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Guest blog article by Lynda McDaniel

Summary

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Kyle Wiens calls himself a “grammar stickler.” He explains that everyone applying for a position at either of his companies, iFixit or Dozuki, is required to take a grammar test. With the exception of a couple of extenuating circumstances—dyslexia and English-language learners—he has a “‘zero tolerance approach’ to grammar mistakes.”

The difference between “too/to,” “its/it’s” and “their/they’re/there” is important, especially at his companies where the main products are user manuals and technical documentation. But grammar matters at every company, he explains. Whether in blogs and articles, e-mails or company websites, Wiens believes “your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence.”

Commentary

Wiens comments echo my own efforts to elevate the quality of writing in the workplace. I appreciate his insights about people judging us with the clues they have—which today are often only our words. Fortunately, people seem to be increasingly interested in refreshing their grammar and punctuation skills. So I question Wien’s rigidity about a single mistake. Excellence is an honorable goal, but not perfectionism. I find perfectionism makes my clients quiver and quake when facing a writing project. It shuts down their creativity and actually causes errors.

Discussion

How are your  grammar and punctuation skills? What is the quality of writing in your workplace? Do you ascribe to a “zero tolerance approach”? Where do you stand on the difference between perfectionism and excellence?

Additional Resources

If you Google “cloud computing,” you are likely to find more than 200,000,000 results. Yes, that is 200 million of them. 

But you don’t even need to Google it. Just look around your office, and you are likely to find many cloud services that are in place:  from web content management, to e-commerce, sales and marketing, storage and backup, financial applications, web conferencing, and the list goes on.

On one side, there are some compelling benefits for cloud services, ranging from significant cost advantages, to easy access across the globe, and offloading the operational headaches of these systems to someone else.

But on the other side, there are risks relating to security, confidentiality, content ownership, stability of providers, among others.

Have you adopted cloud computing and to what extent? Share your experience with cloud computing in the following survey for a chance to win a copy of Cloud Surfing by Thomas Koulopoulos!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cloud-services

Join us on Thursday, August 2nd for our Complimentary Lunch & Learn Webinar, "Living in the Cloud" to hear Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing, A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success, provide valuable insights about this topic.

Haven't heard about our summary+commentary (s+c*d) format? Learn more!

Guest blog article by Lynda McDaniel

Summary

Alison draws from a Wall Street Journal article about grammar gaffes invading the workplace. She offers some legitimate reasons for this, such as words and usage have always changed over time. (After all, we don’t sound like Shakespeare!) She takes a close look at more common gaffes in today’s business writing, such as its/it’s, who/whom, less/fewer, their/they’re/there.

The article also explores her concern that the subjective tense is missing from most business writing today. As she explains, subjunctive tense is used when posing a hypothetical. We should say, “If I were the manager,” instead of, “If I was the manager.” The articles closes with six tips from author George Orwell, including 1) Never use a long word where a short one will do and 2) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Read the full article.

Commentary

I agree with Alison that good grammar is vital. But what concerns me more than the missing subjunctive is our growing struggle to craft cohesive thoughts. Texts and tweets have taken their toll. We need to write longer and more thoughtfully in order to engage our readers and tap into insights and creative ideas. We can learn to write faster and more effectively, and when we do, we enjoy increased results, respect, and revenues.

Discussion

How is your writing changing? When are texts or short e-mails the perfect response? When do you need to spend more time developing your thoughts? Neuroscientists have proven that we have all kinds of great ideas just waiting for us to tap into them, and writing can help us discover them. Do you spend time exploring your thoughts and creativity?

Additional Resources

Collaborating with others is crucial for getting meaningful goals accomplished, especially in today’s work environment where we are increasingly interdependent on each other. Trying to be collaborate all the time however, responding to incoming requests as they come in, being constantly available and responsive on e-mail and Instant Messaging and ad-hoc interactions, would leave us drained and would be at the detriment of our individual focused effort, not to mention that it would also reduce the effectiveness of our collaborative effort. So how can we solve this puzzle and fully leverage our collaborative effort while staying energized and maintaining our ability to focus, imagine, and create?

Make your Collaboration Zone™ shine

• First: Make it known to your team that you are in the Collaborative Zone™. Whether this means scheduling “office hours” or informally indicating your availability via your instant messaging status, your open door, or your bowl of M&M’s at your desk (or fruits and nuts, fresh or dried, for a healthier environment). Occasionally, you might even take a walk around the office and see who is available for some brainstorming or informal learning.

