#leadership

If You’re Making These 3 Mistakes, Your #company Has Bad Customer Service
▻https://hackernoon.com/if-youre-making-these-3-mistakes-your-company-has-bad-customer-service-9

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I often wonder how people don’t get what great customer service looks like — in any #business.Think about it. If you go into a restaurant and the host or hostess is on his or her phone, not paying attention, as a customer you immediately get aggravated. Or if the waiter never checks back to see if you need anything after the food has arrived. These little things greatly affect the way a person perceives the business — and they’re so easy to fix.Another example I’m sure we can all relate to is going to see the doctor.How often do you actually see your doctor at the time you scheduled? Almost never. You set an appointment for 2:00 P.M. and don’t end up seeing them until 2:40 P.M., maybe 2:30 P.M. if you’re lucky.That’s awful customer service.As someone who has built multiple companies in industries (...)

#startup #leadership #customer-service

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Taking a break from the race to the future
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Future: Fast Forward — a different view on the impact of innovationImage retrieved at ImgurIoT, #blockchain, Machine Learning, #ai. What will really be the impact of all this blazing technological innovation? Instead of what technologies we use and how we deploy them, very human factors such as ethics, knowledge of self and meaning, or purpose, are going to make the biggest difference in the future. For individuals as well as organizations. Proposing a different view on the impact of technology.Soon, Formula 1 racing will no longer take place on wheels but in the air, a few meters above a futuristically illuminated track with the twists and turns of your average roller coaster. Including loopings. And perhaps partially in Virtual Reality.“We have to look at reality with different eyes, in (...)

#leadership #futurism #tech

Planning a Cross-Department Project
▻https://hackernoon.com/planning-a-cross-department-project-5270d6165578?source=rss----3a8144eab

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Using the Loops Communication ModelPhoto by Maarten van den HeuvelLet’s be clear, the meeting topic is certainly foggy in many places and there are different approaches that fail at certain point. That is a big true.So far my three previous articles were about a theoretical approach to tackle not only this issue but to reduce communication complexities and improve efficiency.A Communication Model Based on Blockchain describes the basis of the system organization to start building an effective communication environment.From now on, I would like to call it Loops Communication Model (LCM) as the feedback loop is the basic unit of the whole theory and its core element.Boring #meetings? I is about how to apply the model consistently and Boring Meetings? II sees the problem from the meetings (...)

#project-management #product-management #productivity #leadership

Knowing When and How to Delegate in Your Company
▻https://hackernoon.com/knowing-when-and-how-to-delegate-in-your-company-6ac058136f3d?source=rss

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While having a steady flow of work is essential to any company’s growth, constantly staying busy isn’t always a good sign. Granted, being a small business owner requires sacrifices and that can mean acting as your own accountant, office manager, sales rep, and everything in between. Eventually, however, the natural scope of a business will grow and the tasks at hand will become larger and more demanding; this is when it’s time to delegate.Those with the entrepreneurial spirit tend to be independent idealists with just a dash of stubbornness. Finding their calling by paving their own way to success, starting a business requires dedication and sacrifice. Many new businesses don’t survive their first year, but CEOs with honed #delegation skills boost their odds of success right out of the (...)

#operations #infographics #startup-lessons #leadership

The Canary Dies
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Well into the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into coal mines as an early-warning signal for toxic gases, primarily carbon monoxide. The birds, being more sensitive, would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape or put on protective respirators. (Wikipedia — Sentinel Species)At a conference last fall, I chatted with some other attendees, and realized that I wasn’t alone in experiencing a certain pattern. Granted these folks were self selected — they signed up for a conference on product development (Agile and Lean focused to be specific)— but I found the similarities interesting nonetheless.So…getting personal. I am what you might call “sensitive”. Sometimes others call it out as “systems thinking” or “being perceptive”, but let’s use sensitive for now.It (...)

#ux #leadership #change #agile #systems-thinking

#Why[Some Tool]
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I was having a heated discussion with someone recently about story points. It was one of those standard “that’s not the fault of story points” arguments that goes nowhere. I realized a very common pattern — one that I have found to signal an opportunity for “refactoring” common approaches. It is age-old…basic decoupling and separation of concerns.The QuestionWith every process, tool, methodology, and framework you adopt…ask:What job(s) are we hiring [the thing] to do?List them out. What you’ll find, is that you are frequently asking [the thing] to do more than one job. Let’s take a simple example: story points.Example: Story Point JobsEstimate duration for a projectKeep track of progress towards a bigger goal OR deadlineKnow how many stories to “pull” into a sprintCalculate some sort of productivity (...)

