The Barber Shop Is Closed

As I left Dayton last week after a series of meetings at the Kettering Foundation, I walked by this sign: “The Barber Shop Is Closed.” It was taped to a covered-over window just inside security at Dayton airport. Tip’s was gone.

I’d always wondered about Tip’s. It was a large barbershop with two chairs, behind an expanse of glass. I rarely saw anyone in it. There was often a person — whom I assumed was Tip — sitting on the bench opposite the barbershop, sometime resting, sometimes reading.

Over the years (I’ve been going to Dayton for a long time now), I developed a profile in my head. I imagined the barbershop used to have been quite busy, as gentlemen coming into one of the business hubs of the Midwest needed a quick trim on the way to or from their meetings. But as tastes changed and so did the times, I imagine the shop saw less and less activity.

The faster the world spun, the slower the shop might have seemed to.

It turns out that the closing was not a  negative thing for Tip. Turns out he’s Clair Tipton. He retired after 35 years.

But when I saw the “closed,” sign, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for something I’d never known. I regretted never having gotten my hair cut at Tip’s.

Funny how you don’t know you’ll miss something, often, until it’s gone.

Choosing Between The Inbox And The Stream

Like it or not, the stream has entered the workplace. While this may fill some with anxiety, and others with derision, on balance it is a good thing.

Since its use exploded in the late 1990′s, the email Inbox had dominated and controlled most professional people’s lives. It is a never-ending to-do list, created by other people who send a constant flow of messages that arrive on the screen and just sit there, waiting for action. Some are important; others are trivial. The Inbox makes no distinction. It just grows.

But with the advent of social network status updates and “feeds,” there’s a new avenue for new information and messages. And, for things that are not urgent and do not require action, it is far superior to the Inbox.

The Stream is just a constant flow of updates from those whom we have deemed important enough to follow. For some, it’s a large number and for others it is small. Into this Stream, our connections post their thoughts, interesting links, observations, jokes, more links, quick comments back and forth, news not critical but of use, and more. In other words: much of what now clogs your Inbox.

The difference is that, with the Stream, if you miss something it’s not a huge deal. The whole point is that you can miss something.

(There’s more after this video, keep reading:)

Think of it this way: It’s an Inbox with a time limit.

This implies that, as people become more comfortable with the Stream, they will begin to use it more effectively for work.

• When you are sharing something, if it is interesting but not critical, add it to the Stream (by sharing on Facebook or Twitter, for instance).
• Don’t get upset if someone misses something you put in the Stream.
• Try to reserve emails to people’s Inboxes for things you really need them to see or act on.
• Some other rules . . . that we have not even thought of yet, and that will emerge as people use the Stream more and more.

As we all embed these ideas in our workflow, our day-to-day life can perhaps lose some of its anxiety!

Giving A Presentation

This morning I am in historic Williamsburg, Virginia giving a talk to the opening session of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership’s Political Leaders Program. We’re in the Wren Building, which dates to the 1600′s. I feel a little bit in awe.

I also want to do a good job. This is the kickoff of a ten-month leadership program, and Sorensen depends on me, in part, to set the right tone. So I want to do right by them.

Yesterday, Seth Godin — and expert presenter, among other thing — blogged about the two elements of a great presenter. They are: respect (from the audience); and love (to the audience).

[E]very great presenter earns the respect of the audience (through her appearance, reputation, posture, voice, slides, introduction, etc.) and captures the attention of the audience by sending them love. Love takes many forms. I love you enough to teach you this. I love you enough to help you. I love you enough to look you in the eye.

I am going to try to keep this in mind. Thanks, Seth.

Real World Social Media Workflow — How Much Time Do I Spend Listening?

Social media maven Beth Kanter has been attending a conference on nonprofit use of technology. One of the speakers was Wendy Harman, who runs social media for the Red Cross.

