Welcome
Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Contents
CONTENTS
Foresight is published by the Prevoyance Group, and this month contains four sections:
Work
Life
Heard in the Hallways
Travels with Patrick
Work
There have been several articles in the business press as of late about companies thinking unconventionally in order to gain market share. HP has regained lost ground in the consumer PC market by giving up on fighting Dell in its stronghold, the direct market. Bucking the thinking that they had to beat Dell at its own game, HP leveraged and enhanced its relationships with conventional retailers, where Dell has no presence. Now HP is the company to beat while the once-mighty Dell struggles.
The classic example of unconventional thinking is of course Sony’s Walkman. No one knew they needed or wanted a portable music player, but Sony created one of the enduring consumer electronics successes of the last 30 years, and arguably the granddaddy of today’s iPod. While Sony deserves respect for its innovation, the conceptual leap to the Walkman is startlingly simple. People enjoyed listening to music, and the best portable systems of the time were heavy and loud. Is a portable music device that enabled the listener to enjoy their tunes in private really that much of a quantum leap in thinking? It is easy to argue that Sony threw out the baggage of current devices and methods and looked instead at how people interacted with music. Rather than waiting for customers to come clamoring with demands of a portable player, Sony gave customers a solution to a problem they had, but could not yet articulate.
How does this apply to IT? Rather than throw out the hackneyed admonishment to “think outside the box,” I would prefer that you stay firmly within your box, but look for problems that your peers have not yet articulated, and develop solutions to solve them. Companies rarely benefit from abandoning all conventions and entertaining ludicrous concepts for the sake of casting aside the hackneyed “box.” Instead of investigating the near-insane, look at IT’s current services and interactions with other business units, and look for a service or “product” that could revolutionize the way they work. Too often, IT takes a position of waiting to provide a requested service, being the silent butler standing in the corner awaiting his summons. Imagine the value you could create by “finding the walkman” for your peers in Finance, or delivering a solution to a problem Marketing never knew they had.
Life
As my nutritional diet has been gaining momentum, I have been reading about “low information diets” and am trying out a watered down version related to email. The basic concept is simple: email is often an interruption or source of busywork that should be managed in discrete chunks, rather than actively opened, pondered and dispositioned every time Outlook flashes a notification or a Blackberry beeps or vibrates. The concept seems fair. I can think of many occasions where I have been writing or working through a difficult problem, when Outlook notifies me of an unimportant message, providing just enough visual distraction to derail my thought process.
Central to the recommendations I have seen are two key rules: check email at fixed times, and make sure those times are not first thing in the morning, or right before bed. The first rule is straightforward. All notifications, devices, etc. should be turned off, and your email client opened only at the designated time. I am starting with 11AM, 4PM and 6PM. Open your mail client, respond, file or react to everything, and then close it until the next session.
The intent of not checking email first thing in the morning is that the email check saps the energy that you start the day with, which would be better spent attacking a critical task. Avoiding an email check right before bed allows you to go to sleep with a clear head, rather than pondering whatever problems are waiting in your inbox.
While I am mid-way through my first week of the low email diet, I am amazed how often I find myself fidgeting and straining not to double click the Outlook icon, or pick up my mobile phone and check email. At the same, after a nervous glance at my computer screen, I find myself returning to the task at hand where in the past I would spend several minutes or even hours handling email. I will report my results in a future column, and in the meantime, the last email check of the day is due!
Heard in the Hallways
We live in a management culture obsessed with numbers, surveying, analyzing and tracking the minutest details of how our businesses perform. With billions spent on analytics, it is easy to overlook one of the more simple ways of testing the performance of various functions of your business: eating your own cooking. While the latest performance study may contain advanced charts and be derived from formulas that only a statistician could comprehend or love, it may overlook areas that could be discovered through some simple personal investigation. Ring your call center on occasion. Are hold times really “acceptable?” Does that “meets customer expectations” rating on the latest study understate the helpfulness of staff, or mask ornery or unctuous operators, a determination that can be made more accurately with a five-minute phone call versus a complex annual customer survey.
Does your product packaging require hours of patience, a hatchet, blowtorch and box of bandages to open? A trip to a local retailer might tell you far more than a high-priced product packaging consultant. Using your own products or services not only can uncover hidden gems or rough edges, but can be even more effective if you can combine your knowledge of how they are created with a consumer’s viewpoint in your own head. Consider internal products and services as well. Call your internal helpdesks occasionally, and regard new policy directions as both a leader and one who is impacted by the directive. Even the CEO can suspend his or her title for a moment and come to a rational conclusion as a human being as to whether flowery missives from the corporate office are inspiration to the masses, or the brunt of water cooler humor. Rather than requiring a complex survey or study as the middleman and interpreter, seeing both sides of an experience may change your understanding of a product or service, and provide insights to improve them, all with a pittance of time and money.
Travels with Patrick
I recently rediscovered the joys of mountain biking, trading in my workweek attire and briefcase for lycra, gears and chains. I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors, but there is something carnal to mountain biking that you don’t get with hiking. Tearing through turns (if you will give me to poetic license to describe my current plodding pace as “tearing”) while gears jump between cogs and suspension bounces over roots combines man, machine, adrenalin and speed, in a cocktail that rapidly blasts away the trivialities left from the daily grind.