Sasha Dichter

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Tag: Work

  • Meeting math

    Not so long ago I strong-armed a bunch of my co-workers into reading one of the Domino books,  Read This Before our Next Meeting (free for Amazon Prime members).  The book is a diatribe against the meeting culture and all the associated time that’s wasted in poorly designed, poorly conceived, poorly run meetings.

    It’s a book that you don’t necessarily enjoy reading, because the author, Al Pittampalli doesn’t care much if you like what he has to say, spending most of his energy hitting you over the head with anti-meeting diatribes without making the medicine go down too easily.

    That said, the conclusions are hard to ignore: most meetings are inefficient, we are lazy about them, and we could be drastically more productive if we approached them differently.

    My starting point is that we underestimate meeting time the way we underestimate the impact of copying 10 people on an email: it doesn’t feel like having 6 people in a 30 minute meeting is three hours of productive work that’s we’re using up.   But it is – so shouldn’t the organizer be obliged to spend at least a half hour of prep time each and every time he proposes to use 2.5 hours of his colleagues time?

    The most aggressive suggestion in the book is that we should not use meetings to make decisions, we should use meetings to ratify decisions that have already been made.

    The building blocks underneath that recommendation are: no meetings without prior agendas, no meetings without significant work done in advance by the meeting organizer, and no meetings without a proposed decision for the group to ratify.

    Easy to say, but how often do we get a group together and someone says, “OK, we’re here to talk about…..”  That’s not the same as, “We’re planning to do _____, and this meeting is being called to ratify that decision.”

    If that is the bar, you get a lot fewer meetings, a lot more preparation, a lot more time to do real work rather than sit in a room and talk.

    (Bonus: the next time you get 20 people in the room for a 30 minute meeting, make sure you’re getting 10 hours’ worth of organizational impact out of that half an hour).

  • Labor versus work

    I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World for that last couple of weeks.  It is providing context and depth to my intuitive understanding of generosity and gift-giving, helping me to appreciate the rich history of gift-giving, which, I had forgotten, forms the social underpinning of most societies throughout history (except for today, of course).

    Hyde is very specific with his language, and in his chapter on The Labor of Gratitude he is quick to clarify the difference between “labor” and “work.”  There’s enough great stuff here that the right approach seems to be to quote liberally:

    Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will.  A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor.   Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.  Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.  Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems.  But I have no feeling that I wrote them.”  That is the declaration of a laborer…

    …One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work.”

    Labor isn’t better than work, but it is characteristically different, its product is different, the conditions for creating it are different.

    The simple question for reflection is: will your success (short and long-term) and happiness require you to labor or just to work?  And if labor is part of the equation, do you create the conditions in your life that will allow you to labor?  Are you not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor?”  Has your work grown so much that it has essentially crowded out every last moment you had to labor?

    This is one of the big fights of the modern era.  Email, meetings, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, jokes from your buddies, news and TV and, of course, all the actual work you have to do….these mountains are big and growing, and we’ll never finish scaling them.

    I for one feel like I’m in the trenches every day, fighting to labor.  Some days I win, a lot of days I lose.  But I’m positive that I have to keep on fighting.

    You?

  • The open 360

    I recently participated in a powerful, surprising, and very positive experience of open communication and feedback.  The idea was simple and a bit terrifying: bring a team together and have, one-by-one, an in-person, open 360-degree feedback conversation about each member of the team.

    Meaning: sitting in a room with 5 of my colleagues, they went one-by-one describing how we work together, what it’s like to work for me, examples of my strengths and their wishes for how I could grow as a professional.  We then went on to the next person.

    Going in, it felt scary.  Most people are nervous both giving and receiving feedback; doing so publicly feels (at first blush) either like a way to turn the intensity up to a breaking point OR to run the risk of having the whole experience be so watered-down as to not be of much value to anyone.

    It had neither of these pitfalls.  A little skeptical going in, I found it motivating, supportive, constructive, and reinforcing of the team.  As one person in our group said, describing the experience, “We all wear who we are on our foreheads, but we never create a space to really talk about this with each other.”  Indeed, in nearly all cases the feedback about each person was honest, clear, and very consistent.

