a few years and they will point you to Peter Block and Flawless Consulting. Peter assumes that you are an expert in something and that you are not an expert in the interactions and issues you will always and predictably encounter when dealing with others who need your expertise but will rarely exactly understand what that will entail. That's where Block is the expert and he clearly understands the connections and will help you understand them as well.
The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters
Block, Peter
Another set of insights from Peter Block. This one is less about specific tips on how to be a better consultant/advisor. Instead it focuses on the impact of our default attitudes and assumptions on how we handle change, particularly in organizational settings. In particular, Block takes aim at the debilitating affects of always and quickly shifting discussions about any kind of proposed change to discussions of how things should be done or how they are impossible to do.
He argues, successfully, that our disposition toward leaping into questions of implementation is a disguised way to block change. The first question should never be "how can we do this?" as pragmatic as that might appear. Instead, we need to begin with questions of value. "Is this something that we want to do or that we need to do?" If the answer to that is truly "yes" then we will find the answers to the "how" questions as they appear.
Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance And Results from Knowledge Workers
Davenport, Thomas H.
Over the years, I have found that Tom Davenport is one of those thinkers whose most important contribution tends to be a combination of being among the very first to see important new phenomena on the horizon and organize useful ways to think about what's coming in productive ways. Here Tom is picking up on the importance of managing knowledge workers differently than organizations have managed industrial workers and starting to develop some useful frameworks for thinking about what that might mean. This book is a little more focused on the organizational dimension and response to the issues of knowledge work, than the rest of what I am pointing to here. Nevertheless, it still contains useful insight for the individual knowledge worker within the organization.
Secrets of Consulting : A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
Weinberg, Gerald M.
Weinberg has been providing expertise to organizations for decades. His particular areas of expertise is at the intersection of how organizations develop and deploy technology. Along with Block, Weinberg is one of the best and most down-to-earth, accessible thinkers about the challenges of connecting your expertise to organizational action. This is among his best compilations of advice relevant to any of us faced with the problem.
The Information and Technology Environment
Not only has knowledge work become a more central element of the economic environment, but that environment is increasingly dominated by information technology and issues created by the proliferation of data and information available. You cannot pretend to be a knowledge worker and allow yourself to remain ignorant of these foundations. The following titles are entry points that will let you begin to enrich this dimension of your skills and knowledge.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition)
Rosenfeld, Louis
The defined target audience for this book is professionals responsible for designing web sites and other services on the web from the perspective of how to make them more useful as tools for finding and organizing the information needed by organizations and the knowledge workers within them. My own hypothesis is that as knowledge workers we not only need to be able to recognize and take advantage of the work of professional information architects, we also need to develop a base level of design skill to function as information architects for ourselves and for other knowledge workers who depend on us. This is not a professional skill that can simply be handed off to an expert somewhere. Rather it is becoming an element of the basic skillset/toolkit that every knowledge worker will need to possess. This is an excellent first step to developing that base level of skill.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Hunt, Andrew
This might appear to be a bit too technology-focused to be relevant or accessible to the average knowledge worker. On the other hand, I believe that software developers have been doing knowledge work inside of rich technology environments longer than anyone else. The problems they have encountered and the solutions to those problems that they have developed are worth exploring and understanding.
This is possibly the best entry point to that exploration that any knowledge worker might find. If you are not particularly technically oriented, there may be spots that will seem heavy-going or that will not seem relevant. On the other hand, time invested in thinking about the arguments that Hunt and Thomas make and thinking about how you might translate them into your knowledge work settings will prove well spent. At the very least, it will make you more observant and critical about the tools that have been given you to as a knowledge worker. You might well begin to wonder why the lessons of the past 40-50 years of developing software technology have seen so little application to newer knowledge work environments. You might also start looking for ways to translate some of those lessons to your own practices.
Information Anxiety : What to Do When Information Doesn't Tell You What You Need to Know
Wurman, Richard Saul
I encountered this book when it first appeared in 1989 and I was in the midst of working on my doctorate. For me, it was full of insights and tidbits about the problems created by the information environment we were living in then (it has only gotten worse with time) and ways of thinking about how we might tackle solving those problems for ourselves and for others. Wurman is credited with being among the first, if not the first, to coin the term "information architect" and this was his first attempt to describe what that might mean. As knowledge workers we will all have to our own information architects in many respects. This will help get you on your way.
Information Anxiety 2
Wurman, Richard Saul
Wurman essentially created the idea of information architecture in 1975, the year I graduated from college. I wish I had encountered him then rather than 1989, when the first version of this book appeared. His quest is to persuade designers to pay more attention to making it easier for all of us to cope with the onslaught of bits. While that would be nice, I find this more useful as advice for what you and I can do personally to cope until that day comes. One example--LATCH. It's a mnemonic for the fundamental ways to organize any set of information: location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy.
A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers
(Cross posted at Future Tense)
This past weekend I gave a seminar at DePaul University on the topic of "Knowledge worker effectiveness in organizations" as part of the Master's Program in Applied Technology (MAAT). As I was heading out of the house Saturday morning, I decided to grab some of the key books that I thought were important if you were interested in becoming a better knowledge worker. It provoked some interesting discussion and I promised the students that I would send them a bibliography of the books I had brought along.
This is certainly my own idiosyncratic view, but it may be useful to others, if only as a starting point for discussion. Certainly, if you want to improve your skills as a knowledge worker, you are pretty much confined to some form of self-directed learning strategy. I added a couple of titles I didn't see as I was going out the door and decided to limit my suggestions to 25 titles and focus on books that were focused on the needs of the individual rather than the organization. I suspect that you could complete this reading in less than a year if you chose to.
