Cameron Test Bootstrap: July 2015

5 Ways Reading Books Make You a Better Worker

I like to read. I don't read nearly as much as I think I should, but I still manage to crank through a dozen or more books a year. Usually I read fiction, mystery novels or the like, as I find it an equally if not superior entertainment venue to the television. But over the past few years, I've started picking up more and more non-fiction books and, honestly, finding them helpful in growing.

The financial talk show host Dave Ramsey likes to quote Charlie "Tremendous" Jones with this great saying, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read." Think about that for a second. If you don't read books, your mind will not be exposed to anything new or challenging, and you will fail to grow as a human being. You will stagnate. You will stay exactly the same. Is that what you want? Couldn't you do just a little better? I think you can, and that's why I encourage you to read more books. So here's a quick list of reasons to read books and how they can help you at work:

Learn New Skills

Books can teach you things that you did not already know, and they often come at a price substantially cheaper than classes or other mechanisms of learning the same thing. Customized two-day courses can often run $1000 or more, even when the entire content of the class can be captured in a 300-page book for $24.99. Books definitely require more discipline in terms of self-pacing and making sure that you are on target with the content, but if you want to learn how something works, chances are that a few books exist to teach you about it.

Discover Different Perspectives

Books can give you a different perspective on problems that you have already faced and dealt with, as well as arm you with tools that can assist you with those same problems or struggles in the future. Often times, books provide a pacing mechanism for you to walk through advice in your own mind and understand it and absorb it better, even if your best friend or spouse previously provided the same advice. Books offer the ability to re-read and re-read passages again and again for understanding, where a conversation might not.

Expose Yourself to Research

Unless you work in a research facility or university, chances are that you don't go seeking out academic research and statistics on a daily basis (maybe you do, but I'll tell you now that you are the exception). Non-fiction books do require at a minimum some level of research, and they often reference some substantial brainpower, whether the Harvard Business Review or some focused think tank. Regardless, books can affirm or deny facts that you believed to be true, and they often provide data and detailed analysis to back it up. Understanding facts behind your belief structures helps you to explain those ideas to others with an authority and greater detail than just sharing opinions around the water cooler.

Branch Out

Often at work, we sit in a rut. Ruts are easy. Tires fit very well in ruts, and the more they run in them, the deeper grooves they cut, making it harder and harder to turn off the path. The same is true, sadly, of skills. If you do one thing long enough, you will forget many of the other things that you know how to do. The solution? Read more. Books can help you explore different areas that you had previously had limited exposure to. I am, at heart, an IT guy. I enjoy systems development and almost immediate satisfaction to code changes being made on the fly. But still I read books on marketing or finance or personal development, because, at the end of the day, my job will only ever offer me limited exposure to those areas because they are not part of my core duties. Reading will expand your horizon beyond the scope of your job.

Get Better At Things You Thought You Were Good At

Oh, you're an awesome manager, aren't you? Or you already know how to code, right? Not quite. While you may have the skills to pass a rudimentary skills test, you can always improve. You can always be a little better. Often people work in jobs long enough to become complacent and happy with what they are doing, and it becomes easier to continue along at whatever pace they are working. By reading, though, you can pick a topic you think you already know something about, whether you do or do not, and you can learn more about it. Study what you want to learn and get better. OK?

What else do books prepare you for? What book are you currently reading? I'd love to know.

Teaching an Old Dog

You've heard the expression "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." The truth is, if that old dog happens to be a person, I think it is capable of learning any new tricks its entire life. The true questions are whether we want to learn the new tricks.

Sometimes it's necessity, sometimes it's desire, but every now and again it is good to learn something new, or refresh on something old.

For me of late, it's revisiting learning JavaScript within the context of HTML5. I figured with a little brush-up on the conventions, I could spend a little bit of time to make some quick upgrades here on the site.

What is it for you?

Image credit: Josch13 via Pixabay

Annoying Things You Can Do To Be Blocked on Facebook

A few days ago, I wrote a post on how to be really bad at Twitter and lose the interest of your followers, mostly by annoying them. I thought I would counter with a few things that are equally annoying on Facebook and can cause you to get blocked there as well. I'll admit, my tolerance for Facebook annoyances may be higher than for Twitter, just because I don't frequent Facebook as often, but I still try to avoid these things where I can.

Being Offensive

Again, just like Twitter, posting offensive material that targets a particular group of people will likely cause someone to click that Block link by your name. If you only want people who believe the same beliefs to see your posts, you're probably in the clear. Until you are applying for a job or going on a date or anything else where someone sees your profile. Offending groups of people never pays off, in my opinion.

Tagging Without Permission

Some people take close care of their Facebook account and who can see what information. Others throw caution to the wind and post every detail about their lives. When a person used to sharing everything uploads a picture of a person or tags someone in a photo or post who is hyper-sensitive to privacy without their permission, conflict ensues. Sure, Facebook makes it easy to untag yourself or remove items from your timeline, but for some, that does not go far enough. So, they may block you to prevent that behavior again. In this instance, I think there's not much that can be done. The adult way to handle those sorts of privacy issues would be to untag yourself, set your privacy settings appropriately, and send a message to the person asking them not to tag you. But some people can't be bothered with effort to resolve internet disputes.

