Focusing on What is Important

Productive workers are not the busiest worker. They are the people who focus where a difference can be made. It is surprising the management miss this simple concept.

Have seen managers reward workers who show up on time and crank out volumes of simple, repetitive work. Easy to do because these people are not encountering hard problems that require manager’s time & attention. They generate good metrics and free your time.

However your most valuable employees tackle the more difficult work. They are not going to crank out numbers fixing typos. They do research. They negotiate with other departments, suppliers and customers to find good solutions.

Managers have ignored female coworkers contributions I have worked with. It’s because they don’t pay attention to their informally teaching coworkers skills, and ignore how difficult are the issues they tackle. It creates resentment and often leads to your best people leaving.

An Insurance Company rewarding their best salesman. This company focused on the metric of sales calls per agent. The vice president giving the award note the best salesman only made half the sales calls per the goal. “Can you imagine how many sales he would of made if he met the sale call goal?”

The agent responded “Can you imagine how much your sales team would sell if they made as few sales calls as I do?”

The question is Where Can You Make a Bigger Difference at Work?

This riff was inspired by Bloomberg’s Jerry Useem’s well thought out “The Hardest Workers Don't Do the Best Work”. Worth your time to find out why your best workers “do fewer things, and seem to have better developed mechanisms for deciding what not to do.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/the-hardest-workers-don-t-do-the-best-work

Could Your Job be Replaced by a Robot?

Most of us think, “No way a machine could do what I do.” Over your whole assignment that may be true. But there are simple repetitive parts of your job could be automated or done with artificial intelligence (AI) programming.

The drive to work and deliveries will be done by self-driving vehicles. Note auto-pilots can already take off, fly and land aircraft with minimal intervention by pilots. The Navy has already tested self-flying aircrafts on carrier decks, the hardest landing task for pilots.

Computers are better at sorting and searching than we are. Your work organization could be better managed by programming.

Millions of hours legal research are no longer done by young lawyers. The AI research programs are faster, cheaper and more accurate.

In medical fields doctors enter symptoms and programs like IBM’s Watson propose more alternative diseases for doctors to evaluate than their memory would hold. The result is less misdiagnosis.

When I started working drafting was done by hand, and every manager had a secretary or access to a secretary pool. There were dozens of secretaries in my department. Today my department has 3 office assistants for ~150 people. We all write emails, documents & PowerPoint’s instead of memos, and schedule meetings with Outlook.

All these jobs are white collar jobs being automated or out sourced. Parts of all our work can be replaced.

The good news is what can’t be automated is deep knowledge and judgment. We need to do is determine what part of our careers is most valuable, and then focus to be move productive there.

What parts of you job are grinds? Just time consuming. We need to minimizing those tasks, and focus on making money for our companies.

Not saying there will not be change in our working world. It is determining what is valued and providing those services.

What Should You Be Doing Right Now?

You are reading this because you want to be better. You want to be successful. You want to be recognized as a leader.

How do you accomplish these goals (and more)? Thinking Smarter? A Grand vision for the Future? Better Planning?

Focus on now, and do what you know needs to be done.

The execution now is more important that the grand vision. Daily doing beats big dreams time after time.

And don’t focus on the Urgent. Make time for the Important. Somehow it gets put off too long.

Credit Bruce Kasanoff’s article “The No. 1 Secret To Career Success”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucekasanoff/2016/05/20/the-1-secret-to-career-success/#3924fc9128cd

Resolution Follow Thru

Have you failed yet? (How about not even started?) You are not alone. Over 9 of 10 diets have had a cheat day, set back, or even just a “I gained weight” by 2 weeks into the new year. (Was trying to hold my gains, but currently up 2 pounds.)

America financial success is known for the Scientific Method, which translates to trial & error & error & error & …

Failure is not a bad thing. We learn from our failures and our successes.

To really achieve your success this year try measuring and tracking your goal.

Have a spreadsheet where have recorded my steps and weight since 2010. Know now that temporary weight jumps come and go. That 2 pound spike will be gone in a day or two of sticking to my diet. The two pounds to lose will take 2 months more most likely to be permanent. This I have learned from a simple tracking sheet filled out mostly daily.

Fill out a post it with data to take it to the office. Then recorded every day or so. But can go back now to see where have successfully lost before and stay motivated to succeed. Learning is the benefit of actually writing down your results.

To get your resolutions done, start tracking results and be grateful you wrote them down. Time will show you succeeded despite the failures.

New Standard of Excellence

Not often I recommend an article from 2004 to read. But this article by Dr. Atul Gawande leads to a new standard of excellence. Anyone with a basic statics education is familiar with the bell curve. Most medicine is successful in the middle of the curve. Sometimes treatment at the low end of the curve.

Dr. Warren Warwick’s example at the end of the article shows how you get off the chart medical treatment of cystic fibrosis. He made a study of what it takes to do better than everyone else. He believed that excellence came from seeing, on a daily basis, the difference between being 99.5-per-cent successful and being 99.95-per-cent successful. Warwick’s combination of focus, aggressiveness, and inventiveness is what makes him extraordinary.

“What the best may have, above all, is a capacity to learn and adapt—and to do so faster than everyone else.”

The question is why do you want to be extraordinary?

What are you doing today to get there?

Are you in Dr. Warwick’s territory?

The Bell Curve

What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?

The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/06/the-bell-curve

Day by Day Success

Success is built day by day. It does not appear magically overnight. The overnight successes you see on the news come after years of hard work.

What should be on your daily to do list?

•       Care about others
•       Listen & take feedback
•       Work on the important projects
•       Learn something new
•       Be 1% better than yesterday
•       Take Action
•       Repeat often

Build your success today.

Values Manage Your Career

Your work is strongly affected by how you feel about it. The more important you think it is, the more value and purpose you see. Drives us to be better.

My work is driven by these values:

1.      Make the World Better.

2.      Think (Disruptively)

3.      Productive Work

4.      Help Others

5.      Mastery, Meaning & Wisdom

#1 Make the World Better is influenced by Bill Boeing’s value “To Improve the World”.  Want leave the world a better place because of what I do. Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, Rick Warren, Monet, Robert Schuler, Napoleon Hill are a few of the people we respect because of what they have done improving the world.

#2 Thinking Disruptively does not mean I want attention or to annoy people. What it means is we can always serve the customer better. Using new technologies, materials or applying old skills in different ways. There is always a better idea and way. Think about it deeper, ask tough questions, and share your insights. 

Note: disruptive thinkers often pay a high price for not appearing to be a team player. My solution is to explain the why behind questions, be very nice about it, and to execute my work for the team.

#3 Productive Work means creating and maximizing value for customers. Metrics are often used to manage work, but the wrong metric can lead to mediocre results. Focus instead on continuous improvement, reducing waste and organizing efforts.

#4 Help Others is charity and doing good for family, friends and people around the world. The small things done for others will be more rewarding and important than any payday. Serving coffee, washing dishes, picking up trash, and teaching are personal examples where the reward is not financial.

When I was broke figured we should give 10% of our time to charity. Work 40 hours a week equals give away 4 hours a week. Much better than another night watching TV shows or working unnecessary overtime.

#5 Mastery, Meaning and Wisdom means not only developing talents, but also teaching the next generations to do those skills. When involved in solving problems with people, often taught how I did it to my co-workers. It leveraged my knowledge, made the shop more productive, and freed me to tackle new problems.

What do You Value? 

Spend a little time thinking about why you do more than just enough, or where you care more. Your values guide you towards the career you will love and excel at.