Although I didn't do so on Saturday, I spent a little extra time to organize and categorize the list. I also imposed some sense of the order that I would recommend to attack these titles over time. As far as I can tell, most still appear to be in print or obtainable on-line. The links here go to Amazon.
Learning, Mindfulness, and Reflection
The starting point for getting better at anything, including knowledge work, is to increase your capacity for learning from experience. In organizational settings, this need for learning capacity is increased because organizational work rarely leaves time for practice and rehearsal. You need to develop the capacity to learn while you are engaged in performance and in those little moments of downtime. Here is where I would suggest you start.
Mindfulness
Langer, Ellen J.
Esther Dyson and Tom Davenport, among others, have argued that attention is the fundamental currency of the new economy. "Paying attention" has acquired new meaning and significance. In Mindfulness, Langer demonstrates what comprises attention and what the payoffs are when you direct it intelligently. Learning to be more mindful is an absolutely essential step in any effort to improve your capabilities and performance as a knowledge worker
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action
Schon, Donald A.
Along with Chris Argyris, Schon was one of the scholars who defined the topic of organizational learning. Here he examines professions such as architecture and management where the fundamental task is to formulate and apply new solutions to new problems. To do that requires the skill of being able to reflect on and extract lessons from experience in a systematic and reliable way. The Reflective Practitioner contains his recommendations on how to develop that skill.
Teaching As a Subversive Activity
Postman, Neil
Still available and in print, I got my hands on this book just as I was starting college. Fortunately, I had gone to a private high school that fundamentally practiced what Postman was preaching, which was to equip students to question, evaluate, and interpret what they were told. I found Postman's thinking and arguments insightful and thought-provoking even when I found myself disagreeing with them.
Years later I had a chance to meet Postman during a seminar at NYU and we ended up in an unsatisfying discussion about how you could influence the development and use of technology in responsible and useful ways. I've built my career on that assumption and Postman essentially rejected it as even feasible. Regardless, this particular piece of thinking is one that I still return to from time to time to refresh myself on its advice on our responsibilities to be critical, self-directed, learners.
Learning As a Way of Being : Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water
Vaill, Peter B.
Peter Vaill is an organizational theorist and consultant. In one of his other excellent books, Managing As a Performing Art : New Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change, Vaill introduced one of my favorite metaphors for the organizational world we can expect to occupy for the rest of our careers, "permanent white water." As much as we might wish to believe that the rapids we are in are simply a passing moment of thrill to be followed by calm waters, Vaill will convince you that the rapids are here to stay and that rather than simply hanging on until calm returns, we need to learn to navigate as best we can inside that reality. Learning as a Way of Being starts from that permanent white water assumption and explores why and how we need to build learning into the very fabric of who and what we are. Opportunities to coast on what we used to know will come less frequently and be shorter than ever. Most of our systems designed to support learning are not yet up to the task of properly preparing us for that reality; we must take on the responsibility ourselves. Vaill is one of the key handbooks to help discharge that responsibility.
Filters Against Folly : How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent
Hardin, Garrett
Garrett Hardin was a population biologist who became one of the leading thinkers and promoters of ecological approaches to problem solving. He was the person who succeeded in describing and popularizing the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" in dealing with many kinds of resource management problems. Although I had heard of the notion of the "Tragedy of the Commons" I had never linked it to Hardin or anyone else.
I first encountered Hardin's thinking in this small volume in the early 90s. It is a cleaned up version of a series of public lectures Hardin offered about the appropriate relationship between experts and the public and was an effort to offset the notion that experts are people whose expertise is to be automatically deferred to by those who are not expert.
Living in a world that continues to defer to those who claim expertise, this book remains an important antidote. First, no matter what our own expertise, we are always non-experts in many areas and fields that are consequential to us. All of us would do well to understand how to engage with and interpret the work and recommendations of experts in ways that force the experts to be clear about the limits of their expertise and proposals.
As non-experts we need to become more aware of how the "filters" that different sorts of experts use to make sense of their fields not only produce important expert insights but also blind experts to other potential insights that will more than likely bear on making an appropriately informed decision about the questions at hand. To make the general notion of filters concrete, Hardin takes a look at three basic filters that all of us encounter routinely as we engage in interactions between expert and non-expert, regardless of which role we are in today.
The first filter is the literate filter of language, which concerns itself with words and rhetoric. Hardin offers ways to listen to and think about the language employed in expert settings in order to recognize when the language is being used to advance thought and when it is being used to cut off or stop thought.
Hardin's second filter is the numerate filter, which reduces the richness and generalities of the literate filter to more precise efforts to quantify "how much," "how fast," or "how soon." The numerate filter lets us make distinctions about such notions as levels of risk and how much cost is worth how much benefit.
Hardin's third filter is about applying ecological perspectives to questions. He calls it an ecolate filter, but I prefer to think of it as a systems filter. In addition to thinking about questions of language and of numbers, a systems filter focuses attention on questions of what happens next; what are the consequences, both planned and intended versus those that are unplanned and, therefore, unintended that are likely to flow from a proposed change to some system. While some of the specific examples in this book have grown a bit dated with time, the underlying argument and the recommended habits of mind are both worth investing time in understanding.
Improv Wisdom : Don't Prepare, Just Show Up
Madson, Patricia Ryan
One of the peculiar aspects of knowledge work in most organizations is that there is never a time to practice or rehearse. In many other diverse fields, the value and importance of practice is understood and built in. Athletes, Actors, Singers, Soldiers, and Surgeons are all expected to practice their craft as a central part of their training and development. Many continue to practice in parallel with their performance.
In the settings that most knowledge workers operate in, it is always performance time.
