I’m sitting in the main room of Self.Conference waiting for the start of day 2 and mostly trying to figure out how I’m going to absorb another day of material. It’s a problem that is somewhat unique to Self, in my experience.
Monthly Archives: May 2016
Fast Food Delivery
I’ve written and spoken on the subject of managing customers fairly extensively because I feel that it is often done incorrectly—no, not just incorrectly, but extraordinarily incorrectly, cartoonishly so. In my experience, most customer management is done from a place of complete fear. How do we avoid losing the customer, how do we avoid offending the customer, how do we avoid failing the customer.
So defensive. So reactive. So rooted in negative emotion.
Layoffs: Those Left Behind
Last week we went through a round of layoffs (or reductions in force, or whatever trivializing euphemism is currently en vogue). Over the course of two decades in the industry, I have been through numerous layoff cycles—as an employee being laid off as well as being among those that retained their employment, and later as a manager having had to lay folks off and escaping having had to do so. One thing that I have never done is escaped unscathed.
Decision Triage: Cost to Revert
In a previous post, I discussed using decisiveness to reduce or eliminate decision debt; but how do you do that? I mean, if you haven’t made the decision yet, doesn’t that—by definition—indicate that you aren’t yet ready to make the decision?
From my perspective, there is only one useful way to categorize decisions: by their cost to revert. It’s less a taxonomy than a scale, but the basic organizational schema for decisions should be in ascending order from most costly to change to least costly. From there, logic dictates that you should only exhaust as much exploratory effort to make a decision as its cost to alter.
Manager vs Leader Talk at Penguicon 2016
Dawn Kuczwara (@DigitalDawn) and I talked a bit about the difference between managers and leaders at Penguicon this weekend. Penguicon always pulls a different sort of talk out of us, and this is no exception. The informality of the panel-style discussion lent itself to several things…