Additional Resources

First: Balance between presentation and interaction. Reduce the number of slides and increase the number of interactions. The slides serve as the anchor, but all the details can happen outside the slides, such as on the flip chart, through your own storytelling, and interactions with the audience. If you haven’t come across “graphic recording,” check out Visual Meetings by David Sibbet to learn about the art and science of graphic recording and how this can create engagements in meetings and beyond.

Second: Edit each slide so it is easy on the eye and on the brain. Follow the 3x5 rule with no more than 3 to 5 key points per slide and 3 to 5 key words per point. But of course you have a lot of valuable information to present, so how can you stick to the 3x5 rule? There are ways to do so. One viable one is to have hyperlinks supporting documents and webpages. This allows you to dive into the details when the opportunity presents itself. The details are always a click away instead of being in the way.

Third: Add charts, graphics, and animations that are relevant, and omit the gimmicky stuff. A picture is worth a thousand words they say, but what they don’t tell you is that, in a presentation, this is only true if the picture is relevant and is adding amazing value to the point that you’re trying to make. Otherwise, the picture, or graph, and especially the cute animation, can largely backfire and stand out as a big distraction and a barrier to your purpose.

Additional Resources

• Complimentary Lunch & Learn Webinar: Microsoft Office 2010 Tips & Tricks

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 Techniques workshop

• Creating Compelling Presentations workshop

Do you remember the days when you needed a dedicated business card scanning device with its proprietary software to scan business cards? And when integration with other business applications was rudimentary? Well that is then and this is now. The ScanBizCards app is now. After presenting at a conference recently and finding myself with 50+ business cards, this prompted me to take a look at the latest business card scanning apps, which resulted in getting ScanBizCards for the iPhone and significantly streamlining the process of managing business cards.

The ScanBizCards app in a Nutshell

1. You start the app and take a picture of the card. ScanBizCards gives you a nice visual of the scanning process mimicking an actual scanner.

2. ScanBizCards recognizes the text on the business car and therefore populates the name, title, company name, e-mail address, phone, and other relevant fields. When in doubt, the app allows you to make adjustments and reassign and/or edit the unrecognized information.

3. Now comes the magic. You are presented with several options including

• Sending an e-mail to the contact

• Connecting on LinkedIn

• Exporting to Salesforce.com (as well as Evernote and others)

• Adding a follow-up reminder

• Emailing the card

• And more!

4. In addition, your card is stored in your device (my iPhone in this case, even though the app is also available for Android and Windows), and you can easily go through the cards that you scan just like you would if you had the paper cards in your hands.

(5. You throw the original card in the recycling bin!)

Estimated productivity gain

If you regularly deal with business cards and more than just a few at a time, you can expect significant productivity gains from ScanBizCards. The obvious gain is the time saving in getting the contact information in your preferred database (my estimate would be a saving of 5 minutes or more per card).

But the more important gain is the ability to quickly integrate the contact information with your various applications and cloud services (such as LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, Evernote, etc.) and therefore being able to easily manage the follow-up with this contact. This can translate into another saving of 10 or more minutes per contact and the opportunity to leverage your contacts instead of having their business cards collect dust on your desk.

More resources

• ScanBizCards App from ScanBiz Mobile Solutions

• ScanBizCards Review

• ScanBizCards Review Video

At the micro-level

Staying focused means sticking to the desired train of thoughts, relating to a specific topic or task, without having our mind wandering into unrelated and unnecessary areas. In today’s ADD world, this is very challenging. There are many tempting distractions around us and within us that keep taking us off track. Our brain has become very scattered and jumping often from one thing to the next.

To address this challenge, we need to work at “arranging” the environment to be more conducive to focus, and on retraining our brain to be better at focusing. Arranging the environment means taking precautions to minimize external interruptions, ranging from having agreements with our, to closing our office door or putting a visible sign at our cubicle, or putting on headsets, among other measures. Re-training our brain requires some effort. However, Micro-Planning™ and the timer can go a long way in helping this effort.

At the macro-level

Staying focused in this case means keeping our projects, activities, resources, and decisions all aligned and all working together to achieve a bigger goal.

