Business Insight Zone

One of the deep teachings of inbox-fu:

“ReSaDoTh” — Make folders: “Read,” “Say,” “Do,” and “Think”
and put every message in the inbox into one of them.
Focus on them in reverse order.

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Read:

To do our jobs well, we must inform ourselves well. We need enough data. We need meaningful, contextual information organized into actionable knowledge. Set aside the joys of reading a good book or your favorite magazine: the savvy businessperson will always maintain a thirst for new knowledge.

Yet the chances are that some of the reading material lurking in your inbox is not so important. It isn’t meaningful, or it lacks context, or it isn’t actionable. Or, if your experience is like mine, it’s just redundant: it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know about the world, your industry, your company, or how you personally could do your job better.

File your reading and let it simmer. By the time you get back to it, you may be surprised at how clear it is that most of it can be discarded unread. Meanwhile, there are things you need to . . .

Say:

It seems that we spend our whole days talking — in meetings, on the phone, in the hallways, or by “talking” online via e-mail, IMs, Twitter, what-have-you.

Communication is a key part of what makes us human. It is perennially listed as one of the most vital needs — even the most vital — of successful businesses, and not surprisingly as one of the biggest challenges for virtually every company.

And yet we can talk ourselves to death. There’s a reason the Japanese coined the proverb “Talk does not cook rice.” Far too tempting to talk about the projects we mean to tackle, the actions we mean to take, rather than simply executing them.

If someone needs a two-line answer to a question, send that e-mail, archive the question, and be done with it. If an e-mail requires more talk than that, file it under “Say” for the moment, because you should put a higher priority on . . .

Do:

Actions speak louder than words. They can’t help it. Words embrace ideas, but actions embody them, make them real in the concrete world around us.

Many of the e-mails in your inbox require an action from you. The things to be read and the conversations to be had were removed in the two steps above. The hard thinking is yet to come. In between are the nagging but necessary minutiae of every job, every profession.

But how necessary? As you file your “Do” e-mails, consider taking the short, sharp action of deleting the least important of them. If the cake is perfect, the icing is probably irrelevant. Focus on doing the cake right, and do the icing only if there is time for it, and if the effort is worth the return.

Think:

In the hurly-burly of the business world, it is easy to become overwhelmed by all the noise around us. Some of the sharpest professionals I know carve out time for themselves — in a home office, in the coffee shop — where they are removed from all the interruptions of the workplace, and where they can actually think about the work that must be done.

It’s tempting to think that this is a new phenomenon, brought on by cell phones and conference calls and the Internet and . . . well, your inbox. But in fact humans have been lamenting the hustle and bustle of cities for centuries, and the speed of modern life at least since the spread of the steam train. It’s just magnified now — everything faster, more channels, more noise to filter out, a more diffuse signal to detect.

Detecting that signal amid the noise means the difference between achieving breakthroughs or toiling in vain. If you don’t think deeply about what you’re after, why you’re after it, and what the consequences of those choices are, you’ll never draw a bead on your real work, and you’ll never rise above the crowd in business, whether we’re talking about your personal efforts or the work of your team / department / company.

It’s worth it to think. You might get by with as little as two hours of it per week. But you’re going to need to do it, you should do it before you jump onto other things, and you should be ready to do it when you reach that quiet place where you can ponder what you’re really after in your work.

Which is where the “Think” folder comes in. Start from there and do your best.

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Now, what do YOU think of this method?

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Previously . . .

• Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu
• 11 Ancient Secrets of the Dragon Claw School of Inbox-Fu

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Photos: read; speak; labor; think. All used under Creative Commons Attribution or Share Alike licenses.

Spring Training is well underway in Florida and Arizona. (But don’t worry, non-baseball fans; this post is for you, too.)

Those baseball players, young and old, go through practice regimes of increasing intensity over the weeks, preparing themselves to play full-bore by Opening Day. The best of them hone their games, winter and summer, through deliberate practice.

All of this gets me thinking about how we in the business world could emulate ballplayers — not in a rah-rah, go-team kind of way, but in their systematic pursuit of improvement. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Break your WORK down into components.

Position players in baseball need to do three main things during games:

• hitting,
• fielding, and
• baserunning.

For you the list may be a little longer:

• reading reports,
• writing e-mails,
• crunching numbers,
• analysis,
• listening,
• negotiation,
• presentation,
• strategizing,
• . . .

Fill in the blanks based on the nature of your own duties. Whatever the tasks that occupy your day, this key point remains:

We can benefit from considering the components of our work separately, because then we can think about how to improve them individually and in concert.

Break your DAY down into components.

For the players in Spring Training, the daily routine includes big, methodical doses of:

• stretching,
• running,
• throwing,
• batting practice,
• weightlifting,
• skill-specific drills, and
• simulated and exhibition games.

