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I was talking with a colleague recently about the following question:
“How do you accelerate business value?”
One of the key challenges in today’s world is accelerating business value. If you’re implementing solutions, the value doesn’t start to get realized until users actually start to use the solution.
THAT’s actually the key insight to help you accelerate business value.
It’s adoption.
When you are planning, if you want to accelerate business value, then you need to think in terms of pushing costs out, and pulling benefits in. How can you start throwing off benefits earlier, and build momentum?
With that in mind, you have three ways to accelerate business value:
- Accelerate adoption
- Re-sequence the scenarios
- Identify higher value scenarios
Before you roll out a solution, you should know the set of user scenarios that would deliver the most business benefits.
Keep in mind benefits will be in the eyes of the stakeholders.
If the sequence is a long cycle, and the adoption curve is way out there, and benefits don’t start showing up until way downstream, that’s a tough sell. And, it puts you at risk. These days, people need to see benefits showing up within the quarter, or you have a lot of explaining to do.
1. Accelerate Business Adoption
So one of the ways to accelerate business value is to accelerate adoption. There are many change frameworks, change patterns, strategies and tactics for driving change. Remember though that it all comes down to behavior change and changing behaviors. If you want to succeed in driving change in today’s world, then work on your change leadership skills.
This approach is about doing the right things, faster.
2. Re-Sequence the Scenarios
Another way to accelerate business value is to re-sequence the scenarios. If your big bang is way at the end (way, way at the end), no good. Sprinkle some of your bangs up front. In fact, a great way to design for change is to build rolling thunder. Put some of the scenarios up front that will get people excited about the change and directly experiencing the benefits. Make it real.
The approach is about putting first things first.
3. Identify Higher Value Scenarios
The third way to accelerate business value is to identify higher-value scenarios. One of the things that happens along the way, is you start to uncover potential scenarios that you may not have seen before, and these scenarios represent orders of magnitude more value. This is the space of serendipity. As you learn more about users and what they value, and stakeholders and what they value, you start to connect more dots between the scenarios you can deliver and the value that can be realized (and therefore, accelerated.)
This approach is about trading up for higher value and more impact.
If you need to really show business impact, and you want to be the cool kid that has a way of showing and flowing value no matter what the circumstances, keep these strategies and tactics in mind.
The landscape will only get tougher, so the key for you is to get smarter and put proven practices on your side.
People that know how to accelerate business value will float to the top of the stack, time and again.
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“We must become the change we want to see.” – Mahatma Gandhi
I’m a fan of continuous learning and skills development. The challenge, though, aside from figuring out which training is worth it, is to first and foremost build a foundation that makes all the rest of your training actually worth it.
The key is to first build a rapid learning foundation that helps you absorb all the other training in a more effective way.
I’ve wasted a lot of money over the years testing and trying out various programs that made great promises. But, during my trials, I’ve also found programs that really do produce outstanding results. Of course, like anything, you get what you put into it, but some personal development programs are clearly based on better principles, patterns, and practices.
That’s the gold, and we have to dig deep to find it among the sea of mediocre personal development programs.
Just last night, I was sharing with a friend, how to read 10,000 words a minute (I’m not there, yet.) I was explaining the process of training to read without subvocalizing (which slows us down, big time … after all, you don’t want the voice in your head to sound like a chip monk, but you don’t actually have to internally vocalize words for your mind to absorb the content.) Another key is developing high speed imaging skills, where you glance at information and absorb it. Again, this doesn’t come naturally to most people so you need to train for it.
I realized this personal development program alone has paid me back so many times in so many ways and saved me so much time over the years, whether it’s processing email or devouring books. I shared with my friend that I don’t have a lot of time to read books, but I’ll use a few hours to read 3-5 books a week, as well as often write up in-depth reviews. He was amazed, and commented that he’s got a large book pile that he’d like to chomp through.
That’s just one of my secrets that has helped me leap frog in terms of rapid learning and saving massive amounts of time on a daily basis, and being to use my brain for other things than getting mired in walls of text.
But there are more.
In fact, today I decided to share 3 personal development programs that give you an edge in work and life. I’ll bottom line it for you here, that the three personal development programs are 1) Personal Power, by Tony Robbins, 2) The Personal Mastery Program, by Srikumar S. Rao, and 3) Lead the Field, by Earl Nightingale.
In my write up, I shared quick stories on how each of them has helped me gain specific advantages in work and life. In fact, some almost seem like unfair advantages because of the results they produced.
If you are looking to find the difference that makes the difference, or get an extreme advantage in our ultra-competitive world, then these 3 personal development programs should really help you out.
BTW – here is a tip that I often share when it comes to competition. While you can draw inspiration from your “competition,” the best way to compete is to actually compete with yourself. Whether that means pursuit a path of relentless excellence, or simply pushing yourself to higher ground, that’s where your breakthroughs happen.
Here’s to you and your ability to be awesome at life.
One of the best books I’ve read lately is, What Keeps Leaders Up at Night, by Nicole Lipkin. I wrote my review at:
What Keeps Leaders Up at Night
The book is all about how to be at your best, when things are at their worst.
By learning a core set of leadership skills and psychology tools, you equip yourself to deal with the tough stuff, no matter what’s going on.
It covers a huge amount of space in terms of psychology theories, terms and related concepts. Here’s a sampling:
Confirmation Bias, Transactional Model of Stress, Social Exchange Theory, Norm of Reciprocity, Extrinsic Motivation, Intrinsic Motivation, Cognitive Dissonance, Group Conformity, Social Identity Theory (SIT), Social Loafing, Collective Effort Model (CEM), Polarization, Groupthink, Shadenfreude.