To address this challenge, there need to be a clear vision and well defined end results in the first place. But this is only the beginning. What is more important is learning to apply “strategic thinking” project-by-project, task-by-task, and moment-by-moment. Strategic thinking, simply put, consists of reluctantly asking the “why” question. Why are we embarking on this project? Why are we putting resources in this area? Why am I spending time on this task now? And recalibrating accordingly.

In between the micro and macro

Here comes our daily focus, which requires managing focused and collaborative effort, not to mention our energy and our mood, as we manoeuver between tasks, unexpected demands, and the ups and downs that go with them.

To address this challenge, we need to work in bursts of focused, collaborative, and play periods. It is almost like wearing different hats to achieve each of these goals.

Which level is more challenging for you? And how do you stay focused? Join the conversation by including your comment below!

Additional Resources

• Complimentary Webinar Staying Focused in an Add World

• Accomplishing More With Less Webinar Series

Guest blog article by Liz Guthridge

How’s your world—your VUCA world, that is?

VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, a term coined by the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the weeks before September 11, 2001. It’s a popular phrase with Bob Johansen, a distinguished fellow and former president of the Institute for the Future.

According to Dr. Johansen, who shared his 2011-2021 forecast at theAssociation of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) Global Conference in early April, our VUCA world is not going away. In fact it’s just going to spin faster during the next decade.

In his talk “External Future Forces That Will Disrupt the Practice of Change Management,” Dr. Johansen noted that VUCA is not necessarily doom and gloom. While VUCA can provide threats, it also can offer opportunities, especially if you translate VUCA as “vision, understanding, clarity and agility.”

As for his two big predictions for 2022 for organizational change agents, they are:  

1. “The digital natives (now 16 years or younger) will create new practices to make change through gaming.” (The other key phrase besides gaming in this sentence is “make.” Dr. Johansen predicts that a culture of makers will drive the next generation of change. And as a result, leaders need to show the “maker instinct” trait.)  
 

2. “Reciprocity-based innovation will focus on the economic, social and psychological value of reciprocity.” (Two important traits for leaders are smart-mob organizing and commons creating. Think Creative Commons.)

Dr. Johansen challenged the 825 of us in attendance to figure out how to help people and organizations adapt to these changes and others. To do this, we should watch our terms and our questions.

For example, one of the questions we should be asking is not, “What’s new?” but “What’s ready to take off?” Quoting author William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” Johansen said Gibson was absolutely right when he said “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”

Both gaming and reciprocity-based innovation are here already. If you use or are familiar with Dropbox, Evernote, Doodle or any of the other cloud-based tools that offer free basic levels, you know about reciprocity-based innovation. The companies and others like them are giving away free services and products in the faith that they will get back even more in return. (And yes, they also are collecting our data….)

As for games, their value is that “they present obstacles we volunteer to overcome” Dr. Johansen explained. Gaming experiences are a powerful way to learn. 

In thinking about terms, Dr. Johansen observed that change management is an outdated term. Nobody wants to be managed anymore. And change is everywhere all the time. 

Yes! But what is that new term?

As I continue to mull that over, I will commit to these three actions to help myself and others better adapt to our ever evolving VUCA world:

• Get fit. According to Dr. Johansen, this is the age of the corporate athlete. We need to be organizationally, mentally and physically fit. This supports what Tony Schwartz has been advising with The Energy Project. The mental fitness also reinforces what Dr. David Rock of theNeuroLeadership Group teaches about the importance of keeping people in a “toward” state. Otherwise, it’s too easy to hijack people’s brains, which makes them want to fight or flee.  
  

• Do peripheral learning to enhance peripheral vision. To look for people, insights and resources that will help us fine-tune and invigorate our ways of working, we need exposure to things outside our regular stomping grounds. This means hanging out with different people from a variety of different disciplines than our own and becoming aware of what they’re doing and thinking. Exposure to cross-cultural experiences is also helpful. Breaking out of our echo chamber is more important than ever.
  

• Refresh language frequently. This involves more than updating our obsolete language, as I recently wrote about. It’s also tracking signals to see what people are thinking and talking about, and making sure you’re using words, symbols and visuals that resonate with them. 
  

For example, the phrase “executive presentation skills” is so last century. Instead, people want leaders with conversation skills who can build rapport, not just share reports. These leaders—and others too—need to convey complex ideas simply, not simplistically, and listen to what we say.     