    Having done this once, my guess is that this needs to be done in the right way to work.  Here are guidelines we used, which I found very effective:

    • The goal is to give clear supportive and constructive feedback to each member of the team
    • We picked one person at a time to whom to give feedback
    • Each of the five people giving feedback had four minutes in which to give feedback (we used a timer and allowed ourselves to go over a little but not a lot)
    • Feedback consisted of:
    • Context of one’s working relationship with the person
    • General assessment of the person’s working style and performance, with at least two positive statements and specific examples.
    • At least one piece of developmental advice, phrased as, “My wish for you is….”
    • Once the full group has given feedback, the person receiving feedback is invited to ask questions, comment, etc. and have a short (10 minutes or less) discussion

    With our group of six, it took about a half hour to give feedback to each person, plus time for discussion.  So this is definitely a serious time commitment, and we broke it up into three sessions (with the most senior person in the team going first) so we’d have the emotional energy to get through the whole process.

    The most surprising thing, to me, was the expression of a shared commitment to each others’ success.  Person after person describing your strengths and where you shine is incredibly affirming – and it’s something we do too rarely.  The “my wish for you” framing of developmental advice steered everyone clear of comments like “it’s bad when you do this because….” and created a sense of support and collective ownership of the wishes, while at the same time providing clarity about ways each of us could take steps to realize our full potential.  I also suspect that going through this process as a group cracked the door open to more open conversations that will happen much more naturally and will flow much more easily now that we’ve gotten this experience under our belts.

    This process may not be for everyone and may not work in all groups.  You’d need a starting foundation of support and constructive conversation, and you’ll need, I suspect, at least one member of the group who is good at making these sorts of conversations successful and productive and who can model the kind of conversation you’re looking to have.

    But if you’re even a little bit curious I’d encourage you to take the leap.  As I said, going in I had a lot of doubts and I found the experience to break through a lot of the junk that keeps us from real and open dialogue; and it was about 100 times more real than the much more formal, constrained process I’m used to seeing as part of typical year-end performance reviews.

    Give it a go, and let us know how it went.

  • Shorten your backswing

    It was time today to sit down and write a blog post.

    I keep track, by email, of blog post ideas when they happen, and was just about to go into that email account when I saw an interesting tweet….that led me to a clever article about Occupy Wall Street, that….  wait a minute, what was I planning to do?

    There’s the real work we need to do, and there’s all the muss and fuss that we do as part of our process of starting our real work.

    This can happen a lot in sports.  In racquet sports there was a whole move-my-racquet-forward-before-hitting-a-backhand thing that I used to do.  I have the same problem (never fixed) when throwing a frisbee.  If you ever go to a yoga class, watch how much hair-fixing and water drinking happens at the exact moment the instructor calls out a challenging pose.

    It feels minor, but think about all the wasted motion I was doing for the 500 backhands I hit in a one hour squash game – energy spent, speed reduced, extra steps taken for absolutely no reason other than that I’d built up a bad habit.

    This isn’t just about not getting distracted by social media and your inbox (though those are particularly dangerous because they pretend to be work).  It’s about shortening the distance between “I’m going to start working” and “I’m working.”

  • There’s only one

    Tom Fishburne and I went to business school together, which means I was lucky enough to be a very early reader of his “Skydeck cartoons,” funny musings on what life is really like at Harvard Business School.  Tom and I knew each other a little bit at school, and have since gotten to know each other better as we’re each interested in marketing, storytelling and creating the path you want to walk.

    In a perfect reflection of our brave new world, yesterday I saw a tweet of Tom’s that referenced a blog post he wrote, in which gave away the whole presentation (slides, text, the whole shebang) he did at the Do Lectures recently (yes, just writing that sentence made my head spin).

    Tom’s presentation is a detailed, funny, honest account of the last 11 years of his life, and the path he walked from business school student to brand marketer to professional cartoonist.

    If you’re at all interested in writing, publishing, spreading ideas, and how that all happens today (not how it used to happen and how we might wish it still were), check out Tom’s talk.  And if you work for an organization that wants to spread ideas in a new, creative way, you just might want to see if you can get Tom’s help.

    Since Tom he was a kid he dreamed about becoming a cartoonist, but it never seemed like a viable profession (some facts: Bob Mankoff, the Cartoon Editor at the New Yorker, gets 1,000+ submissions a week for 17 cartoon spots, most of which are filled by veterans.  In 1995, Tom’s cartooning idols – Bill Waterson (Calvin and Hobbs), Gary Larson (The Far Side), and Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County) – all retired because of their frustrations with traditional newspaper cartooning).