Take A Stand, On Everything

The Facebook community seems to have more tolerance (or maybe it is just people that I see in my timeline) for people posting or sharing extreme political beliefs and pushing them constantly, as if they were running for office. No matter which side of the political fence you are on, though, I do not particularly want your shared articles from your favorite-(left-or-right)-wing-biased news source that you think will somehow convince the entirety of the Internet to vote for your chosen candidate or see the error in their entire belief system and follow you to the light. Chances are, it's a link to an internet article, which means it has to be true, right?

Vaguebooking

"I might have something going on but I just can't type it right now." Your attempts to elicit anticipation from the crowds of friends that you have on Facebook is more likely to annoy than excite. Trying to be vague about the details of your post will likely generate some questions in the comments, but then it will start to annoy everyone, making them think you are a (no, not poetic artistic soul) whiny self-indulgent brat who thinks you are so important that your friends are enthralled by your life.

The Not-So-Humble-Brag

So whether it is the humble bragging ("I honestly can't believe that I got chosen for that Nobel Prize. All those late nights in the lab paid off, but I would have never thought it would come to this") or the self-deprecating story that actually highlights something completely different ("Can you believe I got a nail stuck in the two front tires of my Ferrari and they can't even fix it? I am going to have to drive the Bugatti for the next week while it is in the shop"), nobody wants to hear it. I am sure you are wonderful, as do the rest of your friends. That's why we're your Facebook friends, right? Still, if you accomplished something, and you are proud of it, just say it ("I am so excited about throwing that no hitter!"). At least you would be genuine.

Miss Your Audience

I don't know how you prep for this one other than only being friends with people exactly like you, but some people get quite turned off by posts from people in a totally different life point or interest set than you. If you incessantly post about your kids, working out, how much you are working, or your back-to-back vacations (separated by that party in Cabo), you might disconnect with your audience. If you have a topic that you are passionate about and trying to promote, you might consider setting up an interest group or page instead of dropping those gems in your timeline.

More?

I am certain that I have listed only a subset of the many ways to be completely obnoxious on Facebook. If you have another one, drop by my Facebook page and let me know.

Image credit: Hermann on Pixabay

Build Your Own

I'm a chronic do-it-yourselfer. I love shows like Fixer Upper and Yard Crashers. In fact, I'm certain that the DIY network and HGTV have my picture on some internal memo of a customer profile sheet, along with details like my age, income, and "likely to buy more tools than he needs" or "willing to try any project to avoid paying someone else to do it." So naturally, when things go wrong (whether actual construction or otherwise), my first instinct is to see whether or not I can fix or build a replacement myself. I also won't hide that my wife, who is much smarter than I am, occasionally has to convince me that some things are best done by a professional. When it comes to projects other than the house, though, I have to do some of the evaluation and convincing myself.

A few years ago, I was using what I still think is one of the best to do list apps to ever hit the market, Astrid. You can still Google "Astrid To Do" and find some pretty positive reviews of it. The squid character that installed with the app was, albeit cheesy, the perfect combination of annoying and charming that it positively encouraged me to make my way through the to do list. Combine that with a pretty powerful scheduling interface, and I had a perfect app for me. Unfortunately, Yahoo purchased the app and for some bizarre reason just shut it down. I searched through so many replacement apps that I strongly considered building my own, even if I ended up being the only user. But I did not build it myself, because I chose not to spend my time on it, there were sufficient numbers of apps that were "good enough" to replace my to do app, and I did not have a need for it.

Recently, Buffer (an app that I can't do without to keep the social sites updated) announced that it was killing its Suggestions feature. The feature basically suggests content for you to push into your various streams. I have used it once or twice, but I've also found some extremely stale content in the list, and stuff that wasn't relevant to my target audience (that's you if you're reading this). Buffer even noted as much in their explanation of why they were shutting down the Suggestions feature. In this case, though, when I considered building a replacement (for myself), the story was a little different. I already had other content suggestion mechanisms in place (mostly Feedly, Flipboard, and Twitter), and simply needed to augment my Feedly with a couple of extra RSS feeds to be able to pull similar and likely more relevant content to share, which I thankfully can still do with Buffer. Problem solved.

At a fundamental level the question truly is whether to build or buy, whether new or replacements. It's not an easy answer. When you buy, you are hostage to the whims of the creator, who may destroy the product whenever he or she wants. When you build, you must have invested in the necessary tools and be ready to spend the time to make it succeed. Certainly building is easier if you are already halfway there.

What criteria would you put in a build it or buy it decision? Leave a comment and let me know.

Image credit: stephanrinke via Pixabay

One Fish, Two Fish

Red Fish, Blue Fish. For this Friday, I encourage you to relax a bit. I know we just did this on Wednesday with the Recharge Day, but I have a feeling you haven't taken me up on it yet. Here's my Red Oscar and Jack Dempsey just hanging out. Take two minutes or so this Friday to find a friend and hang out. And then do it a bit more over the weekend (these fish do it all day, every day, which may be excessive). Recharge, kill your stress, then come back to start again.

Service to Create Customers for Life

I could list several companies that I try to avoid, either because of a bad experience that could have easily been avoided, corporate policies that result in poor customer experience, or generally unsatisfactory products. I do not plan to list any of those here. Instead, I am going to talk about two companies that helped me out tonight, or at least their employees did. The extra mile they went was such a great experience that I consider myself a "customer for life" or at least for a long time.

I'll give a little background first. My car was in the shop today, getting the air conditioner replaced, something I was not particularly happy about in the first place. But, I got the car back this evening and it was, in fact, cool (a necessity in Texas summer).