Lipkin also covers communication styles, stress coping skills, dealing with envy, how to build better group dynamics, how to resolve conflict, how to build better self-perception, how to build constructive core beliefs, and more.
Overall, the book is a great guide on how to keep our cool when things get hot, and Lipkin reminds us that others only see our behavior:
“To paraphrase an old adage, ‘We see ourselves as a combination of our thoughts, fears, and intentions, but others just see our behaviors.’”
Aside from learning how to be more influential, another bonus of the book is that it will help you recognize and label thinking errors and cognitive distortions, which often lead to bad behaviors.
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One of the most important skills of an effective Program Manager is to inspire a vision. If you can’t paint a story of a better future, then all bets are off.
Change is tough enough. People need a good reason. They need to see a better future in their mind’s-eye. They need to believe in the challenge and the change. The cause has to make sense. And, it needs to inspire.
Sure you can throw facts and figures at people. For some, this is cause enough or inspiring enough. For most people, it’s not. They need something that they can latch on to with their minds and their hearts. In fact, if you win the heart, the mind follows.
I’ve put together my thoughts on How To Inspire a Vision, based on what I’ve learned as a Program Manager at Microsoft. Metaphors, stories, and pictures are all powerful ways. That said, you really need to step into the future and walk various aspects to pressure test your vision, and make it real. Not just for yourself, but for your various stakeholders and for their various concerns, which will range from innovation to market position to financial impact to insider perception, etc.
If you have a proven practice for articulating your vision in a way that works, I’d love to hear about it.
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"If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late." -- James Goldsmith
I’m really focused on helping businesses large and small succeed. Times are tough. I’ve been reading a lot of books on business skills and techniques. The latest book I read is pretty hard-core.
And exactly what I wanted to find.
Here’s my review:
Business Techniques in Troubled Times: A Toolbox for Small Business Success
It puts more than 70+ business skills at your fingertips.
What’s especially interesting is that the author is a turnaround artist. He helps flailing and failing businesses get back on track. Imagine having that kinds of ability – to help business rise from the ashes phoenix style.
That’s cool stuff.
Actually, it’s very powerful stuff.
Business transformation is a great place to be in today’s world.
After all, businesses are re-inventing themselves at a pace never before possible.
Anyway, you’ll appreciate this book if you want to know …
How to analyze the marketplace and do true competitive analysis and find your differentiation
How to design a great product or service
How to price your product or service more effectively
How to create a roadmap for your product
How to prioritize your product ideas
How to create a more effective business plan
How to avoid the most common mistakes when making a business plan
How to analyze a business model
How to create a financial plan
I could go on, and on, because this book really packs a lot into it. It’s an “all-in-one” guide that really covers creating and growing a business. You’ll especially appreciate this book if you’ve struggled with the “money” part of business. It’s one thing to have a good idea. It’s another to fund that idea, and to make it economically viable. This book actually shows you how.
The thing I want to stress about this book though is that it’s written by somebody who helps owners save and grow their businesses for a living.
Within the first fifteen minutes of reading the book, I had at least three new business skills I could immediately apply.
If you want a deep dive into the book, including snippets and insight, check out my review:
Business Techniques in Troubled Times: A Toolbox for Small Business Success
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It’s time to share some hard-core skills for improving your focus and directing attention:
Proven Practices for Improving Focus
It’s a hard core set of more than 60 proven practices for improving focus.
It also includes 8 things that work against our focus, and 10 strategies that shape our ability to focus at the macro level.
When I originally created the focus guidelines, it was just a flat list. Recently, I revamped my Focus Checklist to organize it into themes. That helped a lot to make the information more consumable. It only made sense to go back and update my focus guidelines accordingly.
Here is a sampling of some of my favorite proven practices for improving focus:
- Use 20-minute intervals to focus with skill. A 20-minute chunk of time is a very useful slice of time and the productive possibilities are endless, if you can sustain your focus. The key is to know that sustained thinking takes energy, and it burns out. To address this, take breaks to recharge and renew. Five minute breaks are a great way to stay focused.
- Structure for success. One of the best ways to structure your success is to make it easy to pick up from where you left off. You can also structure your success by structuring your information – have one place to look and one place to write things down, including your goals, tasks, and actions.’ You can also structure your environment for to improve focus. For example, you can add visual cues and reminders. You can also optimize your workspace to support your focus. You can also structure your time to improve your focus. Your schedule is your most powerful tool. Use it to “design your time.” For example, you can adjust your schedule to account for your most productive time, your least productive time, the best time to interrupt you, etc.
- Focus on what you control and let the rest go. This is simple and effective timeless advice. It’s all too easy to fork your focus while you worry about things beyond your control. One way to get a handle on this is to simply get clarity on what you do control and act on that.
- Hold a clear picture in your mind of what you want to accomplish. Think of this as a simple flash card. Use it to summon your powers of concentration and direct your attention to the end in mind. Having clarity on this compelling picture will literally “pull” you toward it, and help you focus automatically while staying engaged and excited about what’s possible.
- Have a place to dump distractions. Everybody needs a virtual dumping ground. You need a place to dump distractions. You need a place to dump and store your “state.” All the ideas, reminders, distracting thoughts, etc. floating around your head, need a place to go. It needs to be simple. It needs to be accessible. One simple way is to use a sheet of paper if pen and paper is your thing. If digital systems are your way, the key is to simply have a place where you can quickly write things without having to look for it. A simple practice is to start a new list or dumping ground each day, and give it today’s date as the title. This way you can easily flip back through it.
