The weighted 80/20 rule

   For me one of the most eye opening concepts I have ever encountered is the 80-20 rule. If it's new for your I suggest to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EI6Ph2x4gM or read Wikipedia. 

   Concentrating on the vital 20% and neglecting the rest is not an easy undertaking. However there are tools and methods to help you doing it like the Five Whys, Root Cause Analysis or Current Reality Tree. These tools help your to analyze the situation and to isolate the most critical factors.  All you shell do to focus on these and work hard on them, the result is secured.

  I have used these tool in several occasions and they were always leading me to the critical factors. Attacking these factors with determination helped to achieve good results at least on the sort run, but not in any case on the long term. Why? Have I made a mistake (I certainly have made some...)?  And why have I still the feeling of uncertainty about the these methods? Is it my strong cultural roots which tell me that more efforts lead to proportional more results? Or is it something else?

  A military strategist would tell you that attacking the enemy at it strongest point if successful will almost certain lead to victory but the price for it will be immense and so will be the possibility of failure. You should think it over. 

  I think you have to be careful with the 80/20 rule and its relatives. Maybe you have found the root cause, or the constraint or the answer to the fifths why, and yes eliminating/solving/controlling it would bring the best results. Still there are other factors to consider:

1. The cost: maybe the vital 20 percent will cost you 5 times more (in time, money or stress - you name it) than the 80 percent.
2. Some things maybe minor but must be done. Don't forget about them.

My suggestion make a list of factors and weight them on their effect (use the 80/20 rule) and the weight them again according the effort (time, money, nerves  - depending on your situation). This double weighting will tell you what to do fist. And if you have done it (or failed :-( ) do the analysis again and make a fresh start. Until you found that doing nothing  (i.e. something else) is the best option.

 

Work-alcoholics and Work-maniacs

We all know people -  or we are the people - who work a lot. Ten hours a day are normal, twelve is OK and even more is possible.  But does more hours make more work done?

   I have seen a lot of "around the clock" workers and in my opinion there are two basic categories. About 20 percent are work-alcoholics, these are the people who really do a lot of work without making any fuss about it. They focus on the task to be done, work day and night if needed, and return easily to the normal working schedule (which is for them usually 10 hours a day) when the storm is over. They usually don't like rules or standards very much but can accept them. They are often vulnerable to non professional stakeholders who can't see good performance if it's not advertised well. And these guys don't care about self marketing.

   The other - much larger - group is of the work-maniacs. They are often good fellows too, but more dangerous. These people seem to be virtually at work around the clock, especially at nights or even weekends. As a result they lose sense of the importance of time. Talking to them is often time consuming because they have time to discuss all minor points. Work is the same; they love details and often have difficulty to focus on the important issues. Wrong time management make them to neglect tasks which are fare away on the horizon (more then four weeks), which in turn makes them permanent firefighters. They make an impression of being busy, well informed and covering everything, but in fact they are relatively ineffective and waste the time and energy of others too.

Social (net)working

Net

The success of social networking (and the business problems of Facebook) makes one thinking about the next steps. In which direction will social networking evolve? Even in the light of the enormous success and knowing the fact that for many social networking is an important part of life we can't forget its limitations. 

It's interesting that networking starts with one of the most intimate part of our life; friends.  Why not business contacts, colleagues, partners or authorities, shops? Naturally these also use the opportunity but they just jumped on the train. Google+ has circles which is a good way to differentiate audiences we contact too, but the tool set is the same.

Work

We spend plenty of time traveling between work and home just to make room for the two big time wasters; meetings and management. Most people work on computers and doesn't need any other (physical) equipment. Beside reasons to be discussed bellow social life is the explanation; we need to meet and talk people.  And of course we have to discuss work with each other. But that could be done in one or two days in the office (or at a more suitable place). Except the colleagues are far and we see them very seldom if ever  which is more and more frequently the case.

Platform

We need a next generation collaboration platform. It must have a couple of differences compared to today social networking suites:

• Good distinction between different groups (like friends, colleagues, customers, vendors, authorities...)
• Tools and services:  tools (e.g. accounting, tax, CRM, research databases,) which are able to support the tasks people do and can be connected easily. 
• Processes: users must be able to set up, measure and manage processes to achieve certain results and make people (and machines) cooperate in a value chain.

At corporations

It may last long but corporations has to change the way they work. Internet and cloud computing will make data centers obsolete, and personal devices supersede standard devices. Sticking to the old things (serves, local IT staff to run them, PCs, local networking, rooms, electricity... ) just makes things expensive, which no one could afford on the long run. 

Workplaces will turn to be "clubs" where people socialize, talk - mostly about work - and feel well. They work at home or in shared office room next to their home.

Companies are afraid to loose control when people work from home. We like it or not but the more we move to electronic collaboration and managed processes the more control is possible.

