Business Insight Zone

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?

Here it is:

Many, if not most, companies do nothing, or virtually nothing, to improve their workers’ reactions to stress. Given that stress impedes productivity, this is a huge missed opportunity.

Your thoughts?

(If you’re curious, this isn’t about me — no unusual work stress for me these days.)

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Related:

• Stress kills.
• Stress kills, redux: the best short piece I’ve read about stress.
• Give yourself the gift of calm.

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Photo credits.

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.

. . . as I slump to the end of a tiring — but inspiring — week.

1. Quoth Bill James:

People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.

I take this seriously, not particularly in its baseball context, but because Hoover’s has worked hard for many years to bring high-quality, relevant information to businesspeople. All the time I’m thinking more about how we can do this better, not just in the sense of supplying information better and faster, but in the sense of helping you turn it into new knowledge that fuels your business.

That’s just a sketch of a much bigger idea — more to come.

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2. You may know that in many cases I’m a foe of business meetings, but I had a great one today. After I came out if it, I tweeted this, half in jest:

A good meeting is one you come out of with a hit list in hand.

After discussing it with a friend — who rightly stumped for the benefit of having a clear meeting agenda — I followed up with this:

Sharp clarity going in, severe clarity coming out should be the goal of a meeting.

If a meeting doesn’t exhilirate you, or scare you a little, or give you relief by answering some of your burning questions . . . what good is it?

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3. Something to think about if you find you’re having a hard time thinking:

The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. . . . Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.

How can you improve your own attention? Or your customers’? Or your employees’? It might make a big difference to your business.

Related:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by fauxto_digit, used under a Creative Commons 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.

Further to last week’s post about Malcolm Gladwell’s treatment of sports underdogs, I came across this in Gladwell’s online discussion with Bill Simmons of ESPN:

The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

Turn it back to business: you’re an underdog in something, or your company is, or someone at your company is. Yet the underdog in question doesn’t try something new.

So, what’s wrong with your incentive structure?

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UPDATE, a little later on Monday: I forgot this tidbit from February

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on CEO incentives.

. . . A C.E.O.’s incentive is not to learn, because he’s not paid on real value. He’s paid on cosmetic value. . . .

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

Don’t worry about building a great edifice — the whole wall — a new cathedral.

When you’re feeling your oats, sure, dream of the big thing. But when you’re ground down by daily tasks, or in the midst of a thousand projects for which you have too much responsibility yet too little control, don’t focus on the whole. Just put one more brick into place.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish — even when you’re tired, overworked, frustrated — if you’ll focus only on the very next step. And before you know it, you will have a whole wall finished.

What do you do to focus on the very next step?

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Related:

• ONE thing DONE.

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Photo by Karla Kaulfuss, used under a Creative Commons license.

The other day I got to give a presentation (twice, actually) to the Launch Pad Job Club here in Austin. After it was over, some of the job seekers in the audience stuck around to talk to me. One of them was Zack Metzner, who has used his temporary unemployment as an opportunity to build something for his fellow job seekers — the JoblessJoe site.

Zack knows from experience that being unemployed can be isolating and lonely, so he’s using JoblessJoe — which is part blog, part social network — as a way to let jobless folks know that they’re not alone. The site offers advice and forums that emphasize positive action and problem-solving.

I’ve barely started exploring the site, but already I see that Jeff Johannigman, an old friend who was a colleague of mine in the earliest days of my career, is offering job coaching there. (This tells me that Zack is definitely onto something.)

If it’s relevant to you or someone you know, give JoblessJoe a look. And kudos to Zack for taking adversity and turning it into opportunity.

Over the next two weeks, I’m gone more than I’m home, and I’ll barely be in the office. Many topics to discuss, not much time to discuss them. Therefore, expect an explosion of timeboxing, ergo short posts.

Possibly this is a useful moment to reflect on how timeboxing, lightning-round task finishing, and a general awareness that life is short can drive better business/life performance every day.

Eh?

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Photo by John Manoogian III, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

My kids are fascinated by The Biggest Loser.

I don’t blame them: it’s amazing to see the contestants transform their lives, especially when they’ve struggled with weight problems for many years. The before and after photos can be stunning.

But I’m even more impressed by the folks following along at home.

The contestants on the show are housed, fed, and exercised on a comfortable ranch. They’re led through their workouts under the expert (and ferocious) coaching of Bob and Jillian. They have constant access to the best nutrition and expert medical care. And for as long as they can stay on the show (one contestant is voted out each week), they can make weight loss their full-time job. I’m impressed by their commitment and their results, but the deck is still stacked in their favor.

By contrast, imagine a single mom doing the same thing at home, working out along with a fitness video before she gets her kids up and takes them to school. Or a sales manager hitting the gym before dawn so he can put in 60-hour weeks at the office and still be home for dinner with his family. Imagine folks as busy as yourself, but carrying 100 extra pounds and determined to do something about it. That’s the real challenge.

(This, by the way, is why it’s a stroke of genius that The Biggest Loser has a separate league just for people following along at home.)

You may have noticed that times are tough. There was some surprise in the markets this morning when new retail numbers came out, apparently confirming that the recession will go on for a while longer. Around the business world, belts are as tight as I’ve ever heard of. Layoffs are common. Et cetera.

Yet it is amid exactly this mix of conditions that every one of us can take on the challenge of doing what seems impossible: losing 100 pounds, turning around a department, bringing something revolutionary to market.

We won’t have the luxury of retreating to a ranch in the hills to do it. We won’t have hard-ass trainers like Bob and Jillian to drive us. We’ll have to do it for ourselves.

Are you up for it? Are you ready to impress the world?