- Shelve things you aren’t actively working on. Put it on the backburner, but make it easy to pick up from where you left off.
- Apply concentrated effort. If you spread your effort across too many things you can water down your impact. Concentrating your effort is a way to improve your results. You can concentrate your effort by consolidating the time you spend on a particular challenge. You can spend more time on it. You can increase the frequency. The most important thing is to apply enough effort in a concentrated form to get over whatever the hurdle or hump that’s in your way.
- Use mini-goals. Slice your big goals down to size. Small is the new big, and you can use size to your advantage. By slicing goals down to size, you can build a series of small wins to build momentum. You can also slice a challenge down so that you can divide and conquer it. This is especially helpful when you get stuck. You can also use mini-goals to create a sense of progress. One of my colleagues uses mini-goals to get over procrastination. Rather than have a goal of working out, they have a goal of getting to the gym and getting changed. He said he can choose whether or not to workout once he’s gotten that far, but the goal of getting to the gym and getting ready is non-optional. This little goal helps him complete more workouts than the bigger goal of working out or getting in shape itself. If your goals aren’t working for you, then chunk them down to create laser-like focus.
- Set time limits. Timeboxing and time budgets are you friend. How well can you focus for 30 seconds? What about 5 minutes? By using time limits, you can set the pace and sustain your focus, while giving yourself a break. Play with time limits both to make focus fun, and to create a rhythm of intense focus, then taking a break. This is a way to improve your engagement for short-bursts, as well as to chunk up your focus for the long haul, using little time limits along the way.
- Set quantity limits. Use quantities to help you deal with overwhelm or overload, and to help you stay focused. For example, come up with three simple ways to use these guidelines into your every day routine.
To explore more ways that you can radically improve your focus, check out Proven Practices for Improving Your Focus.
Be sure to share your favorite practices that work for you.
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It was time for an update.
Here’s my Focus Checklist v2:
Focus Checklist (v2)
Here’s what’s new …
I organized the checklist into more meaningful buckets. It’s mostly the original list, but now they are grouped into better buckets to make it easier to turn into action. After all, a great checklist is measured both by it’s value and how actionable it is.
Focus is often the different that makes the difference when it comes to succeeding at work and succeeding in life. Otherwise, we don’t see things to fruition, or we bi-furcate our potential in ways that undermines our effort.
To make it easy to get to the Focus Checklist, I added a quick menu item to the feature menu:
You can still get to the checklists from Resources, but the saying “out of sight, out of mind”, tends to be true.
By moving Checklists to the feature bar, it will remind me to continue to turn insight into action in the form of simple checklists.
I’ve long been a fan of checklists for building better habits and sharing and scaling expertise. I’ve used them for security, performance, application architecture, and for personal effectiveness in a variety of ways. There’s actually a lot of research and science behind why checklists are effective, but I like to think of them as simple reminders and automation for the mind, so we can move up the mental stack and focus on higher-level issues.
If you’re a fan of Personal Software Process (PSP) or Team Software Process (TSP), you’ll appreciate the fact that checklists are one of the best ways to quickly, efficiency, and effectively radically improve quality, for yourself or for the team. Of course, that depends on the quality of the checklist, and your focus on actually applying it, and treating it like a living document, and keeping it updated with your latest insights and actions.
If you adopt checklists as your tool of choice for continuous improvement, you’ll be in good company. It’s how McDonald’s and Disney spread best practices. It’s how the best hospitals reduce errors and raise the quality bar. And, it’s even how the Air Force keeps fighter pilots from falling prey to task saturation.
Like anything, the value of the checklists depends on the user and the usage, and if you treat it as a static thing, that’s when problems happen. Use it as a baseline and adapt it to your needs, and update it based on your latest learnings.
If you do that, and you treat your checklists as continuous learning tools, and you continue to evolve and adapt them, then your checklists will serve you well.
Ugh … it looks like this post ran into some scope creep. This was supposed to be just letting you know that I have a new version available of my focus checklist.
Luckily, my 5-minute timebox in this case, reeled me back in.
Enjoy.
PS – It’s worth noting that the practices behind this focus checklist are industrial strength. Folks with ADD and ADHD have used the practices in this checklist to retrain their brain to focus with skill. They learned to direct and redirect their attention, and to enjoy the process of focusing their mind on meaningful results.
I’m working my way through my massive book backlog, and doing reviews as a I go along. Yesterday, I wrote my review of Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes.
Today, I read and wrote my review of The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results.
It’s perfect timing. Just yesterday a friend ask me if there’s some science and proven practices that we could apply to create high-performance teams, especially when there is a lot of innovation involved and we need to be more agile in how we execute our projects.
At the same time, we need to give enough time to really explore the problem domain and build some solid foundation to base our solutions on.
The Innovative Team directly addresses this dilemma. And it does so in a pragmatic way.
It does do by framing out the 4 stages of innovation and the corresponding cognitive style preferences that people tend to have. The book then shows you how to leverage these different cognitive styles that can often create conflict during the project cycle. It includes specific proven practices for elaborating on ideas and then converging on solutions and keeping things moving forward. At the same time, the framework is all about getting the best out of every one on the team and bringing them along.
It’s a recipe for creating and leading high-performance teams that deliver high-impact, innovative solutions for big challenges.
Here is a quick look at some of the things I found especially interesting …
The Four Stages of Innovation:
- Clarify the situation
- Generate Ideas
- Develop Solutions
- Implement Plans
The 4 ForeSight Cognitive Styles
Here is a brief summary of each:
- Clarifiers – Analyze and clarify the situation
- Ideators – Blue sky or big picture thinkers, continuously generate big ideas
- Developers – Tirelessly focus on developing and perfecting the solution.
