Business Insight Zone

Time to make some hay.

Last October, I made a list of my 10 best posts on productivity. Here are my 10 favorite productivity posts written since then:

1. Book review: CrazyBusy, by Edward Hallowell.
2. 11 Ancient Secrets of the Dragon Claw School of Inbox-Fu
3. Once again: Do Not Multitask.
4. Schedule a conference with yourself.
5. What should you do about weaknesses? (This is a particular favorite of mine: it’s a little abstract, but I think its theme is vital as we consider which skills to improve.)
6. Does it move the needle?
7. Productivity tip: Manage your moods.
8. Productivity tip: Parse ruthlessly.
9. Productivity tip: Batch Processing.
10. Review from ZERO.

What’s your favorite?

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Photo by Meena Kadri, used under a Creative Commons license.

When he was starting out in his career as a pastor, my father was prone to work too hard. Ministers often work seven days a week, going into the office Monday through Friday, chaperoning youth groups or peforming weddings on Saturday, and then leading services on Sunday.

But it gets to be too much, as my dad discovered when his voice — he was a music minister and singing soloist — began to suffer from overuse. A good doctor prescribed a real vacation, and somewhere along the way Dad read that the best vacations are the ones that are most different from one’s usual routine. If you usually work indoors, vacation outdoors; if your work is sedentary, take an active vacation; if your work is physically demanding, make sure to loaf on vacation; and so on.

In Dad’s case, the results were excellent. Our family vacations, which often had us camping in National Parks, recharged his batteries wonderfully. It got to the point that he couldn’t imagine doing his job without taking that annual vacation in mid-summer. Now I’m the same way.

These days, lots of folks complain about being overconnected — and overworked. They take their laptops or Blackberries or iPhones with them everywhere, convinced that they can’t afford to be out of touch even for a few days. Sure, some people really are that vital to their enterprises — heads of state, CEOs, entrepreneurs building their businesses from scratch. And maybe there are a few people out there who genuinely find that the always-on mode of communication relaxes and energizes them. If you’re of those people, more power to you.

But you’re probably not. You’re probably one of the rest of us who benefit greatly from unplugging, at least once in a while.

Leave your laptop in its bag, turn your Blackberry off, and sit by a lake or a seashore or a mountain stream. Watch the sun rise. Decompress. Think. Maybe take along a blank notepad for writing down thoughts in some form besides to-do’s.

Many of us, I believe, would be much better served to do less scurrying and more thinking in our careers. And many of us can improve our physical and mental health — and thus our long-term abilities to do our jobs — by occasionally decompressing totally.

It doesn’t have to be for three weeks. It doesn’t have to be at a fancy resort or on the other side of the world (though I hear Moorea is lovely). But it should be somewhere that allows you to take deep breaths, operate at a different pace, and get out of the hurly-burly for a little bit.

Try it. My guess is you’ll be glad you did.

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Photo by Kasper Sorensen, used under a Creative Commons license.

More to the point, what if some of the foundations of our economy — the American one and the bigger global one — have cracked?

(Stick with me here — my point isn’t to sink you into a state of despair.)

A little while back, I talked at length about a Boston Consulting Group report that showed just how underprepared many businesses were for the onset of the current downturn. The report suggested that, as of this spring, many companies still weren’t dealing adequately with the implications of the downturn.

Since then, I’ve read a lot of daily headlines that suggest just how much the world economy is being whipsawed. In a single week, you can look at a jumble of good, bad, and indifferent trends in consumer sentiment, manufacturing numbers, new home sales, existing home sales, foreclosures, the price of oil, consumer prices, et cetera ad nauseam — and come away none the wiser about where the economy is headed.

Meanwhile, I’ve also read a fair number of sobering analyses that convince me that we should at least entertain the possibility of a long haul of slower growth, tighter financing, and, in general, a departure from the easy-money days of the past couple of decades. A sampler of those analyses:

• bizzXceleration blog — The Vast, Ignored Difference: Economic Bottoming vs Recovery
• Christopher S. Penn — The eye of the storm
• Floyd Norris of the NYT — Feeling Good? Read This
• Knowledge@Wharton — Economic Recovery: Are Happy Days Here Again?
• WSJ MarketBeat blog — Ambivalence in Bond-Land

Please keep in mind that I’m an optimist at heart. I think it’s quite possible — and likely necessary – that we take a hard look at all these unpleasant analyses and think through how we’re going to succeed in business anyway. The major alternatives to that approach would be (a) to ignore reality, which is always a bad idea, or (b) to give up, which I certainly won’t do.