If learning is an essential aspect of knowledge work, we must find and invent ways to practice while we perform and to extract lessons from future performance from past. One intriguing path to explore here is to look at another area where performance is unscripted--improvisational theater. This is one of several recent efforts to make this link between the world of improv and the world of work that most of us occupy. It sketches the world and practice of improv that shed light on how that craft might translate into other realms. It also offers pointers deeper into the world of improv should you find the path worth exploring more deeply.
How to Read a Book
Adler, Mortimer Jerome
You have to respect a book that is still in print after first being published in 1940. This one is well worth the time even if for no other reason than to make the point that reading is an active intellectual task not a passive one. Beyond that, however, Adler and Van Doren provide an overall scheme and a set of habits for getting the most out of what you read.
Writing
Although the quality of writing skills I encounter out of too many schools continues to decline, writing remains one of the core skills for the knowledge economy. Your skill matters both as a tool for cementing your own understanding and as a way to communicate what you know to those who would benefit from knowing what you know. If you are willing to work at it and willing to seek out critical feedback, writing is something that you can improve. These are books I've found helpful in my development as a writer and are ones that I return to again and again.
Writing Without Teachers.
Elbow, Peter
I've been writing for most of my life. This book introduced me to one distinction and one practice that has helped my writing processes tremendously. The distinction is between the creative mind and the critical mind. While you need to employ both to get to a finished result, they cannot work in parallel no matter how much we might like to think so.
Trying to criticize writing on the fly is possibly the single greatest barrier to writing that most of us encounter. If you are listening to that 5th grade English teacher correct your grammar while you are trying to capture a fleeting thought, the thought will die. If you capture the fleeting thought and simply share it with the world in raw form, no one is likely to understand. You must learn to create first and then critique if you want to make writing the tool for thinking that it is.
The practice that can help you past your learned bad habits of trying to edit as you write is what Elbow calls "free writing." In free writing, the objective is to get words down on paper non-stop, usually for 15-20 minutes. No stopping, no going back, no criticizing. The goal is to get the words flowing. As the words begin to flow, the ideas will come out from the shadows and let themselves be captured on your notepad or your screen.
Now you have raw materials that you can begin to work with using the critical mind that you've persuaded to sit on the side and watch quietly. Most likely, you will believe that this will take more time than you actually have and you will end up staring blankly at the page as the deadline hurtles toward you.
Trust Elbow.
Instead of staring at a blank screen start filling it with words no matter how bad. Halfway through your available time, stop and rework your raw mind-dump into something closer to finished product. Alternate back and forth until you run out of time (and end on a critiquing cycle) and the final result will most likely be far better than your current practices.
Bird by Bird : Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Lamott, Anne
Reading books about writing is always a safe escape from the act itself. The key is to limit yourself to the really good books about it. Lamott's "Bird by Bird" is clearly in Sturgeon's 10% of what's best. Her advice is consistent with what I've learned from multiple sources I trust and my own experience. She has an acerbic wit you would want muttering next to you at a cocktail party rather then muttering about you from across the room. She also has a collection of useful tips and tricks to add to my toolkit. Perhaps my favorite is "write shitty first drafts."
Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
Weinberg, Gerald M.
A frequent pastime for all writers and aspiring writers is to read books of advice on how to write. That briefly postpones the inevitable encounter with the blank page or blank screen we are trying to avoid. Most of these books are marginal, some are useful, and a handful prove to be essential. This has the markings of one that may become essential.
Weinberg has produced 30-plus books and 100s of articles over his career. He has also combined a career that started out dealing with technology and transformed to dealing with organizations and the behavior of the people in them. That mixture leads to a view about the practice of writing that is among the most actionable and most aligned with the world I find myself in than anything I have yet encountered. Weinberg is not concerned with the mechanics of writing or particularly with the low-level details. Instead, his focus is on how to integrate the process of writing into the rest of your daily world in a way that makes each better.
Design, Problem Definition, and Problem Solving
We are all exploring new territories. There are few maps and few reliable tools. All of us, then, are called on to take on responsibilities for blazing our own trails and developing the tools and techniques we need as we travel. That makes a deeper understanding of design, problem definition, and problem solving techniques something we all need to develop and continue to develop over time. Here is where I started and where I continue to draw insight.
The Mind Map Book : How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential
Buzan, Tony
The term is a bit "new-agey" for my tastes, but the technique should definitely be in your bag of tricks. Others call mind-maps "spider charts" or "chunking." Whatever the term,it's one of those "coloring outside the lines" kind of insights and this is the definitive book on the technique. Don't get too wrapped up in the artistic advice. You can get 80% of the value from mind-maps out of simple black and white.
Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas Fourth Edition
Adams, James L.
I discovered one of the early editions of this book many years ago. As you might suspect of any book that has reached a fourth edition, Conceptual Blockbusting is full of practical advice on how to set up and think about problems in ways that increase the chances of finding or inventing not only a solution but generally several good to excellent solutions. Adams also has lots of insight about how our habits of mind interfere with generating ideas and advice on how to replace those habits with ones that contribute to better ideas.
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
Alexander, Christopher
Christopher Alexander is a mathematician turned architect. Over the years his work has gathered something of a cult following both in architecture circles and in systems design and development circles. The work that initially grew of of this little book grew to a wide-ranging discourse on the notion of Pattern and Pattern Languages that Alexander developed to help him better understand how people shape their environment to their needs in ways that are both functional and emotionally satisfying.
Like most of his work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form can often be dense. On the other hand, I have found Alexander's thinking to be something I always find worth the effort. This was one of the first books I read that started me on the path of considering both the central role of "design" in matching technology, people, and environment and the notion that all of us should think of ourselves as designers rather than allow design to become the province of yet one more category of experts.
Are Your Lights On? : How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is
Gause, Donald C.