The future of Work

Why do we have workplaces? Why plenty of people spend a lot of time, money and energy to commute every day to work? Why spend companies a huge amount of money building and running offices?  With good reasons but these are losing importance;
Reason #1 Tools
If you work in a factory on in your choices of place of work are limited. On the other hand most of us work in offices. The primary tools we use are computers and software and they are portable. We also may need other office equipment like printers or copiers but these are also more affordable than ever and their importance is lower with growing digitalization.
Reason #2 Communication
To work effectively you have to communicate with your colleagues and no doubt face to face communication is the most effective. However this is only a small part of the communication we have. We read and write a lot of e-mail, have phone conversations which take away a substantial part of our work time. In fact many of us have a lot of communication with clients, partners and peoples from other locations. The workplace gives no better communication than any other place. And there are meetings, but I'm not sure meetings are a really effective way of communication. We need meetings but less of them and they should have better performance. However the ad-hoc creative talks e.g. around the cafe machine are the most valuable source of innovation.
Reason#3 Control
In a traditional environment managers like to have they people around to see that they really contribute. That's they want to keep control.
Reason #3+1 People
I often wonder how people see their workplace as a big family. They make friends and foes; discuss politics, family or anything while working. This socializing effect and loose network is very useful and a real need for people.

I think it doesn't need much explanation that the existence of big offices is less and less justified. As things turn digital and computer mobile we have all the tools of work available wherever we are. Communication is anyway mostly done via e-mail, phone and chat and for the few really(!) important face to face meetings we can afford to travel to a meeting place once or twice a week. Computers also allow stricter control; things are getting more and more measurable. As a consequence organization get flatter and performance gains importance while degrees, position and organizational "embeddedness" (i.e. how long somebody has been around and how many people he knows) lose significance. What about the social effect? I think people still will find a way to be together, most probably with coworking where a bunch of people rent a shared office not far from their home. People of different professions and companies working together will most probably generate plenty of useful ideas.

This is already happening although at slow pace. Why? The merits are obvious. Lower costs for the companies, more free time for the employees, less pollution, traffic jams, global warming... and more innovation. So why so slow? I think it's because we and the companies we work for have a different assumption about work and it's hard to change. It's also difficult for a company giving up their structure and well known methods of doing things. Not to mention managers losing part of their power, and the threat of losing company secret during the frequent interactions. However I think this is question of time. The way we do work, communicate measure and control will change anyway. One day we will discover that it doesn't matter if we check in every morning at the office or go with our laptop into the local cafe.

Is hard work hard?

Sometimes I hear people saying that they work "hard". And they really do; they stay long, held meetings, send tons on e-mails and also produce code. Sounds good.
My only trouble is that I hear it when deadlines are missed, task not done, planning forgotten and the trouble is there.
What's wrong? Most of these people really work hard, why can't they do the job?
After a while I see some patterns in these people's behavior:

• Week cooperation. On the surface the cooperation sometimes seem to be OK. But these people don't like to delegate, and are inclined to override decisions made by others. As subordinates they prefer to work alone.
• Short time thinking. The task being done is isolated, it relations to other or subsequent tasks is not considered. It leads to rework, lack of reuse, hidden problems (e.g. lack of scalability, maintenance or operation issues).
• There are hidden assumptions which are non known for several participants, and even those who make these assumptions don't consider their consequences.
• Last minute changes. The changes are always constrained by others (customers, business) so our person is innocent. Somehow it always happens?
• Fierce activity and/or martyrdom at the final stage of the project.
• Never ending projects. There is always something to fix or missing. Projects or project phases are not finished.

On the other hand there are people who simple deliver without much fuss. They avoid the mistakes above. However they also loose a very effective communication tool: if they task are never a subject of discussions, if they don't send many e-mails and don't have plenty of meetings, than nobody knows that they do important work.

I don't think there is an ultimate solution. However setting up rules, do good project management, applying best practice and development methodologies can help. But the manager of the team leader has to take care for real and "visible" performers as well.

Workplace

Where I want to work?

   Before answering this there is another question: why I want to work at all? The obvious questions that because I have to. I have a family to support and bills to pay so I need money. Would I a millionaire would I work then? Sure I would or at least I would to something productive (without defining what "productive" is) and one of the temptation of being rich seems to be that you have less to deal with unproductive things. 

  So where would I work. Apart of being well paid I would like to produce value as much as in normal work time possible. I'm not too young any more but still believe that I can help making the world a better place. Naturally there are some task I can do better and others I cant. So I take a job which suits my abilities. And the basic work environment must meet the basic requirements. But that is still beating around the bush. A team can achieve more than a pack of individuals. And it depends on the people who you are working with and that depends on the company culture. The company culture again on the values and values on the vision. So we are back to the original question, why do the company exists? Is in they vision that they want to make the world a better place? Can I believe what they say? Would I buy their product? And if yes why? Is it special? Innovative? Something unique. Or they live form what they created years ago? Do I like the design? If I can answer this question with yes, then we are compatible.