Raf Sanga dot com

A Simple Productivity Audit Do you ever feel overwhelmed or have too much to do? Have you been known to move around like a headless chicken? If so, maybe it’s time to do a Productivity Audit . Here are a few questions that will help you decide if it is time to audit your efficiency: Do you feel in control of your workload? Is your email inbox regularly emptied? Are you a distraction free zone? Are you as efficient and productive as you know you should be? If you answered “no” to any one of those questions it may be a good idea to stop and take an impartial look at your current systems. By taking an objective look and making informed decisions about your personal efficiency, you will be one step closer to stress free productivity. Here are a few simple ways you can assess your current systems to see if you are working as efficiently as possible. Check Your Hardware Is your PC or Mac slowing you down or holding you back? Maybe a larger monitor or a dual screen setup would enab...

Steve Jobs , a co-founder and former chief executive officer of  Apple Inc. (AAPL) , died today, the company said in a statement. He was 56. Jobs stepped down as CEO in August after combating a rare form of cancer. “Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple’s board said in the statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.” Source: Bloomberg

There's an unnoticed population of employees in business today. Strangely enough, they're also the majority. The diagram below illustrates the labels that organizations often use (knowingly or unknowingly) to classify their employees. The y-axis focuses on how a professional is measured on meeting the organizational performance criteria that fuel the business engine. The x-axis centers on how the professional fares on meeting the expectations of the human engine. In each of the four corners, we find the Stars, Sinners, Low Performers, and Saints. I'll go into more detail on the four corners of the diagram in my next post, but for now, I want to bring to your attention those falling in the middle of the diagram — the Stalwarts. These solid citizens make up the majority of employees in most organizations. The odds are you may find yourself among the Stalwarts at some point in your career, no matter how high-revving your internal drive is. If so, you probably will find yours...

Support functions, from HR and finance to product development, have to manage a complex mixture of repetitive, project and adhoc work. Teams must prepare updates and reports on a regular basis and must ensure that both internal and external customers are handled in a timely manner. They must also respond at any time to unexpected requests for action or information from across the organization – frequently urgent requests from senior managers who are unaware of the disruption they cause. On top of all this, staff may be asked to spend considerable time in meetings to discuss, review and plan their work. This environment makes it extremely difficult for managers and team leaders to measure and improve performance. Their teams may be working on multiple projects simultaneously. Without knowing who is doing what, it can be hard for leaders to help their teams prioritize tasks. Problems arise from this lack of transparency. For example, work may be unevenly allocated, with staff overwhelm...

Several years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues about a project he was thinking about taking on. We were both solidly in the middle of our careers, but his evaluation of the possible project surprised me. He said, "There are a limited number of things that I'll be able to say I've done in my career, and I'm just not convinced that this should be one of them." What struck me about this conversation is that it took a backward-looking perspective. That is, my colleague projected himself to the end of his career and looked backward over his contribution. By contrast, most of us tend to be forward-looking. We make decisions based on how we think that particular decision might influence the next stage. This strategy can be seen clearly in politics, where politicians often make decisions based on what will help them get re-elected . Research on regret has made a similar distinction. Psychologist Tom Gilovich and his colleagues have compared the regrets o...

Have you ever wondered whether your work efforts were really creating value? From what I've seen in organizations, a lot of people have that experience. The problem is that many times they don't do anything about it. Not long ago I spoke at a company meeting about the challenges of complexity in organizations . At one point, I asked the audience members to identify and discuss simplification opportunities in their areas. During the report-outs, one woman described how she and her co-workers spent hours each week on the cosmetics of a particular report to make sure that it looked good when it went to senior management. She went on to say that this focus on style rather than substance was a waste of time. When I asked why she continued to do this, she quickly said that her boss expected it. Her boss was also in the room, and when asked about the report said, "I don't care what it looks like, as long as it has the right information." This kind of disconnect is n...

  And so it begins: the life of Apple, post Steve Jobs. Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO, effecting a smooth transition to known successor Tim Cook. Jobs is surely not just any retiring CEO. As an entrepreneur, he built a company that changed history . Like many entrepreneurial founders, he did it by force of personality and personal vision, without much concern for consensus or committees. And like many, he paid the price when the narrative took hold that he'd lost his touch, and his board lost faith. But very unlike that typical experience, he found his way back to the CEO job and put the company back in the game. It was quite a feat, and speaks to the specialness of this particular man. But now it's time for Apple as an organization to pull off a feat of its own: it needs to continue on its trajectory without a visionary founder to rally behind. It has had the luxury of having a personification of its ethos, and now it must either allow someone else to be tha...

