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I don’t remember who drew this on my whiteboard, but I liked it.   It’s basically personas for focus and energy.  I’ll summarize it like this:

Procrastinators – Low energy and low focus
Disengaged – Low energy  and high focus
Distracters – High energy and low focus.
Purposeful – High energy and high focus

I like new lenses.  They make an old song new.  In this case, it’s a reminder of the power of focus. 
I think Beware the Busy Manager (Harvard Business Review) is an interesting article on how this shows …

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If you’re backlogged and you want to get out, here’s a quick, low tech, brute force approach.   I’ve used it on my teams many times to help people get unstuck and to feel like they’re getting results.
Map It OutHere’s the steps:

Queue.  On your whiteboard, first write your key backlog items.   This is your queue.   If you don’t have a whiteboard, substitute a sheet of paper.  The point is keep it visible and simple.
To Do. Next to it, write down To Do. 
Rule of 3.  Under …

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In my previous post, I wrote about 3 ways to spot logical fallacies.  In this post, I write about the families and examples of logical sins according to lessons from Jay Henirchs.  In Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion , Heinrichs teaches us about the seven deadly logical sins.  In a logical debate, committing a logical sin gets you kicked out of the game.
Key Take Aways Here’s my key take aways: 

3 kinds of …

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A fallacy is simply a false or mistaken idea.  If you can spot logical flaws, you can save yourself from bad information.  This includes defending yourself from politicians, sales people, diet books, doctors, and even your own kids.  In logical arguments, where logic matters, it’s important to avoid your own logical fallacies, as well as spot them in counter-arguments.  In rhetoric, your overall persuasion is more important than logic.  While logic plays a role, it’s also about emotion and character (see Character Trumps Emotion Trumps Logic.)   …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from author Al Ries. Al is chairman of Ries & Ries, an Atlanta, Georgia, marketing strategy firm that he runs with his daughter and partner, Laura Ries. Their latest book is “War in the Boardroom.” Their website is: www.ries.com. Al is a legendary marketing strategist and the bestselling author (or co-author) of 11 books on marketing including “Positioning”, “Marketing Warfare”, “Focus”, “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding”, “The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR”, and his latest, “War in the …

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Have you ever wondered why some things you can do on “auto-pilot” or without thinking, while other tasks are mentally draining? Your thoughtful tasks are using your working memory (prefrontal context), while your repetitive, familiar and routine activities are using your basal ganglia, which doesn’t require conscious thought.
Working Memory vs. Routine ActivityDavid Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz summarize the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia in their article, “The Neuroscience of Leadership”, in “strategy+business” magazine:

Working Memory (Prefrontal Cortex) – Your prefrontal cortex is your working memory.  It’s …

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." — Will Durant
One of the ways you can transform your ordinary day into extraordinary is to master your craft.  By thinking of yourself as a craftsman, you can think of your work as your art. 
By immersing yourself in your work, you become fully engaged.   When you’re fully engaged, you find your flow.   As you improve your art, you grow your ability.  As you grow yourself you grow your job.  The opposite is to …

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It’s a new year and many of you will be setting new goals for yourself as part of your New Year’s resolutions. I want to give you an important nugget you can use when you implement your goals and start to face some potential discomfort or pain.  This insight may be exactly what you need if you’ve ever failed at changing a habit or meeting your goals in the past.
Creating New Habits and Reducing Friction in Your GoalsI actually wasn’t sure whether to title …

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Manage energy, not time, to get more things done …  This concept really resonates with me.  I also like it because it can be counter intuitive or non-obvious.  One way to try and get more things done is to, jam more in your schedule.  Yuck!  Unfortunately, that’s a fairly common practice.
It’s Not About More Time Management PracticesI actually have lots of practices for managing time (outcome-based work breakdown structures, managing outcomes vs. activities, prioritizing outcomes based on usage and value, avoiding over-managing minutia, using outcome-based …

This is a guest post on lessons learned in leadership from Jim Kouzes.