So I was running an errand this evening to Goody Goody Liquor store, and when I came out, my car wouldn't start. After a call home, I went in to see if anyone could help me jump it. One of the employees offered to help and hooked his truck up to see if we could jumpstart it. He ran his truck for quite a while, we tried several things, but in the end could not get it to start, until another employee lent us some thicker gauge jumper cables and we finally got it to run. He also had offered to loan me a battery wrench to help get the battery out if I had needed it, and he was content to loan it on good faith that I would bring it back. I don't know about you, but I am not sure where else I can buy some craft beer and get that kind of assistance.

From there, with a newly jumped car, I went over to AutoZone, where I proceeded to get help with a new battery, and one of their employees helped change my battery for me while having a pleasant conversation with us. He was helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly, and I left quickly with a new battery.

I came home and gave both a shout out on Twitter, because honestly, companies need to know when they have great employees. Most of the motivation for Yelp or Google reviews always seems to be a desire to ward others off from a bad experience, and sharing positive experiences hold equally important weight, especially in the world of crowdsourcing everything from the internet. I'm preempting today's blog post with this note for the same reason. Sharing good reviews is important.

If not for the good Samaritans at these stores, I might still be struggling to get home or have left my car in a parking lot overnight. I appreciate their assistance, and I'll certainly patronize those businesses again in the hopes they continue to employ such great people.

What businesses have you had a good experience with? Feel free to share or click this link to tweet at me and let me know.

Image credit: Kaboompics via Pixabay

Take a Recharge Day

I'm taking a little recharge day from the blog today, so no big post for you. I'm going to relax, do some swimming, and think up a few more topics for upcoming posts. I also have the important task of deciding what kind of beer I am going to brew this Friday (yes, I brew beer, and it is a fabulous hobby).

Today might not be your day, but I suggest you put a recharge day somewhere on your calendar. You don't have to take it completely off, but you should slow down your crazy schedule, at least for one evening or one afternoon. Enjoy yourself every now and again. You'll come back more productive.

Image Credit: dakzxz on Pixabay

How Not To Be a Needy Employee

As a manager, your job requires that you coach and develop your team. If you do not enjoy coaching and teaching and training, perhaps you should choose a career path other than management. Still, when managing, you can always run across needy employees, who require more of your time than the others, sometimes to excess.

As an employee, it is important to try to avoid being a needy employee. Some might perceive them underskilled, lazy, or just plain annoying. None of those qualities are ones that you want to stick with you around the office. So here are some tips on how to avoid being the neediest on the team.

Do It Yourself First

The neediest of employees need guidance on every single task. It is a miracle if they can sharpen a pencil without asking for how the boss would like it done. At its heart, this type of behavior probably stems from having a bad manager at some point and getting run over for not doing something correctly, in my pop psychological view. But that's no excuse. The best thing you can do to avoid appearing too needy is to never bring something to your manager that you haven't already attempted first. Many people are visual, anyway, and respond better to stimulus. It is much easier to critique something put in front of you than to express in abstract what you are looking for, and your manager is no different. Give him or her something to respond to, and you will get better results. You may even be done on the first try.

Research

Sometimes it is easier to ask the boss. They know the answer, so should they not just share it with you? Chances are if you ask them, they will answer, but may also put you in the needy bucket. A snarkier boss would have you use lmgtfy.com (What is lmgtfy.com?), but most will just chalk up a strike against you. Rather than ask the stupid question, you sit in a better position if you have already done the research, even if it does not provide you the answer. Instead of asking, "How does the billing system work?" you might preface with your prior research. "I read a whitepaper and also searched through the software vendor's site, but I don't understand exactly how the billing system is able to identify part numbers to go on the invoice" explains that not only are you not lazy, but instead you are capable of learning things on your own and only defer to the boss when your efforts have been fruitless.

Partner Up

You may have the other option of utilizing your peers as a first line of defense instead of your boss. They will have an incentive to help you so the team succeeds, while not presenting a negative view of yourself to the boss. Two hints on this one, though. First, don't overutilize your teammates, or they may view you as just as needy as the boss would. Second, offer something in return. People are more likely to help you willingly if they are getting something or know they could get something from you back.

Ask Yourself All of Your Questions

When you ask too many questions, you can appear insubordinate, as if you are challenging the authority of management. As a manager, you should encourage discussion and challenges to ideas to vet out the best ideas, but when an employee questions every single discussion it can become extremely tiresome, particularly when the questions have obvious answers. To avoid being that employee, ask yourself the question first. You might even jot your answer down. If you ask the boss the same question and get the same response you wrote down, chances are it was an unnecessary question and you should have just acted without asking. There's an old saying that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. I don't know about easier, but if the questions could be answered by you nine times out of ten, it might be better to avoid asking at all and take the risk that one time out of ten you were wrong but decisive.

If you haven't noticed, there's a theme to all of these points. When you approach every problem first by running to the manager, you are needy. Take action yourself and follow up with the manager later, and you are not needy. It's a simple rule.

What other needy behaviors do employees demonstrate? Click to tweet at me and let me know.

Image credit: geralt via Pixabay

4 Business Ideas I Got Riding a Bike

A few weeks ago I bought a bike. That is a bike as in bicycle, not motorcycle. Now the honest truth is that I haven't ridden a bike since I was probably twenty years old, so it has been a while. I took it out on my inaugural ride and made it probably a couple of miles out and back before collapsing in a sweaty heap and then subsequently sliding into the pool to cool down. This morning, I went out on the bike again with the family, but as it is already in the 100s here in Texas, even the morning led to excess sweating and water consumption. My return to cycling has taught me a few things, though, and a few of them may even make sense in a business context. Let's see what you think.