- Implementers – Implementing the plan and moving to the next project.
Common Patterns of the 4 Cognitive Styles in Action (+ The Integrator Style)
Here are some common scenarios that you might see, or see yourself in, when working on projects and going through the various stages of innovation:
- “For example, if you really like to generate ideas and also feel adept at clarifying the challenges, you are probably full of energy out of the starting gate, identifying and solving issues with ease, coming up with targeted ideas that you feel perfectly (and instantly) solve the problem at hand. But because you do not devote much energy to later stages in the process, you might find that these solutions ultimately fall short of their mark because they are not properly developed or implemented.”
- “What if you really like developing an idea and putting it into action but had no energy for clarifying the challenge or generating a bunch of potential options for it? This would mean that you enjoy the final steps of the process – seeing well-thought-out ideas come to fruition, and watching people welcome and readily adapt to the new solutions thanks to how thoroughly they were developed to fit the situation. When your ideas have failed, it’s often not the fault of how well they were developed but because they were not well targeted. They may have solved a problem or met a need, just not the right one.”
- “Some people may have nearly equal preference for three of the four stages. For example, they may like clarifying, ideating, and developing but not implementation. These people would be comfortable analyzing, coming up with ideas, and tinkering with them toward perfection, but they often can overestimate how much they can get done and you may see them step back when it’s time to put the ideas into action.”
- “There are of course many other combinations of types, each with their potential plusses and negatives. In our story, the character Maya represents of the more common combinations of preferences – the integrator. She was comfortable with all the stages in the process with no clear preference for one stage or another. Integrators are indeed a special group. If you are leading a team and are lucky enough to have an integrator in the mix, you may be able to leverage that person’s abilities strategically to move the team on to the next phase of the process or to act as a mediator between team members of different preferences.”
As you can imagine, this is a powerful books, especially if you do project work. It’s also powerful even if you just want to improve your own ability to innovate, either as a one-man band, or as part of a larger team, or leading a high-performance team.
If you want a deep dive on the book and more highlights to get a better sense of what this book is all about, check out my review:
The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results.
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Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes
One of the smartest books I’ve read lately is Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes, by Maria Konnikova. I wrote a deep review to include a bunch of my favorite highlights.
It’s hard to believe I only scratched the surface in my review, but it’s a very deep book with tons of insight and proven practices for elevating your thinking to the highest levels.
While I like the concepts and practices throughout the book, my favorite aspect was the fact that Konnikova references some great research and theories by name and illustrated how they apply in our everyday lives.
Some of the examples include:
- Correspondence Bias
- Scooter Libby effect
- Attention Blindness
- Selective Listening
Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes includes plenty of surprising insights, too. For example, we physically can see less when we’re in a bad mood. We can do better on SATs simply by changing our motivation. We can use simple meditation techniques to causes changes at the neural level, to increase creativity and imaginative capacity.
If you’re a developer, you’ll appreciate the “system” view of how memory works. Konnikova walks the mechanisms of the mind based on the latest understanding of how our brain works. You’ll also appreciate the depth and details that Konnikova provides to help you really understand how to think and operate at a higher level.
Basically, you’ll learn how to put your Sherlock Holme’s thinking cap on and apply more effective thinking practices that avoid common cognitive biases, pitfalls, and traps.
By the time you’ve made it through the book, you’ll also better understand and appreciate how our mindset and filters dramatically shape what we’re able to see, and, as a result, how we experience the world around us.
If you want a tour of the book in detail, check out my book review of Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes.
It might just be one of the smartest books you read this year.
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A while back, I started a site called Shaping Software. The purpose was to create a collection of little nuggets on lessons learned from designing, building, and shipping software.
I ended up writing more than 100 articles on software development (browse the archives for a quick view).
The didn’t maintain the site. For one reason, I wanted a timeless depot, and I wasn’t sure how timeless it could be. Another reason is the site didn’t take off the way I expected. For example, if my MSDN blog generates 1000’s of visits a day, Shaping Software was in the 10’s per day.
Looking back, I think I learned important reasons why it didn’t take off. I didn’t name titles very well. It’s not always obvious what’s inside. Also, I didn’t always elaborate on topics that needed more elaboration to better understand and appreciate the nugget of knowledge. On a very practical, SEO side, I didn’t apply any SEO knowledge and I didn’t build any backlinks. Given what I know now, I probably should have continued to groom and to grow it.
There will always be a need for learning how to shape software with skill and there is an “evergreen” body o timeless principles, patterns, and practices … that is not well known. It’s an art and science and there is always a gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. Principles, patterns, and practices at our fingertips help us reduce that gap.