If you're not familiar with the law of diminishing returns , it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you've reached that point. For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome? Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers. At the first meeting the team brainstormed ways to drive up sales, but before moving ahead decided to collect data about current sales and survey sales managers and customers. Since it wasn't clear which ideas might work, this seemed like a logical next step — until the data analysis work dragged on for months as the team tried to reach the perfect answer. I've seen this pattern in many organizations where, instead of moving into action, m...

It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended. The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic ; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research. To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started wi...

Next time you come across a wishing well or fountain, don’t fall for it. You can still pitch in a coin or two if it’s for a good cause but just don’t make a wish like you are suppose to. In fact, you should NEVER make wishes if you want to be successful at anything. Too often we end up wishing for things. We wish we could have more money. We wish we could be better looking. We wish we could be in better shape. What I would like to do is propose that you wipe out the word ‘wish’ from your vocabulary. Instead, replace it with the word ‘commitment’ . So instead of making wishes for the things you want in life, make commitments instead. Make Fully Committed Decisions When I do my motivational keynotes, I tell my audiences to make ‘fully committed decisions’ . That is, they should make strong decisions to pursue their goals with total commitment instead of just wishing to become successful. This may seem like a simple play on words to some people but there is indeed a significant diff...

Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey. It would be so easy to quit. But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. In start-up land, Air B&B notably went for 4 years with scraping the barrel kind of funding and just recently received $112 million . Most people don't remember how dire the Apple situation was in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned. A share of Apple back then would buy you a cup of coffee; now it'll get you a nice bottle of Opus One from, say, 1987 . Business is full of stories of perseverance and pursuit — of the almost-failed hero who didn't quit when times were dark. Those stories admonish quitters, and honor the survivors. I should know. I am both. My dark night literally came in a late evening 1987, when I was attacked by a serial...

"Are you familiar with the term willful blindness?" This was the question that floored the Murdochs at Tuesday's parliamentary select committee hearing because it cut right through the narrative News International executives have been spinning to counter the hacking scandal that has engulfed the media group in recent weeks. Innocent ignorance has been NI's defense from the start. Rupert put too much trust in his key lieutenants, James could not be expected to know every detail of the NI operation and Rebekah merely delegated responsibility to her staff and relied on their good judgement. Those at the top could not be expected to know everything that was going on in NI and, besides, who could have anticipated that the work of a few rogue freelancers would undermine the entire News Corp empire? As a performance, it was neither convincing nor original. We have seen and heard it all before from leaders during other crises. Consider the Royal Bank of Scotland , BP , ...

Interns take note: energy and enthusiasm are no longer enough. You've got to bring something more meaningful to the table. A friend and senior executive at Yelp recently shared how busy she was balancing a demanding job, a busy travel schedule, and a newborn at home. We were catching up at a Northwestern University alumni event ; so naturally I suggested she take on a student as a summer intern. She looked at me square in the eye, without a trace of irony and stated, "I have no time for an intern." Isn't the whole point of an intern to make your life easier? When an overworked young Gen Y executive says she has no time for an intern, isn't something wrong with our system? Interns aren't supposed to be a drain on time, energy or resources. In practice, however, they can be. In today's competitive economy, where everyone is doing more with less, you've got to figure out a way to be value add from the start. Interns, you might just have to come up w...

This week News Corp. execs James and Rupert Murdoch were dragged before a investigatory committee of Parliament over the U.K.'s phone-hacking scandal. Meanwhile hacktivists LulzSec decided to take matters into their own hands, and targeted the website of News Corp. paper The Sun, replacing its homepage with a faked edition. Shortly afterward, LulzSec said it had also acquired a huge amount of corporate emails from the Murdochs. They've since pledged not to release them, lest they compromise ongoing legal cases against News Corp. and its executives, but the Murdochs may still face having their email dirty laundry aired in the future. How is this kind of hack pulled off? We spoke to our expert adviser, Nick Percoco of Trustwave's Spiderlabs, to gain an insight, based on his expertise as an ethical hacker--hired to pull off these kinds of attack by companies themselves. The Website Hack, Simply Done Website redirects are pretty common nowadays--it's a relatively lo...

This visualization tool can enable practitioners to make sense of large volumes of interconnected data and fast-track implementation of Lean Six Sigma.
 Hospitals and health plans know that the high cost of care is squeezing the U.S. economy. That’s why so many of them are using Lean Six Sigma to control spending by refining internal processes—while still satisfying customers in a highly competitive market. A major health care consortium based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area recently used Lean Six Sigma to find ways to improve its health insurance validation process and thereby improve customer satisfaction.  With a looming deadline before them, Ralph Jarvis, principle of Jarvis Business Solutions, and his staff used “mind-mapping” to kick off and manage a Lean implementation that resulted in a dozen ways for the hospital to improve its insurance validation process. Mind mapping software uses visual shorthand to capture in one screen the kind of complexity and depth that might...