Beth has a great recap of that session here, with these key takeaways:

• First thing every morning, [Wendy] spends a couple of hours listening – reviewing hundreds of mentions that have been captured in their monitoring radar using a variety of free and professional tools, including Radian 6.   Wendy estimates it’s about 1/4 of her time presently.   I suspect it took more of time in the beginning as she developed her work flow and got over the learning curve – and of course was able to upgrade her tool set.
• Senior management is not turned off by the term listening.  She often writes social media manifestos, filled with examples, pros/cons, and shows tangible, measurable results from their social media strategy.
• She has a social media elevator pitch in case she encounters one of the senior people at the organization in the elevator: “I’m the social media lady who builds relationships with our community online.”   Perhaps she extends that to include “that results in increased goodwill, improves our reputation, and donations.”
• She and the others on staff are no longer afraid of negative comments or posts.  “The opposite of hate is indifference, if someone bothers to post a negative comment it means they care.”  She was also pleasantly surprised about how much was positive.  Negative comments are an opportunity to educate and improve what they are doing.  “It is about being polite and honest.”
  
• Wendy balances her personal/organizational social media profiles.  When she uses her personal social networking or twitter account, her rule is not to say anything that would embarrass her mother.
• Challenges include dealing with the tidal wave of information that they have to analyze and manage. One of the values of a professional tool is that it saves a lot of time in the work flow.  Focusing on the how to represent learning in a visual way.  Laura Lee Dooley shared this example (bookmarked posts of people talking about her organization fed into Wordle)
  
• Their community now knows that they are listening and the conversation has changed from talking to how we help you.
• They have an extensive social media participation policy that has helped spur adoption internally.

Looking at my own workflow, I realize that my mornings are often spent “listening” — yet I don’t call it that. I have seen it as time I am wasting and that I ought to minimize. Now I see I ought to perhaps consider boosting it a bit.

Finding Talent

Yesterday I wrote about the idea of using a portfolio instead of a resume when jobsearching.

That got me to thinking. If I were hiring, how would I approach hiring differently than the norm?

The answer: I would not wait for people to apply. I would continually be on the lookout for talent. There are lots of ways to bump into people and get a sense of what they are about. Blogs, social networks, forums, etc., etc. . . . it can all come into play here.

As I run across people who seem interesting, I would make a note and try to get contact info. (It will help if I am very clear in my notes about why I highlighted this person — in fact, this may be the key.)

Then, when looking to fill a position, I’d look over my collection of people. Is there anyone there I might want to reach out to, before I go posting on Monster and drowning in a flood of dull resumes?

Just a thought.

Portfolios, Not Resumes

I am not sure why, but I have been thinking a lot about jobs and job searching these days. Maybe it has something to do with the economy.

In any event, as a thought experiment, I began toying with an updated resume. What would I include? How would I change my existing one?

I quickly became discouraged becuase I realized I would not want to work for an organization that uses resumes as the primary screening tool.

So I began thinking: what would I want an organization to look at as it makes its hiring decision? I realized that these days, especially in the “gig economy” that so many professional people (and others) are now a part of — the best way to convey your value is through a portfolio.

Take the handful of things you are most proud of and present them as if they each were an area of your portfolio. Maybe it’s your blog, your neighborhood newsletter, a project at a recent employer, a change process you are spearheading in your current job. Now — put it all together as a webspace. Or a report. There are plenty of tools to do this. Think as if you were preparing your annual report. Sure, you need to include the boring due diligence bits (your list of jobs . . . the resume). But that’s not what grabs anyone and it’s not what conveys your value.

Do I have such a portfolio to show you? Not yet. Like I said, this was a thought experiment. Give me time!

I will say, though, that writing this post spurred me to put together this. It’s a start.

What’s Your Rhythm?

I recently had an exchange with a friend during which I recalled that at different periods, his energy level on certain issues seemed to go up and down.

 

Sine Wave

That got me to thinking about my own energy and attention levels. I have long been aware that my effectiveness and energy follow a pretty strong sine wave. It’s not as severe as a bipolar thing — just a sine wave. Sometimes I am way engaged and on top of it . . . othertimes it is a struggle to mark even administrative work off of my to-do list.

