Rick Ross on Business, Software and Life

Child's Play: A Lesson in Team Communication

The Game

Whether in grade school or at summer camp, most of us played a game that offers insight into team communication. While its name, the Telephone Game may not be familiar, how it's played should quickly refresh dusty memories.

To start, participants form a line and the facilitator whispers a story to the first person. That person is then asked to whisper the story to the next person. The process is repeated until the story reaches the line's opposite end.

At the point, the first person and last person in line are asked to repeat what they've heard. What follows is predictable. Usually the room breaks out in laughter as participants enjoy with disbelief how twisted the details have become.

For project teams, one of the game's lessons is obvious. Keep communication paths as short as possible.

The Real World

Of course, the game is simplistic and doesn't fully reflect other real world challenges. Project communication paths are relatively short, but damaging distortions are introduced in other ways.

Interesting Posts #2

Making Sense of Data Overload

No news here - the internet and social media are providing us with overwhelming amounts of potentially useful information. Beyond simplistic tools, like trending topics and tag clouds, how can we mine valuable business information from the morass?

A picture is worth a thousand words and carefully constructed graphical representations of data are even better. Unfortunately, old standbys like pie charts and bar graphs struggle under the weight of increasing complexity.

Using data collected from Twitter, the author of the first post provides four examples of more sophisticated emerging representations of what are becoming known as "business intelligence graphics".

Four Ways of Looking at Twitter

An Unstoppable Dynamic Duo

In a business context, software is developed to enhance results. The typical thinking is that while employees use software, software has its job and people have theirs.

Instead of a division of labor, developers need to consider another option: human /computer collaboration. The combination works extraordinarily well, and is shockingly underutilized. Yes, you can read this as: major opportunity for competitive advantage.

The following article provides a clear example of this approach. Consider how it can be applied to your business.

Did Garry Kasparov Stumble Into a New Business Process Model?

Too Much Control?

As companies encounter problems, they add controls to prevent recurrence. What could be wrong with that? The short list appears below.

Controls:

1. may be ineffective and never serve the purpose for which they were intended
2. may have unintended consequences
3. become outdated over time
4. may accumulate to the point where they hamper effectiveness

What can you do to prevent these problems? The author of the final article uses airport security to highlight problems with controls and offers a suggestion to keep them in check.

What Shoe Bombers Tell Us About Office Bureaucracy

Interesting Business Posts #1

This collection of posts is comprised of three excellent reads from the Harvard Business Review blogs.

Motivation

The first post takes note of an interesting phenomenon regarding motivation. The author underscores the results of an experiment with a related personal experience.

Who's more motivated? Someone paid at their regular rate, someone asked to work at a discounted rate or someone asked to help as "a favor".

While the post will be of interest to all leaders, this one's essential for nonprofit execs. For them it contains a gem of a practical tip. 

A Story About Motivation

Metrics

Metrics must be used with caution. Without careful consideration and design they can introduce unintended bias.

The author of the next article puts it this way:

"As humans, we're hard-wired to infer causality from correlation: when the numbers go up, we tend to take credit. But when the numbers go down, we tend to blame someone or something else."

The article concludes by describing three valuable ways to avoid common mistakes when formulating metrics.

Entrepreneurs: Beware of Vanity Metrics

Consumer Behavior

This collection's final post describes how product labeling affects consumer behavior. How did customers react when Starbucks began publishing calorie information about its offerings? Read the surprising results in the article linked below. Note that it's labeled!

Calorie Labeling at Starbucks (727 Words, 6 Minutes to Read)

The Hidden Costs of Turnover

Hard to measure business costs are often treated as if they don't exist. Consider employee turnover. Does your company underestimate its cost?

Of course, some turnover is unavoidable and even desirable. When it becomes obvious that an employee is a poor fit, it's a net positive when they leave.

However, many valuable employees leave for completely preventable reasons. This unnecessary and undesirable turnover costs the company substantial, but usually unacknowledged dollars. Since inexpensive retention measures can dramatically mitigate the problem, what steps is your company taking to limit unwanted departures and retain experienced staff?

Should you be doing more? As you consider your answer, review the partial list of turnover related expenses below. Give special attention to those listed under the "Hard to Measure" (the hidden costs of turnover) section and add additional costs that apply to your own situation. 

Measurable

• Background checks, drug testing and other screening
 
• Recruiting fees or costs to advertise the open position
 
• Staff time will be spent reviewing applications and conducting interviews
 
• Lunches or dinners that are part of the process
 
• The cost of formally training the replacement
   
• Setup of the new employees computer, voice mail, ID badge and network access

Hard to Measure

• While the already mentioned cost of the formal training is clear, it's hard to assess how much staff time will be taken up helping the new employee learn "the ropes".
 
• How long will it take the new employee to deliver value at the level of the previous employee and how much money will be lost in the process?

Leading Distributed Teams

Point

Projects that utilize distributed teams pose unique challenges. Active leadership and practices designed to address these challenges are required for success.

What is a Distributed Team?

For the purposes of this article, a Distributed Team is any team where at least one member regularly works from a location that prohibits regular face to face contact with other team members.

The dynamics to which this article refers become more pronounced in direct proportion to the number of remotely based members. They apply to teams brought together for a single project and to a lesser extent to teams with a limited common purpose, for example a company with offices in multiple locations.  

