Just wanted to giver you all a heads up on two pieces of software that I came across recently: Cinch and Divvy.

Divvy · Window management at its finest.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Irradiated Software – Cinch

Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as ‘hot zones’. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size.

I use Cinch, as it is simple and suites my needs perfectly. If you needa bit more control or functionality, Divvy might be for you.

From the Economist’s Guru section article on Elliott Jaques:

Jaques (1917-2003) decided that jobs could be defined in terms of their time horizon. For example, a director of marketing might be worried about marketing campaigns for next year, while a salesman on the road is worried about reaching his targets for the week. Jaques also believed that people had a “boss” and a “real boss”. The boss was the person to whom they were nominally responsible, while the real boss was the person to whom they turned to get decisions crucial to the continuation of their work.

The sales manager in charge of a salesforce would not have a longer time horizon than the people in his salesforce. So when a salesman wanted a decision on something affecting his ability to deliver to his clients, he would go over the head of the sales manager for that decision. Jaques called this “level skipping”, and identified it as a dangerous pathology in any hierarchy.

He then looked at the time horizons of people, their bosses and their real bosses, and he found that people with a time horizon of less than three months treated those with a horizon of 3–12 months as their real bosses, and so on up the scale. He identified seven different time horizons, from three months to 20 years, and argued that organisations, no matter how complex, should have seven levels of hierarchy, each corresponding to a different managerial time horizon. Jaques’s theory has come to be known as RO (requisite organisation).

This reminds me of the Tolstoy quotation from C.S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring”:

“When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent, which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood-what he had already guessed-that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and a more real system-the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris, Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.”

“I wasn’t really being asked “Does Agile scale?” (By now, though, we know the answer: yes.) What I was really being asked was, “Does Agile work in large, dysfunctional organizations? Can I keep doing all of the ineffective things I’m required to do and still say I’m Agile?”

James Shore: Stumbling Through Mediocrity

In an recent article for Future Changes, Bill Arconati – Confluence Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian – argues that Enterprise Wikis are much better than contemporary e-mail culture , creating what he calls an opt-in culture:

“In an opt-in culture, employees contribute to conversations where they gain the most satisfaction and have the largest impact. They look beyond their tiny fiefdoms and seek out situations where they can add value and offer their expertise.” – Wikis, “Opt-in Culture” Contribute to a Healthy Organization

Her contrast opt-in culture with its opposite – the opt-out e-mail culture – that completely dominates the business world:

Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate an opt-in culture is by contrasting it to an opt-OUT culture like email. Have you ever left work at the end of the day and thought to yourself, “All I did today was respond to emails?” In email-based companies you frequently spend your days knocking down emails like a bad game of Whac-A-Mole.

The main problem with email is that you have little control over what lands in your inbox. Most emails are either (i) people asking you to do something or (ii) conversations between two or three people (frequently executives) with a dozen innocent bystanders in the cc line. The only way to shut out the noise in an email culture is to opt-out and say “Take me off this thread!”

Even if you successfully filter out mail you don’t want, there’s little you can do about the email you’re NOT receiving. Important management decisions are made every day on your corporate email server without the input of your company’s most interested and qualified employees. For example, I’m in marketing but I’ve worked in product development and corporate finance in past roles. I’d like to think I have something to offer to conversations about product development and financial analysis even though they’re technically outside of my designated role. But in an email culture, I wouldn’t be cc’d on those emails and hence not part of the conversation simply because I’m a marketing guy. Much of the knowledge and experience that I bring to the organization would be completely wasted in an email-based culture.

He is right, there is terrible waste in the fire-and-forget e-mail culture, with massive numbers of hours lost to simply cheking that mails can be safely discarded.

Bill ends by explaining how to use wiki’s to develop an opt-in culture:

1. Communities of interest – deploy a wiki that lets you create a separate space for every area of interest.
2. Comments and Discussions – deploy a wiki where conversations can naturally evolve out of content.
3. Subscriptions – deploy a wiki where users can opt-in to conversations happening in the wiki either by subscribing via email or via RSS. With email and RSS notifications, users can actually monitor and participate in conversations happening all across the company.
4. Openness – Consider a wiki where openness is the default.

Read on: http://www.ikiw.org/2009/03/04/wikis-opt-in-culture-contribute-to-a-healthy-organization/

[Originally published on LimbicNutrition]

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame has written a good article on Writing in the Age of Distraction.

The best advice in the article (for me) was this:

Don’t research

Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type “TK” where your fact should go, as in “The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite.” “TK” appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is “Atkins”) so a quick search through your document for “TK” will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

Excellent advice.