Almost all of our training and experience is focused on how to get the answer; how to find a solution to a well-defined problem. In real life, most of our time is spent trying to fit the current mess around us into something that looks like a problem we might know how to solve. In Are Your Lights On? Gause and Weinberg offer one of the few books (and fortunately one of the best) on ways that you might go about investigating, understanding, and defining what you are dealing with to turn the present mess into a problem that can, in fact, be solved.
The Design of Everyday Things
Norman, Donald A.
We live in a designed world. 90% or more of what we encounter on a daily basis consists of objects, structures, and processes designed by someone else intended to influence our behavior in a particular direction. Sometimes our encounters with the designed world or benign and even pleasant. The designs make our experience easier or more satisfying. All too often, though, our encounters with the world around us are a source of frustration and exasperation, whether we are dealing with a voice mail system from hell or trying to figure out which funny symbol on a sign will lead us to the appropriate restroom.
Norman is a cognitive scientist who began to study and explore how designed objects connect with us as human beings and how choices made in their designs either help or hinder their effective use. This book will help you understand how design impacts your daily life and suggest how you might want to think as a designer in your own knowledge work.
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
Tharp, Twyla
For me a recurring theme in developing skill as a knowledge worker is that we all need to take whatever talent for creativity we were gifted with and develop it as far was we can. We live in a world that demands on insight and creativity from all of us. We cannot sit back and wait for someone else to frame the question and design a solution for us to implement. We all have to contribute to the earliest stages of the creative processes and stay connected and engaged with the process through to the end. Tharp is among the most creative choreographers alive today and this book is a remarkable blend of practices, tricks, techniques, perspectives, and personal reflections on what it means to accept the responsibility to turn creative talents into creative habits.
For Tharp, being creative is her job and she shares insights and advice about what that translates too in terms of disciplines and habits of work and preparation that deliver creativity when you need. Tharp cannot afford the luxury of waiting for the creative muse to strike. In her world, that is simply an excuse to stall and avoid responsibility. Whether we like it or not, or know it or not, we now live in that same world and we would all do well to listen to and act on her experience and advice.
Management and Consulting Skills
As knowledge workers we are all consultants at some level. We must take responsibility for managing our own work and we must work with our clients (whether they are inside or outside of our organization) to collaboratively agree on what must be done by when. This requires skills for project planning and management that few of us are called on to develop and skills for operating adroitly within complex organizational settings. These titles will help, whatever your current level of knowledge and skill.
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Allen, David
There are hundreds of books on the topic of time management. David Allen goes beyond them in a significant and useful way. He focuses on a coherent and fundamentally simple system for getting work done. The fundamental insight? Get everything out of your head and written down. Identify all of the projects on your plate and the outcomes you intend to accomplish. Figure out the one next physical action that needs to be done to advance each project. Organize your lists of things to do by the place or context where they can be done.
Developing the discipline takes time (at least for me), but the payoff is high. Also check out David's website at The David Allen Company. Think of this as one of the key process building blocks for a personal knowledge management system
Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used (Second Edition)
Block, Peter
Fundamentally, regardless of what other knowledge work job we might hold, we are all called on to be consultants at one time or another. Your expertise is valued to the extent that others understand it and make use of it. That makes you a consultant and understanding how to do it well is important to your ultimate effectiveness as a knowledge worker.
Talk to just about any consultant who has been at it for more than a few years and they will point you to Peter Block and Flawless Consulting. Peter assumes that you are an expert in something and that you are not an expert in the interactions and issues you will always and predictably encounter when dealing with others who need your expertise but will rarely exactly understand what that will entail. That's where Block is the expert and he clearly understands the connections and will help you understand them as well.
The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting On What Matters
Block, Peter
Another set of insights from Peter Block. This one is less about specific tips on how to be a better consultant/advisor. Instead it focuses on the impact of our default attitudes and assumptions on how we handle change, particularly in organizational settings. In particular, Block takes aim at the debilitating affects of always and quickly shifting discussions about any kind of proposed change to discussions of how things should be done or how they are impossible to do.
He argues, successfully, that our disposition toward leaping into questions of implementation is a disguised way to block change. The first question should never be "how can we do this?" as pragmatic as that might appear. Instead, we need to begin with questions of value. "Is this something that we want to do or that we need to do?" If the answer to that is truly "yes" then we will find the answers to the "how" questions as they appear.
Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance And Results from Knowledge Workers
Davenport, Thomas H.
Over the years, I have found that Tom Davenport is one of those thinkers whose most important contribution tends to be a combination of being among the very first to see important new phenomena on the horizon and organize useful ways to think about what's coming in productive ways. Here Tom is picking up on the importance of managing knowledge workers differently than organizations have managed industrial workers and starting to develop some useful frameworks for thinking about what that might mean. This book is a little more focused on the organizational dimension and response to the issues of knowledge work, than the rest of what I am pointing to here. Nevertheless, it still contains useful insight for the individual knowledge worker within the organization.
Secrets of Consulting : A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
Weinberg, Gerald M.
Weinberg has been providing expertise to organizations for decades. His particular areas of expertise is at the intersection of how organizations develop and deploy technology. Along with Block, Weinberg is one of the best and most down-to-earth, accessible thinkers about the challenges of connecting your expertise to organizational action. This is among his best compilations of advice relevant to any of us faced with the problem.