Without giving away any secrets, and without wanting to sound too much like an advertisement, I can tell you that current market conditions have sharpened our own thinking here at Hoover’s. We offer great information and great tools that help businesspeople get their jobs done quicker and better. That’s a winning proposition in a down market. And more than ever, we’re enabling our users to access what we offer in the midst of their daily workflow, whether that means coming to our own site, tapping in through their own CRM, or using our information as it’s folded into the offerings of our partners.

Beyond that, I can tell you that we’ve honed our plans and dialed up the intensity of our efforts across the board, all without predicting — or needing — any huge rebound in the economy. In other words, while we share guarded optimism about the direction of the economy, we’re also prepared to succeed even if things don’t get better anytime soon.

I take the time to say all of this because I keep hearing some folks in the business world talking about how things must be getting better by now, or how the bad news is over-reported, or how things will be better for their business “now that the economy is picking up.” I think that’s a horrible way of looking at things, because it violates the key tenet of the Stockdale Paradox that you must face the bad news — or the possibility of bad news — head-on.

By all means, believe that things will get better at some point. I bet they will. By all means, hope that the recovery comes sooner than later. I do. But be prepared to succeed even if that point is a long way off.

Equip yourself appropriately.

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Related:

• Beware “unexpected”!
• Readings: “Collateral Damage”
• The big economy and your economy.
• David Granger on “The Best of Times” currently underway.
• Back to the ethic of the farm?
• What if the economy is worse than you think?

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Photo by Phillip Capper, used under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s a simple business idea — for yourself or your company — that I took from the world of baseball.

Consider a mythical big-league general manager, call him John Doe, who needs to rebuild his cellar-dwelling team. One of Doe’s earliest steps is to evaluate every single player on his rosters, from the big-league team all the way down through the minors. There are many gradations of value and value-for-money, but at a simplified level, players will fall into four broad categories, based on two simple questions:

1. Is this player useful to us now?
2. Will this player likely be useful when we’re back in contention a few years from now?

Let’s consider four players from Doe’s perspective.

Armendariz is your aging veteran at third base. Solid player, solid guy, signed to a reasonable contract. You’ll use him for as long as it makes sense, but you don’t expect him to be manning third base on your pennant-winning team five years from now. You keep him in place and make a note that you’ll need a long-term solution at third base.

Baker‘s injuries have caught up with him. He’s past thirty, he doesn’t hit for power anymore, and his gimpy knees won’t let him run well in the outfield. He’s given good service to the club, but you have better options at the plate and in the field, especially given how much salary Baker would want if he were to stick around. You let Baker go, knowing that you can find someone else — a youngster, a minor-league veteran — to fill his role on the cheap for now.

Chadwick is the least of your problems. A natural centerfielder, the kid is the best athlete on the team at the ripe old age of 22, and he’s only getting better. He should be leading the charge to the pennant five years from now, playing centerfield and batting in the middle of the order every day. Sign him to a long-term contract, ink him into the lineup indefinitely, and hope he avoids injury.

Domingo is a pure raw talent. Great fastball, hard worker, and the makings of a world-class curveball, but he’s only 19 years old and needs lots of polish before he’ll be able to pitch effectively in the big leagues. You bring him along slowly in the minor leagues, help him avoid injury, and let him learn how to pitch. Five years from now, he might be starting Game 2 of the World Series for you. Meanwhile, you’ll need a pitcher to fill that spot on the big-league roster.

Applying this approach to your own work

The parallel may be obvious: for every asset you have, you rate whether it’s useful now and useful later.

Depending on whether you’re managing a whole company, a department, a team, or just yourself, these assets could include

• capital goods — factories, machinery, servers, etc.
• talented people
• intellectual property
• skillsets
• operating procedures or habits
• cash
• brands
• . . .

Make a list of your “roster” of assets. Go through them one by one, thinking ahead to when you win your “pennant” — whether that means taking the top spot in your industry, advancing to the C-level in your own career, or whatever.

Factory X may be useful to you now, yet clearly not have the headroom to be useful to you when you’re going toe to toe with General Electric. Habit Y may be actively impeding your ability to get things done now, much less later. Brand Z may be just an idea on the drawing board now, but a potential Hall of Famer for you in the future. You get the idea.

Mind you, this doesn’t tell you how to get from here to there. Many of the best teams in baseball rebuild through every possible avenue: trades, free agency, smart scouting and drafting, foreign signings, you name it. Many of the best companies do the same, cultivating some assets inside the organization, acquiring others from outside as needed. That’s where things like good judgment come into play.

