What do you do for a living?

What do you do for a living?
I would bet that your answer will consist primarily of your job assignments or professional characteristics.

What makes you sad?
Do I see among many others a failure of a company project or missed deadline?

What makes you happy?
May I guess that it is part your work achievements and part your personal life victories. Predominantly the second part of the answer.

On a grander scale:
How would you like to feel and based on what? What are the strongest influences you are object of and  how do you react to them? How do you feel at the end of the day?

There are many stories that epitomize the really simple to articulate, but extremely hard to implement solution. I guess you have heard the story about the fisherman and the fishing empire. It's a long one for this blog post.

There is one simpler that became my favorite one. It has been echoing in my head the whole day. When asked, one of the Mountain Men replies:

 - What do I do for a living?

 - I Live for a Living.

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Rocket Science

The blog post that moved me quite a bit last week was Björn Goerke's First, they fire you up….

For me, as an information developer and a writer, this presents a perfect cohesion between beautifully laid out thoughts an a curious video.

My reply to it is that for every Solid Booster Rocket there is always the hope to become a SpaceX Reusable rocket.





[credits: spacexchannel]

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose

Well, sooner or later, the summer vacation is over and is time to get your hands dirty.

This transition is remarkably harder, when there are tough decisions to be made, especially involving close friends and colleagues. This, I guess is the right time to remember the first of the 7 habits:
 - Be proactive - willfully choose your path and do not let be acted upon, be "response-able".

Quite often there is the temptation to give ready answers and hope that they will stick. Similarly, quite naturally, they do not. Unless the receivers of these ideas is actually starting to
 - Dream of achieving your proposals.

Hmmm, it is an interesting relation between Stephen Covey and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The All Mighty Scrum Master

It is absolutely true that a correctly set up team of professionals does not need a dedicated Scrum Master.

Problem statement: However, sooner or later, they will fall in the trap of the everyday ordeal. You can easily recognize it by retrospective action items not done, or a messy Jira, or continuous overcommitment. There might be other signs, specific for your team.

As to why it happens: The answer can be found in team dynamics. Sooner or later, the team reaches the stage after "form-storm-norm-perform". This stage still does not have a name. It is characterized by the old "common sense" taking rule.

Solution: This is the right time to reintroduce the role of the Scrum Master. It must be someone with knowledge of the project history, as well as with a lot of trust from the team. The only missing ingredient from the recipe is human interaction and dedicated discussions on how to overcome the good old common sense. For inspiration how to continue, refer to Beware of Common Sense

Justine Toms and The Blogs

Justine Toms ignited quite a fire this week. It started with a presentation on the importance of online presence. Then, it continued with many heads considering revitalizing their blogs.

Who knows, it might be a new beginning.

Her online profile is: Justine Toms

About Trust and Agile as Behaviors

Something that amazes me is how easy we forget basic postulates. In this case, our believes determine our behaviors. Thus the connection between trust in the new ideas and our behavior towards implementing them.

If you want to read an interesting post on the connection between trust an becoming agile, head straight on to LeadingAgile and read Agile at the speed of Trust - an Overview (Written by Peter Callies).

Collaboration Workspace

There is a very fluid like connection in my mind from the Tribes, through the post Slack to the community moderators training I am taking part of. Actually, it feels like riding on the crest of a wave. When ready, I would be happy to share a link to this new community with you.

For the moment, a slight hint would be collaboration workspace.

Achievements through sacrifices

Yesterday the temperature difference was especially harsh. I was appropriately dressed, so did not really felt the cold. This fact brought to my mind an interesting thought. I was achieving my short term goal of not catching a cold this day. However, I was tampering my long term objective of strengthening my body through measured dosages of stress. If by some reason I had to bear the cold without my gear, I would be less resilient and perish more easily.

Similarly, to survive an economic crisis, a company should protect itself against the currently harsh conditions (by laying off people, cutting R&D or marketing or HR budget and similar). The important point to keep in mind is the plan how to emerge as a stronger player after the crisis (in this case R&D effectiveness turns out to be a key factor).

This can be summarized as follows:

make a balance between
long term and short term
goals and achievements
and decide which one to sacrifice
(preferably surviving long enough to judge upon viability of our plan)

Guy Kawasaki

A link from Ekaterina's blog lead me to these rules How to Change the World

Apart from having a nice post about a very interesting car (Audi R8) it has some interesting observations on Macintosh history in the making and About information on effective learning. So, I think I will give it a try ;- )))

The stress surrounding the change

It still amazes me how much stressful a small change can be, even to the extent of willingly returning to the previous and probably less optimal situation. (In addition, the physical attraction to an object that I am used to is something near the end of my understanding.)

Three days ago I have changed my phone with a new one from another manufacturer. My old one was so badly damaged by the years spent in my pocket that some of its more desired functions were not functional anymore. The new one is shiny and have so much new things to get to know. However, the effort it takes to get acquainted with it led me to reevaluation of my decision to start this change. The solution for the moment is to use both of them for the time being.

This is a simple example from my own experience. Nevertheless, it made me think about the feelings of the employees, that are asked by their managers to learn to work with a new version or even a product from a new vendor. I am confident that even if they were enthralled at first, they needed encouragement to keep going.