The Information and Technology Environment
Not only has knowledge work become a more central element of the economic environment, but that environment is increasingly dominated by information technology and issues created by the proliferation of data and information available. You cannot pretend to be a knowledge worker and allow yourself to remain ignorant of these foundations. The following titles are entry points that will let you begin to enrich this dimension of your skills and knowledge.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition)
Rosenfeld, Louis
The defined target audience for this book is professionals responsible for designing web sites and other services on the web from the perspective of how to make them more useful as tools for finding and organizing the information needed by organizations and the knowledge workers within them. My own hypothesis is that as knowledge workers we not only need to be able to recognize and take advantage of the work of professional information architects, we also need to develop a base level of design skill to function as information architects for ourselves and for other knowledge workers who depend on us. This is not a professional skill that can simply be handed off to an expert somewhere. Rather it is becoming an element of the basic skillset/toolkit that every knowledge worker will need to possess. This is an excellent first step to developing that base level of skill.
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Hunt, Andrew
This might appear to be a bit too technology-focused to be relevant or accessible to the average knowledge worker. On the other hand, I believe that software developers have been doing knowledge work inside of rich technology environments longer than anyone else. The problems they have encountered and the solutions to those problems that they have developed are worth exploring and understanding.
This is possibly the best entry point to that exploration that any knowledge worker might find. If you are not particularly technically oriented, there may be spots that will seem heavy-going or that will not seem relevant. On the other hand, time invested in thinking about the arguments that Hunt and Thomas make and thinking about how you might translate them into your knowledge work settings will prove well spent. At the very least, it will make you more observant and critical about the tools that have been given you to as a knowledge worker. You might well begin to wonder why the lessons of the past 40-50 years of developing software technology have seen so little application to newer knowledge work environments. You might also start looking for ways to translate some of those lessons to your own practices.
Information Anxiety : What to Do When Information Doesn't Tell You What You Need to Know
Wurman, Richard Saul
I encountered this book when it first appeared in 1989 and I was in the midst of working on my doctorate. For me, it was full of insights and tidbits about the problems created by the information environment we were living in then (it has only gotten worse with time) and ways of thinking about how we might tackle solving those problems for ourselves and for others. Wurman is credited with being among the first, if not the first, to coin the term "information architect" and this was his first attempt to describe what that might mean. As knowledge workers we will all have to our own information architects in many respects. This will help get you on your way.
Information Anxiety 2
Wurman, Richard Saul
Wurman essentially created the idea of information architecture in 1975, the year I graduated from college. I wish I had encountered him then rather than 1989, when the first version of this book appeared. His quest is to persuade designers to pay more attention to making it easier for all of us to cope with the onslaught of bits. While that would be nice, I find this more useful as advice for what you and I can do personally to cope until that day comes. One example--LATCH. It's a mnemonic for the fundamental ways to organize any set of information: location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy.
posted by Ravi at 8:37 PM
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Friday, December 23, 2005
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Saturday, October 22, 2005
The 10 Faces of Innovation -- FastCompany article
The 10 Faces of Innovation
In an exclusive book excerpt from the general manager of Ideo, we meet the personality types it takes to keep creativity thriving--and the devil's advocate at bay.
From: Issue 99| October 2005 | Page 74 By: Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman Illustrations by: Yukio Shimizu
We've all been there: the pivotal meeting in which you push forward a new idea or proposal you're passionate about. A fast-paced discussion leads to an upwelling of support that seems about to reach critical mass. And then in one disastrous moment, your hopes are dashed when someone weighs in with those fateful words: "Let me just play devil's advocate for a minute. . . ."
Having invoked the awesome protective power of that seemingly innocuous phrase, the speaker now feels entirely free to take potshots at your idea and does so with impunity. Because he's not really your harshest critic. Instead, he's essentially saying, "The devil made me do it." Devil's advocates remove themselves from the equation and sidestep individual responsibility for the verbal attack. But before they're done, they've torched your fledgling concept.
The devil's-advocate gambit is extraordinary but certainly not uncommon since it strikes so regularly in the project rooms and boardrooms of corporate America. What's truly astonishing is how much punch is packed into that simple phrase. In fact, the devil's advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today. What makes this negative persona so dangerous is that it is such a subtle threat. Every day, thousands of great new ideas, concepts, and plans are nipped in the bud by devil's advocates.
Why is this persona so damning? Because a devil's advocate encourages idea wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting. Once those floodgates open, they can drown a new initiative in negativity.
Why should you care? And why do I believe this problem is so important? Because innovation is the lifeblood of all organizations, and the devil's advocate is toxic to your cause. This is no trivial matter. There is no longer any serious debate about the primacy of innovation in the health and future strength of an organization.
As the general manager of Ideo, I have worked with clients from Singapore to San Francisco to São Paulo, and witnessed firsthand how innovation has become recognized as a pivotal management tool across virtually all industries and market segments. And while we at Ideo used to spend the majority of our time in the world of product-based innovation, we have more recently come around to seeing innovation as a tool for transforming the entire culture of organizations. Sure, a great product can be one important element in the formula for business success, but companies that want to succeed today need much more. They need innovation at every point of the compass, in all aspects of the business, and in every team member.
Building an environment fully engaged in positive change, and a culture rich in creativity and renewal, means creating a company with 360 degrees of innovation. And companies that want to succeed at innovation will need new insights, new viewpoints, and new roles.
All good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action, the spark with the fire. Innovators don't just have their heads in the clouds. They also have their feet on the ground. The company 3M, one of the first to fully embrace innovation as the essence of its corporate brand, defines it as "new ideas--plus action or implementation--which result in an improvement, a gain, or a profit." It is not enough to just have a good idea. Only when you act, when you implement, do you truly innovate. Ideas. Action. Implementation. Gain. Profit.
All good words, of course, but there's still one piece left out. People. That's why I prefer the InnovationNetwork consultancy's definition: "People implementing new ideas that create value." The classic 3M definition might leave you with the impression that, as a bumper sticker might put it, "Innovation Happens." But unfortunately, there's no spontaneous combustion in the business world. Innovation is definitely not self-starting or self-perpetuating. People make it happen through their imagination, willpower, and perseverance. And whether you are a team member, a group leader, or an executive, your only real path to innovation is through people. You can't really do it alone.