You never forget core skills

The saying goes, "You never forget how to ride a bike." I'll vouch for that statement, but the first five minutes I spent on the bicycle made me wary that the last couple of decades had eroded my memory from lack of use. Instead, I determined that while my execution lacked grace initially, I had not lost the skill entirely. Likewise, you never lose the skills core to your being. If you can sell, code, figure out problems, communicate, crunch numbers, identify deals, or think about long term strategy, those skills become ingrained in your being. Once you make a skill part of you, the difficulty in losing that skill increases. Execution of skills, however, cannot become part of you. That execution must be continually nurtured. So, just like my first few minutes on the bicycle, while you will always know how to perform those core tasks, practice and repetitions are still required to either retain or regain any proficiency in using your skills.

Always set a good example

When I was a kid, we rode our bikes around the neighborhood fast, zooming down hills and over ramps. We did everything without a helmet. Nowadays, that would be considered extremely reckless, and it is. I was in enough bicycle accidents that could have been serious that in retrospect, I know I should have worn a helmet. So, as I should, I have my daughter wear a helmet while she is riding her bicycle. I wear a helmet as well. In fact, I bought my helmet before I even bought my bicycle. Do I need one? Statistically, maybe not, but the amount of risk that it would put me at is multiplied by the risk that my daughter would take by not wearing a helmet if I gave her the signal that it was OK. You never know whose eyes are watching you. In the office, there are opportunities to cut corners, and even things that you don't truly need to do. Ask yourself if not doing them may increase risk to the company if someone else follows your lead and cuts corners as well.

Pay attention to details

After noting a few bikes in the store not installed exactly as I would have liked, I made the decision to get my bicycle in a box and assemble myself. That assembly required a level of precision that was frustrating, even to me. I spent inordinate amounts of time aligning brake pads and making sure that the wheels were evenly spaced. I was pretty sure that I had paid attention to every detail. The problem came when I took off the front wheel to throw the bike in the back of my car and then reassembled it. Not taking the appropriate time there to precisely align the wheel caused my brake cable to rub on the tire and rip some of the plastic covering off of the cable in a short ride across the street. The lesson I learned here was that no matter how much planning and precision went into the original design, I needed to spend the same amount of attention to detail during the execution phase, when I was quickly reassembling and riding. Not doing so has left me with more work later to clean up the mess. Problems can occur at any point in a project, and it pays to prepare for anything. But most importantly, prepare yourself and be vigilant about your attention to detail.

Work hard, but have fun

My first bike ride left me pretty exhausted. The temperature was steamy, I was out of shape for a ride of that length, and I was re-learning how to change gears and operate the bike on the fly. But on the way back, I coasted down a nice hill that I had previously pedaled laboriously up. The relaxation of picking up speed without pedaling, coupled with the breeze whipping across my face, left me feeling exhilarated and enjoying the entire ride, exhausting or not. Take time to enjoy the fruits of your labor, where appropriate. Enjoy the success of a project well done. Work hard, and then enjoy what you have accomplished.

Did you like this article? Share it on your favorite site, and let me know.

Image credit: tpsdave on Pixabay. No, that's not me. I'm taller and less talented on a bicycle.

Truly Engaging the Audience

Stumbled across this last week and have to share its brilliance. Math teacher Matthew Weathers plays this prank on his class using some pretty well edited video and acting.

Click here if you can't play the video.

There Are No New Ideas

You stole your latest idea.

I'm not saying someone told you the idea and you then claimed it as your own. I'm not claiming that you even subconsciously took something that belonged to someone else. Rather, your latest idea is the product of your experience, and in business, it likely originated from watching similar activity and similar results to the ones you are hoping to achieve (I hope). If you are stealing ideas that had poor results, then perhaps we should be having a different conversation.

I thought about this the other day as I learned about a new methodology, which happened to be an existing methodology that I was already familiar with spun up with a couple of innovative, yet derivative tools. To me, it was nothing particularly new or different, though through a different filter or perspective, it could have been groundbreaking.

Business operates on a limited set of rules. Deliver the product your customer wants at a price they agree to pay (and is profitable to you) as quickly as you can with a good customer experience in mind. Repeat. If you can do this over and over again, you'll make money. No level of innovation and new ideas are going to change that set of rules. As a result, those areas of fact have been pored over for decades, on how to deliver faster (Lean Manufacturing) on a product the customer wants (Market Research) at a profit (using IRR and ROI, etc., where investment is involved). The ideas are all used up.

What's not used up is the application of those ideas to the situation. The idea that you should deliver faster has been around since Henry Ford, but that doesn't mean you are delivering as fast as you can. Profit concepts have been around for millennia, but that doesn't mean your margin is set perfectly.

Mystery novels (and romance novels and thrillers and movies and television shows) all follow a formula. In fact, so many movies follow a similar formula that it has been extracted and superimposed on their plots, called Save the Cat. Just because it follows a formula does not make it the same. The difference in Jurassic World, Jaws, Birdman, Whiplash and Avengers: Age of Ultron isn't in the idea. In fact, on the front page of the Save the Cat site, there are beat sheets for all of them showing they follow the same formula. What's different is the execution. Each one is executed differently to take the formula that works and manipulate it to their own end.

