Monthly Archives: May 2008

15th May, 2008

4 comments

Two Good Things

For the past year or so, Sarah and I have ended each day by telling each other two good things. For the bulk of the year, our format was for the two things to be things that happened during the day that had made us happy such as closing a deal, getting a compliment, or hearing a great joke. We started the practice at a time when we were both at the beginning of major projects that were the essence of delayed gratification. Personally, I felt crushed by the amount of work ahead and the distance to the goal.

What two-good-things taught us was how to appreciate the good things that were happening to us every day. Most days we had a bundle of good things to report (reporting more than two was allowed). I can only remember a few days, less than five, where I had to manufacture a second good thing (“my burrito at lunch was great!”).

Sarah likes credit so I’ll say that the idea was hers, but the reason it clicked with me was that I had been reading a lot of Scott Adams’ blog and was struck by the way he’d used positive thinking while building his career. Here’s his essay on affirmations, and how fifteen times a day he wrote down his affirmation that he would become a syndicated cartoonist. After that, and ten years without taking a day off, he found himself a syndicated cartoonist.

Recently we decided to switch our two-good-things format. We’d gotten even busier and things we wanted the other person to do weren’t getting done. It was easy to look at the situation as one of us was slipping, but it’s hard to take criticism when you’re working harder than you’ve ever worked. So we changed the two-good-things format to acknowledge two things that the other person had done.

Of course we still don’t limit ourselves to just two things and we even let the other person give reminders about things they deserve points for. The result is that we each feel better about the other person’s contributions, about our own contributions, and strangely we’re both getting more things done that we think we can get points for. I feel like an addict but I’m not actually spending more time–I’m just more efficient. I used to spend hours avoiding the dishes but now when I walk by the sink I feel a happy calling and then suddenly the dishes are done.

There are a lot of parallels in business.

I’ve always liked Marc Hedlund’s application of lessons from the cat circus to engineering management, essentially “pick a cat that does something useful and then encourage the hell out of it.”

One of the speakers at MX 2008 talked about how at every executive meeting they end with the executives nominating people they’d like to thank in a different department. Then the executive goes and thanks that person face-to-face. Pretty good for encouraging cross-department team work.

There’s also an idea, Appreciative Inquiry, to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn’t.

One of the biggest hurdles to being positive at work is that a lot of times it doesn’t feel fair. You end up finding some trivial thing to attach some positive feedback to when the ‘fair’ thing to do is punish the massive screw up that got your attention in the first place. Scott Adams makes a big deal about how mystical his affirmation practice seemed, but his key point, and the key point with all these practices, is that they’re effective. I like to think of them as brain hacking–and I wish I could manufacture positive reinforcement hacks for everything I try.

For example, what would happen if instead of your team starting the day with a meeting talking about what they were going to do, you ended the day with everyone giving kudos for tasks they saw other people do? Would you create a culture of people addicted to accomplishment?

7th May, 2008

7 comments

Deliberate Practice

Sarah and I just got back from a talk at Haas about “deliberate practice” as it relates to excellence. The idea is that how good (or expert) you become at a skill has a lot more to do with how you go about doing your work than it has to do with merely performing the skill a large number of times or over a long length of time. An expert will break down the skills that are required to be expert and focus on improving those skills either during practice (sports) or during the course of day-to-day activities (business).

Most people who perform a job over a number of years will become experienced non-experts, not experts.

It’s easy to look at this in terms of sports. During practice, Tiger Woods doesn’t merely spend time hitting balls on the range. He practices specific shots and fine tunes his mechanics with each swing. One of my running teammates used to spend most of her easy runs thinking about her running form. I spent my easy runs day dreaming. She won more medals (and ended up running for Cal).

This all reminds me of an old study of what differentiated classes of swimmers, The Mundanity of Excellence (it seems to be readable through Google book search). The researchers found that swimmers who moved up in class did it almost entirely by how they went about performing their practice. It was the quality of their work, not the quantity of their work that mattered. Moving up in class could be as simple as changing the way you cupped your hand during your swim stroke, as long as you were willing to practice that improved stroke during every lap of every practice.

This was a business school talk though, and we ended up wanting more examples of how you would apply the concepts of deliberate practice in a business setting. So I started thinking about ways that I would or should focus on the quality of my work rather than the quantity of my work. It’s hard.

Public speaking is an easy one. People are so afraid of it that there’s an entire community to help people practice (Toastmasters). But where do you go to practice email? You have to do it on the fly.

When I write an email I consciously try to apply the rule that the action item for the receiving party should appear in the first two sentences. My emails are more effective as a result. They didn’t get more effective merely because I’ve spent years writing them or because I’ve experienced the receipt of well written emails. They got better because I made a conscious decision to apply a better practice with each email.

Every time I write code I start a mini-todo list where I can shelve ideas or concerns that popup. The list also means that if I get interrupted I have context that helps me get back into the flow faster. This is the major practice that let me be a productive developer while dealing with the interruptions that come with being a manager or running a business.

Sales is a huge one. Let’s just say that if I promise you a response and you get it, that’s because I started using Highrise to manage all my contacts. I’m not working harder to keep up with my email, I’m just working smarter.

The nice thing about having better practices for the mundanity of work is that it frees me from a lot of mental baggage so I can actually reflect a bit about what’s going on in life/business. There’s no sense making the engine more efficient if I’m using it to drive off a cliff (or some such crazy metaphor).

7th May, 2008

No comments

Small Business Hacks

Here are my notes from the small business hacks session at Web2Open. Don MacAskill, Jen Bekman, and Bryan Mason were the major guests.

Don’t discount until completion.
Bryan says that when they do pro-bono or non-profit work they don’t discount their work until the client has implemented their advice. I can relate to that. CrowdVine’s second customer got a nice discount because we were looking for reference clients and then the customer changed direction mid-project, leaving us without a public reference implementation.

Don’t ever discount.
Jen’s advice is to offer something that’s got a lot of value and don’t ever deviate from your message about how valuable it is. There’s a low priced option for her art, but there’s never going to be a discount on that option. It’s too valuable to discount.

Don’t do direct sales or marketing.
All three were relying on word of mouth and felt that gave them focus: have an amazing product. Brian said that the only cold call sale they ever made was cornering someone from Flickr at a party and begging them to let Adaptive Path do a rev on the product.

Give each employee two 30″ monitors.
Nothing says you’ll have the tools to do your job than showing up on day one and finding two 30″ monitors. That’s one of many tricks responsible for a 100% retention rate at SmugMug. Way to go Don!

Hire Customers.
Don’s other trick for retention (and also for finding kickass employees) is to hire customers. They take less training, have higher loyalty, and you can observe them before you talk to them.

There’s so much good advice that’s hard to get online but easy to get through word of mouth. It’d be nice to do a monthly small business dinner or something where we could get at these tricks.