No surprise there. I suppose everyone goes in the same sorts of sine waves. But then I got to thinking about the period of my particular wave. I think it is about fifteen days from zero to zero.

In other words, If I start the month at zero (or “neutral”), I’m likely to have a peak of energy around the 7th, get back to “neutral” around the 15th, and then be in the dumps around the 21st.

In my experience, the peak time can be pretty awesome and include prodigious creativity, indeed the whole upper third of that part of the curve is cool. The lower third of the “down” curve is not exactly torture — but I am in trouble if there is something I need to really push on at that time. I get things done, but it is hard to do my best work.

(I know this is similar to biorhythms, but I do not know enough about that to render an opinion. I am just going on my own observations, and leaving the whys for another time.)

All this makes me think a few things:

1. It would be worthwhile to test this and catalog it. Give myself a “score” every day in terms of energy and effectiveness level, and track that for a couple of months. That will show me (a) whether the hypothesis is right; and (b) what my period is.
2. If I do have such a sine wave, it might be a good idea to predict the peaks and valleys and jigger my work schedule accordingly. 
3. I assume other people have such a wave — what is their periodicity? If I can figure that out for colleagues, I can more effectively work with them (in the same way that it is helpful to know my own and others’ Myers-Briggs temperaments). 

What’s your rhythm? How do you know?

Institution Revolution

Andrea Jarrell pointed out to me that, according to Inside Higher Ed, Brandeis University is selling all of the art it owns. 

Says the article:

“These are extraordinary times,” said a statement from Jehuda Reinharz, the university’s president. “We cannot control or fix the nation’s economic problems. We can only do what we have been entrusted to do — act responsibly with the best interests of our students and their futures foremost in mind.” The university’s statement pledged continued support for teaching the arts, and for the liberal arts, and said that the decision was part of “an emerging new vision for the university aimed at streamlining it for the future while bolstering its focus on undergraduates, the liberal arts and research.”

Last week, the Brandeis faculty agreed to create a special committee to review the curriculum. Among plans being discussed are adding business or engineering programs and finding a way to simultaneously expand undergraduate enrollment while shrinking the faculty. University administrators have also floated the idea of replacing all existing majors and minors with new “meta-majors,” a term whose definition is hard to pin down even among those who have discussed it. Many faculty members have said that they will never go for the abandonment of traditional disciplines, and many have derided that idea as simply cover for eliminating positions and departments.

Two points, related.

First, it is interesting to note that no institution really is safe — even ones that exist within other institutions. In today’s climate, all organizations are subject to breakup and no organization is guaranteed permanence. Higher education is an area (like primary education) that has been stretched by the transformational forces in society but so far has sidestepped the revolution going on all around us. For the most part, colleges and universities still look like colleges and universities. But for how long? How much of that stability is just momentum? (So, for example, looking just at the art museum issue: Why should a college be home to the best art museum in New England? Why shouldn’t such a museum be standalone?)
 
Second, the challenge Brandeis is facing is quite literally to do more with less. That is going to take equally revolutionary thinking. You can’t just wring more out of people, you’ve got to restructure the way the  work gets done. I happen to think this “meta major” business sounds like a bunch of bogus claptrap. However, it’s worth asking: What is a “major?” Why do we have them? How are they best taught?

It’s may also be worth asking: Why is there tenure? Should there be required minimum teaching skills in order to actually get up in front of students? Why does all this have to take place in a location?

Can Process Trump Execution?

I got to thinking recently about a time I spent a half day observing a visioning exercise. I was excited, at first, to have the opportunity to learn a thing or two. The people leading the session have worked with lots of civic groups and local governments over the years.

I saw, though, that at the end of the session few participants were any closer to a real vision than when they began. Why? Because, while the facilitators did all the steps by the book, they were not attentive to what was happening in the room. People had tuned out, so everything was a”going through the motions” exercise.

