Be the Man (or Woman).
In either case, be true to yourself. Not your job. Stand up to the fools. Let no one push you around. If you know you deserve to lead, then lead. Don’t take “no” for an answer.
Monthly Archives: August 2011
Blog Migration
Dear Readers:
I am in the process of migrating my blog from Tumblr to WordPress. This change may take several days. Please excuse any radical differences, lame style defaults, page bugs, or interruptions to usual programming.
Thanks for your patience and understanding!
Assume Procrastination
In one way or another, everyone procrastinates. In college, I accepted my procrastination after a while and budgeted the final six hours before papers were due to write them. Deadlines won’t go away. So how can we optimize our lives and get more things done?
The first option is to impose earlier deadlines – quicker turnarounds. It makes sense: just get it done earlier. I see two problems with this, however. First, you (and those you impose earlier deadlines on) will call your own bluff. “I know it doesn’t need to be done until next week, so why is my deadline tomorrow?” Second, urgent new accelerated deadlines can interrupt the flow of other work you are making progress on. Constant bombardment of short-term work will push more important long-term projects to the backburner.
The second option is a bit more abstract: connect project milestones sequentially. Most human beings have trouble switching back and forth between projects, so why not line them up one after the other? Move on to the next task when the first is complete? Parents try to teach this at a young age: “Finish your homework first, then you can go play video games.” The benefit to this method lies in a recurring completion gratification. It feels good to get something done. It may start feeling good enough that it also feels good to start something new.
Line up your impending tasks on a to-do list, re-order them as you see fit (or most fulfilling), and let no one interrupt your conquest. Knock them out one by one. And find joy in beating the deadlines.
The First Sign of Great Leadership
A great leader can make decisions quickly. Better than most, he or she can efficiently break a complicated problem down into its component parts and take action. Without hesitation. Without fear of being wrong.
Do not be afraid of being wrong. While leaders can only build great things with higher batting averages, it takes practice to hit the ball. With enough experience and mistakes, you should have better chances at making good choices. Over time, two wrongs can make a right.
Opportunities for decision making start small. If you cannot decide where your indecisive group of friends should dine together, then you probably cannot make important product, market, or life decisions.
The Self-Correcting Company
Give your team ownership and authority enough to solve problems they discover without having to ask your permission first. If you are worried they will correct errors in a manner you do not agree with (or worried they will try to fix things you do not feel are broken), replace those people with others you trust – or learn to open your mind and have faith.
As team leader, you cannot act on everything yourself and are too far removed to supervise every detail of your organization. Therefore, you must either create a system of reporting and permissions to channel all information to you OR give your people the freedom to take care of it. For leaders who want control, the channel system sounds utopian – in practice, it is a staggeringly inefficient and damaging bureaucratic architecture. You simply have too few hours in the day to make decisions for everyone, and your organization will spite you for it.
To keep your company afloat and moving forward, empower your team to use their skills as they see fit. Trust me, it will be more stress off your back, and your company will be better for it.
Hollywood Is like the Army [Film Friday]
Only without honor and push-ups. There’s a high level of discipline (though not necessarily the same caliber of punishment). There’s a system of rank and rigid hierarchy, especially on set. There’s a delicate network of specialized soldiers – and the brigade is only as strong as its weakest link. But unlike the army, Hollywood uses ego and opinions instead of bullets to survive.
Vacation
To fuel consistent hard work and quality, it is absolutely necessary to take real breaks. No human being can sustain a high level of effort and thoughtful decision-making without rebooting regularly.
You need to keep the pencil sharp if you want to write a full book.
I’m taking my own advice for the next five days. Please forgive me if posts are more succinct than normal!
Cooks and Trees
Too many cooks in the kitchen. I hear that phrase a lot. Companies or groups with many people putting their hands on it, diluting it, confusing it, and sending it off course run the risk of destroying or burying beautiful things. Understandably, too many people pissing on the same tree does not help the tree grow. Be wary of committee projects, even democratic projects. Too many people with too many opinions can result in too many compromises. And if I’ve learned anything, compromised products are seldom successful.
That said, be careful blaming the opinions or the people involved. It’s not necessarily the cooks’ faults for having opinions; it may very well be the kitchen’s fault for having room enough for too many cooks. If you open the door to that level of collaboration, it must be organized. Fortunately, there are such things as hyper-collaborative companies and organized brain trusts (Pixar is my favorite). With strategy and structure, an over-staffed kitchen could be a very great thing. Do not blame the people; blame structure.
Most Humans Do Not Like Cages
So don’t put them in one. Avoid boxing people in, limiting their freedoms, or denying opportunities. Job descriptions, risk aversion, regulations, and bureaucracy are all cages in disguise. As a leader, expect people to outgrow the cages you put them in. Be prepared with a bigger cage or let them run free. As a subject or follower, never settle until you find a comfortable cage – or until you break free.
LifeCal Schedule Button (Soft Launch)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with Mark Godwin to design and engineer a little web plugin tool we call a “Schedule Button.” Quite literally, it is a button that you can save event data to and embed into your own website. When your visitors click the button, they can schedule your event to their own calendars.
The potential use cases for this button are many: concerts, flights, movie showtimes, house parties, television premieres, conferences, conventions, and more. Business owners and hosts alike can use this tool to connect with their attendees and provide them with necessary details.
I have a hard time managing my time as it is, and existing digital calendars do not make it easier. Few people go to the trouble of typing out all of the event details for everything they do. We built this tool for event hosts to make it easier for potential event attendees to input the correct information into their calendars. The hope is that there will be higher attendance rates if your event is staring your attendees in the face from within their own calendars. Unlike Facebook events (which is exclusive to the Facebook platform), we are trying to make this an open plugin compatible with all calendars and available for embedding into all web sites.
We are soft-launching this button today at Lifecal.co to collect feedback from our closest friends and followers before we announce the tool wider this week. Please head over to our site and check it out! If you have any comments or suggests, identify any bugs, or can think of other great use cases I have not mentioned, please let us know! You can use the discussion board below or email me at craig@lifecal.co.
Craig Ormiston 