I find chunking my notes from lectures and training helps me turn insights into action. I chunk them into three categories: actions, insights, and notes. This simple refactoring helps me quickly find the actions or my “ah has” without having to fish through a laundry list of reference points. I bubble these to the top so I can find them at a glance. The act of refactoring my notes also helps remind me of the most valuable parts, which is usually the new distinctions …

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Time boxing is a way to chunk up time and get results.  If you continuously miss windows of opportunity or spend all of your time in one area of your life at the expense of others, time boxing can be one of your best tools.   A time box is simply a limited set of time to accomplish a result.  Think of it as how much work can you get done in a given block of time.  I use it to organize my day, drive project results, make incremental …

 
I finally wrote up my notes on Precision Questioning and Precision Answering, or PQ / PA for short.  It was one of my most effective training sessions at Microsoft.
My manager encouraged me to take PQ / PA so that I would be more effective in executive reviews and our group was full of avid PQ / PA practitioners.  I had a tendency to tell stories and elaborate, so this was about cutting to the chase crisply, with brutal effectiveness.  I took the class a few years back, so …

"Is the glass half empty, half full, or twice as large as it needs to be?"  — Anonymous
Don’t fall into the intelligence tap.  The intelligence trap is when you get trapped in one point of view.  You make your mind up based on your first opinion.  Once you form your initial opinion, you use your thinking to support your position, rather than to explore the subject to broaden your thinking. 
The solution is to use the PMI technique to improve your thinking.  The PMI technique is a thinking technique to …

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Given the economic climate and some horror stories I’m hearing, I’m refocusing on some patterns and practices for feeling good.   I think motivation is one of the most crucial skills you need throughout your life.  Even if already have motivation techniques that work for you, this is a set of expert techniques from the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated , by Dr. David Burns.
Thought PatternsBefore reviewing the motivation techniques, you should be familiar with the following thought patterns:

10 Distorted Thinking …

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How important is determination and drive for success?   Drive is a common characteristic among successful people.  The good news is that just like luck and success, drive is a continuum.  There’s examples where people with minimal drive, but they enjoy what they do, experience great success.  On the other end of the spectrum, you find ruthless obsession. 
What if you aren’t naturally driven?  Here again, there’s good news.  You can adopt successful strategies.  What you lack in personality, you can make up for in approach.
In Tactics: The Art and …

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What is the role of luck when it comes to success?  It’s a wide spectrum.  It ranges from a great deal of luck to no luck at all, or, in fact, some very bad luck.   What’s important is that your belief about luck can really shape your chances for success.  If you take a passive view on luck, success may happen to fall your way.  if you take a positive view on luck, you can increase your ability to deal with negative situations, as well as …

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It’s been a few years since I met with Loren Kohnfelder. Every now and then Loren and I play catch up. Loren is former Microsoft. If you don’t know Loren, he’s famous for designing the CLR security model and IE security zones several years ago. He created a model for more fine-grained control over security decisions and he’s a constant advocate for simplifying security.
The last time we met we had some pretty interesting discussions.  You might think two guys that do security stuff would talk about …

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I got some relevant training for today’s world.  The training was “Influencing without Authority” and it was based on the book, Influence Without Authority (2nd Edition).   The focus was how to succeed when you don’t have authority and control over execution.  This is a common scenario in cross-team, cross-group scenarios.  At Microsoft, you don’t get rewarded by saying, “…if only I had control over authority and execution … I would be successful.”  
This training is actually useful beyond just the work scenarios.  You can …

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Do you have to be great at everything?  If this stops you from doing things you want to try, then it’s a limiting belief.  Scott Berkun spells this out in Why You Should Be Bad at Something.   Life’s not static.  As Tony Robbins would say, you’re either growing or dying, climbing or sliding.
One of the things that can hold you back is a fixed mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, you attribute results to innate ability and you discount learning.  You think people are …