Your Best Just Got Better - A Review

I've been reading Jason Womack's book, "Your Best Just Got Better," on my Kindle for the past week or so.  I just finished it and the verdict is in: It is so well done!

I met Jason a few years ago when he still worked for the David Allen Company, and have been impressed with his perspective from day one, particularly his ability to provide insightful suggestions to improve your skills no matter what your current situation.

Expand your perspective to improve your outcomes

This book is very interesting, practical, energizing and I highly recommend it.  Throughout, Jason offers hands-on exercises to get you into a more active mode of driving your own future.  I read the book cover-to-cover, but now I am planning to go back and conduct the exercises step-by-step (I skipped some exercises because I was on planes, or my energy / attention levels weren't where they needed to be) because I can see just how powerful they can be.

One pervasive theme throughout the book is to think beyond your "normal" perspective so you can stretch your goals, drive different and better effort, and get more assertive in pushing your life where you want it to go.  For example, the book begins with an interesting visioning exercise called "Your Ideal Day," which gets you to begin imagining how things could be if you had a magic wand.  If you want a taste of this, be sure and check out Jason's web site for a sample, along with a contest that goes through the end of 2012.

One of the things I like about Jason is that he uses a lot of models and constructs that make sense to me (I'm big on finding models that I can apply in different situations.  For example, I like the I.D.E.A. model that shows up throughout the book:

I: Identify a very specific area you want to improve. Focus your attention on making the best better in one area of your life, and clarify what that will look like when you get there.

D: Develop strategies to engage in specific actions and techniques to direct your professional improvement and personal development. Acknowledge the process—remember, you’re just getting started! An important aspect is that the most sustainable changes people tend to make usually start small, are repeated with consistency, and often result in a payoff greater than anyone could have hoped.

E: Experiment by planning for and taking actions that generate bursts of momentum. Experimenting gives you the freedom to stop at any time to try something new. It also provides a more objective framework so that you can determine whether you should stop or continue moving forward. When you take actions to make your best better, it continues to get better.

A: Assess the value the effort has created. Here is the question I consistently ask myself, my friends, my family, even my clients: “Is what you’re doing worth the effort?”

Womack, Jason W. (2012-01-05). Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More (p. 5). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

 Shape your own outcomes

Jason also provides some great advice in shaping the results you get in your life - one involves adjusting the words you use to create more positive, future-oriented results; the other involves taking inventory of the people you hang out with, and distancing yourself from those that have a negative or counter-productive influence on you.  Truly great advice.

You'll find some familiar concepts (including some I've written about in the past, like time audits) and they're always presented with solid step-by-step methods to help you apply the concepts.  For example, you'll find some great techniques for more effective "chunking" (aka time boxing) your day to get more out of each 15-minute block in your day.  You'll also find good techniques to track how you're doing on your goals, as well as how well you're using your energy to get there.As someone who's always looking for ways to become more productive, I eat this stuff up.  

This book is that it isn't just about getting more done, Jason also coaches you on methods you can use to make more money - that's something we can all use, particularly in this economy.  And Jason's advice on how to build and leverage your network (business, social, etc) is excellent.  Very cool.

A great book for "now"

Lately, I've noticed that a lot of people I know are taking hard looks at their lives - either to increase their success, make more money, or fig our out what's next for them.  If that sounds like you, this book is perfect for you right now, and I encourage you to pick up a copy and get started going through the exercises.

If you aren't sure, or you want to get a feel for Jason's writing style, why not start with a free e-book from him called, "7 Keys To A More Productive Day," from Jason Womack's web site.

If you're convinced and ready to jump in, grab a copy of "Your Best Just Got Better," today.  By the way - I think this book will be a great gift for some recent graduates I know, as well as great gifts this holiday season for some of my good friends.

Presenting with a pocket full of cobras

I was just reading an article on Harvard Business Review's blog, written by Kare Anderson - it is called "Make Your Message (Almost) as Vital as AIR." It is a great set of guidelines to help make your message more impactful.  She uses the acronym "AIR" to represent three aspects of effective messages - here is a brief recap:

1. Actionable:  "To secure connection with your intended audience or market, aspire to offer the equivalent ease of Amazon Prime's one-click buying."
2. Interestingness:  "Make your message so unexpected, novel, provocative or otherwise odd that they are compelled to pay attention even if they are supposed to be doing something else."
3. Relevance:  "You can increase relevance by getting specific sooner. That may mean you capture fewer people overall — but you will capture more of the right people, the people you need to reach."

In addition to resonating with the advice in this article, I absolutely agree with Kare's conclusion: 

Crafting a memorable message will make you more quotable, will keep you at the top of people's minds, and will ultimately inject your life with more opportunity and adventure.

Is your message lost in the noise?

I commented on Kare's article on the HBR site, but wanted to elaborate a bit here about just how vital the "Interestingness" part of this formula can be.  

