Category Archives: Knowledge Work

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Parkinson’s Law to our Advantage

The United States Congress averted a major tax hike and expenditure cut – the so-called “fiscal cliff” – by reaching a compromise deal just before the deadline of January 1, 2013. “Just before” practically was the start of January 1.

It was a tough milestone considering there was a divided Congress and political polarization on economic issues. However, the deadline was known for ever, practically built into the system and the backdoor negotiations for the compromise deal were in full swing for many weeks. Yet, the deal was reached at the eleventh hour – only when the hard deadline was at the door. Interestingly, there have been similar eleventh hour deals on fiscal deadlines over the last few years.

parkinsonThis is an example of Parkinson’s law in real life – famously known as Work Expands to Fill the Time Available. Everyone involved kept on negotiating and trying to get their way in the deal until they could do that no more. Usually, we expand the work required to achieve some goal based on how much time we have. We adjust our focus and plans accordingly. We define the complexity and scope of the task if we can based on how much time we have.

There are many other real-life examples. Cricket matches finish in the last over. Projects end at the last minute. All news in the world magically fits into the same 16 pages of a newspaper. Meetings consume all their allotted time. We reach office just in the nick of time. Deals are reached at the last minute. Storage requirements increase to fill the storage capacity. Our expenses adjust to fit our income.  Given any deadline or constraint, we carve an execution path in such a way that we finish right at the end. Not before, not after.

There are two very interesting corollaries for Parkinson’s Law.

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Lessons from “The Avengers”

A form of mental torture not appreciated enough is kids forcing moms and dads to watch their favorite shows over and over again. Barbie, Dora, Diego, Tom & Jerry, Ben 10, Cinderella, Superman, Spiderman – you name it. In my case, its my 6 year old and The Avengers. I have even lost the view count. And I don’t even really like it.

But repetition is effective. Redundancy works. Forced slavery leaves its marks. It lets you view things differently and abstractly. Once I resigned myself to my misery, I tried to eek something out of it.

ImageAvengers is a team of superheros brought together to save the world from evil and annihilation. Each had some extraordinary skill – good enough to have a brand of their own. Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Black Widow. Avengers, name of their team, battle against the evil of Thor’s brother Loki to save the world. Here are my three lessons from my incarceration:

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The ‘Boring’ Sampras

Nothing is perfect. That is why pencils have erasers, software has Undo and Tennis now has the Player Challenge System.

ImageHowever, there are many things which are near-perfect. For example Pete Sampras as a tennis player. Sampras was considered a winning machine, stayed world number one for six consecutive years, won 14 grand slams and achieved everything that a tennis player can dream of. Heck, he even beat Roger Federer, the then world number one, in an exhibition match 5 years after he retired. He had every shot in the book, excelled on all surfaces and practically won every tournament worth winning.

But Sampras was also considered by some as ‘boring’ and ‘mechanical’. For most of his career, he played so well that his wins seemed even effortless at times. He won tournaments without much fanfare or “heart in the mouth” moments. His general expressionless demeanor while slaying his opponents with textbook shots made him look mechanistic at times. There was no fuss about his game.  The flamboyant Andre Agassi called him “more robotic than a parrot” and went on to say “I envy Pete’s dullness. I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of need for inspiration”. Even Sampras’s autobiography read mechanistic (compared to that of Agassi which actually contained these comments).

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The Creative Stretch

If you are driving to the grocery store couple of miles away from your home, your planning for the trip will be minimal compared to planning a cross-country road trip. For grocery store, a cursory look at the fuel gauge may suffice. For the road trip, if you have enough resources, you need extensive planning. Money, maintenance, weather and time all become considerations. The very notion of a destination far away forces you to think and plan differently – encouraging and even forcing to be creative.

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Our road trip 2003

Think of a startup. It is typically cash-strapped. One way forward is to grow organically. You depend on the revenues you generate. You build slowly while keeping the lights on. All investments are conservative and cautious. As you keep the liabilities to a minimum, you also limit the flexibility and freedom of action. You first ensure cash flow to sustain the monthly expenses before you think of hiring or availing that training opportunity.

The alternate path is to get external financing – say from a venture capitalist. You give up some of your equity in the company and have more stakeholders to answer to. But you also get this doze of welcome cash that lets you not worry about the next payroll or rent payment. Money is not a variable anymore at-least in the short term.  You have more space to be creative and think and plan big. With enough resources, you can plan a road trip rather than just be confined to visit to your local grocery store. You are encouraged – even forced – to be creative and think big. You can actually accomplish much bigger things.

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Real Life Mavens – Evernote Ambassadors

Remember mavens as people who are experts in a particular subject and are willing and eager to help others without any expectations of return.

Well, I being an avid user of Evernote (specifically to manage my GTD way of life) I found this fascinating example of real world mavens – Evernote Ambassadors. These are passionate users of Evernote application who have volunteered to help other users to adopt or get better at using Evernote as a tool to capture, organize and archive information.

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All of them must be loving helping others and Evernote has done a very smart move to leverage their mavens!

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Behaviors of Charisma

Thanks to the many top-notch universities opening up their learning resources online, we have access to some great stuff. One of these is Stanford’s eCorner – their entrepreneurship resource center.