The same is true of business operations. The idea isn't revolutionary. The methodology is a new take, perhaps, on the same ways of looking at things. But your execution could be so close to perfect and so unique to the situation that you excel. Make yourself look different by executing better.

Like this post? Click and let me know.

Image by funnytools on Pixabay

What Wikipedia Can't Tell You About Management

Go ahead, look it up. Wikipedia describes management as:

Management in businesses and organizations is the function that coordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively.

From there, it takes a very clinical and scientific approach (this is wikipedia after all) to describing basic management functions and structures. The article does well to describe Planning, Controlling, Commanding, Coordinating, and Organizing as basic management functions, but it leaves out a few things that I have noticed over the years, particularly at larger companies.

Pushing Paperwork
As you manage more and more people, you become responsible for the career paths (and paperwork associated with) each of those individuals. Hiring a new person? Prepare the paperwork. Someone pursuing a new job? Get your papers ready (every time they apply). Trying to promote someone? There's a binder over there to fill out. Want to fire someone? We've got a whole file cabinet for that. The paperwork one person generates in a year from a Human Resources perspective does not add up to all that much, maybe two or three events in a year. But as your team size grows (another reason to keep your teams below seven), those two or three events a year becomes fifteen or twenty.

You're Never The Boss
Unless you own the company outright, you will always have a boss. VPs answer to SVPs or the CEO. CEOs answer to their boards. And the boards serve at the whim of shareholders or owners. If you seek authority and autonomy by pursuing a career in management, you might be sorely disappointed. Perhaps an entrepreneurial pursuit could fulfill you more, but that comes with additional risk.

You Will Make Hard Decisions
Dramatizations of management have people in suits focused on extremely difficult strategic decisions, either focused on mergers and acquisitions or art theft (OK, maybe that's just The Thomas Crown Affair), but in reality, managers are asked to make more difficult positions than that. The two hardest, in my opinion, decisions made are whom to lay off and whom to hire. Layoffs require decisions that profoundly impact people's lives and often those lives are the lives of friends. You can hire someone as easily as you can decide on a spouse, but with only one or two dates to make up your mind.

Don't Forget Performance Reviews
Perhaps one of the least enjoyable aspects of management to many is the annual performance review cycle. The Washington Post ran an article a few years ago that pointed to annual reviews as a demotivating activity that most employees and management universally hate together, but still they remain a staple of corporate America. So once a year, prepare to write a novel explaining why your employees are doing well or not, in a dance that should repeat what good managers do all year long and as a crutch for bad managers for failing to provide feedback the rest of the year.

Hope You Like Capitol Hill
Like it or not, there is a political aspect to management as well. Whether you work in a hyper-political and toxic environment or one that is more friendly, you still need to be able to negotiate and compromise with your peers like a Senator seeking a bipartisan coalition. Good managers need to be able to work out deals and agreements back and forth, all with the benefit of the company and customers in mind. Sometimes that means you won't be the one with the idea that triumphs, but sometimes you will be.

That's Not All
There are other horrible aspects of management. But there are great things, too, that they don't tell you, like the satisfaction of having an employee grasp a point that you have been coaching them on. As you get higher up, watching and developing first-time managers in the same skills that you have developed over the years can be great. Getting the ability to share your ideas with the leadership of the organization can give you a stake in the outcome for the company.

What else does Wikipedia leave out? Leave me a comment here or on Facebook and let me know.

Being Awful at Twitter in 8 Easy Steps

Have you ever wondered how you could be worse at social media? I'm no master, by far, but even as a common user, time and time again I come across people who struggle with Twitter. Here are several things they do that could be hurting your Twitter following.

1. Never Tweet
If you don't ever tweet, why would anyone want to follow you? A quick glance at the Twitter users with the most followers (via TwitterCounter) shows a good several thousand tweets under the belts of the top 25. I've certainly found myself following celebrities or others whom I am interested in, only to find that they tweet so rarely that I never see anything from them in my feed. This is particularly important for individuals who follow large numbers of people (we'll call it 100 or more), because the feed is already so full of noise it can be hard to be heard if you aren't speaking frequently enough. I've heard varying recommendations on how frequently to tweet, but nobody recommends never.

2. Repeat Tweet. Repeat Tweet. Repeat Tweet.
So, while you need to make sure you are being heard out there, you don't want to sound like a scratched vinyl copy of Rick Astley (Rickrolling is still a thing, I swear). It is definitely OK to tweet the same thing twice, particularly if you have followers in substantially different time zones. But some people tweet the exact same tweet (or maybe they have a different spacing or extra "s" on a word to avoid Twitter rejecting the tweet as a duplicate) over and over and over again for days on end. That's engaging. I really want to have a meaningful dialogue with a parrot who keeps asking for the same cracker I gave her on the first day we met.

3. Be a Robot.
There are several bots on Twitter. They retweet anything that contains certain keywords. They follow or reply to people just based on the content of their messages. What the world does not need is for humans to start acting like Twitter bots. I followed a guy for a while that had zero tweets that were not retweets of things his company account was putting out. If I wanted to follow the company, I would have, instead of the individual. You expect a non-stop stream of marketing from following a company. But every single one of this guy's tweets started with "RT @company_name" which made the account virtually worthless. Sure, promotion is a good thing, but you are a human. Your bio says you are into this baseball team or that hobby. Sprinkle some tweets about that in between your corporate shill retweet marathon.