Anyway, here are 30 nuggets from Shaping Software that you might find useful:
- 4+1 View Model of Software Architecture
- 5 Ways to Manage Complexity in Software Architecture
- Application Scenarios Model
- App Types, Verticals, and Scenarios
- Best Practices at Microsoft patterns & practices
- Constructive Criticism of the Waterfall Model
- Engineering Practices Frame
- Evolutionary, Incremental, and High-Risk
- How To Bring Experienced Engineers on Board
- How To Cure Optimitis
- Insourcing
- Key Project Practices
- Knowledge Areas, Capability Levels, and Ladder Levels
- Macro and Micro Software Processes
- Make a List of the Jobs to Be Done
- Microsoft patterns & practices Solution Engineering
- Mission Impossible
- MSF Agile at a Glance
- Organizational Structures to Support Product Lines
- Periodic Design Refactoring (How To Avoid Big Design Up Front)
- Personas at Microsoft patterns & practices
- Requirements Types
- Scenario and Features Frame
- Shifts of Power (Ward Cunningham's way of describing what drives the requirements)
- Software Product Lines
- Source Code Reuse
- Waterfall in the Large and in the Small
- What is Systems Architecture
- Why Do We Need Software Architects
- You Can’t Evaluate Architecture in a Vacuum
Probably, the most important article to read (and re-read) is:
Lessons Learned in Microsoft patterns & practices
I find myself still using and referring to many of the ideas on a regular basis, whether it’s explaining to somebody why you can’t evaluate an architecture in a vacuum, or what shifts of power mean to software, or how to avoid Big Design Up Front, or what the different types of requirements are, etc.
I have to wonder whether it’s worth reinvesting in it, as a true repository of timeless insight and action for the art and science of building software.
One of the challenges my General Manager put on my plate, was to tell a simple story, as simply as possible, about the essence of doing Enterprise Strategy.
Here is what I ended up with:
The way I told the story is …
- We use scenarios to scope meaningful chunks of change (vs. boil the ocean)
- Big scenarios are actually chunks of organizational change.
- We drive a program of change using a repeatable formula: Current State, the desired Future State, the Gaps, the ROI, and the Roadmap for Business Capabilities, People Capabilities, and Technology Capabilities.
- The value is in the change, and this connects business and IT in a significant and meaningful way.
He loved it.
I elaborated.
I shared a simple Workstream Frame to show how when we drive Enterprise Strategy, we can use the following canvas as our backdrop:
It’s a simple map but it helps chunk up and think about how you are making the changes:
- Program Governance – This is the space of operational excellence and governance.
- Business Value – This is where the business-led conversations and business-led changes flow.
- IT People/Process – From a pragmatic perspective, this is where IT-led conversations, and changes to IT people and process happen.
- Technology – This is where the fundamental technology changes happen – the IT platform for the business. Again, dominantly IT-led conversations.
To fully appreciate the simplicity above, below is what I first walked my General Manager through, and he said, while he could appreciate the essence of it, it was too complex:
At the end of the day, I think he was right, and I was glad that he pushed me to find a simpler story and to be able to tell it quickly at the whiteboard.
When people see that it’s all about driving a chunk of organizational change, and that it’s by changing the business, people, and technology capabilities, light-bulbs go off, and people get excited by how they can reshape the future of their Enterprise story, through Enterprise Strategy.
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“Xbox One is designed to deliver a whole new generation of blockbuster games, television and entertainment in a powerful, all-in-one device” -- Don Mattrick, president, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft
Key Features of Xbox One
- Integrates the cloud, voice control and gesture technology.
- All-in-one entertainment solution: Live TV + video-on-demand + web chat.
- Measure your heartbeat
- Recognize your voice
- Voice activation, motion, and facial recognition control the Xbox One
- A new set of universal gestures to control your TV
- Improved Kinect sensor will track wrist and shoulder rotations
- TV on Xbox One. “Navigate and watch live TV from your cable, telco or satellite set-top box through your Xbox One. Microsoft is committed to bringing live TV through various solutions to all the markets where Xbox One will be available.”
- Snap Mode. Offers a second screen and allows users to run two activities – such as watching TV and browsing the internet, or using Skype – simultaneously.
- Home. “Turn on your entertainment system with two powerful words, “Xbox On,” and a custom-tailored Home dashboard welcomes you with your favorite games, TV and entertainment.”
- Skype for Xbox One. “Specially designed for Xbox One, talk with friends on your TV in stunning HD, or for the first time ever, hold group Skype calls on your TV.”
- Trending. “Stay on top of what is hot on TV by discovering the entertainment that is popular among your friends, and see what is trending within the Xbox community.”
- OneGuide “Find your favorite entertainment easily, searching by network or name, all with the sound of your voice and presented in a tailored program guide.”
- Content maker + platform provider
- Main camera can record 1080P RGB video at 30 frames per second.
- Powered by 300,000 servers (more than the entire world's computing power in 1999)
- 8 gigs of RAM, 8-core CPU and GPU SoC, and a substantial 500GB HDD
- A Blu-ray drive as well as USB 3.0 and integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi.
Microsoft Summary of New Generation of Xbox Live
- Smart Match. “A new Smart Match matchmaking system virtually eliminates waiting in lobbies by estimating wait times and finding people you want to play with while you are enjoying other activities — reputation fundamentally matters and helps find best matches.”
- Game DVR. “A dedicated Game DVR captures and accesses your magic moments, all saved to the cloud. Along with sharing tools, you will have the most amazing bragging rights with Xbox Live.”
- Living Games. “Dynamic, living worlds evolve and improve the more you play, and advanced artificial intelligence can learn to play like you, so friends can play against your shadow.”
- Expanded achievements. “A new and expanded achievements system captures video of your epic moments, continues to grow a game’s achievements over time and rewards you in new ways, and your Gamerscore carries over from Xbox 360.”
- Xbox SmartGlass.“Xbox SmartGlass is natively part of the Xbox One platform, built in from the beginning with the ability to quickly render content directly onto your device, and now more devices can connect at one time for multiplayer and shared entertainment.”
Microsoft Summary of Xbox One Look and Feel
- “New Xbox One hardware is sleek and modern and complements any décor. The console is shaped in the 16:9 aspect ratio and employs a horizontal orientation optimized for its high-speed Blu-ray™ disc player. It is molded in a deep and rich liquid black color and includes a distinctive beveled edge.”