(And, we can hope, no juicing with steroids.)

For you and me, each day might also include some specific “drills” — though I have to confess that this is where the analogy gets hard for business people. Many of us don’t put ourselves through regimes of practice designed to make us better bit by bit.

But consider what we could choose as areas of focus:

• inbox management,
• effective meetings,
• meaningful conversations,
• prioritization,
• time management
• . . .

These activities usually aren’t as cut-and-dried as lifting weights or taking batting practice, and in my experience the various aspects of the business day slosh together much more than the different aspects of baseball. (One of the reasons I’m careful about using sports analogies: the arbitrary rules of sports make them much easier to analyze than the messiness of real life.)

Still, I think the moral of the story holds true . . .

You can get better part by part.

If you want to be a better “hitter” in business — let’s say by running better meetings — then you can practice specifically for that.

There is often synergy between the parts, too. Running sprints improves an outfielder’s fielding and his baserunning, for example. In business, learning to prioritize helps your ability to manage time, manage your inbox, run meetings, strategize, and so on. And improving any of these things tends to improve the others, too, in a virtuous cycle.

Tell me what you think:

Are you ready for your own Spring Training?

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Related posts:

• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?

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Image by macroninja, used under a Creative Commons license.

One of these days I’ll review Talent Is Overrated at length. (You may recall that it’s been on my desk for a while.) Meanwhile, here’s a short distillation of the core ideas on “deliberate practice” that Geoff Colvin captures in that book — and that Prof. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues laid out in their research.

Talent isn’t the issue — well-designed practice IS. Practice is well-designed when it’s:

• specific & technique-oriented
• high-repetition
• paired with immediate feedback.

Big performers often don’t display the most “talent” when they’re starting out. What they DO display is:

• self-regulation
• an ever-growing base of knowledge
• powerful mental models for organizing / accessing / using that knowledge.

That’s it. Don’t worry about how much talent you have for whatever-it-is you’re passionate about. Just start practicing better.

Fellow deliberate practice buffs: have I captured the key ideas here?

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Related posts:

• Deliberate practice in the working world. (Big omnibus post, lots of links to other reading.)
• The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.

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Image by Vincent Liu, used under a Creative Commons license.

A friend used that acronym — a new one for me — in a Twitter conversation recently. It means:

Learned Something New Today

This could be the mantra for many a successful otaku.

Wait, what? Otaku? LSNT? Is this a jargon lesson, or a business blog? (Quick answer: both!)

Otaku is a Japanese term meaning someone “with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games.” A buff, a nut, an XYZ-head.

The Otaku Scientist

I learned about otaku a couple of weeks ago while I was reading through Mark McGuinness’s fabulous series of posts about Charles Darwin’s creative process. Here’s the key bit from the post “Darwin’s Voyage of Discovery”:

Visiting the Darwin exhibition [at the Natural History Museum in London] was a bit like spending time in the company of a charming but obsessive friend. We all know them — people who never shut up about football or cooking, or who reinterpret every conversation in psychological or political terms. They can be fascinating, but you sometimes wish they would change the subject. I got the impression Darwin hardly ever changed the subject. It seemed to be constantly on his mind. Even he found it wearying — while working on his theory of evolution he used to play billiards every evening, in an attempt to ‘drive the horrid species out of my head’.

The Japanese have a word for this kind of obsessive person – ‘otaku‘. It means something like ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’. A classic otaku has an encyclopaedic knowledge of things like manga comics or technology, but you can also be an otaku about any subject. We’ve seen before on the Lateral Action that obsessive behaviour is often critical to creative achievement – whether in Michelangelo’s countless drawings, Brian Wilson’s marathon recording sessions, or Stanley Kubrick’s mind bogglingly detailed research for his films.

Darwin was clearly an evolution otaku. His curiosity about the natural world combined with the questions he had inherited from past thinkers, leading to the habitual observation, questioning and thinking to which he attributed his success. His obsession manifested firstly in the meticulous observation and collection of specimens during the voyage of the Beagle, and later in the endless hours of study and reflection through which he worked out his theory. The fact that he was an otaku meant he persisted when the dabblers gave up.

The Otaku Coach

This reminds me of something I read a while back about the greatest professional (gridiron) football coach of this generation, Bill Belichick:

“Perhaps his most unheralded virtue, but one that explains plenty to me, is his innate curiosity,” [Belichick's friend Rob] Ingraham wrote in an e-mail message. “Bill wants to know what makes things tick, and when applied to his passion for football, this extends to every facet of the game: ‘What makes this blitz work? How do you counter this blitz? How can you disguise this blitz? How can we vary this blitz? Who can I call tonight to talk blitzes with?’