As you may know from my writing on this blog, I spend a lot of time doing presentations and leading discussions as part of my job in a software company.  In addition to trying to create Actionable, Interesting, and Relevant messages, one of the big challenges I have is delivering my message in a way that allows me to not only compete with the "ambient noise" of daily life but to get people to stop what they are doing and engage with me.

Often, especially when I'm presenting to large groups at conferences, I can see people with their heads buried in their email, Facebook, or some other online activity.  I try not to take it personally and, in fact, I try to frame it as a challenge:  How can I pull them away from other activities enough that they begin to engage in my topic?

Got a cobra in your pocket?

As I mentioned in my comments to Kare, I used to work with a guy that I described as having a "pocket full of cobras."  Why?  

Any time he started to get attacked in meetings, or feel uneasy with the topic at hand, he had a knack for coming up with some tangent that sucked everyone in and got everyone focused on something new.  Kind of like if he'd pulled a cobra out of his pocket and thrown it on the conference room table - if that happened, no matter what you were doing a moment before you'd instantly turn your attention to the cobra. 

My coworker used his cobras as a way to deflect and distract, but I believe you can create your own collection of cobras that you can use to compel and focus your audience.  After all, when presenting, or writing, or even trying to lead a discussion in a room full of coworkers, sometimes it can be good to "shock the system" with a dramatic, controversial, or unexpected injection of provocative content.

Be prepared.

Some of my favorite communicators are great at grabbing your attention, and have developed their own "pockets full of cobras" to help keep you focused on the right things.  Some of the things I've seen work well include:

• Stories:  Telling an interesting or personal story to illustrate one of your main points can be very effective.  People tend to remember stories, so you'll increase the likelihood that they'll retain your key points if you wrap them in good stories.
• Pictures:  I've seen a (welcome) trend away from bullet points toward evocative images.  These work most effectively when combined with good stories, as described in the previous bullet.
• Polls:  Want to engage the audience?  Be ready with some questions that require them to answer, vote, or otherwise respond.  If you do this early in the presentation, you'll keep them on their toes - after all, if there is going to be another quiz, they're going to pay more attention.
• Small group discussion with a report back:  This doesn't work for all topics, but it can be effective to get the audience engaged, take the 'burden of content' off your shoulders, and inject new ideas into the group.  Get each table to go off and work on a problem (could be the same problem for everyone, or a collection of relevant problems), the get each group to report back about their group's ideas or proposed solutions.
• Videos:  Videos or film clips can often switch things up and get people to pay attention to what's going on in the room.  
• For example, I once did a presentation that used an excerpt from the movie "The Blind Side" to frame a discussion about the need to make a radical change in companies' approaches to their information security strategy.  I then told a story to connect my concepts to what we saw in the video clip.  I got lots of feedback from the audience for months afterward, talking about how much they remembered that presentation and used it as a reminder to think differently about their security strategies.
• Step into the crowd:  Move into the crowd, or take a step into the crowd.  That little bit of "hey, what's this guy up to" can shift people's attention.  And, they'll be less likely to do email or Facebook with you walking around behind them!
• Contrast:  What do I mean by contrast?  Contrast could be silence.  It could be a loud noise.  It could be a goofy exercise.  Just find a way to break the flow of the discussion in a noticeable way, and you'll increase the chances that people will shift their attention to where you want it to be.
• One cool trick I've learned is the "blank screen" technique.  In PowerPoint, you can just hit the "B" key on the keyboard and your screen turns black.  Do that, and people stop reading your slides and look at you.
• Another cool trick if a lot of people are having side conversations is to just stand there and look at them without saying a word (or, if you don't want to stare at them just look out into the room).  After about 5-10 seconds, they'll probably stop what they are doing and look at you.  Boom.  You have them back.

These are just a few of the productive cobras I've developed.  Do you have any other ideas or techniques that sound anything like this?  How about sharing them?  I'd love to put some more cobras in my pocket.

Begin with the end in mind

I have been traveling a lot the past couple of weeks and was catching up on my reading today, when I learned that Stephen R. Covey died on July 17, 2012.  Apparently, he had a bicycle accident back in April and died of complications from the accident.  I am sad to see him go.

Back in the late 80's, I started to get into time management in an effort to be more productive.  Like many people at the time, I began with a Franklin Planner and even took a course on how to use it.  The Franklin method made a big impact on me and helped me begin my decades-long relationship with productivity methods.  In the 90's, I discovered Covey's book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which helped me re-frame why I did things and helped me more consciously work on more impactful activities.  This matrix is one I still think about as I plan what I want to work on:

From this book, I began to embrace the "Sharpen the Saw" concept and tried to spend more time in Quadrant 2, Important but Not Urgent.  I also learned the value of outcome-oriented thinking with his principle to "Begin With the End In Mind," and tried to create mutually beneficial results with his admonition to "Seek First To Understand."  Very powerful and motivating stuff.

Dr. Covey's work has influenced me quite a bit - in fact, my first post on this blog was a review of his book, "The 8th Habit."