ImageThere is a great talk by Olivia Fox on “Building Your Personal Charisma”. What is fascinating is that she describes charisma as a set of behaviors that can be learned and executed. It’s not intrinsic, genetic or inborn as we tend to believe. This is a pivotal lesson about management and knowledge work in general – it’s a set of behaviors that can be learned and executed. Peter Drucker’s basic premise in “The Effective Executive” – probably the best management book ever – is that an executive’s job is to be effective and effectiveness can be learned.

Olivia says that we tend to believe that charisma – and similar attributes like leadership – are innate because they are shaped by circumstances very early in our lives. But they are just learnt – or not learnt – early. They are not innate. They can be learnt at any stage and adopted. Anyone can be charismatic – at least to some extent.

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Leverage the mavens

A very dear friend of mine – let’s call him Jake – is a fanatic when it comes to cars. He is an expert on cars. His knowledge and insight is brilliant. He loves cars. He gets seduced by them. He reads about them. He researches them. He gets passionate when they come up for discussion. He probably dreams about them too. He has all episodes of Top Gear recorded twice – just in case he loses one of them. Associate a car with any activity and he will be game for it, no matter how disinterested he is with the activity itself.

Someone asked me if he also loves dogs too. Somehow, the guys who love cars tend to love dogs too. Well, I think he probably does – provided its a dog with a car.

But there is something else about Jake that differentiates him from other car fanatics. And it is certainly not dogs. Jake is not just an expert on cars. He wants to share his expertise too. He loves to help others with their car hunt. He is always ready to go on a car inspection. He will take your car to the workshop too. He can actually hold a half-hour conversation about cars with someone whom he hates otherwise. He expects nothing – absolutely nothing – in return for sharing his car expertise.

ImageJake is a car maven. Not a consultant. Not an advisor. Not the middle man for car sales. A car maven. A maven is an expert on a subject who has an extreme intrinsic desire to help others related to it. Jake just does not know about cars. He loves to help others about them as well. That is what differentiates him from other car experts.

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The New Manager and the P-A-C

It may sound nerdy but I love models and applying them wherever I can. They give me a structure to make sense of a situation and pursue a solution. I do not have to reinvent the wheel. Someone has already thought through similar situations and may have prescribed what to do. It is if I am standing clueless in a totally alien land and suddenly been handed a guide-book with a map. I still have to find the way but it is much easier. A model will make me think more, skip less and act effectively. The key is to apply the correct model and be open to tweaking it. If I am starting a new team, devising strategy for a chess game, making a decision to switch jobs, evaluating how to budget the next quarter or to manage my investments, I look for a model that I can apply. This is what the organizations do. This is definitely what the researchers do. We build on what we already know and formulated rather than starting from scratch (and repeating the mistakes). 

Hence, whenever I am reading a book, attending a training or talking to someone who knows more than me, I am always on the lookout for a new model or a tool. I try to extract from all the details, anecdotes and discussions the underlying models and tools and add them to my armory.

Image“I’m OK-You’re OK” by Thomas Harris is a great self-help book that makes people understand themselves and how they function. It helps them living a better life by immensely improving their personal and business communications. It’s a bit dense but classic read. My best takeaway from the book was the “P-A-C model” which is the basis for the overall framework that Thomas offers. P-A-C stands for Parent-Adult-Child (always start from Caps). 

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Analyzing the Past

We collect piles of data over the years. We have an archive of emails, documents, snaps, cards – everything. We do it so that we can reference or reuse our “stuff” later – for example we can refer back to an email conversation 5 years ago. We even do it because we feel good about all this ‘past’ sitting with us. However, hardly we use it to get an insight into what has happened. We do not think we can learn from this huge repository. Sometimes its the lack of tools. But believe me this can be a treasure trove.

I am fond of collecting stuff – but also to make some sense out of it later. Even if it is just for fun. I like to be able to identify any trends, patterns or behaviors from what I have and see if there is something insightful lurking there. You simply cannot trust your memory or raw brain to do that processing for you. It’s not cut for bulk processing and data mining.

Wordle is a nice tool that lets you analyze large amount of text and visually display most commonly occurring words – in a very visually appealing manner. The source text can be raw text or even sources on web that have an RSS feed. So, if I analyze my blog, here is what Wordle tells me: Continue reading →

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Communication is what the listener does

My last post got me thinking about this even more: Communication is what the listener does. That’s what Peter Drucker told us.

We treat communication as talking, speaking, writing, emailing, posting, updating. We think of notice boards, bulletin boards, lectures, monologues, no-reply mass emails, broadcasts, multicasts and delivering messages.

So what is wrong with this? Well nothing – other than that it is at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Communication is all of the above – and much more. They are all necessary but not sufficient for communication. Image

A professor of mine told us once that his job – or for that matter job of any teacher – is first to get down to the intellectual level of his audience, the students, talk to them in a language they understand and make them ask questions. It is not easy to do so because it requires first knowing the intellectual level and capacity of those being taught and second to talk to them in a language and structure that they can absorb. A teacher talking at her intellectual level far above that of students in a class room is like a radio channel transmitting at a frequency that no one can tune to.

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