"Innovation is all about the roles people can play, the hats they can put on."
Innovation is all about people. It is about the roles people can play, the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt. It is not just about the luminaries of innovation like Thomas Edison, or celebrity CEOs like Steve Jobs and Jeff Immelt. It is about the unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out.
At Ideo, we've developed 10 people-centric tools, talents, or personas for innovation. Although the list does not presume to be comprehensive, it does aspire to expand your repertoire. We've found that adopting one or more of these roles can help teams express a different point of view and create a broader range of innovative solutions.
And by adopting some of these innovation personas, you'll have a chance to put the devil's advocate in his place. So when someone says, "Let me play devil's advocate for a minute" and starts to smother a fragile new idea, someone else in the room may be emboldened to speak up and say, "Let me be an anthropologist for a moment, because I personally have watched our customers suffering silently with this issue for months, and this new idea just might help them." And if that one voice gives courage to others, maybe someone else will add, "Let's think like an experimenter for a moment. We could prototype this idea in a week and get a sense of whether we're onto something good." The devil's advocate may never go away, but on a good day, the 10 personas can keep him in his place. Or tell him to go to hell.
The Learning Personas
Individuals and organizations need to constantly gather new sources of information in order to expand their knowledge and grow, so the first three personas are learning roles. These personas are driven by the idea that no matter how successful a company currently is, no one can afford to be complacent. The world is changing at an accelerated pace, and today's great idea may be tomorrow's anachronism. The learning roles help keep your team from becoming too internally focused and remind the organization not to be so smug about what you know. People who adopt the learning roles are humble enough to question their own worldview, and in doing so, they remain open to new insights every day.
1. The Anthropologist brings new learning and insights into the organization by observing human behavior and developing a deep understanding of how people interact physically and emotionally with products, services, and spaces. When an Ideo human-factors person camps out in a hospital room for 48 hours with an elderly patient undergoing surgery, she is living the life of the anthropologist and helping to develop new health-care services.
2. The Experimenter prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by a process of enlightened trial and error. The Experimenter takes calculated risks to achieve success through a state of "experimentation as implementation." When BMW bypassed all its traditional advertising channels and created theater-quality short films for bmwfilms.com, no one knew whether the experiment would succeed. Its runaway success underscores the rewards that flow to Experimenters.
3. The Cross-Pollinator explores other industries and cultures, then translates those findings and revelations to fit the unique needs of your enterprise. An open-minded Japanese businesswoman was taken with the generic beer she found in a U.S. supermarket. She brought the idea home, and it eventually became the "no brand" Mujirushi Ryohin chain, a 300-store, billion-dollar retail empire. That's the leverage of a Cross-Pollinator.
The Organizing Personas
The next three personas are organizing roles, played by individuals who are savvy about the often counterintuitive process of how organizations move ideas forward. At Ideo, we used to believe that the ideas should speak for themselves. Now we understand what the Hurdler, the Collaborator, and the Director have known all along: that even the best ideas must continuously compete for time, attention, and resources. Those who adopt these organizing roles don't dismiss the process of budget and resource allocation as "politics" or "red tape." They recognize it as a complex game of chess, and they play to win.
4. The Hurdler knows that the path to innovation is strewn with obstacles and develops a knack for overcoming or outsmarting those roadblocks. When the 3M worker who invented masking tape decades ago had his idea initially rejected, he refused to give up. Staying within his $100 authorization limit, he signed a series of $99 purchase orders to pay for critical equipment needed to produce the first batch. His perseverance paid off, and 3M has reaped billions of dollars in cumulative profits because an energetic Hurdler was willing to bend the rules.
5. The Collaborator helps bring eclectic groups together, and often leads from the middle of the pack to create new combinations and multidisciplinary solutions. Not long ago, Kraft Foods and Safeway sat down to figure out how to knock down the traditional walls between supplier and retailer. One strategy--a way to streamline the transfer of goods from one to the other--didn't just save labor and carrying costs. The increased efficiency sent sales of Capri Sun juice drinks, for example, soaring by 167% during one promotion.
6. The Director not only gathers together a talented cast and crew but also helps to spark their creative talents. When a creative Mattel executive assembles an ad hoc team of designers and project leaders, sequesters them for 12 weeks, and ends up with a new $100 million girls'-toy platform in three months, she is a role model for Directors everywhere.
The Building Personas
The four remaining personas are building roles that apply insights from the learning roles and channel the empowerment from the organizing roles to make innovation happen. When people adopt the building personas, they stamp their mark on your organization. People in these roles are highly visible, so you'll often find them right at the heart of the action.
7. The Experience Architect designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customers' latent or expressed needs. When Cold Stone Creamery turns the preparation of a frozen dessert into a fun, dramatic performance, it is designing a successful new customer experience. The premium prices and marketing buzz that follow are rewards associated with playing the role of the Experience Architect.
8. The Set Designer creates a stage on which innovation team members can do their best work, transforming physical environments into powerful tools to influence behavior and attitude. Companies such as Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic recognize that the right office environments can help nourish and sustain a creative culture. When the Cleveland Indians discovered a renewed winning ability in a brand-new stadium, they demonstrated the value of the Set Designer. Organizations that tap into the power of the Set Designer sometimes discover remarkable performance improvements that make all the space changes worthwhile.