4. Spam Reply.
This goes hand-in-hand with #2 up there, but I see people who often start tweeting at various people, sending the same message to each. The tweet isn't verbatim the same (because the @someone from the beginning has changed), but otherwise it is identical. A feed filled with "@person1 I think you should try this great product" and "@person2 I think you should try this great product" isn't particularly interesting to anyone. Not even persons 1 and 2.

5. Don't Follow Anyone
Unless you are Conan O'Brien, you likely won't have a following of 17 million if you only follow one person. Aside from the fact that I don't understand how people get news and information without following some key accounts on Twitter, you need to follow people to understand trending topics, keep ahead of what is going on in your industry, and most importantly, engage in conversation. I've heard Twitter described as a cocktail party, and at times that is pretty accurate. But I don't know of many cocktail party successes from people who are not engaging the other party-goers but rather just listening to what the wall or the hors d'oeuvres have to say.

6. Tweet at yourself.
I'm pretty sure even if there were a real verified Twitter account for Bob Dole (lots of parody accounts), he would have a handler inform him not to tweet @BonaFideVerifiedBobDole (I'd think). Tweeting at yourself is like talking to yourself. You look a little crazy. I am sure that some social media guru will call me on this one, saying there is some magic mystery to tracking your retweets through a secret campaign code embedded in the Google Analytics tracking of the .@ mention so they have to add those to every comment they make, but now you see what I mean by a little crazy.

7. Tweet offensive stuff
If you have a political soapbox, I suppose more power to you. You believe in a cause so strongly that you need to shout it from the Twitter rooftops, then go right ahead. But if you are trying to maintain a professional Twitter account, I'd recommend you leave the politics and religion at home, just like you would at the office (unless you do discuss those topics frequently at the office). That said, if your cause is championing intolerance towards any group or making jokes at the expense of others or other groups, you'd be better off not making those comments either way. Granted, I'm sure someone is offended by my homebrewing or the fact that I tweet about Baylor football for most of the fall, but I'm not marginalizing any particular group of humans with those tweets. It's not the same thing.

8. Tweet pictures of your lunch. And only pictures of your lunch.
Unless you are Neil Patrick Harris and can manage a 78,000 person following for your lunch pictures (@NPHFoodPorn), nobody really wants to see your lunch. Or your dinner. Or your breakfast. The old joke was that Twitter was the place where people posted pictures of their meals. I find that ridiculous. That's what Facebook is for.

Did you enjoy this? Share it on Twitter (with this simple link of course) and let me know.

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Stealing Scrum: How to Perfectly Size Your Team and Organization

If you aren't familiar with Scrum, it's a methodology that IT teams use for Agile software development. It has some basic tenets and subscribes to the core essentials of the Agile Manifesto. As I have learned more and more about Scrum, I have started to see patterns that I think could be applied across other departments as well.

One of those areas is organizational design and team size. Scrum originally recommended a team size of seven, plus or minus two, so five to nine individuals. From what I can gather, that number was really based on a psychology paper by George A. Miller called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." If you want, you can download the paper here for personal use from the University of Toronto. Miller's basic premise is that humans have a natural upper bound for being able to keep concepts in working memory, and that upper bound is, in many cases, nine. Alongside that, seven items are truly in a sweet spot of sorts. If you don't want to read the paper, but are interested in Miller's Law, you can read the Wikipedia synopsis here.

From Scrum's perspective, team members must effectively communicate and coordinate with one another, and the same limit of five to nine individuals results in highly functional teams. As Scrum has grown, and effective teams have been found with as few as three individuals, the recommendation in some circles is now six, plus or minus three, retaining the same maximum of nine.

Another popular team sizing guideline comes from Amazon's Jeff Bezos, commonly cited as the originator of the "two pizza rule," which recommends that no team (or meeting) consist of more people than can be fed by two pizzas. Again, that puts a pretty strong upper limit at around nine to twelve individuals.

So when your organization is larger than nine people, how do you manage it? I recommend you stick to the guidelines across levels of the organization where you can. Try to follow some of these guidelines:

Keep team size under eight direct reports.
In order to keep under the magic upper limit of nine, keep teams under eight direct reports plus a manager. The nine individuals will communicate and coordinate more effectively than teams of twelve or fifteen. In addition to overall team size and communication, it is difficult to manage more than eight direct reports. I always recommend managers talk one on one with their employees, and even with eight employees, that's three days per week requiring doubling up on those conversations just to make the rounds once per week. Once you get above nine or ten, it becomes immensely difficult to keep track of what the team is working on.

Respect lower bounds as well.
Whether you choose three or five as your lower bound, teams should have a minimum number of individuals to be able to contribute successfully. If there are not enough employees in the organization or overall team, consider flattening it out, having the two or three individuals as peers rather than a management-employee relationship. Teams with one employee reporting to a manager may not have enough bandwidth to effectively accomplish what they need to and create unnecessary managerial tasks for the lead. Flatter teams in that regard would bump the managerial responsibilities up to someone who already has that as a large function of their job, and would give the team access to more peers to collaborate and work with.