“You get the picture,” Ingraham added. “No stone goes unturned because his curiosity drives him to learn everything he can, which he then absorbs, thinks about, mixes into the boiling pot with the other ingredients and ultimately prepares to dish out on some poor unsuspecting sap. It’s been said that he’s not Mr. X’s and O’s, but rather Mr. A to Z, the complete package. I believe that his curiosity has been the catalyst in bringing all this together. Not unlike some other accomplished gents throughout history!”

Now, I doubt that Belichick will go down in world history like Darwin or Michelangelo, but the theme is the same: he’s an otaku of football, and a lifetime of studying the game hasn’t dimmed his fire to learn yet more about it.

What about you? Are you an otaku for your passions? Are you committed to LSNT — every day?

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Photo by skycaptaintwo, used under a Creative Commons license.

“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
–René Descartes

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Let me explain it the way I understand it. Anyone in the audience with better neuroscientific chops (read: “anyone in the audience”) should feel free to correct or expand on what I say here.

1. The frontal lobe of the brain is the seat of human creativity. It is the place where novel thoughts arise and new relationships between things are imagined.
2. The frontal lobe of the brain shuts down in the face of fear or worry, at which point the “lower” centers of our brain in the cerebellum kick in to carry out things like the fight-or-flight instinct. This is handy when you’re confronted with a tiger, but less handy when you’re wondering how you’ll pay the bill for your kid’s braces — or, more to the point, how you’ll hit your work targets for the month.
3. The cerebellum is extraordinarily powerful for carrying out habitual tasks — brushing your teeth, touch-typing — but cannot generate creative thought. Yet it will take over forcefully under conditions of stress.
4. If we want to balance our daily tasks in a way that harnesses the natural functions of our brains, we should form powerful habits around the parts of our days that can be made routine, while warding off anxieties so that our frontal lobes can come up with deep, creative, or cool solutions to our challenges.

If you’re responsible for just yourself in business, how can YOU form more powerful habits while warding off anxieties?

If you manage others, how can you help THEM do these things?

(This is part of what I was talking about when I talked about brain-friendly habits this morning.)

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Image by Hatchibombotar.

There’s this crazy dream I have, in which the business headlines relay endless success stories of companies, large and small, that:

• reject shiny baubles, quick fixes, or exotic financing in favor of genuine innovation around
  • remarkable products;
  • brain-friendly habits and technologies for employees and end users,
  • collaboration on behalf of the customer,
  • smart design,
  • grade-A service, and
  • long-term sustainability for financial and social stakeholders;
• combine that with good, old-fashioned, we-earn-it, operational execution; and then
• communicate all that goodness in an open, honest, human, authentic way through every medium available to them, including
  • advertising,
  • traditional marketing,
  • phone,
  • word-of-mouth,
  • social media,
  • the Web, or
  • face-to-face interactions.

Is that so much to ask?

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Image by visulogik.

Warren Buffett’s Chairman’s Letter is more famous, and justly so, but I love this portion of the Berkshire Hathaway annual report [PDF link] — emphasis in original:

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BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.
ACQUISITION CRITERIA

We are eager to hear from principals or their representatives about businesses that meet all of the following criteria:

(1) Large purchases (at least $75 million of pre-tax earnings unless the business will fit into one of our existing units),
(2) Demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of no interest to us, nor are “turnaround” situations),
(3) Businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt,
(4) Management in place (we can’t supply it),
(5) Simple businesses (if there’s lots of technology, we won’t understand it),
(6) An offering price (we don’t want to waste our time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown).

The larger the company, the greater will be our interest: We would like to make an acquisition in the $5-20 billion range. We are not interested, however, in receiving suggestions about purchases we might make in the general stock market.

We will not engage in unfriendly takeovers. We can promise complete confidentiality and a very fast answer — customarily within five minutes — as to whether we’re interested. We prefer to buy for cash, but will consider issuing stock when we receive as much in intrinsic business value as we give. We don’t participate in auctions.

Charlie and I frequently get approached about acquisitions that don’t come close to meeting our tests: We’ve found that if you advertise an interest in buying collies, a lot of people will call hoping to sell you their cocker spaniels. A line from a country song expresses our feeling about new ventures, turnarounds, or auction-like sales: “When the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.”

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Why I love it: the clarity, the lack of fluff, and the directness. “Here is how we will do business, and here’s how we won’t.” Period. Oh that we could all be so disciplined as to build businesses that can operate this way.

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Related reading:

• Bloomberg News: Buffett Says Economy ‘In Shambles,’ Promises Recovery
• BIZ: Munger on “the Shoe Button Complex.”
• BIZ: Here’s why I harp on Warren Buffett’s good sense.

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