Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

[Review] Strategy and the Fat Smoker

I've been involved in a lot of strategy work at my company lately, and have been doing some research on how to develop, influence, and lead others through this process. One fascinating (and very good) book I encountered was David Maister's "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy."

Knowing is easy; doing is hard

Maister starts this business book with an analogy rooted in personal life: He knows that smoking is bad for him, and he knows he should eat healthy - so why is he still a fat smoker? He knows what he should be doing differently, he periodically declares he'll change (even making New Year's resolutions to that effect) - but it's too easy to not make changes in what you do, so nothing changes. The same thing happens in business - organizations come up with ideas, strategies, and plans but don't do anything differently.

This book is loaded with pithy "wisdom bites" in the margins - and the first one in the book sums it up nicely:

"Real strategy lies not in figuring out what to do, but in devising ways to ensure that, compared to others, we actually do more of what everybody knows they should do."

Collected wisdom

What follows is a collection of wisdom, examples, and tools that Maister has gathered during his years of work with a variety of organizations around business strategy. Not only does he give examples of effective and ineffective companies, he also provides tools for individual leaders to assess their own strengths, weaknesses, and motivations to determine what changes - internally and externally - are needed for success.

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[Review] Remarkable Leadership

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in my post about New Year's resolutions, I've been reading Kevin Eikenberry's book, "Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time." The book opens with the question, "Are leaders made or born?" - and Kevin provides the answer: Leaders are made.

Sure, we all know people who seem to be "born leaders" and make it look easy, but the premise of this book is that remarkable leaders learn many of the things that make them remarkable. I agree with that premise - I know people with great charisma, brilliant ideas, and other things traditionally associated with great leaders. But I've known some great leaders, and their leadership goes beyond charisma and great ideas. Remarkable leadership is about what leaders do day in, day out - and how they learn from their interactions with others.

This book feels like an "on demand mentor" for developing your skills as a leader.

What do you need?

Eikenberry provides a bunch of "modules" in this book, each focused on analyzing and developing a narrow facet of leadership. In addition to background and case studies he provides a bunch of little self-assessments to get you to think about what you really need to be a better leader. I found these assessment questions to be very focusing, and they helped me decide which chapters I needed most.

Why not just read the whole book? Sure - you can (and you probably should). But another cool thing I found in this book is a description of 3 other ways to use the book:

  1. Start with a quick read, and then decide where to focus.
  2. Browse quickly, then decide where to start.
  3. Start with the skill you are most interested in.

In the first two options, the self-assessments are excellent tools to guide your choices (for the third, I guess you could use the table of contents).

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Whip your office into shape

Hot off the presses: My friend Ariane Benefit of the Neat & Simple Living blog has just published the Neat & Simple Guide to Organizing Your Office. I bought and downloaded it last week (she's offering a special introductory price of $12.95 through February 1) and read it on the plane the other day.

If you're struggling with clutter and organizational challenges in your office, this guide was meant for you. You'll be led through some background about chronic disorganization, motivations for getting more organized, and why you may be "stuck" in a messy situation.

Organize to fit your style

Ariane takes you through an analysis of various working, thinking, and organizing "styles" and discusses how to tailor your organizational scheme to better support your own style. She provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing and dealing with the clutter in your workspace. Another useful section of the guide provides examples of various kinds of organizing tools (bins, shelves, stands, etc.) and discusses the merits and potential pitfalls of each tool. I found this section to be valuable and thought-provoking.

She also offers quite a collection of tips for filing, electronic organization, reinforcing and maintaining you systems, and other hints to help you achieve and maintain success in your quest for organization.

And if you still feel overwhelmed after reading the book, you may need professional (organizational) help. If so, Ariane has a brief discussion on selecting a professional organizer to get you on track.

One last comment on this guide: it just feels organized. It's loaded with useful pictures -- and the layout, graphics, and flow of the book are awesome.

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Hit the GTD mother lode

I was just checking out a tremendous list of GTD resources at Bootstrapper: "The GTD Resource Motherload: 100+ Links." There are 103 links there - I haven't been through them all yet, but have found a few gems already so I wanted to share this resource with you.


A few of my favorites:


99. A Roadmap to Spectacular GTD Failure: This article tells readers what NOT to do if you want to implement a successful GTD system.
This includes such gems as the following (which would be funnier if it didn't hit so close to home:


"Do your weekly review when you're damn good and ready - Make sure to never even attempt to schedule a regular time for your weekly review. Friday afternoon, Saturday night, Wednesday during lunch. You're a busy person with a dynamic life - you clearly can't be expected to block out 1-2 hours per week!"

67. GTD-Tools.com: GTD-Tools.com publishes articles and reviews of the "best GTD tools and productivity software tips." Readers can also catch up on the latest GTD-related news.
Visually, this is a bit busy but it contains some awesome info!


52. Time Management, Simplified: This post teaches readers "how to be productive with no worries" by simplifying the GTD system so that it works for your life.
I really like this "in a nutshell" summary of the essence of GTD.


These three samples are just barely scratching the surface - go check out the other 100 GTD resources!



Learning from the site of a Trucking Accident

What the heck does the title of this post mean? Well, I'm referring to the TruckingAccident.org Blog where I found a great resource for the road warrior in a post called "The Mobile Productivity Toolbox: 100 Resources to Keep You Productive When on the Move."

Some of the new finds (for me, anyway) from this list include:

  • #4: Mobivox: Get cheap Skype calls even when you're away from your computer and WiFi with Mobivox's service.
  • #7: ProjectStat.us: If you're traveling, you may not be able to field lots of calls and emails about progress on projects. Keep everyone out of your hair by letting them find out with ProjectStat.us. [Note: ProjectStat.us is awesome - and I love their logo]
  • #61: oh don't forget: Get reminders sent to you via SMS with this service. You don't even need an account to do it.

And, as the name of the post implies, there are 97 others. Go check it out!

Oh - and if you are a blogger, you might find some gems in another one of their articles: "Travel Blogging: 100 Resources To Help You Post on The Road."

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