Tighten it up as you move up the chain.
As the size of the organization being managed increases, the need to get closer to a sweet spot becomes more important due to one factor: span. The leader of an organization with five hundred employees has no ability to know what each of those employees are doing on a daily basis, so it is ever important that the model be optimized for upwards, downwards and peer-to-peer communication. Once the organization gets more than two levels deep, the span of topics covered makes it that much more difficult to manage large numbers of direct reports. Some individuals get lost in the shuffle entirely, along with their entire teams. As the span increases, a range of five to seven direct reports becomes much more manageable. I have witnessed even great executives struggle when presented with eight or nine direct reports.

Do you have anything to add to this article? Drop me a line and let me know, or share the article with your friends on social media or email.

This article is the first in a series evaluating how Scrum methodology might be utilized in non-IT business operations and decisions to improve productivity and performance.

Image modified from silhouettes extracted from an image from geralt on Pixabay.

An Easy 4 Step Plan for When Things Go Wrong

Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned. For example, yesterday, my blog auto-emailer sent out a version of my post that was missing some edits (noticeable mainly from the half words in there that looked like gibberish). Then a friend noted on the Facebook page I launched earlier this week that I had not edited the about section of the page before I launched. I'll be honest, I just did not remember. Sometimes we can blame the technology. Sometimes we can blame ourselves. Sometimes it's the complicated processes. Regardless of the reason, sometimes, things just go wrong. When they do, what can you do?

1. Fix it.
First, you have to correct what went wrong. In some cases you can't fix everything, but you should make an attempt to correct it. In the case of my email that went out incorrectly, I couldn't very well un-send an email, but I could post the correct version of the article on the site as fast as I could once I noticed, so anyone that wanted to read the non-gibberish version could click the link and see it. What's more, those that don't subscribe via email and only catch the updates on Facebook or Google + or Twitter would see the correct version. Do your best to correct any aspect of the mistake that you can and try to minimize the damage that it could cause.

2. Acknowledge the failure.
Nobody's perfect. Pretending that everything you do works like a well-oiled machine makes you look a little bit pretentious (not to mention a liar). Things go wrong all the time. Sometimes there's not even fault or blame to go around, but you should acknowledge the mistake. It makes you look human (let's hope you are human), and generally people understand. Those that don't understand probably are not human themselves, so avoid them. Nobody needs to hang out with that negativity.

3. Implement preventative measures.
Just because people can forgive your mistakes, don't assume they will forgive you for making them again and again. Work some preventative measures where you can to avoid having the same errors lead to the same mistakes. If you can't put systematic checkpoints in place, make checklists or processes for yourself to follow to try to avoid the issue in the future. It's ok to make a mistake but not OK to fail to learn from your errors.

4. Move along.
"Don't cry over spilled milk" goes the adage. When you've made a mistake or had something blow up in your face, you have to learn from it, take your lumps, and move along. Sitting around and focusing on the mistake for longer than necessary to learn what lessons it has to teach you is counterproductive, and that behavior will only discourage you from trying similar things in the future. Once you have finished steps 1-3, start something new. Get rolling. Something will go wrong again in the future. But the more you do, the more successes you will end up with than failures.

What has gone wrong lately for you? Were you able to correct what you could and move along?

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The One Constant in Business

There is but one constant in the world, and business is not different: Things will change. I'm not sure whether to attribute the idea to Hericlitus in 500 B.C. or François de La Rochefoucauld in the 1600s, but the idea persists. The world changes, while all of us in the world fight to keep it the same.

Why do we do this? Status quo is easy. It is understood. Change is difficult. It requires development. New thoughts, new skills. It requires a level of discipline of the self to understand that change is necessary to grow. What if the caterpillar refused to change? No butterflies. What if the market refused to change? No innovation. What if we all refused to change? The world would be at a standstill.

So how do you embrace change? There are entire methodologies and manifestos based around the idea that change is a constant in business. But the fundamentals are simple:

Understand change will happen. Nothing you can do will stop it. Even if you get everything internally standardized, the industry will change. The regulatory environment will change. The government will change.
Determine multiple courses of action. Given propensity to change, determining different approaches based on different variables is prudent, not wasteful.
Accept the change. It will happen to you, and just accept it for what it is as opposed to an evil, nefarious and conspiratorial plot to force you to be uncomfortable constantly.
Anticipate the next change. There will always be something. Maybe this focus is on optimizing something that you already do, or developing something entirely new. But spend time thinking about what is likely to come so that you can develop responses ahead of time and be prepared.

What's changing in your world? How do you adapt? Let me know.

Three Keys to Attracting a Following

My bad cell phone pic of the Killdares at the Dallas Zoo

We've all heard of building a following. It's a good phrase for it, as it takes patience, persistence, and constant production of value. I also think that it is equally viable to say you attract a following rather than build it. If you build something, it implies you have raw materials and just construct it from scratch. To attract something, you need a lure, bait, something that it finds irresistible.

A couple of weekends ago, we saw a local band (though they tour nationally) called the Killdares play at the Dallas Zoo for their annual Safari Nights concert series. The Killdares are a bagpipe-infused band with the ability to generate die-hard fans over their rather long tenure here in Dallas. We went with the kids, as did many other families, and I heard some people around the bar asking who the band was that was playing that night. Several of those in attendance were obviously just there for something to do. For us, it was a bit of both. I've caught the Killdares several times (usually at public events like the Irish Festival or the State Fair), and I know their sound well if not their songs, so seeing them in a venue that the kids would like is a double-benefit.