#agile #leadership #product-management #innovation

Just One More Sprint !?
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In this post I am going to use a common scenario to highlight some key product development prioritization concepts. Specifically, we are going to dig in to the decision to stop one effort, and start another effort.Do We Keep Going?Let’s start with an example. When I draw it out below, you might say “this is a no brainer!” On some level it is, but stick with me.Example…I think a new workflow will generate $45k in extra revenue monthly (the Cost of Delay). We work for two weeks, and realize some very high percentage of that value ($42k/month). Should we “finish the project” (in this case add an additional option to the workflow), or should we stop immediately and take on new work?Note how there is $3k left on the table…it is value yet to extract.Comparing CD3 (For Work Done, and Work (...)

#agile #design #leadership #product-management

Better Outcomes. Less Drag
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With endurance sports coaching we:Train for the demands of the goal event(s).Take only necessary risks.Anything that can give the athlete a reasonable shot at their goal event with LESS risk (overtraining, injury, etc.)…we try/do. For most motivated athletes, training hard is not the problem. Training smart is a lot tougher.The same is true with product development. Being (and looking) busy is relatively easy. Success theater is easy. Adding process, rules, policy, reporting, and guardrails is easy. Working with minimal process overhead is hard. Fluid working agreements are hard. Transparency with outcomes is hard. Working focused and smart is a lot tougher.I think it was Arlo Belshee who once said something like “scaling is fundamentally a question of what must remain the consistent, and (...)

#agile #innovation #leadership #design #management

Boring #meetings ? Part II
▻https://hackernoon.com/boring-meetings-part-ii-a4c46a608df8?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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Optimizing and preparing a meetingPhoto by William StittAttending to a meeting moderation workshop can be quite interesting to get closer to classic moderation techniques and structured meetings in order to try to listen how to tackle typical meeting problems:Too many meetingsNever-ending meetingsNot structured meetingsEveryone had those. If you never faced at least one of those problems this post is not for you.My intention is not to reproduce the whole workshop but to mention what I consider the structural backbone of a successful meeting.Setting the MeetingWe are genetically engineered to do one task at a time. Which means that we can not do multiple tasks and achieve better qualities at the same time. Period.So, the one that is moderating can not take notes at the same time, or write an (...)

#product-management #management #productivity #leadership

The efficiencies of leading with trust
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-efficiencies-of-leading-with-trust-1649149ccc83?source=rss----3a8144

Everyone likes to say they trust their employees but often their processes, #management style and policies say otherwise.For example: When strict policies exist in an organization the argument often is “but what if someone does X and Y?” So to prevent it, a policy is enforced — for everyone. This is basically saying “if one person could take advantage of it, we can’t trust anyone.” They focus on the potential bad apples to define the rules for everyone, including the majority who’s not.Leading with control vs. Leading with trustA controlling environment creates a slacking workforce. People will do just what they’re asked to do and not more.“Why should I work extra hours, if you accrue my vacation days by the decimals?”If an organization wants to get trust and commitment from their employees, it has (...)

#leadership #tech-management #leading-with-control #leading-with-trust

Life’s collaborative lessons transform #business
▻https://hackernoon.com/lifes-collaborative-lessons-transform-business-aa1f4348fd27?source=rss--

Organizations have three options: 1. Hit the wall 2. Optimize and delay hitting the wall3. Redesign for resilience — simultaneously optimizing existing networks whilst embracing disruptive #innovation and working collaboratively with partners.Dawn Vance, Global Supply Chain Director at Nike, in Hutchins (2011)Living the questions that initiate the transition to a commons-based collaborative economy describes transformative innovation from within the third horizon. It is an example of how H3 [the 3rd Horizon] is already present today but unevenly distributed. A fundamental transformation of our economic and monetary systems is becoming a necessity, if not inevitability. [This is an excerpt from Designing Regenerative Cultures. If you want an introduction to the 3 Horizon Framework for (...)

#culture #leadership #sustainability

Why businesses fail at machine learning
▻https://hackernoon.com/why-businesses-fail-at-machine-learning-fbff41c4d5db?source=rss----3a814

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I’d like to let you in on a secret: when people say ‘machine learning’ it sounds like there’s only one discipline here. There are two, and if businesses don’t understand the difference, they can experience a world of trouble.A tale of two machine learningsImagine hiring a chef to build you an oven or an electrical engineer to bake bread for you. When it comes to machine learning, that’s the kind of mistake I see businesses making over and over.If you’re opening a bakery, it’s a great idea to hire an experienced baker well-versed in the nuances of making delicious bread and pastry. You’d also want an oven. While it’s a critical tool, I bet you wouldn’t charge your top pastry chef with the task of knowing how to build that oven; so why is your company focused on the equivalent for machine (...)