9. The Caregiver builds on the metaphor of a health-care professional to deliver customer care in a manner that goes beyond mere service. Good Caregivers anticipate customer needs and are ready to look after them. When you see a service that's really in demand, there's usually a Caregiver at the heart of it. Best Cellars, a retailer that takes the mystery and snobbery out of wine and makes it simple and fun, is demonstrating the Caregiver role--while earning a solid profit at the same time.
10. The Storyteller builds both internal morale and external awareness through compelling narra-tives that communicate a fundamental human value or reinforce a specific cultural trait. Companies from Dell to Starbucks have lots of corporate legends that support their brands and build camaraderie within their teams. Medtronic, celebrated for its product innovation and consistently high growth, reinforces its culture with straight-from-the-heart storytelling--patients' firsthand narratives of how the products changed or even saved their lives.
Note:
The appeal of the personas is that they work. Not in theory or in the classroom but in the unforgiving marketplace. Ideo has battle-tested them thousands of times in a real-world laboratory for innovation. The personas are about "being innovation" rather than merely "doing innovation." Take on one or more of these roles, and you'll be taking a conscious step toward becoming more of an innovator in your daily life.
Adapted with permission from The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman, to be published October 18 by Currency Books, a division of Random House Inc.
Copyright © 2005 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Fast Company, 375 Lexington Avenue.,New York , NY 10017
posted by Ravi at 3:25 PM
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Saturday, October 01, 2005
Thursday, August 11, 2005
7 Secrets To High Performance Thinking - By John Colanzi
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7 Secrets To High Performance Thinking - By John Colanzi
Our minds are like high performance race engines. They have the ability to take us anywhere we want to go at amazing speed.
But sadly most of us haven't done the necessary maintenance and tune ups to enable our minds to operate efficiently.
There are three reasons this can happen.
1. Laziness. Some of us know what to do, but we're either too lazy or lack the discipline to do what's necessary to keep our minds at peak efficiency.
2. We don't believe in our potential or the awesome power of our minds.
3. We don't know the 7 Secrets Of High Performance Thinking.
In this report I'm revealing the 7 Secrets Of High
Performance Thinking. I'm taking away any excuses you
have for not Thinking Like A Winner.
As you start putting the 7 secrets to work for you,
you'll notice the effects are geometric.
Each technique will be multiply the effectiveness of the
others.
Once you've started using all seven you'll be amazed at
how powerful your mind can be.
No realistic goal will be beyond your grasp.
So what are the 7 Secrets Of High Performance Thinkers?
Secret Number 1 Relaxation
High Performance Thinkers have learned to use the power of Relaxation.
They know that stress impairs their ability to perform and that it's better to take a break when they are feeling fatigued or frustrated.
If you'd like to perform at your optimum levels, schedule daily periods of relaxation exercises.
You can meditate or listen to soothing music or tapes.
If you're always at the computer like I am, you can take a short jog, or do some exercise.
In essence you should do the opposite of what your daily tasks are.
If you’re a laborer you would relax by finding something that stimulates your mind.
If your daily routine involves a lot of thinking or sitting at a desk, break up your day with some physical exercise.
Once you've learned to harness the power of relaxation, you'll find reaching your goal so much easier.
Make relaxation a part of your daily routine.
Secret Number 2 Visualization
Any task we attempt is easier if we are relaxed, especially mental conditioning.
Visualization is a powerful tool when combined with relaxation.
Many individuals say they are unable to visualize or create pictures in their minds.
That's not really true.
They visualize, but because they haven't practiced controlling their mental pictures, they see what they want to avoid rather than what they want to accomplish.
Your mind absorbs what you input and that's why so many of your fears come true.
You can either control your mental pictures or they will control you.
You will be drawn to any picture you hold long enough in your minds eye.
If you want to become prosperous and successful, you must take control of the movies you play in your mind.
The first step is to make visualizing your more successful, prosperous self a daily habit.
When you first begin to practice seeing yourself in a new light, your rational mind will rebel and the doubts will creep in.
You'll only be able to hold your mental pictures for short periods of time.
As your practice continues you will be able to hold the pictures for longer periods of time and you'll be able to view them in greater detail.
If you're wondering if it's worth the effort, I'd like to give you an example of how powerful visualization is.
When Ali was preparing for his fight against Foreman, the "experts" gave him little chance of winning.
Foreman was younger, bigger, stronger and hit like a mule.
So what did Ali do?
He went to his training camp and avoided reading all negative stories about his impending defeat.
He not only began physically training for the fight, he began mentally rehearsing his reactions to being hit by Foreman.
Ali knew that there was a possibility of being knocked unconscious during the fight, but how would he handle it?
He began mentally training his body to wrap his arms around Foreman and clinch as soon as he felt himself begin to lose consciousness.
The night of the fight his mental training paid off.
In Ali's own words he admitted there were times in that fight when he was literally out on his feet.
The only thing that saved him from defeat was his visualization exercises.
Each time he was hit hard enough to be knocked unconscious, his body took over and held onto Foreman long enough for Ali to regain his senses.
That night history was made, through the power of Visualization.
Are you ready to make history?
Secret Number 3 Self Talk
So far we've discussed relaxation and visualization.
Now we're going to talk about autosuggestion
(Self talk).
Autosuggestion is the simplest of the 7 secrets.
It's also my favorite.
It's simply talking to yourself. You pick a habit or quality you wish to acquire and repeat it to yourself over and over.
It's my favorite technique, because it literally changed my life.
Don't shrug it off.
It may appear simple, but it's oh so powerful.
I was in my late 40's, my business had gone bust and my health was shot.
I saw no way out.
I just knew the odds were against my ever getting out of the situation I found myself in.
Broke, the clock ticking and unable to work.
Well as the song says, if you ain't got nothin, you ain't got nothin to lose.
Since I had nothing to lose, I started using autosuggestion.
I admit it. I talked to myself.
