Business Insight Zone

Being both a stickler for words and a student of workplace issues, I’ve been paying more attention lately to the “crutch” words we use when we talk about work. I encounter these in my own office (not least from myself!), from my students, from my friends on Twitter, and in countless articles about the way we work today.

Here, then, is my nominee for Public Enemy #1 in the category of “crutch” words:

Busy.

Someone asks, “How’s it going?” We say, “Good — but I’m soooo busy” or “Ack — I’m SO busy” or just “Busy, busy, busy.” Often, we don’t even pause to think why we’re so busy, or why the busy-ness isn’t getting better over time.

The way I’ve used the word, and the way I’ve heard others use it, it’s like talking about the weather: “I can’t believe how rainy it’s been” turns into “I can’t believe how busy I’ve been.” As though busy-ness is something that just happens to us.

Well, UNlike the weather, busy-ness is something that everybody talks about that we CAN do something about. So in the interest of reminding myself that I’m responsible for my own working life, I’ve stopped using “busy” and started using expressions like these:

• “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
• “I’ve taken on too many commitments, and now I’m trying to figure out how to balance them.
• “My schedule has been hectic, but that’s my own fault.”

Sure, these are just semantic tricks, but the words we use shape the way we think. And I’d rather think clearly about the way I work, instead of acting like the universe has dropped a big pile of “busy” on my plate and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Down with “busy”-itis!

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Now over to you, dear reader:

What are the worst “crutch” words YOU hear at work?

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(Photo by wanderingseoul61.)

If you care at all about relations between the United States and China — and in my book, you should — do yourself a favor and read anything James Fallows writes on the subject in The Atlantic Monthly. Fallows has been living in China for the past couple of years, filing story after story on the commercial, economic, and political realities at work in the world’s most populous country.

Particularly interesting is this article from the beginning of this year, in which he discusses the strange financial relationship that prevails between the two powers:

The $1.4 Trillion Question

The whole thing is worth a read, but here’s the nut graf:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus — $1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day — that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends — suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic — will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.

Read more

Decisions, decisions . . .

“Modern Western society has two epidemics,” she said. “One is rampant self-control problems — over-eating, over-drinking, over-spending, sexual liaisons that ought not to happen. The other is rampant choice-making. I see these two as intimately related.”

“She,” in this case, is University of Minnesota researcher Kathleen Vohs, who has done extensive research on the way that people make decisions, and the toll that decision-making exacts on the human brain. I found out about her work — and found the quote above — in this article:

Being a Decider Takes Its Toll
New research suggests every choice made depletes our store of mental energy, lessening our ability to control impulses.

The conclusions in the article are startling:

“We have a model about self-control,” she explained. “Self-control is governed by what I call ’self-regulatory resources.’ “

These resources are finite, meaning every act of self-control draws down our supply, leaving us vulnerable to impulse behavior in other arenas.” Read more

The other day I posted a long summa about stress and the bad things it does to us. This morning I read a great short piece from John Murrell of Good Morning Silicon Valley on the subject of stress and how we react to it:

Stressors are inevitable; stress isn’t

I won’t summarize it for you, because I think you should take three minutes to read the whole thing, then as long as you need to ponder its ramifications for your own life.

What I will do is quote John’s conclusion for shorthand, and as a reminder to myself:

It comes down to acceptance — acceptance that you are largely powerless in this world, and that’s OK; acceptance that the outside world will continue to turn without your constant attention; acceptance that you can’t change the wind but you can adjust the sails.

While I’m at it, I’ll tell you that I’ve been reading Good Morning Silicon Valley longer than any other blog or newsletter. If I had to cut my RSS feeds down to ten, GMSV would make that list easily.

Do yourself a favor and read Murrell’s piece on stress. If you care about what goes on in the high-tech world, do yourself another favor by adding GMSV to your regular online rounds.

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(Photo of some serious de-stressing by -just-jen-.)

In my search for more articles about “deliberate practice,” I came across this piece in TIME Magazine.

The Science of Experience

The piece as a whole isn’t a knockout — I think it stretches a bit too much in trying to analyze the Presidential candidates — but this part was worth the price of admission:

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps — one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, “All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn.” In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

So, what about you: Are you stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity? Or stretching your skills?

Seems to me that during an incipient recession is a perfect time to focus on the latter.

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(Photo by le.)

It’s hard to believe, but nearly two years after its release, the Wii phenomenon is still building. Just yesterday I was talking to a colleague who’s had real trouble running down a Wii to purchase, and then comes this story in the morning’s news:

Nintendo Forecasts Profit Will Rise 26% This Year

April 24 (Bloomberg) — Nintendo Co., the world’s biggest maker of handheld game players, forecast profit will rise 26 percent this year as its Wii console outsells rival machines. [...]

“Wii console sales are still on an upward trend,” Koki Shiraishi, an analyst with Daiwa Institute, said before results were released. “I don’t expect them to peak this fiscal year.”

I love how the mighty-mite Wii is kicking the butts of Microsoft’s Xbox360 and Sony’s Play Station 3. Why? Because the Wii is just . . . plain . . . BETTER.

Now, all the hard-core gamers in the audience will immediately say, “Nuh-uh!” — because the Xbox and the PS3 have demonstrably higher-tech components. More “horsepower,” in other words.

But pesky little Nintendo thought differently and figured out that they were trying to sell a more competitive gaming system — one that more people like better, instead of one that’s “better” in terms of component specs. The result has been a monster hit — surely one of the greatest products in the history of consumer electronics.

