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Use your brains to design your work/life balance

I just read about Emily and Paul in David Rock’s Your Brain at Work. Parents of two children in their struggle for an ideal work-life balance. Emily just got promoted in a large corporation; Paul runs his own business as a software consultant.
The pressure in their lives, just like yours and mine, is filled with a bewildering blizzard of friction, tension, ambition, execution in the midst of emails,
phone calls, conference calls, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Yeah, the kids are also an essential part in the lives of Paul and Emily.

Indeed, very recognizable!

Staying ahead of the storm becomes a seemingly insurmountable task provided we do not acknowledge how our brain works.
In David Rock’s book, we lean how Emily and Paul’s brains work as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they’re presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. The author is aware of how a the brain works—and more specifically, how it can perform in an optimal way in a work setting. We learn getting things done and feel comfortable at the end of the day with your beloved spouse and kids.

The core

YOUR BRAIN AT WORK explores issues such as:

why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources

why it’s so hard to focus, and how to better manage distractions

how to maximize your chance of finding insights that can solve seemingly insurmountable 
problems

how to keep your cool in any situation, so that you can make the best decisions possible

how to collaborate more effectively with others

why providing feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier

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how to be more effective at changing other people’s behavior
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My rating
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4,5 stars on a scale 0-5.
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David Rock really rocks, bringing neuroscience studies and insights to the battlefield of work/life balance and even more important for management and leadership.
The author provides easy access to the insights of complex studies and even more important constructs these into doable concepts. For me the real eye-opener was the introduction of the Scarf-concept as a valuable elaboration of change leadership concepts. Cecil Dijoux recently wrote about the concept in his post http://thehypertextual.com/2013/04/23/social-neuroscience-scarf-model-and-change-management: a must read with excellent references.

David Rock also contributes to transforming one personal work styles through doable principles. This is an invaluable contribution for me creating – indeed – a better work/life balance and acting as a better change leader.

This book is recommended reading for anyone who is interested in designing a better work/life balance and for those connecting to a changing context in the business world. It is then up to you how that knowledge and information will be applied by you to meet business, professional or personal success.

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Posted in Recovery and the way out of the crisis, recession and depression

The rise and ohoh rise of the collaborative organization

Aug 25

Posted by Fred Zimny

The core

This is a nuts-and-bolts guide.

Jacob Morgan provides the information, insights and a strategic framework you need to use emergent collaborative software behind your company‘s firewall to solve business problems, unearth new opportunies and to drive innovation.

This book is about enterprise 2.0. As defined as the use of emergent social software platforms by business in pursuit of their goals regardless of whether it is inside or outside the firewall.

Jacob Morgan is the principal and co-founder of Chess Media Group, a management consulting and strategic advisory firm on collaboration. He is the author of his new book “The Collaborative Organization,” the first strategic guide for executives and decision makers seeking to deploy emerging technologies and strategies in the workplace (published by McGraw Hill, due out June 2012).

My rating

4,5 stars on a scale 0-5.

In an earlier post I wrote about the inertia of some managers for investing in knowledge management.

In that post I made a reference to Kaplan and Norton’s Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible assets into tangible outcomes.

Jacob includes one – at least for me – essential part of it:

None of these intangible assets has value that can be measured seperately or independently.
The value of these intangible assets derives from their ability to help the organization implement its strategy…..
Intangible assets such as knowledge and technology seldom have a direct impact on financial outcome such as increased revenues, lowered costs and higher profits, Improvements in tangible assets affect financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships.

Jacob and I agree completely with that statement.

The author claims that one can use the book as a guide for a one’s collaborative journey. One should utilize everything you can in this chapter and in the book, adapt it, change it and make it your own. Regular readers may see a similar approach as of my blog serve4impact: context, connect, construct and compact changes. But be cautious: the book has a technology focus. To really start your collaborative journey I would like to recommend Morton Hansen book on Collaboration and Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0.

I refer buying this book to anyone who is working in a knowledge intensive industry. As a manager or profesional. It is not limited to leaders for creating , implementing and adapting a strategy. Buy the book and do not read all of it. Check out your action points and start reading. As stated before, there is even more food of thougth (such as this fine reading list).

One flaw of the approach is that the approach of collaboration is limited at the enterprise level. Be aware of that.

But to mitigate that flaw, I will include some fine decks. Not for reading, but for creating action.

Decks and further reading

Senior executives are skeptical of the value of social software.

Posted in Recovery and the way out of the crisis, recession and depression

4 Comments

Tags: Andrew Mason, Andrew McAfee, Apple, Arab Spring, Business, Business process, carol velthuis, Chess Media Group, Christine Lagarde, Collaboration, Company, EBay, Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Good to Great, Hewlett Packard, Jacob Morgan, Knowledge management, Leadership, Management, Marché de La Viande, McGraw-Hill, McKinsey & Company, Personal development, Recovery and the way out of the crisis, recession and depression, Sheryl Sandberg, social, Social Enterprise, Strategic management, Vision, visionaries, vision things, trends

Accenture’s how to make your company think like a customer

Jul 29

Posted by Fred Zimny

I just started reading Bill Self’s book 3-D . Reading his entertaining and challenging book, It reminded me of this Accenture publication.

Accenture’s comment:

For too many companies, ensuring that every customer has a tailored experience remains an elusive goal. Indeed, in a 2010 survey of more than 140 North American companies, just 3 percent were identified as truly “customer-centric organizations.” Fully a third were found to be “customer oblivious.”

The stakes are high. Some studies suggest that failing to deliver a high-quality customer experience can result in a staggering erosion of a company’s customer base—a loss of as much as 50 percent over a five-year period.

Posted in Social CRM and social business

1 Comment

Tags: Business, Business Services, Company, Consulting, Customer, Customer experience, Customer Management, Customer service, http://literarycoffee.tumblr.com/, Social CRM and social business

Service Design Lost in Translation by Ingjerd Jevnaker

Jul 22

Posted by Fred Zimny

If you think you are selling a product, you’re wrong. Today, businesses and the public sector alike, have to consider the user experience in a more holistic manner. It may seem self-evident but the way that tech support handles the customer, how shipping works, or how long the queues are at an airport terminal determine people’s overall satisfaction with your product or service. This is true even if your company does not handle these elements of the service delivery directly. In other words: designing the service experience is the next area of competitive advantage for most companies and organizations.

To meet these new demands, a new generation of designers are jumping on the bandwagon of service design. However, the approach and types of projects that service designers get their hands on are different across the Atlantic. This dual session is a conversation about service design in the US and Europe and what this new buzzword means for design, businesses and organizations.

Photocredit: david mendolia