Expertise Does Not Come Easily…

I had occasion to watch my son learn a new move on his skateboard last year. I think he called it a pop-shove-it. The thing that struck me was how hard he kept trying, for what seemed like a hours per day. It took him weeks to be able to land it reliably.

If only he spent that kind of time and effort on algebra, I thought.

In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz describes Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything. In it, he reaffirms the widely-accepted viewpoint that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert at practically anything. With expert guidance, a passion for what you are doing, a ritualized practice schedule, taking regular breaks, and placing the hardest efforts first, the 10,000 hour rule is your ticket to mastery, whether in mathematics, music, sports, or , um skateboarding.

Is this really news? As far back as 1859 Samuel Smiles wrote in Self-Help. "Strenuous individual application is the price paid for distinction; excellence of any sort is placed beyond the reach of indolence." No argument there.

It is harder to believe that, if you are apply the six crucial steps to excellence, that you guaranteed success. I think it will guarantee that you are an expert, but expertise and success is not the same thing.

Practice won’t get you a face like Elizabeth Taylor, or a vision like Pablo Picasso. Some things will remain inborn.

Here are the Six Keys according to Schwartz:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

How do you ensure excellence?

-Dave

Externalities and Today’s Transparent Leadership

There is an interesting article in the April 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

“Leadership in the Age of Transparency” discusses the issue of what economists call “externalities” and their new influence on leadership.

An externality is any side effect of a businesses’ service or product that is not measured within the company’s bottom line. The authors argue that today’s leadership should take into account the impacts of externalities proactively, and not wait for the storm clouds to gather.

For example, Steve Jobs supposedly once challenged his engineers because the new Mac they were developing has a boot up cycle that took a second or two longer than previous models. Seem inconsequential? Jobs pointed out that if they sold the planned one million new Macs, and each user experienced a one second delay each day, by the years’ end, 4,000 man-days would have been wasted waiting for their Macs to boot.

This is one way to consider externalities—factors that your customer may experience that , while seeming to be inconsequential to you, may eventually accumulate to the point of business stress—and will be occuring in the blind spot of the business leader.

Some other examples include pollution—if not measured, smokestack particulates can accumulate downwind causing painful remediation and court costs. A less industrial example: if you’re menu-driven voice mail system keeps users waiting for thirty full seconds, versus your competitor’s ten. In both cases, the organization may not be measuring an externally experienced factor that will have a large and potentially negative impact.

The authors argue that today’s transparent leadership demands that we keep a vigilant eye toward externalities, and identify those that we should internalize.

What about you? Are there externalities in your business that your should be measuring?

-Dave

"Owning" Your Business

It may (or may not) be hard to believe, but the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, the Chop-o-matic, the Showtime Rotisserie, and the Inside-The-Shell Egg Scrambler were all brought to us by the same man.

Ron Popeil, who started Ronco in the 1960’s, is famous for his cheesy televised pitches and his even cheesier gadgets. What some people may not know is that Popeil is also the inventor or the lead perfector of all these gadgets. One reason that he is able to be such a passionate salesperson is his absolute and unshakable belief in his products. He knows every detail intimately. Take the Inside-The-Shell Egg Scrambler: "Gets rid of those slimy egg whites in your scrambled eggs!" Popeil has said the inspiration for this product was his lifelong revulsion toward incompletely blended scrambled eggs.

One can take a lesson from this man. He “owns” his business in a way that few businesspeople do. His products are a personal reflection of his character.

Suppose that we took such ownership over our service to our customers? Suppose that we fanatically sought improvements in services or products? That we had an organizational culture that would not permit employees to settle for less than perfection --because it reflected upon them personally?

So, next time you see Ron on the tube hawking a product, stop and reflect that his “Just–set-it-and-forget-it!” Showtime Rottiserrie (that he invented in his kitchen) has surpassed $1 billion in sales.

-Dave

Norms, Anyone?

I’ve been mentioning the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce’s New Media Technology Conference (#FredNMT) to friends and business colleagues and more than a few have reacted as if they had just tasted soap. They tell me, for example, they don’t like Facebook and can’t even imagine using Twitter in any way. Now, my guess is that no one sympathetic with this point of view will be reading this blog, so I won’t argue that point. Rather, let’s consider what some folks don’t like about this new-fangled New Media.

