Business Insight Zone

This is what I get for waiting to do a job “the right way.” For months now I’ve been meaning to write a review of Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. It’s a good book, albeit with flaws, that has lots of important ideas about “deliberate practice.” But the review I have in mind would probably rival my Russian-novel-esque treatment of Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy, and who has the time for that?

So, for now here are pointers to three items on Talent is Overrated that I’ve found useful:

1. You don’t get better at writing essays by writing more essays. In this post, G. Brett Miller draws on his U.S. Army experience to confirm Colvin’s observation that the military, at least in peacetime, does a much better job than the mainstream of corporate America at performing deliberate practice. Key quote:

When I left the military and joined the corporate world, what struck me most was how little practicing — and how little learning and improving — anyone did. For anything.

It’s worth pondering Miller’s comparison of the typical corporation to the military in wartime.

2. Software coder Mark Needham offers a straightforward summary of the concepts of the book in his detailed book review. Although he uses some examples from the world of computer programming, nontechnical readers will also get a lot from his clear exposition of the book’s principles.

I particularly like Needham’s call “to create shorter and more effective feedback cycles for individuals to help them to get better.” This is a real challenge for companies that are married to annual reviews as the main (or only!) means of regular feedback, but it’s a challenge that must be overcome if the principles of deliberate practice are to take hold in an organization.

3. At his Three Star Leadership Blog, Wally Bock takes Colvin’s book down a peg in “Talent is Overrated is overrated and overpriced.” Bock praises Colvin for laying out important precepts — talent is overrated, and you will need a lot of time working on your skills — but suggests that readers might be as well served to read Colvin’s FORTUNE articles on the subject (to which he links), along with a related item from the Harvard Business Review.

Bock also says that, in the book,

There’s too little attention paid to other factors that influence success like coaching, family support, developmental assignments, and luck. There’s virtually no discussion of the fact that for leadership and other business skill areas, learning and doing intertwine.

I liked the book better than Wally did, but I do agree that Colvin didn’t do as much as he might’ve to explain specifically how his paragons of business deliberate practice, Jeff Immelt and Steve Ballmer, used deliberate practice to ascend the heights of corporate success.

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I’ll give a more detailed critique of the book soon. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts?

• If you’ve read Talent Is Overrated, what do you think of it?
• Even if you haven’t, what do you think of the premise that deliberate practice can improve business performance?

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Related:

• Deliberate practice in a nutshell.
• Deliberate practice in the working world.

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Gini Dietrich, CEO of the P.R. agency Arment Dietrich, just blogged about the internal e-mail ban that her company instituted last month — and the many tonic effects that flowed from it. As it happens, I read her post as I was wrestling with the last stubborn mildew in my own inbox.

I praised Gini’s post on Twitter, and as we discussed it, I came forward with this thesis:

E-mail is the rotten beating heart of office inefficiency in the modern workplace.

Please discuss.

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Picture by Kreg Steppe, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

My agenda for today includes a few hours of driving on the stretch of I-35 that connects Austin to Dallas, where I’ll spend the next two days at the Inbound Marketing Summit. (If you’re there, please find me and say hello.)

I’ve been doing more traveling for work lately, experimenting as I go with different approaches to maintaining (or even increasing?) my productivity. But now I want to tap your brains with some informal poll questions so that we all can benefit from our collective experience as business travelers.

So, my hearty road warriors . . .

• How do you stay productive when you’re traveling?
• What pieces of technology do you rely on when you’re traveling?
• What are your key sources of information on the road?
• What types of work can you not do on the road — and what types can you do better on the road?
• How do you evaluate whether a particular piece of business travel is worth it?
• What’s your best advice for someone taking on a lot of business travel?

Please, friends, educate me (and each other!) in the comments thread.

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Photo by skez, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Skip the crossword.

Okay, that’s a trivial piece of advice — and I like crosswords enough that I won’t deny you that pleasure if you really enjoy it.

But better than a crossword is to bring your life and work into sharper focus, and to align your actions with what you really want for yourself, your organization, and the people you care about.

Yesterday I suggested that you take an hour on Sunday to figure out which projects you should abandon. This reminded me of a few other posts I’ve written that might be just the thing to change your Sunday afternoon from a last chance at laziness to a first crack at living a week that really moves you closer to your goals. Here they are:

• One big workflow. (Don’t buy into the myth that there’s “work” and “life” — it’s all one thing.)
• 60 weekend minutes that will make your week go better. (6 tasks x 10 minutes each = one hour that will start your week on the right foot.)
• The Magic Hour. (Similar idea, but focused on your #1 project.)
• Self-management tip: explode the stack. (Big stacks are daunting, and conceal both jewels and junk. Use this technique to uncover each.)
• Stress kills. (Before you get back into the stressful swing of your week, contemplate what stress is doing to your mind and your body — then nip it in the bud.)
• Give yourself the gift of calm. (Strike a pre-emptive blow against the busy-ness of the upcoming week so you can reap the rewards of calm, focused work.)