- “The completely redesigned, revolutionary 1080p Kinect is more precise, more responsive and more intuitive.”
- “Xbox controller is refreshed with more than 40 technical and design innovations. Updated directional pad, thumb stick and ergonomic fit immerse all gamers in ways that are uniquely Xbox, and precision and control have been dramatically increased with all new vibrating impulse triggers. The Xbox One Wireless Controller is designed to work in concert with the new Kinect, allowing the two to be paired automatically to create seamless player syncing.”
Interesting Deals for Xbox One
- NFL Deal - Integrate coverage of the sport with game-like elements such as a Fantasy Football app, allowing viewers to manager their own fantasy sides while watching the real thing in action.
- Stephen Spielberg Deal - Stephen Spielberg will be producing a TV series based on the best-selling Halo game, exclusively available to Xbox One.
- EA Games - Four new titles exclusive to Xbox: FIFA 14, NBA Live, UFC and Madden.
Analysts on Xbox One
- Gartner: "The Xbox One really looks to advance the state of video game technology and entertainment in a way that we haven't seen before," said Brian Blau, a director of Gartner Research."
- Greenwich Consulting: "The Xbox One is set to mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment." -- Fred Huet, a managing partner at Greenwich Consulting
Key Links for Xbox One
- Guardian - Xbox One: Microsoft Reveals New Console that Changes Everything
- Microsoft - Microsoft unveils Xbox One: the ultimate all-in-one home entertainment system
- The Telegraph - Xbox One Launch: as it happened
- Redmond Pie - Xbox One: Features, Specs, Release Date -- Everything You Need to Know in One Place
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I mentor several folks on how to make money online, either because they are trying to supplement their income, or take their game to the next level, or simply trying to reduce the worry around losing their job.
An interesting pattern is that many of the folks that I know that make a second (3rd, 4th, 5th) income online, show up strong in many ways. Their second source of income is always a “passion business.” They find a way to monetize what they love in a way that’s sustainable and creates a ton of value for their tribe of raving fans.
They end up spending more time in their art, so they recharge and renew, and show up fresh at work because they found a way to spend more time doing what they love (it’s an interesting question when you ask the question, “What do you want to spend more time doing?”, and then actually do it 
One of the most important success patterns I see is that people do what they would do for free, but pay attention to what people would pay them for. This does two things:
- It forces them to figure out what they really do love and can do day in and day out (where can they be strong, all day long)
- It forces them to be smarter at business (otherwise, it’s not sustainable and it slowly dies)
I see people succeed at making money online by doing lots of experimentation and continuous learning. The ones that do the best, learn from success AND failures. The ones that create truly outstanding success, learn the patterns of failure to avoid, and the patterns of success to do more of.
Lucky for me, I got to see several people right around me making $10,000, $20,000, etc. a month online, and they happily shared with me what they were doing, including what was working and what was not. The variety was pretty amazing, until I started to see the patterns. As I started to see the patterns, what surprised me the most is how so many people fail to make money online because “they try to make money online” – it’s like chasing happiness, and having it always evade your grasp.
How ironic.
There are so many ways NOT to make money online. In fact, they are worth enumerating because people still try them and get incredibly frustrated and give up.
Here are 50 Ways How NOT To Make Money Online.
It’s serious stuff.
I took a pattern-based approach, so that it’s easy to see the principle behind each recipe for failure.
You can actually apply many of the insights whether it’s an online or offline business, and whether you are a one-man band, or a business partnership, or working in a corporation.
It puts a distillation of many business basics, great business lessons, and business skills at your fingertips.
I’m hoping that more people can be entrepreneurs and create their financial freedom by doing more of what they love, in a business-smart way.
Also, I’m hoping this helps more people get their head around the idea that we’re in a new digital economy and the ways to make a living are changing under our feet.
The future is here and it belongs to those that create it and shape it.
Own your destiny.
Daniel Cook has a great PDF on the 8 Laws of Productivity. The subtitle is “8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat.”
It’s the synthesis of Dan’s learnings and research over the years on how to create more productive teams.
Right up front, Dan defines productivity as work accomplished, minus work required to fix defects, and minus work required to fix bad design decisions. He adds that it’s possible for productivity to be negative when workers end up doing more harm than good. Dan says, “People commonly measure ‘what was accomplished’, but often this is a poor measure of productivity. It is possible to check in code and design decisions that must be later fixed or removed at great cost. If you only measure work accomplished, you could generate great ‘productivity’ numbers but never ship a working product. The real measure of productivity is valued working code in customer hands.”
Here are the 8 Laws of Productivity according to Cook:
- Law #1 - Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity
- Law #2 - There is Always a Cost to Crunch
- Law #3 -- Repeat experiments on knowledge workers, not factory workers
- Law #4 -- Teams on overtime feel like they are doing more, but actually accomplish less
- Law #5 -- Productivity is maximized in small teams of 4-8 people
- Law #6 -- Seat People on the Same Team Together in a Closed Team Room
- Law #7 -- Cross-Functional Teams outperform siloed teams
- Law #8 -- Scheduling at 80% produces better products
Law #1 - Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity
What happens if you try to improve productivity by working longer, either through more hours in a week, or more hours in a day?
Cook summarizes the results:
<40 hours and people aren't working enough
> 60 hour work week gives a small productivity boost
The boost lasts 3 to 4 weeks and then turns negative
Cook tells us that according to Ford, and 12 years of experimentation, 40 hours was the most effective.