These everyday, technologically capable people tell me they don’t like the idea of sharing or seeing what they consider personal information up on a computer screen. The first reason is they don’t want the wrong person – whoever that might be – to know anything about them. Secondly, they just find they don’t want to know much of what some people share.

I know I am not alone in being careful about anything I post on WaterCoolerView.com and on MScottatFCC. I am a Frederick County Workforce Services employee and we partner with Frederick Community College; it is certainly true in the modern world that no one involved wants me to offend anyone in their name. So, how do we know how not to offend anyone?

Norms are defined as “spoken or unspoken rules that distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.” So, in different ways my friends and I are wondering, “What are the norms?” Some obvious norms include no profanity, no personal attacks, really no attacks at all – but are there less obvious norms?

I think the question of "what is private and what is public" is an area where the norms are not so obvious, and there are many more. I am inviting the Frederick new media technology community to ponder about the question of norms as we prepare for the conference. What do you think?

-Marc

New Media Conference in Frederick

Why do some people seem to be a few steps ahead in the race to adopt the latest evolutions of new media and technologies? Probably because they attend conferences like the one being held by the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce. The full day event is made up of short sessions broken out by topic and audience knowledge base. So, laggards like me can ask embarrassingly basic questions without annoying the more knowledgeable technorati.

There are three concurrent breakout sessions for beginning, intermediate, and advanced participants. Sessions will over topics such as Twitter, Facebook, email campaigns, blogging, and more. There's even an optional lunchtime bonus session to demonstrate and discuss new applications, including Google Wave, Posterous, and Hoot Suite. The New Media & Technology Conference will be held on February 5th .

The registration deadline is January 27th and many seats are already reserved. Find out more on the conference website.

-Dave

Learning from an American Story

We all know the trouble facing the U.S. Automobile industry. None of the big three are in good shape, and until recently I didn’t have faith that any had a clue as to how to respond. This New York Times article gives me some hope – at least for Ford – and is definitely worth a read.

The watchword for Ford right now is focus. For decades Ford has had something like a dozen different companies jostling for resources and attention from managers and from the market. The result is what you usually get when you try to be everything for everyone – no one really knows who you are.

Upon coming to Ford from Boeing, new CEO Mulally has instituted a new vision: One Ford ... One Team ... One Plan ... One Goal. The most tangible example of this focus will be the new Ford Focus, which will be manufactured on a single platform for the entire world. This seems poetic when we remember Henry Ford’s famous response to requests for Model T’s in various colors. Mr. Ford understood the value of focus when he said they can have “any colour - so long as it’s black.

Food for thought – in what ways is you company trying to be too much for too many?

Where should you focus?

-Marc

Shifting Focus from Objectives to Training

Peter Drucker would have turned 100 a few weeks ago. A groundbreaking and transformative management guru, he passed away in 2005.

One of his management theories states that organizational performance is achieved by focusing managerial energy on measurable objectives (the "what"). I think it does little to address the required underlying skills and aptitudes of individual performers (the "how"). While some will argue that Drucker’s Management by Objective approach will uncover training deficits and prompt skill development of employees, too often the learning aspect is downplayed or abandoned entirely. It assumes the employees are all as they should be rather than as they are:

• “I will create a regular objective review structure that will require her to make step by step progress toward the agreed upon goal”


• “He will either be able to perform or he will be --- (terminated, demoted, reassigned, sent to gulag)”


• “If the objectives are clear and measurable, it will be their responsibility to meet them.”


• “Clearly stated employee goals and objectives are the core of an employee evaluation system.”

It seems to me that statements like these are still common, but are borne of a 1954 management philosophy. As a manager, do you find that focusing on the progress toward a goal (for example developing proposals) can stall even if the employee has the desired outcome pinned to her cubicle wall on a neon piece of paper?

What if a manager was to focus his energy primarily on the development of the individual? Talk about the employee’s challenges in finding model proposals, mentor him or her on it, accompany him or her on proposal review meetings, model the behavior you would like to see, observe the employee doing it and give feedback.

Business plans and objectives are required, certainly. Peter Drucker’s SMART objectives are a good model. But you might be better served if, rather than saying to yourself “Today I will focus on objective 2.35b,” you say “today I will make sure that Dave knows how and when to access the proposal library.”

-Dave