What could be used in such cases is some mentoring, some positive example and a hope that we can get over the troubles. Even if there is no such example for our specific problem I can bet that a new one would be more than happy to be created by me, you or your friends ;- )))

Prioritization

Last night I was torn between two programs on the television. The first one was on DW-TV about innovation in Germany and the Hasso Plattner Institute (interesting for me as I work for SAP). The other one was the Fight Quest on Discovery Channel (interesting for me as I was a keen practitioner when I was at school).

Both of them were too late at night. Both of them were running almost simultaneously. Both of them were attracting different parts of my attention. I ended up feeling just like in the good old school years with a lot of studying and fighting.

Eventually I made a choice to switch between the channels and to watch both of them. It was just like in real life - dynamically switching between tasks and balancing the priorities.

On the first part of the BPM book

Some time ago I finished reading the first, theoretical part of the book BPM: the SAP Roadmap. It reminded me of the good old university years and the textbooks full of theories, history and new ideas. If you are not a believer in BPM, it probably will not manage to persuade you. For this, you will have to read the rest of the book. Probably a couple of independent source of information will prove usable as well.

However, this first part of the book will reveal you the enormous amount of effort behind BPM. You will feel the weight of the million hours of discussions and intellectual investement. The amount of experiments and improvements will finally dawn on you.

As a result you will feel the urge to continue reading it.
Just like I did.

TED

This is one of the places I go, whenever I need to convince myself that life is not "all about the money".

This week they are holding their talks in California. Although currently you can view only Bill Gates, one of the other speakers is Shai Agassi. I am anticipating his talk on TED, as he really is a man of vision. What I remember from his time at SAP is his inspiring presence.

If you have the time, my advice to you is - watch it! Even if you do not fully agree with him, you can learn from the passion with which he supports his "ideas worth spreading" and makes us dream with him.

"Let me see you make decisions...

...Without your televisions" - Depeche Mode

(Although I find it strange) I tend to watch television more, when I have to start working on a scary problem.

Based on this observation, lately I had to deal with a lot of such issues, since the last couple of evenings were wasted in front of the tube waiting for an answer...

So, the first phase, the realization of the problem, is successfully passed.

Do I have the courage to move to the next level - buy a book, talk to a friend and make up my mind?

over (DE)centralization

Centralizing the control and knowledge in one point is in effect creating a single-point-of-failure and multiple points willing to relocate to the center. As a result motivation to work is reduced, creativity is restricted by burdening and tangled communication channels,

Over decentralization is equally dangerous. Surprisingly for the very similar reasons.

To me, this rule is equally true for countries, governments and enterprises. I hope to find some guidance how to balance between these two extremities.

"Yes" or "No"

"German" or "Chinese"

Sometimes the best motivator is the situation we are dealing with.

For a couple of days I have been wondering which language or learn: German, Chinese or a combination of both. The big problem was that both courses had to start at the same time.

Before taking a decision, I did my preparation according to the guidance of Spencer Johnson's "Yes" or "No". My mind was telling me that I should pick up the useful German. My heart was dragging me towards the "cool" Chinese. As a result I was close to the idea of sparing more time for German and keeping the Chinese as a side dish.

Unfortunately for the Chinese, the organizers turned out to be impolite and I lost my confidence in them. So now I am in a position to study German only and search for a new Chinese language course offering.

Additionally, my next target in mastering the "Yes" or "No" tactics is to take decisions without relying on the circumstances.

"I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive." - Albert Einstein

Motivating the Change

I have finished the first, theoretical part of the SAP book about BPM. It contains a very good summary of the history and theory of the matter.

However, one of the strongest summaries of the whole improvement idea is the one from Exupery:



"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless see"

I have tried to connect it with my experience: persuading separate people to yearn is difficult and requires a lot of tact. It is even more problematic in a large organization as it meets different kinds of resistance on different levels and in different locations.

Well, I am most than willing to assist in helping people yearn about the see. I just hope that more of the people I meet will be able to see the poor elephant in the snake's stomach.

The Dip

At school we were thought that one negative example is enough to invalidate the theory we are trying to prove.

The Dip by Seth Godin is exactly the same example. It shoots at you statements that make you doubt your own behavior. It helps you question the theories supporting your existential philosophy. It is like a real friend supporting you and giving you a hope and advice.

But do not be fooled by the "entertaining book" description on the back cover. A handful of courage to dwell in your deepest motivational factors will not be enough to really entertain yourself and smile at your mistakes. This book will send shivers up and down your spine. But it is for a good reason, as they will help you get through the dip. You can only hope that a fortunate circumstance will face you with it in time before you choose too many wrong battles.

Being Good vs. Being Respected

As a young kid I watched A Bronx Tale movie. One of the many topics is about the borderline between being good to people around you and being respected by them.

The gang boss Sonny had an interesting summary of the survival rules:
You should be tough on people, so that they fear you. At the same time you should be kind to people, so that they need and maybe love you and do not feel urged to kill you. The secret is in the balance between love and hate.

Nowadays, thinking about murder is not among the widespread fears. Nevertheless there are many different forms of deaths in our society. At work your idea might not win if you are not pushy enough. Or if people think you are too light-hearthed even though this is a sign of a life-philosophy (Happy Gilmore) and not a problem solving capability.

Sadly, even though we are mostly not living in a gangster environment, we are still guided by such rules.