I have since turned to other methods for the "how" part of productivity (such as David Allen's Getting Things Done, and my current favorite system, Michael Linenberger's Master Your Workday Now), but Stephen Covey's work is still my anchor for the "why" part of productivity.

Rest in peace, Dr. Covey - and congratulations on a fine legacy.

5 Ways Taking Classes Helps Improve My Skills

This week I was reminded of a great way to improve your skills:  hands on practice in a well-organized workshop or training program.  In my case, I took some "boot camp" courses in computer hacking at a security conference to brush up on my skills and learn about new tools.  I felt like I was getting rusty and wanted a refresher.  Boy, was it fun!  [Note: I don't hack things for malicious reasons - I help people secure things for a living, and a strong defense requires a deep knowledge of how the attackers will come at you.]

I try to keep up with things from online sources (blogs, discussion boards, etc.) but it is difficult to internalize some of this without sitting at the keyboard and trying some things.  In this regard, the workshops I was in had a few key advantages:

Access to experts who can help you learn

I am generally good at solving problems because I have a good mental process for figuring things out.  However, sometimes I know what questions to ask but not how to get the answers.  This happened a lot in my class.  

One of the instructors set the stage nicely for this by saying, "I won't tell you the answer, but if you ask me the right question I will tell you how to get the answer."  Essentially, he was testing for whether or not we grasped the concepts behind the problems we were trying to solve; if we understood well enough to formulate the right question, he would point us to the right tools, resources, or processes for us to research how to get the answer we were looking for.

Access to others with different approaches

Another aspect of the classes that I liked was how we compared solutions and approaches after each challenge.  Each student would independently solve the problems, then we'd talk through how we got to the solution at the end.  I learned a bunch of techniques from other people that helped me improve my own skills - in other words, when I saw a method that worked better than my approach I added it to my arsenal.

We also learned about tools and tricks to make things easier - typically leveraging a proven process, or automation, or resources we didn't know about before the classes.

A safe environment to try new things

We were all in the classes to learn new things, so there was no stigma attached to making mistakes, and no shame in asking for help.  

Also, the people who conducted the classes provided us with a fantastic assortment of systems to hack, each with different operating systems, different vulnerabilities, different kinds of target "prizes," etc.  This is very difficult to come by in the real world unless you have a pretty sophisticated lab setup. It felt kind of like a playground.

Competition fuels the fire

In a lot of classes, there are competitive exercises intermingled with the learning exercises.  My classes were no exception - we had several "capture the flag" scenarios that allowed us to compete with each other to see who could achieve the goal first.  This was a lot of fun, as it forced us to apply the things we'd been learning but put some time constraints on us.  That made it feel much more real, and not so academic.

Feed the thirst for knowledge

The other side effect?  I now want to learn even more about the topics I worked on in class.  I have a long list of things that I touched on in class, but want to research more deeply.  And I want to check out a few training classes that can help me get there faster.

There you have it - 5 ways classes helped me improve my skills.  There are other benefits (met some great people, got CPE credits, etc.) but these are the ones that will keep me coming back.  What about you?  Have you taken a course lately?  It might be a good way to get you into a new mode of learning and improve your skills.

Effective metrics drive the results you want

This week I attended the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Washington, D.C.  I attended a lot of very good sessions, but the one that left the biggest mark on me was a session called "Metrics That Matter," delivered by Jeffrey Wheatman.

I went to this session because I've had a lot of conversations with information security executives this year, and a common question is "What should I really be measuring?," or they make comments like "I report on a lot of things, but I am not sure what the top indicators are that I should roll up to my executive team."

My initial reason for attending this session was for my "day job" as the CTO of a tech company, but I feel like I can "generify" Wheatman's guidelines to apply to anything that needs to be measured & tracked.

1. Effective metrics must support the business's goals, and the connection to those goals should be clear.
2. Effective metrics must be controllable. (In other words, don't report on things that "just happen" - report on things you can drive up or down with your own, direct actions).
3. Effective metrics must be quantitative, not qualitative.  If you need to measure something "softer" like customer satisfaction, find a way to make it quantitative, such as with a method like Net Promoter Score.
4. Effective metrics must be easy to collect and analyze. (Wheatman says "If it takes 3 weeks to gather data that you report on monthly, you should find an easier metric to track.")
5. Effective metrics are subject to trending.  (Tracking progress and setting targets is vital to get people to pay attention)

This set of guidelines really resonated with me, and I am going to run my metrics through this regimen to make my own metrics better.  If you're a Gartner client, there is a detailed research report from Wheatman on this topic, and I suggest you grab a copy.

I've also learned that it helps to simplify how you report on metrics.  When dealing with executives, stick with small numbers and primary colors - and when you get senior enough, try to boil it down to up/down, happy/sad.

What about you - do you have any best practices to share around metrics?  Could you apply these to your own individual metrics or self-improvement goals?