Merry Christmas

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To all my readers, Merry Christmas to you and yours!

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Make That Boss Happy

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Make That Boss Happy Managing Your Boss's Expectations: 5 Things To Think About. "The more we manage expectations, the better we can manage the future." Stanley L. Boswell, Jr. It's almost always useful to understand and manage our counterparts' expectations, especially our Boss's. It minimizes the chance for disappointment and maximizes the chance for satisfying the Boss. Here are five tactics to consider, practice and get good at (and, where possible, get in writing): 1. Confirm boss’s expectations. Duh! But far too often we think we understand (when we don't) or we're afraid to look dumb is we ask for confirmation/clarification. 2. Get commitment on priorities. Here we want to make sure that the new task is important and valuable enough to replace one of your current Top 3 tasks. If so, then one current task has to be re-assigned, delayed or killed. Don’t commit to new tasks until priorities are re-evaluated.   3. Reach common agreement on what = su...
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Yo-Yoing Between Tasks? Why Switch When You Can Batch? A study of Microsoft employees found that when they were interrupted by an email, they needed fifteen minutes to fully regain their train of thought. Switching back and forth between tasks is costly in time and energy. To see this switching cost in action, try this basic exercise:   Say “abcdefgh” then immediately after that say “12345678”. Notice how long it takes you to do this.  Now mix the two: say “a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8”. It takes more time and mental energy while switching between letters and numbers. A useful tool to combat our switching habits at work is “batching “. You can work fewer hours, and work less hard during those hours, by batching your tasks more effectively.  Batching means grouping together similar tasks, so you spend less time and energy switching between different types of activity.  In the “a1b2c3 . . .” exercise, it’s like handling all the letters first, in one batch, then handling the number...
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Storytelling vs Data & Facts Facts don’t connect with people, people do.  In order to truly engage consumers and employees, business needs people and their stories.  Storytelling can support the fact-based approach, because it help us better understand how KPIs and other data was generated and what they mean.  Data tell us what happened out in the real world.  Storytelling helps us to paint that picture and give it context, emotion, and meaning.  It also makes the data 22 times more memorable and much less boring . When you think about it, thats all KPIs are: a scoreboard for what happened in the past, is happening now, or is projected to happen in future.  KPIs are actually the Story of Life. Storytelling let’s us translate the data into „Human“. That makes it emotional, powerful, and memorable. I sometimes think KPIs should be called Key People Indicators. Takeaway: Facts and data are essential for business. Bringing them to life with Storytelling is ...
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