Posts Tagged “work”
Ross • 1st May 2010 • Learning • business, consulting, dubai, work
Consulting can add huge value to organisations. Note the use of ‘can’: my claim is deliberately conditional. When done badly, consulting can knock value off firms. That is the point made well by this piece from The Tech. Although you must always be sceptical about the tone of articles such as this, especially when the paint a picture of personal moral superiority, it does contain some passages that will ring true from most consultants, like this:
This leads to what I like to call, “Find me a rock” problems. The classic “find me a rock” story is as follows: A manager goes to his engineer one day and asks for a rock. “A rock?” asks the engineer. “Yes, a rock. That isn’t going to be a problem, is it?” replies the manager. The engineer laughs and tells the manager he’ll go pick one up during his lunch break and it will be no problem. After lunch, the manager visits the engineer again and the engineer shows him the rock. The manager looks at it for a moment before telling the engineer, “No, that one won’t work at all. I need a rock.”
“Find me a rock” problems sound dead simple, but in actuality have requirements that are poorly stated or unknown. You never know what you’re looking for; you only know that you’ll know it when you see it.
If only badly specified requests were limited to consulting.
Ross • 26th Apr 2010 • Living • meetings, productivity, work
A colleague points me in the direction of research that large brainstorms can be fruitless. Highlights from the original research (in her summary):
“There is considerable evidence that group brainstorming is less productive than individual brainstorming”. Explanations for this “productivity deficit” include “social matching… a tendency to conform to peers” and “social loafing… because responsibility is diffused”. The researchers focus on a third , viz “collaborative fixation” — “Exchanging ideas in a group reduced the number of domains of ideas that were explored by participants. Additionally, ideas given by brainstormers conformed to ideas suggested by other participants.”
As she mentions, the experiments were conducted using computer terminals (presumably to enable the researchers to control the environment) and so it’s not clear how face-to-face interreaction would have affected the result.
So what should you do if you find yourself in a timesuck meeting like this? Doodle.
Ross • 18th Mar 2010 • Learning, Thinking • business, charter cities, ecological, economics, green, work
I have just come across Harvard Business Review‘s summary of ideas to watch in 2010. It’s great. Best bits:
- A Charter Cities plug
- It turns out that workers value progress in their workplaces. They like to hit project milestones and get stuff done. Managers don’t realise this.
- Short discussion of green bond financing for ecological building retro-fits.
There is also an ethically dubious encouragement to ‘hack work’. While I think this is valid in some cases, I don’t think it is a model that one should promote. In a good organisation, it shouldn’t be necessary, and the ideas that need to be promoted are those that fix the organisation, not learn to work around it more cunningly.
Ross • 17th Mar 2010 • Thinking • behaviour, career, climate change, environment, ethics, morality, psychology, work
Recent research suggests that being green may make you mean. This is a specific example of ‘moral compartmentalisation’. Ian Leslie thinks that this also occurs in the workplace: people who put their family first feel they don’t need to be nice at work. It’s an appealing theory.
Ross • 31st Jan 2010 • Thinking • computers, computing, development, dharavi, economy, slums, technology, work
I am interested in the potential of boosting wages in slums by setting up IT centres so that locals can work via Mechanical Turk, and similar services. Although these jobs pay below UK minimum wage, it would be multiples of a typical slum-dweller’s income. It appears that this is not a new idea. Some firms have gone a stage further and distributed this work by mobile phone, broadening reach. However the benefit of a single location is that you don’t rely on the worker having a phone, and that you could combine work with education and IT literacy classes.
Ross • 9th Nov 2009 • Living • commuting, getting things done, reading, Thinking, work
Ben Casnocha blogs about the need for building thinking time into the daily routine. He suggests ensuring that you schedule in time for reading, driving and similarl activities where thinking can happen unprompted. I agree and it is for this reason that I lengthened my morning commute. I now take a less quick but less packed train to work. I have just the right amount of time to sit, read and think about the day ahead, and I still arrive on time. I lose only some fairly unproductive time between 08:20 and 08:50, when previously I would do a sift on the overnight emails to warm me up for the day.
Ross • 12th Aug 2009 • Learning, Living • economics, history, japan, ninja, work
The Business Environment Unit (BEU) is no more. I now work in the New Industry, New Jobs Directorate (NINJa). According to this excellent paper:
…the ninja were but one manifestation of fierce and extensive resistance to encroaching armies in the dying years of medieval Japan…. [they] armed themselves with simple weapons and guerrilla techniques…
Not a bad fit to my new unit. However:
…the ninja and the communities they defended were eventually slaughtered or intimidated into quiescence by the powerful armies of the “unifiers” like Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century.
Not the best omen.
Ross • 10th Jul 2009 • Living • careers, international development, jobs, work
Adam Smith International, an international development firm for which I worked a few years ago, is recruiting for a graduate role. If you have just graduated (or are about to) and have an interest in political and/or economic development, I can certainly recommend working at ASI: responsibility from day one, international travel and a really good, close-knit team. Details here.
Ross • 15th Jun 2009 • Living • jargon, work
I read an interesting piece in yesterday’s Sunday Times on government use of jargon. So I was amused to come back to work today and find the emergence of a new term in my burgeoning, post-holiday inbox:
phoenixed (verb): the process of having gone into bankruptcy to emerge stronger and more streamlined, e.g. General Motors, Chrysler