    Tom hadn’t cartooned in a while but, bugged by a business school classmate back in 2000, Tom started a weekly cartoon for the Harvard Business School newspaper.  Fun stuff that got folks’ attention, but definitely a hobby for Tom.

    Upon graduation he worked in product marketing at P&G and then went on to work at method.  From all accounts, Tom really enjoyed this work.

    Along the way, week in and week out, Tom kept cartooning, kept building his tribe (starting with just 40 people at P&G to whom he’d send his marketing cartoons), kept working.  Prominent folks (Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, the NY Times) wrote about his work which increased his audience, but it was all a labor of love – he was making no money, making time for all this in addition to his (big and growing) day job.

    But slowly, paid gigs started coming in, and Tom realized that he might, just might, be able to make his passion into his profession. (all the details of how he made the decision here)

    Fast forward to 2010: Tom, having just gotten a promotion at method, decides it’s his “now or never” moment – if he doesn’t leap now, he never will.  So he leaps.

    Panic, fear, terror, ensue.  Tom is, after all, a SITKOM: “Single Income, Two Kids, Oppressive Mortgage.”

    Yet nine months later (his goal was a year) Tom’s hit his goals to bring in from cartooning what he did working for method.  It’s all happening for Tom.

    Of the many funny and insightful insights for startups/freelancers/how-to-pursue-your-dreams folks, the one I love the most is the quotation from Jerry Garcia: “you do not want to be considered the best of the best.  You want to be the only one who does what you do.”

    The other big insight is about there being no shortcuts.  While it took Tom took nine months from the day he quit method to earn enough money to support his family, it actually took him 10 years and 9 months from the date he started cartooning to make this all happen.

    The confusing thing about social media and the internet era is that the stories that spread are about overnight successes.  Yet the reality for most of the world is about hyper-specialization and methodical audience-building that pays off after a LONG long time.  The Web 2.0 meme is about speed, but for nearly everyone there are no shortcuts.

    The big question to ask yourself is: how do you feel about the notion of becoming the only one who does what you do?

    The moment you decide you’re not scared of that – and the moment you realize that you’re not going to know on Day One of your 10 year journey what exactly that thing is – is the moment you’re free to get started.

    Tom is an amazing cartoonist and I love his work.  And at a time when the greats of a previous era are hanging up their pens, Tom’s just getting started.  That’s because, while there are thousands of really incredible cartoonists out there, there’s only one Marketoonist.

     

  • The Six Stages of Kevin Kelly

    Last week I encouraged readers to buy the End Malaria book.  When 62 great thinkers line up behind a cause and offer to share their ideas with you for free, PLUS you get to make a donation to end malaria…to me that’s a no-brainer.

    (one important clarifying point in answer to a question that came from a reader: the book itself is not about malaria, it a series of short essays on living a productive life.)

    First, a reflection on my experience buying the book.  To my surprise, it did actually feel, when I curled up with my Kindle, that I’d gotten the book for free and had also made a donation to Malaria No More.  It didn’t feel at all like I’d paid $20 for a book (I hadn’t).  Interesting to think about that buyer experience in terms of participating in something as opposed to just consuming it.

    Second, I have both the Kindle edition and the physical copy, and for the first time in a while I think the print is better just because it is so beautiful.  It will make a great gift.

    Third, Tom asked for reflections from the book itself, so here goes:

    Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, wrote an essay in the book called What You Don’t Have to Do, which really has amplified my thinking on the same topic.  Here are the stages of professional life, according to Kevin:

    Stage 1: Don’t Screw Up.   “When you start your first job, all your attention is focused on not screwing up.”

    Stage 2: Learn New Things. “At this stage, working smart means doing more than is required.”

    Stage 3: Exploration.  “Working smart here means trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are best at.”

    Stage 4: Doing the Right Task. “It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone.”

    Stage 5: Doing things well and with love. “At this stage, you can begin to do only the jobs that you are good at doing and that need to be done.  And what a joy that is!”

    Now here’s where things get interesting, because it doesn’t stop there.  The meat of Kevin’s essay is about getting past this stage, which is asking a lot.  Stage 5 sounds pretty great.  But, Kevin tells us, through real dedication, hard work, and honest reflection, we can go a step further and discover the things that ONLY we can do.  Counter-intuitively, this means taking all things that are worth doing and that you do really well (but that others can also do well) and letting go of them.

    As a magazine editor, that meant Kevin giving away all his story ideas to other writers, except the ones that no one would take on.  These felt like duds, but Kevin discovered that some of them would keep coming back to life AND that he couldn’t get others to write them.  So he hung on to them, and eventually he wrote them.  They became his best stories.