The consultants had fallen into a trap I can really sympathize with (since I do presentations myself, and it’s happened to me): they’d lost the room and couldn’t quite get it back. So they fell back on their slide deck and just got through it.

This got me wondering about how often  such sessions unfold this way. How well are civic engagement consultants really doing their job? Because, while process is important — how things get executed is equally (if not more) important.

For many people in the civic sector, this is not necessarily welcome news, because execution of small group discussions can be a definite bottleneck. Some might even object that with the right process or approach, the skill of the person in the room should not matter. But, in my experience, the skills of the person in front of the room do matter.

(Just as important is a good match between the task and skills — is it a conversation, a speech, a workshop, a focus group? Not everyone has the right skills for each.)

The good news is that such skills can be taught and improved. But It can be painful. I say this from experience. It takes the oppenness to hear negative feedback without dismissing its source, the courage to fail publicly, and the perseverence to try again.

Late Nights And Pacing Yourself

I’ve gone through a number of “work phases” in my life so far and reading about the new workstyle shift people are expecting to see in the Obama White House got me thinking about them.

The Obama White House is expected to be much different than the Bush White House:

Bush famously arrives at the Oval Office by dawn, leaves by 6 p.m. and goes to bed by 10 p.m. Dinners out are as rare as a lunar eclipse. Obama, by contrast, stays up late. He holds conference calls with senior staff as late as 11 p.m., and often reads and writes past midnight.

Get ready for late nights and weekends, in other words.

From Work Ethic To Static

Much earlier in my career, I viewed long hours and late nights as status symbols: they marked how committed you were to getting the job done. I would work late into the night, and nod approvingly to myself when I would receive a 1:00 am email from a subordinate. “Ah, he’s a good egg,” I’d think. “Good work ethic.”

But I changed my tune after a while. As I got better at working and managing my own time, I began to see late-night emails and Sunday night cram sessions as symptoms of something more negative: an inability to stay on track. In certain areas, there really is more work than there is time to do it, and immediate response is required. Political campaigns, some start-ups, daily journalism, medical care. But in most cases, even large workloads can be handled in a “normal” work week. The trick is to keep static and timewasters to a minimum.

This is especially true in the so-called “independent sector” (nonprofits). Everyone in the independent sector talks about being “too busy” — but they aren’t really. The nonprofit sector overall contains many of the more forgiving workplaces. (I do understand there are exceptions; I am talking in generalities here.)

And so, when a colleague would send me a 1:00 am email, I no longer nodded approvingly but instead would say to myself, “This is lame. Get some sleep so you can function.” The feeling would usually be intensified by the knowledge that the sender most likely was feeling proud of working so hard, unaware of the impression the late-night note caused.

New Rules About Time, Place And Manner

But now, having been in the truly independent sector for some years (that is, I do not work within an organization) I am changing my tune again. One of the benefits of working on my own is that the time constraints of the workday don’t matter. I can get my work done whenever — and that means I also have time in the day to have a life.

That also means I’m the guy sending late night emails!

But I am not sure this round-the-clock phenomenon is unique to the independent life. Workstyles are changing inside organizations too. The start and end times of the workday, for example, have long been much more permeable than they were a decade ago. It’s not weird for a colleague to come in at 6:00 am and leave at 3:00. Location is less restricted too. It’s not weird for someone to actually work at home most of the time. Most organizations are also much more tolerant of different approaches to work (some people work in bursts andd need slack time in between highly productive periods; otheers are more methodical).

So, while I fully understand that the workload in the White House is crushing no matter what, I also see the new Obama White House workstyle as symptomatic of the broader changes in work overall. Things really have changed when it comes to what we expect of that place called “the office.”

But closer to home, I am also much more charitable in my inward responses to people around me. Late night emails and middle-of-the-day silliness are no longer the negatives I thought they were.

Maybe I am growing up!