#machine-learning #technology #leadership #business #artificial-intelligence

Boring Meetings ? Your Problem Is Something Else
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Photo by davide ragusaYes, you all hate long, senseless and tedious meetings that are not going anywhere. There are also well defined rules to not have those meetings.Set a purpose and goal, have an agenda, assign a moderator, make summaries, be free to leave the meeting if you are not needed and you don’t need anything from it…These meeting rules are good, but they are nothing else than consequences of people needing to reshape what most of the time is not well organized.I do believe the problem is bigger than only boring meetings. It is all about the structure of communication between the business units.Your problems are not the meetings. Your problem is the whole system that makes the meetings boring.In a previous article I was proposing a new model based to reduce unnecessary (...)

#leadership #product #boring-meetings #strategy #product-management

Notes from Radical Candor — Kim Scott
▻https://hackernoon.com/notes-from-radical-candor-kim-scott-b663c019d025?source=rss----3a8144eab

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I recently completed Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity’. She wrote this book on her Radical Candor method which she designed after a highly successful #management career at Google followed by Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management.Before reading this book you might want to check out these 2 blogposts which led to this book:Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good BossOn Receiving (and Truly Hearing) Radical CandorI am sharing my favourite parts from the book here.Guidance, team, and results: these are the responsibilities of any boss. This is equally true for anyone who manages people — CEOs, middle managers, and first-time leadersAs a manager you have fulfill your three responsibilities: 1) to create a culture of guidance (...)

#product-management #radical-candor-kim-scott #radical-candor #leadership

How Highly Resilient People Survive to Thrive
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[Photo by Keith Hardy on Unsplash]Resilience is the universal human capacity to face, overcome, and even be strengthened by experiences of adversity — bending like bamboo instead of breaking.“Resiliency is an attitude; it’s your belief that you can conquer anything. It is the ability to go from days to weeks to months to years to reach your destination, defining and re-defining your personal goals along the way. At times, it means using adversity to find the opportunities that lead us to our true destiny.”— Survive to ThriveCreating your thoughts, following your own path, ignoring skeptics, and dusting yourself off every time you fall requires discipline over energy and drive.Often, that comes solely from within. How we cultivate that inner focus is by taking steps on our personal journey with (...)

#success #resilience #inspiration #failure #leadership

How to Start Setting Long Term Goals
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-start-setting-long-term-goals-3e5dccb2f274?source=rss----3a8144ea

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By Praveen Tipirneni, CEO of Morphic Therapeutic Inc. Originally published on Quora.When beginning a large project or complex task, the problems you’ll run into aren’t always apparent.This can be an issue, because lack of clarity often leads to an unproductive response. We often rush into implementing new solutions before thinking about whether we’re even solving the right problem.On the other hand, it’s possible to get so wrapped up in trying to understand the problem that you never begin working on solutions.The trick is: You want to get a sense of the actual problem, but you also need to take measurable and readily quantifiable steps to keep yourself from getting bogged down.Over the past few years, I experienced this first hand while trying to bring a TEDx event to the auditorium in the (...)

#personal-development #goal-setting #productivity #leadership #self-improvement

How to Build a Project Management Organization in 90 Days
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-a-project-management-organization-in-90-days-783b907f4a12?s

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I recently took an IT #leadership role with a biotechnology company where software development is a critical capability and had the opportunity to build a Project Management Organization (PMO) from scratch. This essay represents my #agile and pragmatic point of view on project management and organizational change management.Have a Vision.What does a Good PMO capability look like? Write it down as the PMO charter document. Your team will need this mission statement, principles, and responsibilities as well as SMART metrics for how you will measure success. This is your truth and it will seed the culture that grows and guides the team around you.In my case, my mission statement went something like this:“Our Project Management Office (PMO) is a service-oriented capability whose purpose is  (...)

#project-management #coaching #project-management-org

How great teams learn from #failure.
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-great-teams-learn-from-failure-66a34985249e?source=rss----3a8144eabf

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credit: ▻https://bit.ly/2H6WGwo

license: (CC BY 2.0)Mistakes, when handled appropriately, can be pretty great. Your team has identified a failure point, addressed it, and everyone has learned from the experience. Making mistakes is one of the main ways people experience professional growth.All the benefits of mistakes go away if the team does not handle the failure effectively. Below is an explanation of how teams turn failure into a purely negative experience, followed by strategies for benefiting from failure.“What are they going to do about it?” I asked my wife after she described a mistake someone made at her work. She explained how senior #leadership would perform an investigation that:Would determine who was at fault for the error, andDetermine what repercussions the perpetrator should  (...)