Luckily I was alone when I did it, or I'm sure they'd have thrown the old net over me.
I wasn't even sure it would work, but I did it anyway.
It was nothing fancy, just two sentences I repeated, day in and day out.
The first sentence was, "I am a lot more creative than I ever imagined."
The second was, "I have an unlimited number of creative ideas in my subconscious."
So what happened?
At 50 years old I've been given a second chance.
I've gone from throwing in the towel and preparing to lead what Walden called a life of quiet desperation, to making my living as a writer.
I can work from anywhere.
I make money doing something I love.
If autosuggestion isn't powerful, I don't know what is.
It's changed my life.
Secret Number 4 Goal Setting
Goal setting is actually an extension of our survival mechanism.
All living things have survival mechanism. From the tree, whose leaves turn toward the sky before a rain to the birds who, fly to warmer climates during the winter.
But as men and women we have an advantage. Plants, animals and insects have no control over the direction their lives take.
It's preset for the survival of their species. We on the other hand have the ability to take part in the
shaping of our destinies. We can choose our path.
Our ability to think of the future and set goals gives us the ability to be the captains of our fates and the shapers of our destiny. Sadly most of us tend to shrug off the power of setting goals and our lives end up being tossed to and fro like a ship in a storm.
Our high powered minds are programmed to help us achieve success, but we give it no direction. We ride around with this high performance engine between our ears, and never take off the emergency brake.
If you truly want to become a high performance thinker, you should set goals that get you excited. Your goals should be big enough to motivate you, while still being believable.
Don't mistake daydreams for goals.
Don't mistake what will make others happy, for a goal that will get you excited.
It has to be your goal.
Start setting believable, achievable goals. Set a time limit on accomplishing your goals and set higher goals each time an old goal has been achieved.
Set up a reward system for achieving your goals on time.
Make reaching your goals a game, a treasure hunt.
If you've got time to root for your favorite sports team, you have time to start rooting for you.
Setting and achieving your goals is the real Super Bowl.
Make yourself the MVP of your life.
Secret Number 5 Whole Brain Thinking
The fifth secret of high performance thinking is learning to think with both sides of your brain. High performance thinkers are whole-brained thinkers.
Most of us have one side of our brains dominant. If the left side is dominant we tend to be more logical. If our right side is more dominant we tend to be more Intuitive.
A prime example would be what we label as women's intuition. For some reason we find it more acceptable for women to use their intuition and we expect men to be more analytical.
The true high performance thinkers are as comfortable setting down detailed plans for accomplishing their goals as they are at thinking outside the box and coming up
with a new way of seeing and doing things.
The true skill is to be able to use either side at will.
It's sad to see how many writers, artists and inventors have historically ended up broke, when all they would have needed was to use a little more of their left brain logic.
At the other end of the spectrum, you can find many businesses going under because they fall behind their competitors who are willing to use their right brain skills and intuit coming change.
To operate at maximum efficiency, you must learn to be a balanced thinker.
You not only need to know how to use both sides of your brain, you must know when to use your rational analytical skills and when to be more intuitive.
You should develop your reasoning and research skills, while allowing enough flexibility to follow your hunches.
If you study many of our top executives you'd find they have two major traits in common.
1. They are goal setters. (left brain)
2. They credit much of their success to following their hunches. (right brain)
Bottom line.
They are whole brain thinkers.
Your brain is a marvelous creation. Don't waste either half.
Use it all.
Become a whole brain thinker and you'll be ahead of your competition.
Secret Number 6 Humor and Pleasure
The Taoist's have a saying, "The Journey is the reward."
High performance thinkers exemplify that remark.
They pick their profession, not because of the money they expect to make, but because of the joy it brings them.
In the words of J. Paul Getty, they've learned to thrive on the pressure.
They don't see what they do as do or die.
They've learned to laugh at themselves and try not to take things too seriously.
What others may consider a problem, they consider a challenge.
Their sense of humor and ability to enjoy their work increases as their abilities increase.
Many times they spend long hours on a task not because they feel a need to work hard, but because they have so much fun at what they do.
When we find joy in doing what we love, time flies by in the blink of an eye.
If you're ready to be a high performance thinker, learn to laugh more.
Find work that gives you joy.
Stop looking at the task at hand as a struggle. View it as a magnificent game.
To the high performance thinker, there is no line between work and play. His work is his passion.
In the sports world it's called being in the zone. High performance thinkers perform in the same manner.
* They are acting in the moment.
* They have no doubts.
* Time almost stands still.
* They are focused to the point that outside influences are literally blocked out.
Stop trying so hard and start enjoying the process.
Secret Number 7 The Subconscious Mind
The first six secrets were the blocks building up to the real secret behind high performance thinking.
High performance thinkers recognize the awesome power of their subconscious mind.
* Relaxation
* Visualization
* Autosuggestion
* Goal Setting
* Whole-Brained Thinking
* Humor
All of the above are designed to help you unleash the awesome power of your subconscious mind.
The subconscious has been called the sleeping giant.
It's like a big bear hibernating during the winter.
It's waiting for you to wake it so it can do its work.
All systems of mental conditioning from Silva Mindcontrol and NLP to the mystical traditions such as Yoga and the Martial Arts are designed to take us beyond our cultural conditioning.
They are all designed to help us realize that there is more to high performance thinking than our logical analytical thinking.
Hunches, intuition etc. are the results of our subconscious working behind the scenes.
In the words of Maxwell Maltz, "Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs."
That power to make your dreams come true is your subconscious mind.
Maybe it's time you woke the sleeping giant and put it to work for you.
Wishing You Success,
John Colanzi
Copyright (c) 2003 John Colanzi.
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posted by Ravi at 12:22 PM
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