Meanwhile, though, thinking like a general manager can help you to address the conundrum that Jack Welch has said is the central problem that makes business management so hard in the first place: balancing the short term against the long term.

How can you think like a general manager in your work?

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Photo by Lia, used under a Creative Commons license.

Using a combination of Google Analytics and my own taste, I’ve come up with what I think are my 13 best posts on the use of social media in business. I’ve even taken a stab at putting them in rank order — though I’d love to have your feedback on what you think is most useful.

Here’s my list:

1. Social media and the acid-bath of ROI.
2. The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else.
3. Why companies should explore social media, in a nutshell.
4. The Social Media Are Not So New.
5. Using social media for competitive intelligence.
6. Social media makes merchants of us all.
7. Dale Carnegie and the Social Media.
8. Hello, world! (Or, how to introduce yourself in the social media)
9. Using Twitter for Business: my presentation to HIMA.
10. YMMV.
11. Your brain hates Twitter.
12. Getting out of the social-media silo.
13. Social media: the right tool for the job.

What do you think of these?

And what do you think I should write about next in the social-media vein?

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Photo by Scott Ableman, used under a CC No Derivative Works license.

If you ever have a question about Hoover’s or a problem with our product, I want to make sure that you know how to get in touch with us. Here are some options:

• The Feedback page leads you to our online knowledge base, a feedback form, our contact e-mail, and a form you can use to offer updates about any company we cover.
• If you want to talk to our award-winning customer-support team, you can call 800.486.8666 between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Friday.
• The Products & Services page gives you more information about our subscription levels. If you’re in the U.S., you can dial 866-307-3812 to talk to an account rep who will walk you through the sales process; otherwise you can use this page of international sales office numbers to reach our sales staff.
• We use the @hoovers Twitter account actively, and that’s often an easy way to catch our attention.
• Failing all else, you can always try contacting me directly at twalker {at} hoovers {dot} com.

My turnaround time runs much slower than our support reps’ (they tend to answer within a couple of rings of the phone), but I’ll do what I can to get you pointed in the right direction.

And how much should they?

My friend Dave Livingston (you may remember him) made a simple statement in an e-mail exchange that stopped me in my tracks:

“Most businesses don’t have the habit of thinking about themselves.”

I think it’s true, and that it’s true of must individuals as well, in the sense that we seldom think through how we do things and how we might do them better. (Deliberate practicers, by contrast, do this sort of thinking all the time.)

What do you think?

Today we’re happy to celebrate one of our own for his extra-curricular endeavors: it’s the official release date for The Day-Glo Brothers, the first published book by long-time Hooverite Chris Barton.

The book chronicles the invention of day-glo colors by Joe and Bob Switzer, brothers who collaborated in the 1930s and 1940s to make the daylight-fluorescent pigments that we take for granted today when we see things like safety cones and highlighters. Chris actually stumbled across their story while doing his job here:

The project started at Hoover’s, actually. In August 1997, when I was in [the] Editorial [department], I read Bob Switzer’s obituary in the New York Times. I started writing for kids about three years later, and the Switzers’ story had stuck with me all that time. I started researching it in mid-2001.

Chris is wry about the very long time it can take to bring an illustrated book like this to fruition, pointing out that it’s taken eight years to produce a 48-page book. But he’s also highly methodical in his pursuit of writing projects outside his duties as a senior business analyst in the Hoover’s IT department:

I get up at 5 a.m. six days a week — seven days a week, when I’m on deadline. Most lunch hours, I spend writing or researching. If I have any free time in the evenings, I’m probably working on something related to my writing.

Besides his own patient efforts to build his audience through his blog, Chris benefits from the outstanding job that Charlesbridge did in publishing the book. Tony Persiani’s cheerful illustrations include swathes of the day-glo colors Fire Orange, Signal Green, and Saturn Yellow.

Charlesbridge also set up a page with animations that explain the difference between regular light, regular fluorescence, and day-glo fluorescence. Even better, Wired ran a blurb on the book last week. And if you’re in Austin, you can join Chris and many of his friends and fans for a book party on July 11 at BookPeople.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear from Chris, either: he already has several other books for children under contract, including a picture book “a lot sillier” than The Day-Glo Brothers that should be out from Little, Brown in early 2010.

Congratulations, Chris!

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Bonus Coverage at the “Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast” blog, including an interview with Barton and Persiani and a generous peek at sample pages from the book. Check it out!

BONUS Bonus: The Day-Glo Brothers just earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly!

UPDATE — Wednesday afternoon: WOW! The Day-Glo Brothers lands a review in BoingBoing!

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