Learn and Lead

I am sure you’ve heard this before, what with 54% companies banning social media sites. Of course, Twitter and Facebook are complete waste of time. Reading and writing blogs is a complete waste of time too. I also hear some executives say email is a waste of time too. And phone? What does everyone talk about anyway? They should get off the phones and just work (and I have had managers complain that personal calls were affecting productivity of some people). I think books are a waste of time too. After all what good could possibly come out of reading anything.

Social media is a tool, a medium. What you do with it constitutes the value you extract from it. Twitter can be a very useful productivity enhancer tool. However if you use it only to catch up with friends, chat about what you are having or review movies (and there is a lot of that going on on Twitter), then yes companies will see it as a productivity sapper. Facebook is a great way to connect with people. But are you spending too much time playing Farmville or answering who is the best looking friend, then yes Facebook is not exactly going to be popular with your boss. Blogs are a great tool to reflect what you have learned, great way to connect with other thinkers and great way to learn. But if you are overactive on your blog about movies, your landlord, or your blue umbrella (yes I have seen this posts with more than 50 comments on how someone got wet because they forgot the blue umbrella or something like that), then companies aren’t necessarily going to be thrilled by it. You can spend all your time reading John Girsham or Harry Potter, but companies would prefer if you read Good to Great, Built to Last or Wikinomics or something like that and implement your learning in your work.

So if you don’t want companies to ban Twitter, Facebook or other social media sites, then show your boss the value you are getting from them and how the company can benefit from it.

A question was asked on Twitter for some tips on running better meetings. I sent out a series of tweets and then added a few more to make this blog post.

Here are my tips for better meetings:

1. Question the need: Ask yourself, do you even need the meeting? Do what you can over email to avoid meetings.
   
   
2. Have an agenda: Not points to discuss but decisions to be made. If the meeting is to review progress, make sure you have status against goals.
   
   
3. Keep'em short: Schedule shorter meetings. Force participants to take decisions in the short time.
   
   
4. Review actions: Review status of actions in last meeting. If no action for 2 meetings, question if you really need the action.
   
   
5. Have the right participants: What are you expecting each participant to contribute? Do you have the decision makers in the participants? Do the participants know what's expected from each of them?
   
   
6. Summarize actions: Not just summarizing the actions but also be specific, who is required to do what and by when.
   
   
7. Avoid gimmicks: Just stay focused and have the meeting. Don’t have silly gimmicks that are supposed to make meetings more effective. You don’t really want to start measuring meeting effectiveness, passing tokens etc. Hey, you’ll probably end up in having more meetings deciding the gimmicks.
   
   
8. Who is running the meeting: Identify who is really running the meeting? The meeting chair should help participants stay focused on the meeting agenda.
   
   
9. Be prepared: with your agenda, data and decision points. Better preparation means shorter meetings.
   
   
10. Follow the hygiene: of being on time and stopping on time.

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/a-barth/ / CC BY 2.0

Just discovered Microsoft Office Outlook Connector. The Outlook Connector provides allows you to manage your Windows Live Hotmail email and contacts from within Outlook. According to the Microsoft website, it is ‘free of charge’. It installed without any problems and now I am using my Hotmail email in Outlook. Pretty cool. It seems you can do a lot more with this connector.

Two posts on Mark Oehlert’s blog caught my eye today. In his post about Ubiquity user-generated mashups plugin for Firefox browser, Mark wonders why organizations standardize on IE when a much better product is available at the same cost (free). I responded on his blog and realized this could be a post of its own.

As I wrote in my post on why workplace learning is largely 1.0, here are some of the reasons for organizations standardizing on IE:

1. I guess the fact that the OS comes preloaded with a browser might have something to do with this.
2. We are lazy and don't really want to take the pain of installing a new browser, especially when we don't know the advantages.
3. We are too lazy to learn new tools. After all just installing Firefox is not enough. Vanilla Firefox will not provide the advantages that it does with plugins added.
4. We don't pay attention to teaching using tools like a 'browser'. Have you ever seen training on browser on any corporate productivity improvement training? Good case for 'Work Literacy' like initiatives!!!
5. The new plugins (like the Ubiquity) don't come with "business" or "corporate" examples in their videos. Heck I won't be able to make a good business case with the above video of showing that Firefox will improve productivity when the video talks about using mash ups to identify restaurants near you.
6. Applications run only on IE. Many (I am guessing all though I haven't tested all) internal application in our organization don't run very well on Firefox. So I need to have both browsers even though I use Firefox as my main browser of use.
7. In any case we don’t want employees to fritter away their time browsing. After all they should be doing something productive like work rather than browsing.
   

Wearing a corporate hat, having Firefox instead of IE has no advantage unless I integrate my training, applications and way of working to take advantage of the new tool. And, again wearing a corporate hat, perhaps the advantage is not worth the effort, or we don’t know about it.

Personally I started using Firefox primarily because IE 7 was hanging on me more often than I liked, and haven’t looked back since (except when I need to use internal applications). However I have seen a sum total of only one other person in our organization using Firefox.