Interestingly, an early XP practice was 40 Hour Week, before it became Sustainable Pace. The main idea is that "productivity does not increase with hours worked."
A key point here is that "After a certain tipping point, teams tend to be more destructive than productive." (see InfoQ on Sustainable Pace)
I've experience the benefits of a 40 hour work week and wrote about it in 40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft.
An interesting data point is that 6 of the top 10 competitive economies prohibit employees from working over 48 hours/week. (See MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week.)
Law #2 - There is Always a Cost to Crunch
What happens if we work harder in bursts? Can we take advantage of the burst that comes from working overtime? What happens if we crunch for a week and then 'only' 40 hours for another week? Are there other patterns of scheduling work that might be more efficient?
Cook summarizes the results:
Anything over 40 hours results in a recovery period, no matter how you split it up.35 to 40 hour weeks can be divided in a variety of ways, such as four 10-hour days on and three days off.
These 'compressed work weeks' can reduce absenteeism and, in some cases, increase productivity 10 to 70%
Law #3 -- Repeat experiments on knowledge workers, not factory workers
Do the same rules apply to creativity and problem-solving as manual labor?
Cook summarizes the results:
Studies show that creativity and problem solving decreases faster with fatigue than manual labor.
Grinding out problems by working longer on average result in inferior solutions.
Lack of sleep is particularly damaging.
Law #4 -- Teams on overtime feel like they are doing more, but actually accomplish less
If many workers self-report that they are the exception to the rule and can work longer with no ill effects, and overtime workers report they are getting more done, is this true?
Cook summarizes the results of measurements where Team A works overtime and Team B does not:
Team A feels like they are doing much more than Team B.
Yet, Team B produces the better product.
Law #5 -- Productivity is maximized in small teams of 4-8 people
Does productivity change for various team sizes and which size team produces the best product?
Cook summarizes the results:
Productivity for small groups is shown to be 30-50% higher than groups over 10
Cost of communication increases dramatically for groups larger than 10
Smaller groups don't have enough breadth to solve a wide array of problems well
Interestingly, the Navy Seal create super teams with teams of 4.
Law #6 -- Seat People on the Same Team Together in a Closed Team Room
What is the most productive physical work environment? Are cubes, individual offices or team rooms most effective? Every individual has an opinion, but what is best for the team?
Cook summarizes the results:
Studies show 100% increase in productivity
Being nearby means faster communication and problem-solving
Few external interruptions to the team (not the individual) means higher productivity
Law #7 -- Cross-Functional Teams outperform siloed teams
How should workers of different disciplines be organized? Should teams be composed of a single discipline? For example, all programmers or all artists? Or should teams be mixed?
Cook summarizes the results:
Cross-functional teams produced more effective solutions in the same time
Cross-functional teams have more likelihood of generating breakthrough solutions
There is some negotiation of norms of front, but this is a short-term loss
Law #8 -- Scheduling at 80% produces better products
What percentage of team capacity should be officially scheduled? 110% to promote people to 'stretch'? 100% because that's what they can do? 80% because slacking is good?
Cook summarizes the results:
Scheduling people at 100% doesn't give space to think of creative solutions
Not lost time: Passionate workers keep thinking
The 20% goes into new idea generation and process improvements
Producing 20 great features is usually far more profitable than producing 100 competent features
Dan included some of his research sources:
Crunch in the Game Industry
IGDA - Articles - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons - http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php
InfoQ - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work, by Ben Hughes - http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/crunch-mode
Best Team Size
Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number? - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?articleid=1501
Team Performance and Team Size - http://www.teambuildingportal.com/articles/systems-approaches/teamperformance-teamsize.php
Sickness and Overtime Correlation
Relationship between self-reported low productivity and overtime working - http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15461524
Prioritization
First Things First (book) - http:///en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things_First_(book)
4 Day Work Week
Alternative Work Schedules and Work–Family Balance: A Research Note - http://rop.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/28/2/166
Team Spaces
"Rapid Software Development Through Team Collocation" IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 28, No. 7, July 2002
Additional Resources
INFOQ: Does Sustainable Pace Mean a 40 Hour Work Week?
MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week (Info Graphic)
40 Hour Week (C2 Wiki)
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Any activity can be turned into a game, if it meets the right criteria. Wise words from Dan Cook:
“If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.”
Gamification is hot. I called it out in my Trends for 2013 roundup. When all things are equal, fun is a differentiating factor.
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30 Days of Getting Results is a hard-core time management course.
It’s a 30 Day Sprint with a lesson each day, but you can go at your own pace. For example, I every now and then I scan through it in about 20 minutes to remind myself of the best time management skills to work on.
Some of you have let me know that you can’t get to the site. I’m not sure why.
Regardless, I have a free PDF version of 30 Days of Getting Results available.
It’s powerful stuff. If you want to master time management, productivity, and work-life balance, this short-course will help you do that.
Time management and extreme productivity are a few of the things that I regularly mentor individuals, teams, and leaders on.
It’s 129 pages, and very easy to flip through.
Each lessons includes an exercise to make it real and drive it home.
If you download and go through it, please rate it on Good Reads.
Enjoy.
To do great things, it helps to study people that do great things and show us better ways to do things. It helps us build our reference library of what’s possible and it helps inspire us to new levels of success.
Most importantly, it expands our capabilities.
Chalene Johnson is a powerhouse when it comes to personal development. She continuously pushes herself, while expanding and exploring what’s possible physically, mentally. and emotionally. She’s a unique blend of entrepreneur, physical fitness expert, choreographer, author, life changer, and motivational speaker … and we can learn a lot from her approach.