    That’s the last stage, not just for Kevin but for all of us: finding those things to which you are uniquely suited, and doing only those things.

    Think of the discipline that requires.  Think of the faith it takes to let go of all sorts of things you’re good at and that are worth doing – and the fear that if you do that, you’ll be left with nothing (which of course you won’t).  Think of the courage and conviction it takes to realize that when people are telling you something is a bad idea, they may just be indicating that this one, and only this one, is the one that YOU need to make happen.

    Kevin’s essay is much better than this blog post, so I hope you have the chance to read it.

  • Missing deadlines

    There are two things that happen when you miss deadlines, the first obvious, the second insidious.

    The direct impact is that you don’t ship your product.  Revenues come in later.  Business partners are disappointed.  Your team is let down.

    The insidious part is that – drip, drip, drip – what you mean by “deadline” starts to erode.  “Deadline” becomes “what we’re shooting for if nothing goes wrong.”  But of course something always goes wrong, so the first sign of trouble becomes a chance to negotiate (with your team , with your business partners, and with your procrastinating self), a chance to argue that something’s got to give.

    When hitting deadlines becomes non-negotiable, you and your team put that whole negotiation aside and just get to work.  It’s amazing to discover what you can produce when you expect yourself to deliver every time.

    *                         *                               *                                      *                                    *

    (If you’re curious: it turns out that the source of the word is a “dead line” for American Civil War prisoners who were kept inside a stockade.  A railing placed inside the stockade marked the line prisoners were not allowed to pass – and guards were told to shoot any prisoner who crossed the line, because they were deemed to be trying to escape.)

  • Potshotters

    POTSHOTTER  noun \pot-ˈsho-tər\

    1 : someone who primarily or exclusively provides criticism

    2:  a person who critiques, tears down, weakens

     

    What could be easier than sitting back and describing how something could be better?

    “If I were in charge, I’d…”

    “This thing is a mess, I can’t believe they let this happen…”

    What could be harder than leaning forward and making it better?

    Leaning forward, putting yourself on the line, coming up with your own ideas that might be right and might be wrong, getting into the messy thick of things….that’s the hard part, the real part, the valuable part, the part that scares the pants off of most everyone.

  • Free Kindle book – save your meetings

    A few years ago, I started a depressing Excel spreadsheet to track how many hours a day I was spending in meetings.  It was sobering.  Four, five, sometimes six hours a day.  When was I supposed to do real work?

    It seems like an impossible problem to solve, but there may be a way.  Al Pittampalli has a new manifesto on how to save your company by rescuing it from death-by-a-thousand-meetings.  It’s called “Read this before our next meeting: The Modern Meeting Standard.”  You can read it in less than an hour, and it just might turn your company around.

    Even better, it’s free for the next five days on Kindle, no strings attached.

    Download here.

    The first paragraph of the book:

    Someone asked me the other day what I do for a living.  I found myself hard-pressed for an answer.  If he wanted to know my job title, or what industry I worked in, then all I had to do was recite what’s on my business card.  But he seemed sincere.  He honestly wanted to know what I do most of the day, so I was honest, too: What I do for a living is attend meetings.  Bad meetings.

    Sound familiar?  Download the book for free.

  • The emotional chasm

    “Fundraising is all about relationships,” we say.

    Sure.

    And then we churn through lists and count the level of activity for members of our team (how many calls, how many meetings, etc.), because actually measuring relationships and whether they’re being created is really, really hard.

    Of course you must churn through the list.  You must reach out more.  It’s non-negotiable.  You don’t get to hide behind “I’m a relationship-builder so I don’t do proactive outreach” because the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

    But you’ll be churning through lists forever, with the same disappointing effort-to-outcome ratio, if you don’t get more of your relationships to cross the emotional chasm.

    You know it when it happens – those people with whom you made a genuine connection, those people who touched you as much as you touched them.  You know it because you understand these people in a different way – and they understand you in a different way – because you have shared something genuine about who you are, deep down in your soul.

    I know.  It’s uncomfortable to actually say that kind of thing out loud.

    But we’re in this because we actually want to make the world a better place, right?  There’s nothing more real, honest and vulnerable than that.  That’s why this job is so hard when you’re trying to protect yourself and keep things at arm’s length, and why it becomes natural when you allow real human connection to happen, even if just for an instant.