I wanted a visual that could express one of the idea of Sources of Insight. I think the Yin and Yang is a good model. According to Wikipedia, the Yin and Yang expresses how seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent.

Trying to plan for a month can be a challenge, especially if you don’t have an approach. I’m going to share with you a very simple way to plan your month. It’s simple, but powerful. You can use Agile Results as a way to simplify your monthly planning. Agile Results is the system I talk about in my book, Getting Results the Agile Way.

This is a leadership assessment you can use to assess yourself against effective leadership practices. This leadership checklist organizes leadership qualities, leadership habits, and leadership practices into the following categories: action, change, communication, decisions, influence, motivation, problem solving, self-awareness, teamwork, and vision.

This is a guest post from best-selling authors Roger Conners and Tom Smith on personal accountability and how it’s the key to your success.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” — Parkinson’s Law

Your Outcome: Learn how to master time management and set effective time limits for things and then bite off what you can chew within that time limit. Your ability to use timeboxing and time budgets will help you manage your energy, free up your time, get more things done, and achieve work-life balance.

“The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.” — John Mason Brown

Holding people accountable is a skill you can learn. In a world where you get results through teams and teamwork, enforcing accountability plays a key role to success. Even if you’re just holding yourself accountable to some results you want in your life, it helps to know the ways to enforce accountability and why there can be a lack of accountability. A lot of it comes down to clarifying the outcome, setting expectations, and then addressing motivation, skills, and feedback.

I got an email from a GM (General Manager) at Microsoft, who will be giving a presentation at Microsoft on “How To Be an Effective IC (Individual Contributor)” and he’s collecting best practices. Scott Hanselman shared his thoughts and I thought I would share mine. For this post, I attempted to boil down some of the best lessons I’ve learned for myself, that I mentor others, and that I see others put into practice.

PM is short for Program Manager. At Microsoft, the PM role is a fairly common role, and it can mean a lot of things, so I’ll explain a bit about what a PM does down below before we dive in. To bottom line it, you can think of a PM as a technical leader that orchestrates a product or service through planning, design, and execution. As you can imagine, this requires a variety of skills from communication and interpersonal skills to strategic thinking and execution.

At Microsoft, we use the term “frame” or “framing a problem” in the context of project management. You might hear somebody ask, “what’s the frame?” or “how have you framed the problem?” A Frame is simply a way to partition a problem. The heart of a frame is coming up with a context to understand the dimensions that matter and figure out how to prioritize and scope. I use frames a lot here on Sources of Insight to chunk bigger problems down, as well as to organize and share information. It’s a lens.

I have the privilege of taking some extreme training on influence. It’s a pilot class based on the book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. Influence is about changing hearts, minds, and behavior to produce meaningful, sustainable results. The beauty of the model is that it scales up and down from personal life style changes, such as losing weight, to global changes, such as eliminating diseases. I like it because it’s a simple lens to look at those persistent problems where change seems impossible. Rather than bump your head against a glass ceiling or spin your wheels without traction, it’s a systematic approach to diagnose and implement change.

This is the heart of my results system. It’s a pattern I call Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection. It’s probably the single most important thing I teach everyone I mentor. It’s the same approach I use to lead myself and my teams. It’s a way to help set yourself up for success each day. It’s also a way to keep learning and growing. It’s simple, but it’s powerful. In fact, it’s power is its simplicity

Photo by David Masters
Do you have a favorite set of forcing functions?   A forcing function is any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.   If you have areas in your life that you’re finding inertia, try adding some forcing functions to get results.
Slides as Forcing Functions
At Microsoft patterns & practices, one of our forcing functions is building a slide deck.  Building a deck is a forcing function because it forces us to distill the points, close down on issues, identify what …

Photo by helmet13
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 …

"A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together!"  — Author Unknown
How can you make your best contribution at work?  Play to your strengths.   The sooner you move to your strengths, the sooner you improve your contribution.   Find your strengths and offer them to your team.  It’s how to be your best.  It’s how you’ll feel stronger each day. 
As a Program Manager (PM) at Microsoft, I’ve built a lot of project teams at patterns & practices over the …

How do you get people to take action?  If your results depend on other people, how do you set the stage for action and help build momentum?  In The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Michael Watkins write about how to use action-forcing events to help move people into action.
Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways:

Identify who does what when.  There’s a big difference between agreeing to actions and having owners that are accountable.  There’s also a big difference when you have a timeframe …