We’ve talked about this before:

• The best thing I’ve read about Nintendo’s Wii. (Links to a great article from Fortune.)
• Company of the Day, current edition: Nintendo. (Back when we were doing Company of the Day.)
• The Wii little dragon-slayer of the video game industry. (Most detailed entry; Chris Huston nailed the appeal of the Wii on the first take.)

As I was writing this entry, I talked about the Wii phenomenon with a different colleague. As he and I were talking, we came to the idea that the Wii might be something like the original Model T. Henry Ford’s great insight was that his company could use then-cutting-edge manufacturing processes to lower the price — and increase the ease of use — of automobiles to the point that they would appeal to a mass audience.

In comparison to Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo has done the same thing for the gaming-console business. History in the making, at least for this one niche.

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(Photo via Wikipedia.)

One of the side effects of spending so much time thinking about (a) the media and (b) business management is that I can’t even read the recap of a baseball game in peace. I come across something like this . . .

Tigers score most runs this season, hand Rangers sixth straight loss

DETROIT (AP) — The Detroit Tigers’ biggest inning in four years could mean a lot more to the foundering Texas Rangers. Manager Ron Washington’s job might be in jeopardy.

. . . and the rant just boils up inside me.

Please bear with me here, because this isn’t so much about baseball as it is about management decisions and how the media covers them.

There are several things wrong with those two opening sentences:

1. The Tigers didn’t need their biggest inning in four years to beat the Rangers. They were already beating them. Sure, the score would have been 7-6 instead of 19-6, but a loss is a loss — and the psychological weight is still heavy when it extends a losing streak. Sure, when a team puts up an 11-run inning, that ought to be in the story’s lead, but the way it’s used here is not apt.

2. Washington’s job might be in jeopardy? According to whom? The writer? “Anonymous sources close to the Rangers’ front office”? No sources besides Washington are cited. The manager, for his part, said the right things: “Any time a team is in a losing streak, the manager’s job is on the line . . . It falls on me when the team isn’t playing well. I’m the manager . . . that’s the way it goes.” But this is a still just a unsubstantiated notion on the beat writer’s part — and not a helpful one, since the lead conveys a hunch or rumor as though it’s an established fact.

3. From the perspective of how the Rangers club is managed, the real story is the mediocre-to-low quality of the pitchers that Washington has been given to work with. It’s bad enough that the Rangers were facing the Tigers, who have one of the most dangerous lineups in the Major Leagues. Fact is, though, that the Rangers have been getting shelled frequently throughout this season — because their pitching isn’t strong. And whose job is it to acquire good pitching for the team? (Hint: not Ron Washington’s.)

It’s that last point I want to harp on, because we see this all too often in the “real” business world, too: a middle manager is handcuffed in terms of resources, personnel, decision latitude, or whatever — and then blamed when things go wrong.

The real fault here lies with the Rangers front office for assembling a thin pitching staff. Knowledgeable analysts were saying before the season ever started that the Rangers weren’t very good. Now those predictions are coming true on the field.

Here’s the thing: part of the blame for the team’s poor showing could fall to Washington. But if it does, he should be fired because of his overall qualities as a manager — not because of what happens in one game . . . against a heavy-hitting opponent . . . on a day when Ranger pitchers melt down one after another.

And an AP beat writer should help readers to understand that, not confuse the issue.

Here endeth the rant . . . for now.

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(Photo by Dave Hogg.)

Simple question:

What’s the dumbest thing your organization does?

Gruesome though they may be, I look forward to your comments. Feel free to post under a pseudonym if necessary. Fire away!

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Related post (with even more pointed comments in the vein of those here):

• What “Real Advice” Would You Give Your Company?

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(Excellent found-item dunce cap by my Twitter pal ninjapoodles.)

Among the other things it kills — people, for instance — stress kills your ability to do good work. If you want to improve your organization, get ahead in your own career, and enjoy your life in the process, it’s time to let go of your stress-embracing ways.

First, though, a key distinction. There is such a thing as eustress, or “good stress,” which is the sort of tension you feel inside when you’re exhilarated about something. (The concept was pioneered by Hans Selye, who did groundbreaking work on stress in the middle decades of the 20th century.) But that’s not what we’re talking about here — and not what most people mean when they talk about the stress of the workplace.

Stress Is Poison

This sort of bad stress contributes to a range of health problems — everything from hypertension to E.D. to high cholesterol to asthma. But it also saps your ability to be creative, since stress tends to provoke a fight-or-flight response in us that is toxic to higher rational function. So when you say you can’t think your way through a problem because you’re stressed-out, you are literally correct.

Unfortunately, the way many workplaces operate, you’d think stress was a cardinal virtue. Read more

On Friday I mentioned my appearance on Bloomberg TV, in which I discussed the IPO market for the first quarter of 2008, and where I think the IPO market may be headed for the rest of the year. The Bloomberg host seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more sanguine, but right now I just don’t see much reason for optimism about the IPO environment.

Reasons Not to Be Optimistic about IPOs:

>> We’ve been seeing few new IPO filings from week to week, and there’s a large backlog of filings from earlier quarters for companies that have either withdrawn or indefinitely postponed their IPO plans. So even without any prognostication, we can conclude that potential IPO companies and their financial advisers are leery of going forward with these plans.

>> In general, unless you have a history and brand position like Visa’s or Google’s, you want Read more