#great-teams #management #learn-from-failure

How we run bol.com with 60 autonomous teams
▻https://hackernoon.com/scaling-agile-bol-com-69a11a47418?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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Scaling #agile @ bol.comAs an organization designer, I’m always looking for examples of progressive organizations. Bol.com, the largest online retailer in The Netherlands and Belgium, is definitely a great example that we can learn from.Every day, over 1200 people work together to create the #1 online shopping experience for their customers. Their IT department consists of more than 350 engineers that are part of 60 cross-functional teams. Staying organized at this scale is definitely a challenge.In this article I’ll share some of my findings. But wait, there is more: we created an explainer video! If you prefer visuals over text, scroll down to the bottom to view them immediately.Fleets and SpacesA Fleet consists of 4–5 closely related teams that share a common mission. A Space consists of (...)

#retail #organizational-culture #organization-design #leadership

The 10 Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs to Develop
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-10-skills-every-entrepreneur-needs-to-develop-a268a0ce6584?source=rs

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The new world requires a new skillset. Are you prepared?The first world is shifting towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Defined as the fusion of technologies which blur the lines between the digital, physical and biological spheres. With advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, The Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing and autonomous vehicles characterizing it.In this new era, often called the Information Economy — workers aren’t valued for their productivity on the assembly line, or for their ability to work productively as a cog within a larger machine. They’re valued for their ability to innovate rapidly to outpace their competition. From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of the Fortune 500 companies have maintained their place atop the (...)

#startup #entrepreneurship #design #leadership #life

Help! My mentee isn’t listening to me!
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Quick article while I wait for Game 2 of Warriors Cavs. Last week I had a fantastic conversation with a top employee on my team. He’s an up and coming Senior Engineer who recently started mentoring newer recruits. He asked me:“As a mentor, should I be a sounding board or should I take on a more active role and give advice? I’m uncomfortable telling people what to do.”This is a great question because there are many approaches to mentoring and #leadership styles. Sometimes it makes sense to apply what is referred to as a “coaching” style, where you ask leading questions in an effort to try and get the mentee to figure out answers on their own.More typically, mentees have some expectation that they will learn from a mentor’s past experiences and get tangible advice. If they wanted a sounding board (...)

#coaching #self-improvement #mentee-isnt-listening #mentorship

#momentum
▻https://hackernoon.com/momentum-58ec98e7209c?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

I’ve heard many a leader, exec and entrepreneur lament a lack of “urgency” within their teams. It’s a natural reaction and something I have definitely felt myself. It comes from not observing the expected, and perhaps necessary, rate of progress. Most of the time that is a true and fair assessment of the situation — progress is stalling, or perhaps it has stalled altogether.These conversations often come around to how some of the #team are lacking the same sense of urgency we have, or not caring as much as we do or not working hard enough. Which leads to considerations of “wartime vs. peacetime” or communication strategies to explicitly state the level of urgency required. There are attempts to make the team work with more urgency but they only cause further damage.This is because it is a (...)

#leadership #product-development #startup-lessons

Dieter Rams 10 Principles of Good #design
▻https://hackernoon.com/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-good-design-e7790cc983e9?source=rss----3a81

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Let’s dig in to why this is such entertainingly bad design….Before we dive into the theory of design — browse here for more examples of awful design.Back? It’s important to understand why good design is so important. People make subtle design mistakes when designing everyday objects constantly. As Don Norman says in the Design of Everyday Things:“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”Most designers don’t design things for people. They design solutions to their own problems (i.e. I want to make attractive things, I want to finish this project etc). When Don wrote DoET he was speaking about kettles, microwaves, and doors. But the same applies to User Interfaces, public transportation systems and the (...)

#entrepreneurship #leadership #life #startup

Good Process vs. Bad Process
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Busy with the newborn, but still pondering, tweeting, writing some thinky posts (influenced by the lack of sleep, no doubt), and occasionally doing short, low fidelity podcasts).Last night’s sleepy list…when is process “good” ?Good process (is) | Bad process (is)Encourages mindfulness | Encourages mindlessnessFlexible to local concerns | Inflexible to local concernsAdaptable, frequently challenged/improved | Set in stone. “Just because…”Mostly “pulled” because it is valuable | Mostly “pushed” on to participantsCore principles understood | Automatic/forced adherenceEncourages conversations/collaboration | Reduces quality/quantity of conversationsCo-created/designed with “users” | Designed in vacuum and imposedValue to all participants | One-sided valueIncreases confidence in outcomes | Detached from  (...)

#management #kanban #agile #leadership #design