But among the know-nothing-about-the-band crew, and those of us with a hybrid agenda, there lurked a tribe, and a multi-generational one at that. The longevity of the band has allowed them to build fans in their 60s singing every word along with them and fans in their 20s wearing Killdares jerseys to the show. They had no shortage of kids dancing along to the tunes as well. They certainly attracted the following through a few key factors:

Create a Universal Product - The appeal of the Killdares' music may not attract everyone, but it certainly spans different market segments. Still, Celtic music with rocking rhythms is still a niche. But it is a niche that exists in enough segments of the population that they still have potential customers that they haven't reached yet. When designing your product, your brand, and your value proposition, it has to appeal to enough people that you may always have customers still willing to buy. A product that appeals to one person can only sustain you if that one person can support your entire life, and then you're not selling, you're a dependent.
Persist over Time - The Killdares have survived well over a decade, playing venues open to their style of music, and continuing to play true to that style, through personnel and other changes. Cast a line once while fishing, and you may catch nothing, no matter how great the bait is. Cast great bait out a few hundred times, and you will.
Enjoy Producing - The Killdares are not U2. They don't have the fanbase that the Foo Fighters have. But they do seem to enjoy playing, and it shows. When you enjoy producing whatever it is you have to offer, the quality is improved.

What other factors do you think contributes to attracting a following? Whom do you follow? Why do you follow them?

If you are interested in following The Killdares, check out their site and their music.

Early Hat Tricks and Disruption

If you watched the FIFA Women's World Cup on Sunday, you witnessed an event. Carli Lloyd of the U.S. team managed to score three goals in the first sixteen minutes for the first hat trick in Women's World Cup history, and a faster hat trick than any in the Men's World Cup as well. Augmented by an additional score from her teammate Lauren Holiday, the last goal put the U.S. up 4-0 over Japan. The momentum of that quick start gave the United States team what it needed to roll to a 5-2 victory at the end of the match and their third World Cup title.

The amazing speed and positioning of those first four scores made me think of how that would affect competition in industry. I know sports analogies don't always translate perfectly, since competition in the world is often multi-headed, and the referee keeping time does not exist, but in this instance, I thought it definitely illustrated the effect of an overwhelming early show of force in disrupting the opponents.

Being first to market can be a powerful force in establishing brand identity and loyalty, almost as much as a truly superior product can. But those that are first to market with a strong product offering double their chances to solidify a lead over the competition. Just like Japan struggled to overcome such a massive lead, so too do business competitors playing copycat or catch-up to the disruptors.

Take this analysis of Uber and Airbnb, both of which turned traditional service offerings into peer-to-peer services. The incredible rapid growth (as shown in the charts in that article and my recreation of their Airbnb's listings growth chart) came from both offering an innovative product to a welcoming market, but also from being first to do so. A competitor trying to compete in 2015 has to now persuade the half of a billion individuals who listed last year that their product is so superior that it warrants a switch. It's a much tougher sell once someone is hooked. That is why incumbents must work harder than ever to make whatever service they provide as sticky as possible to their customers to try as best they can to insulate against disruptive forces. But, when facing a truly new and innovative solution, the disruption can be too great, leaving the incumbent and other competitors on their heels and trying to catch up.

What disruptive force do you see coming next? Is it new technology (SDN, IoT, Self-Driving Cars) or a traditional service offered in a non-traditional way? Let me know in a comment or note what you think.

Soccer ball image credit: Andy03 via Pixabay

Facebook

Sure, announcing that I have a new Facebook page might be like telling you I got a cell phone in terms of cutting edge developments. That said, it does provide a new avenue to have continued discussions around business, productivity, and management away from the blog. I'm also working on auto-publishing over there so you can get blog updates when I post them.

Feel free to jump over there to Facebook, like the page, and add to the conversation.

Not on Facebook? You can also find me on Twitter and Google + or subscribe to email updates here on the site.

Happy 4th!

Well, today is the 3rd, I know, but perhaps you have the day off to celebrate in advance of tomorrow, like I do. For the Americans out there, I encourage you to take a moment and reflect on our nation and the freedoms that we share. There are so many opportunities in this country, and you have control over which ones you seek out. Despite our differences, we all manage to rally around the idea of freedom, and we can support one another. Celebrate this weekend. Be safe. Make sure you have some downtime built in to help you recharge before heading back to work. I'll be back Monday with another post. Until then...

Happy Independence Day!

Photo credit: PublicDomainPictures via Pixabay

Holiday Traffic

Monday was not a holiday. But as I drove into work (and even more pronounced in my work parking lot), it sure seemed like it. Several people have taken off for what may be the entire week. And that, in my opinion, is great for them.

My wish for them is to use the holiday to enjoy and recharge. For me, their time off allowed me to take advantage of the light traffic. As fewer people clogged the highways heading to work, the drive passed by quickly.

Alternatively, when it is popular vacation time, the paths to the beach or the lake get a little bit more congested. Cars line up, waiting to get to their pleasure destination.

Even when it isn't a holiday, these patterns hold true. Have you ever gone to work on a Saturday? How about tried to play golf or go to the gym in the middle of the day on a Tuesday? If you go against the popular trend, you might find your path easier than you think. The same is true for businesses. As more and more traditional industries are being disrupted by innovation and new ideas, those that truly create brilliance find that the gym is empty when they arrive. They can choose whatever treadmill they would like.

It is easy to beat the competition when there truly is no competition. (Tweet This)

How can you find your empty playing field? Where is your wide open highway? Find it and step on the gas.

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Photo Credit: Unsplash via Pixabay