I hope you’ll find something here that’s useful — and that you’ll do something with your Sunday afternoon that will bring you better rewards than a crossword ever could.

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Image by Pete, used under a Creative Commons license.

“Too much for the space available.”

Could be too much stuff for the physical space available, like in the kitchen above.

Could be too many meetings for the space available on your calendar.

Could be too many projects for the space available on your team’s work schedule.

Could be too many ideas for the “space” — time, energy, budget, cognitive capacity — available. (Let me raise my hand on that one.)

Here’s the problem: your inbox, your computer, your filing cabinets — they all have virtually unlimited space for stuffing in more. But your brain doesn’t.

Your calendar doesn’t.

Your budget doesn’t.

A Pareto-parsed view of your work doesn’t.

Antidotes:

• Don’t think more, think better.
• Don’t do more, do important.
• Don’t commit to more, commit to what moves the needle.

How do you administer these antidotes?

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Image by Hassan Abdel-Rahman, used under a Creative Commons license.

Want advice on whittling down your To-Do list? Oh, I’m full of that kind of advice:

• Toss something off the list.
• Change verb tenses to promote action.
• Banish multitasking.
• Parse ruthlessly.
• Make a STOP-doing list.
• . . . and so on.

Heck, I even wrote a little poem about to-do’s.

But while all of this advice aims to help you and me both get more to-do’s done, it’s possible that none of it goes far enough — at least if it doesn’t help us to change habits of inattention, overburden, multitasking, or mindless repetition. Hey, we’re human — our brains are wired to follow habits. No need to cry about it . . . but no need to remain a slave to old patterns, either.

The Prescription

This is the medicine I’m taking.

1. Pull all your to-do’s into one place. (If this means you have to have to fill 20 pages of a word-processing document, so be it.)
2. At the top of the list write “Maybe Do” in place of “To Do.”
3. Find a pad of paper, a blank table in a quiet room, and an undisturbed hour. (This may be the hardest step. But persevere.)
4. Read through the “Maybe Do” list without writing anything down. Just read through the whole thing, line by line, to remind yourself what’s on it.
5. On your blank pad of paper, make a heading: “To REALLY Do.”
6. Under that heading, write down the half-dozen things from the “Maybe Do” list that genuinely must happen — so you can keep your job, so you can be a good parent, so you can become world-famous, so your company can stop gushing red ink, or whatever is most important to you.
7. Seriously, limit it to half a dozen, at the outside. Go back and mark out items you wrote down on the “To REALLY Do” list until there are only six.
8. Do those things.
9. Repeat steps 4 - 8 ad infinitum.

What do you think? Try it and tell me if it works for you.

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Construction photo by hansntareen, used under a Creative Commons license.

Are your thoughts and obligations packed together this tightly?

The Attention Deficit Doctor

Dr. Edward Hallowell is psychiatrist who’s known best for his groundbreaking work on Attention Deficit Disorder. He coined the term “Attention Deficit Trait,” or ADT, to refer to the ADD-like symptoms that affect so many of us today because we overstimulate ourselves with too much information, too many obligations, too many inputs.

If you suffer from ADT — no shame in that — here’s a three-point summary of Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD:

• “Owing to disorganization, frustration, and the feeling of being overloaded, the person tends to waste his or her creativity, energy, and talent, getting more and more buried under unmet obligations, unfinished projects, and piles of books or papers waiting to be read.”
• The antidote is straightforward to describe, but difficult to implement: “In order to cope with the many demands of everyday life and the information overload each day brings, a person needs to be able to stop and think, to pause over one point long enough to extract what matters before moving on. . . . Life is a powerful accelerator these days; what separates the successful from the frustrated is the quality of their brakes and their ability to use them.”
• Working harder or faster will never be the solution to this problem, because of basic constraints in how our brains work; Hallowell takes considerable pains to describe these constraints and how to work with them instead of against them.

If any of this rings a bell for you, I encourage you to find a time to set aside your busyness long enough to read what follows. And if this review prompts you to read CrazyBusy, so much the better. I wouldn’t call it a timeless classic, but it is a highly informed analysis of our current maddening ways of doing business — personally and collectively — and it’s loaded with wise prescriptions, both scientific and philosophical, for how you can turn down the “crazy” in your life by turning down the level of “busy” that plagues so many of us.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Book Review

Let me tell you a little story at my own expense. Last year, after writing about Read more

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.