Taylor Davidson has put together a lovely list of “25 Secrets Learned through Failure“. It is definitely worth a read. Here is the intro…

I started to write about the keys of success for entrepreneurs and startups, but as I wrote I realized that while I’ve seen companies fail, projects flounder and ideas die, I’ve had little first-hand experience with success. My ideas on the keys to success remain just that: ideas.

But I’ve learned a lot through failure. Close observation and unfortunate first-hand personal experiences have taught me many lessons about why companies fail.

Let’s be clear: this is intended to be an assessment of the 25 most important lessons I have learned through failure, not a comprehensive analysis of all the reasons entrepreneurs and startups fail (and trust me, this is the shortened version: I’ve learned more than 25).

The first sixteen primarily address strategic and operational issues while the last nine deal more with management and organizational issues. Since I believe the three most important factors for any company are people, product and market, I’m not sure that I’ve come up with the “appropriate” ratio of ways to fail, but perhaps you’ll have ideas that will bring the ratio more in line. I’m looking forward to hearing about the secrets you’ve learned through failure.

Here are a few of my faves…

1. Dither, dither, dither; plan, plan, plan.
Instead: Fail fast. Fire, aim, repeat.6. Focus on the long-term.
Instead: Focus on the short-term.

7. Build prototypes, mockups and samples.
Instead: Start building in a format and medium as close to the finished product as possible, and iterate, iterate, iterate.

9. Give customers everything they want.
Instead: Listen to customers, then throw (almost) all of it away.

10. “New, New, New!”
Instead: F*** new. What’s different? What’s better?

15. “We can build a successful business by capturing just X% of the market.”
Instead: Sell to one customer. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

22. Meet to discuss.
Instead: Meet to decide.

Read on here.

The faculty at Executive Rockstar have a great video introduction to Issue Decomposition, one of the most useful tools in the consultant’s toolkit.

Issue Decomposition is essentially a modified and structured Socratic interrogation (iterative interrogative loop)  that has its modern origins in Cold War strategic thinking and its resultant field of Game Theory.

It was developed to help with high stakes multilateral negotiations, like Nuclear Arms Reduction, by clarifying the core issues and elements of any problem or situation.

It has evolved into one of the best but least known about decision support systems.

It is both very simple and powerful tool that can liberate those bedevilled by a lack of clarity or confusion.

Check out Phil’s introduction over at the Executive Rockstar Secrets Blog:

Executive Rockstar Issue Decomposition Crystal Clear Thinking | Secrets Of Executive Rockstars

The guys at Executive Rockstars have found a brilliant way to get  answers from Experts Exchange without having to have a subscription.

It involves exploiting the fact that Experts Exchange publishing their content for Google to index, so it is visible to Google searches.

Check the link for an explanatory video and instructions:

http://www.executiverockstar.info/secrets/2008/10/26/secret-backdoor-to-it-answers/

This is typical or the sort of brilliant hacks and solutions that Jason and Phil come up with.

Really enjoying the new blog – Lateral Action – from the guys behind CopyBlogger .

Here are some starter posts to give you an idea of the themes and style:

Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation | Lateral Action

Foolish Productivity: The Hobgoblin of Creative Minds

Beyond Getting Things Done: Lateral Action

The founders of my all time favourite consulting company (Beaufortes) are up to something super interesting.

Here is what came into my inbox yesterday:

What a week! Lehman brothers, Merrill Lynch, Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, things are getting worse, and they’re only going to get tougher as the financial ripples spread out across the industries and across the globe!

We all need to make sure that we are in a position to be indispensable, if we are going to weather the financial storm ahead! And as a good contact in my network, I wanted to offer you something that would help

http://www.ExecutiveRockstar.info

It’s a f-ree report that we compiled for a big name client’s talent management programme. They wanted to know how their top guys pulled in the big business and did what they did, and we found out for them. These guys are never going to be out of work, and you really need to hear about how they did it!

http://www.ExecutiveRockstar.info

I hope that your company pushes on through, and I hope that this helps you be one of the glorious survivors. There is no charge, consider it a goodwill offering in the spirit of the pulling together in the LinkedIn network!

I am fully signed up to this. The founders – Jason and Phil – are both brilliant men and their own careers are a testament to the power of their methods.

Being their personal friend, they occasionally comment on my business activities, projects and ideas in the form of short mails suggesting lines of thought, trends or possible activities. I can honestly say that those occasional mails pack more value into them than all the professional advice and consultancy I have bought – and that includes my business book list.

I am not entirely sure where this is going – seminar, book, training course – but whatever it is I can assure you of one thing: You will see me there because there is no way I will miss it (whatever it is!)