Advantages

Distributed teams have an obvious advantage over those that are locally based. Members can be drawn from a much larger talent pool resulting in higher team competency.

Web-based collaboration tools help facilitate meetings that can surpass the effectiveness of those that are physically attended. Benefits include the ability to record and playback entire meetings for later review as well as digital tools that offer benefits like the ability to save "whiteboards", ad-hoc team survey results and presentations.

Email - When the Line Goes Dead

In his Harvard Business Review blog post, "How to Handle Silence, the Worst Kind of Feedback", Peter Bregman tackles the common, yet difficult to deal with, problem of communications that go silent.

He suggests that after two unanswered communications, you "reach out one more time" with the message, "I don't mean to hound you — but I figured I'd reach out one more time. Please let me know if you are able to discuss this further. If I don't hear from you, I'll assume you're not interested."

While the solution he proposes is reasonable, there's a special case that requires further consideration - email. That's because we often can't be reasonably sure that the intended recipient is receiving our emails, even if they have in the past.

Here are a few of the possibilities:

• Even some of the most organized people have allowed their inbox to grow out of control. They may regularly miss messages they consider important.
• Procrastination - your emails have been placed in an "answer later" folder.
• Your address book contains an outdated or infrequently checked address.
• After a recent update, your SPAM filter no longer considers responses from your recipient "worthy" and discards them.

Who knows how many avoidable misunderstandings have resulted from emails not getting through or inadvertently not getting read.

The Solution

Never let a conversation end on an unanswered email. If you're about to "reach out one more time" and the previous attempts at communication were via email, call the person. Let them know that you're calling because you're not sure if they've received your emails.

I've appreciated this additional courtesy on those rare occasions where I've unintentionally failed to respond.

The Genius of Simplicity

"Text “Haiti” to 90999 to give a $10 donation". Genius! Credit the Red Cross with leveraging the power of simplicity and convenience. Their strategy is resulting in a highly effective campaign to help those devastated by the recent earthquake in Haiti. 

On the surface, the campaign might seem unremarkable. It's when you consider the roads not taken that the effort becomes extraordinary. They managed to hold-off complexity and over-analysis.

In most organizations, response to a major crisis would require a meeting of top executives. These are usually people who have demonstrated exceptional analytical and critical thinking skills to climb the career ladder. Each desires to add their mark to the final result.  

While in this case the decision certainly made pre-crisis, imagine the discussion: Why $10? Let's make it $25. Shouldn't we offer different size donations? Why only one? What if donors don't want the charge on their phone bill? What if they want to pay by check or credit card? Many people don't use text messages! We're going to alienate important demographic groups!    

Planning, Prognosticating or Procrastinating?

The word "plan" connotes a degree of certainty. One expects a thoughtfully constructed timeline consisting of activities and contingencies. Attention to a few common issues can help avoid compromising the plan's integrity or unnecessarily delaying the project.

Issues

Wanting to eliminate the unexpected, investors and stakeholders often demand that managers "get it right". They insist on knowing the precise details of how a project will play out.  

Unfortunately, their "need to know" doesn't alter reality. Uncertainty is part of life and always a part of projects. Efforts to mitigate it are essential and a key goal of planning. However, attempts to banish uncertainty completely by sweeping it under the rug just setup a vengeful return at an inconvenient later date. 

One Million for Me and None for You

How vulnerable are your leadership skills to self-deception?

Imagine you're the President of a thriving technology company. You work to attract the best and brightest students for summer internships. Your goal is to evaluate their potential for permanent positions.

One day one of these interns knocks on your door with an idea. You decide to implement it and the idea ultimately adds a million dollars to your company's bottom line. This isn't a hypothetical example, but is instead a true story.

How should you reward this employee?

First, consider the legal angle. You agreed to compensate the intern for their work. You owe them nothing more or nothing less than the agreed upon amount, regardless of their performance. As the business owner, you're burdened with the risk and are fully entitled to the rewards. From this standpoint, the million dollars is all yours.

So what happened in the real life version of this story? Believing that performance bonuses are problematic, the President was against providing a monetary reward. Instead he offered the student shares of company stock contingent upon him accepting a permanent position at graduation.

Business Game Changers #2 - 5 Surprising Ways to Learn More

Point

The internet provides a daily deluge of information and ideas. Failure to utilize them means risking your business or professional edge. A carefully crafted learning strategy is needed to derive maximum benefit.

Action

Use a blog reader

The best blogs provide the latest information in concise high value packages. Blog readers save selected sources for ultra-efficient review and provide significant advantages over email subscriptions.

For those that don't currently use a one, the advantages may not be obvious. They become more apparent in direct proportion to the number of sources you follow. Blog readers help you visually scan only posts that have been written since the reader's last use. The task of separating posts into "read" and "don't read" becomes fast and easy.

Make a written list of sources to ignore

It's impossible to review everything that becomes available each day. Being highly selective about the sources you review and, even more importantly, those that you don't is a key to success.

Do you really need to read about the latest violent crime or the latest celebrity scandal? Add these items or others that don't support your educational goals to a written "don't read or watch" list. At a minimum, commit to limiting your exposure to them to a few minutes a day or just ignore them completely.

Don't spend much time making the list. Instead, consider it a "work in progress" and update it as needed.