I wrote up 27 lessons from Chalene Johson, but my favorite lesson is actually Lesson #7 – Success isn’t magic, it’s a method:
Chalene says, “It’s NOT luck — it’s KNOW HOW. There is a formula for everything.” You have to study the people that have the results that you want. Learn from their formula. Study what made them successful. If you can find the proven practices and the methods that work, you’ll speed up your success, and you’ll avoid the dead-ends. Finding a formula helps you establish and practices routines that will help you get better and better over time.
Personally, I’ve found this to be true time and time again. Whenever I got stuck, it was my strategy or approach. I just didn’t know the right formula or who to model from. There’s always a recipe. One of the most important things I learned on the Microsoft patterns & practices team is that if you look to the right sources, you’ll find the proven practices or the patterns that really work, even if it’s not well-known (in fact, part of our job on the Microsoft patterns & practices team was really to share and scale this knowledge more broadly.)
I’ve shared my personal rapid results formula before in The Way of Success, and it helps elaborate on how to model success in a more effective way. As Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. We just need to be good students of possibility to find them and apply them.
Even if you’re not into working out, I think you'll enjoy lessons from Chalene Johnson on personal development, productivity, motivation, and more.
Everything.
This morning I started and finished, The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power, by Bill Schley.
It’s a powerful book that brings us the essence and lessons of entrepreneurship, including what we learn from a band of Navy SEALs, Israeli investors, a branding expert, and a chairman of a multibillion-dollar tech company.
But my favorite nugget is about what we learn from customers.
Customers teach us how to be better.
They are our ultimate business mentor, if we listen and learn.
Schley writes:
“Customers might as well be air and water; your business has no life without them. Success is something you must learn from them because only they can teach it to you, through what they need, where their pain and pleasure are, how they want to be sold to, what kind of relationships they want to have with a company in your category, and so forth. Customers hold the answers to all your most important questions about your product, service, and brand. The Wonderful Paradox is that the secret of getting what you want is to think most about what they want.”
I’ve always been a fan of customer-connected development to build better software and ship better products. Empathy for customers seems to be the difference that makes the difference when it comes to envisioning and creating great products and services. (It works for education, too, when you put the learner-first, great things happen.)
If you just have a long list of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, then it won’t help you focus on immediate actions. The key is to organize your tasks in Microsoft Outlook by priorities.
The challenge is that the first thing you’ll most likely want to do is sort by a custom priority.
While it’s not very complicated, it can be incredibly frustrating if you just want a simple task list that sorts by your custom priorities, and you don’t know the precise steps to make that happen.
Let’s do it.
If you do want to use Microsoft Outlook for tasks, here’s the trick to making it more useful:
- Add Start Date (it’s often more important to know when to start something, than to know when it’s due – this helps you bubble up critical actions better)
- Add a custom priority field. In the example below, I created a “Pri” field and used P0, P1, and P2 for the priorities. Here’s the trick:
- Don’t use the “Custom Priority” field that’s readily available in “Field Chooser”. (You won’t be able to edit the text and you’ll get frustrated.)
- Instead, add a custom field by clicking “New…” on the “Field Chooser” – see below.
- Group by your custom field. After you add your custom field for priority, to group by it, you need to use the “Group By” option (it won’t be listed under “Arrange By”)
- Note -- You need to switch “Select Available Fields” from the default to “User Defined Fields in Folder” (otherwise, you won’t see your custom priority field)
Here it is visually …
This is just a simple set of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, nothing fancy, so we keep our focus on the key thing – a list of tasks organized by priorities with a start date.
When you right-click on the fields, you can click the “Field Chooser”, and then click “New …” to create a “New Column.”
To group your tasks by your new custom priority field, you can again, right-click the fields at the top of the Tasks, but this time, click “View Settings.” From there, click “Group By …” and then change “Select available fields from” to be set to “User-defined fields in folder.” This will then let you set the “Group items by” option to your new custom priority field (“Pri” in my example above.)
Remember, the key to effective task management isn’t managing your tasks. It’s actually doing the most important tasks that achieve your goals, at the right time, in an efficient and effective way.
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I was helping a mentee take a new view on their business, so they could transform their business to compete in a new arena. Here are the 7 ways I outlined for them to get a better view on their business to shape significant change:
- What are the key deliverables that the company cares about? (Who are the stakeholders and why do they care?)
- How does the money flow? (Who funds and why? If they gave you more money, what more would you do? If you got less money, what would be cut? This gives you a fast business sense)
- What is the cadence of your deliverables? (Do you ship 3 big thingies or 30 thingies per year? .. what would a “fast” cadence look like? More importantly, what would people value? For example, can you focus on 3 big wins each quarter that have high impact?)
- What’s the roadmap look like? (Can you put it on a one-slider to show the big impact in a way others get?)
- What are the critical few KPIs that tell you whether you are keeping up, falling behind, or changing the game?
- What is your unique set of capabilities of your product/service?
- What is the unique set of capabilities of your people?
If you can answer those without a lot of work – congrats!
The above lens gives you quick insight and a critical view into the customer, the value you provide, the cost, and the capabilities you can use to drive meaningful change and transformation.
To put that into context and apply it, when business leaders look to shape a business, they tend to look at the capabilities. They want to know what’s unique and what’s redundant. If you can’t differentiate at your capabilities, then you have a problem articulating your unique value.
Capabilities help give you a simple language for talking about value and unique strengths. They are also a business tool for consolidating and improving efficiencies by maturing or outsourcing capabilities.
Use them wisely.