Raf Sanga dot com

Improving the fit between the priorities of managers, their direct reports, and their supervisors—all the way up to the CEO—is a good place to start. The biggest and most destructive myth in time management is that you can get everything done if only you follow the right system, use the right to-do list, or process your tasks in the right way.  That’s a mistake. We live in a time when the uninterrupted stream of information and communication, combined with our unceasing accessibility, means that we could work every single hour of the day and night and still not keep up. For that reason, choosing what we are going to ignore may well represent the most important, most strategic time-management decision of all. To illustrate, let’s look at the experiences of Todd, 1 the head of sales in a large financial-services firm and a direct report to the CEO. Todd had been struggling to change the way people approached the sales process. He wanted more m...

If you’ve spent enough time in the workforce, you almost certainly have a trail of damaged professional relationships behind you. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad manager or employee; it’s simply a fact that some people don’t get along, and when we have to rely on each other (to finish the report, to execute the campaign, to close the deal), there are bound to be crossed wires and disappointments. When conflict happens, many of us try to disengage — to avoid the person around the office, or limit our exposure to them. That’s a fine strategy if your colleague is peripheral to your daily life; you may never have to work with the San Diego office again. But if it’s your boss or a teammate, ignoring them is a losing strategy. Here’s how to buck up and repair a professional relationship that’s gone off the rails. First, it’s important to recognize that making the effort is worthwhile . Obviously it’ll ratchet tension down at the office if you’re not glaring at your colleague every...

We are in an Information Revolution — and have been for a while now. But it is entering a new stage. The arrival of the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet is generating previously unimaginable quantities of data to measure, analyze and act on. These new data sources promise to transform our lives as much in the 21st century as the early stages of the Information Revolution reshaped the latter part of the 20th century. But for that to happen, we need to get much better at handling all that data we’re producing and collecting. Consider the more than $44 billion projected by Gartner to be spent on big data in 2014. The vast majority of it — $37.4 billion — is going to IT services. Enterprise software only accounts for about a tenth. The disproportionate spending on services is a sign of immaturity in how we manage data. In his seminal essay, “ Why Software is Eating the World ,” Marc Andreessen pointed out that for each new technology wave, the money eventually sh...

Going into a negotiation with someone who holds more power than you do can be a daunting prospect.  Whether you are asking your boss for a new assignment or attempting to land a major business deal with a client, your approach to the negotiation can dramatically affect your chances of success. How can you make the best case for what you want? What the Experts Say “There is often strength in weakness,” says Margaret Neale, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Having power typically reduces a person’s ability to understand how others think, see, and feel, so being in the less powerful position actually gives you a better vantage to accurately assess what the other party wants and how you can best deliver it. And when you do your homework, you’ll often find you’ve “underestimated your own power, and overestimated theirs,” says Jeff Weiss, a partner at Vantage Partners, a Boston-based consultancy specializing in corporate neg...

  Lean innovation is being embraced by everyone — from the smallest start-ups to the largest global organizations. But in most cases, it’s still falling well short of its full potential because it either lacks or fails to tightly integrate with the mechanisms needed to systematically capture lessons learned and share them outside the team. And that’s where the money is in innovation. Lean innovation embraces a philosophy of not letting perfection get in the way of progress. It leverages the Pareto principle that 20% of a product’s features (what’s distilled down into the minimal viable product) will most likely deliver 80% of the benefits sought by customers. As an approach, lean innovation lends itself especially well to corporate cultures, often engineering ones and others strongly focused on process-improvement programs such as Six Sigma. Its straightforward, step-by-step methodology makes it relatively easy to explain and to implement: Identify the minimal viable ...

One of the more vexing problems most managers face every day is how to get involved in the work of their people without doing the work themselves or micromanaging those doing it. You can resolve this challenge with the same approach that we described in our previous blog — the technique we call Prep-Do-Review. In this simple but often forgotten action model, you think of every activity not as one step — doing — but three distinct steps: prepare to act, act , and then reflect on the outcome and what can be learned from it. Last time, we focused on how you can convert everyday activities into tools for making managerial progress — moving toward goals, developing people, building a team, creating and sustaining a network, and all the other things managers are supposed to do but never seem to have the time to do . Here we focus on using Prep-Do-Review with your people. Start by expecting your people to use Prep-Do-Review themselves in their work. Not only will it make them m...

Bill Bartmann, CEO of debt collection company CFS2, does things a little differently. Instead of just calling, hounding, and suing debtors to pay what they owe, he calls them "customers" and provides them with free job-search services, such as resume help and interview prep. Perhaps the reason Bartmann runs his company differently is because he himself has never shied away from living life differently . A high school dropout who later put himself through college working at a hog slaughterhouse, he found himself $1 million in debt himself after his first business collapsed. He clawed his way back up by building CFS, the subject of this HBS case study — but then, that too, imploded . Now he's back (again), and doing things differently (again). What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation. What's it like running a debt collection company that's so different from the rest of the industry? It's a little bit like telling everyone that the world...