What other actions do we need to take? And can you help me find a more up-to-date, accurate phrase for “change management”?   

Note: Please join us next week to get more of Liz's insights at her lunch & learn webinar: Communicate in a more brain-friendly way

Guest blog article by Rick Colosimo

Besides profiling a few prolific users and an "Odd Couple" married couple, complete with female Oscar, with photos, emails, audio, and video adding up to vast amounts of digital storage space, there is a list of a handful of "tell-tale" signs. Signs of digital hoarding include: using all your free space on gmail; a desktop cluttered with icons; digital photos that are mostly bad; and TV shows you don't plan to watch. Suggested "treatments" include: Inbox Zero (made famous by Merlin Mann of 43folders); declaring email bankruptcy; and reducing inflow to your email inbox. 

The real kernel of where this article meant to go is one of the signs that is ignored in the text: "Deleting anything makes you anxious -- even things you can't remember why you saved." Digital storage, by itself, is in a different category than physical hoarding because of the inherent cost-benefit analysis. With no physical outcomes, other than costs for a 2TB hard drive (<$200) every so often, it's hard to compare keeping emails with a pile of old unread newspapers. Certainly, the filing vs piling debate makes the "cost" of storing more even lower -- the generally accepted answer these days is that it's faster to search than maintain a detailed filing system. The search costs go down more than expected because you don't have to search for everything you store, but you have to file everything to have a filing system.

I think the critical distinction is one of attitude and anxiety: if you are anxious, you have a problem regardless of whether you have 100 photos or 100,000. If you search and can't find things, that's a different problem with a specific solution for your situation to create total organization. I find that Quicksilver and Spotlight do quite well at finding things quickly for me with little worries on my part.  

Take a quick look at your primary machine (OmniDiskSweeper is a free lightweight simple sizing tool): how much do you have in various folders?  After doing some cleaning myself, it reports: 

• iTunes (Includes Stanford IOS course in HD and music videos): 50gb

• Documents (includes archived client files and backups as well as my second copy of most mail since I have Outlook for Mac installed too): 26.6 gb

• Pictures: 16.9 gb

• Library (a Mac folder that stores mail, working folders for DevonThink, and IOS backups): 14.3 gb

• Downloads (all my "temp" storage plus working files for learning how to program): 4.2 gb

• All that plus the miscellaneous leaves me with plenty of space on a 256gb solid-state macbook air.

NB: To be fair, I've offloaded 10gb of old Windows PST files to my time capsule, and about 6gb of tutorial videos for Rails/IOS as well. Much of my old music (about 60gb) resides on my still-running Windows Vista desktop on a 500gb hard drive.

What's your digital storage profile look like? What tools do you use to find things easily?

A recent report by RW3 LLC, a cultural training service, found that 46 percent of employees who work on virtual teams said they had never met their virtual team cohorts and 30 percent said they only met them once a year. The report, The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams, was based on a survey of nearly 30,000 employees from multinational companies. The survey also found that:

• The top challenge for virtual team members was the inability to read nonverbal cues (94%).

• There is an absence of collegiality among virtual team members (85%).

• It is difficult to establish rapport and trust in virtual teams (81%).

• Most virtual team members (90%) said they don’t have enough time during virtual meetings to build relationships.

• Managing conflict is more challenging on virtual teams than on conventional teams (73%).

• Decision making is more difficult on virtual teams than on conventional teams (69%).

• It is more challenging to express opinions on virtual teams than on conventional teams (64%) (Hastings, 2010).

If you have been part of a virtual team, you've probably dealt with your share of these challenges and you are wondering about where to do from here. 

Career experts at the Kenan-Flagler business school have produced a comprehensive white paper exploring virtual teams, their benefits and challenges to organizations, and outlined the three key steps that HR and talent management professionals can follow to ensure that virtual team members and leaders in their organizations have the skills, competencies and tools needed to succeed inspite of these challenges. These important steps are:

1. Participate in the selection process of virtual team members and leaders.

2. Ensure for the appropriate selection, training and use of virtual team technologies.

3. Provide training for virtual team members.

Refer to the white paper online or the PDF version for the in-depth review and recommendations.

And how about your experience and recomendation on how you have addressed the virtual team challenges in your environment?