i-TFTD #316: Timely Tips

This bonus edition of i-TFTD with quotes related to time was triggered by the recently concluded World Cup cricket when over a billion people spent hours and days watching a dozen or so men playing with a stick and a ball!

#316-1. Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
-Jean de La Bruysre

#316-2. Time is our most valuable asset, yet we tend to waste it, kill it, and spend it rather than invest it.
-Jim Rohn

#316-3. Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.
-Leonardo Da Vinci

#316-4. Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too s! hort for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.
-Henry Van Dyke

#316-5. One realizes the full importance of time only when there is little left of it. Every man's greatest capital asset is his unexpired years of productive life.
-P.W. Litchfield

#316-6. Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't spend half our time wishing.
-Alexander Woollcott

#316-7. Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.
-Stephen Swid

(Thanks to Prashant Varekar who shared three of the above quotes.)

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Time is one of the few things that we perceive to be available in fixed quantity, non-stretchable and experience it moving in one direction always. I say ‘perceive’ because both from a scientific (Einsteinian) viewpoint and in a spiritual sense, time is not absolute. Ultimately time management is life management because it is either conscious or unthinking prioritization.

Most people have some paper-based or electronic To Do lists. A popular suggestion these days is to also have a Not To Do list (some call it To Don’t list or Stop Doing list). Feeling “crazy-busy” is a modern epidemic fueled by an always-connected, information-flooded environment. A couple of years ago I decided to stop regular watching of TV including CNBC and news channels. It turned out to be much easier than I thought and obviously freed up valuable minutes every day to spend with family, to read more or just relax without mental clutter.

Part of the trick of feeling in control is to accept that what we do spend time on every day or week is probably we do really care for at the moment. One needs to periodically balance between this basic self-acceptance and aspiring to do more.

i-TFTD #315: Strong, Positive Effort

#315-1. There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
-R. Buckminster Fuller

#315-2. Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

#315-3. Every worthwhile accomplishment has a price tag attached to it. The question is always whether you are willing to pay the price to attain it--in hard work, sacrifice, patience, faith, and endurance.
-John C. Maxwell

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Good leaders must believe in the existence of unique talents in their subordinates. We must avoid labeling individuals based on their past performance in a given situation.

We need to at least believe in our own untapped potential! I! t is easy and popular to blame those around us and our circumstances. It appears harder but is more useful to examine if we can do something to achieve better success, if there are great things in ourselves and our lives that we are not utilizing.

Of course, achieving anything of value requires our effort, a willingness to step up and forward.

i-TFTD #314: On Criticism

#314-1. Whining is a reverse placebo. When you get good at whining, you start noticing evidence that makes your whining more true.
-Seth Godin, Marketer and Author (1960-)

#314-2. Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
-Gene Fowler, journalist and author (1890-1960)

#314-3. Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—and most fools do.
-Dale Carnegie, American self-improvement guru and author of 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' and other bestseller books (1888–1955)

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Complaining about the right thing to the right person at the right time is neces! sary but whining is ineffective complaining. A related concept is escalation, an essential skill to possess in today’s system-driven, matrix-structured global organizations. Many people confuse the art of escalation with complaining. If you do not escalate a matter to your boss in time, you not only lose the defensive opportunity to protect your interest, but are shutting the door to obtaining a solution in a timely manner. If you escalate to someone else’s higher-ups you may temporarily make the person unhappy but you will generally find that in the long term it results in respect and responsiveness. This, of course, assumes that you have been fair and transparent in attempting to get a business objective met and resorted to escalation only when reasonable follow-ups did not yield timely response.

When we face criticism or opposition it is useful to consider what the other person wants instead of focusing on fighting the opposition per se.

One should guard ! against acquiring the reputation of being a whiner. A handy technique one manager I know uses to curb this tendency in his team is to tell them, “Come to me with any complaint or problem but state it and then give at least one possible solution or suggestion even if it requires someone else to do something.”

i-TFTD #313: Make Discomfort Your Friend

#313-1. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and thinker (1875-1961)

#313-2. In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

#313-3. Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.
-Susan B. Anthony, reformer and suffragist (1820-1906)

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Modern psychologists explain many characteristics of the human brain in terms of evolution. Nature is the ultimate designer that drives the basic survival instinct through efficiency and shortcuts. Our constant attempts to achieve a feeling of comfort could be seen as an outcome of this. Of course we intelligent beings know that long-term sustained comfort is often achieved at the cost of temporary discomfort but our day-to-day actions do not align with this wisdom. Deliberately seeking discomfort is a habit highly successful individuals seem to cultivate. A lot of creativity also emerges with such an attitude of stepping beyond the familiarity zone. Even the irritability caused by another person can be usefully deployed to derive learning value in terms of improving self-awareness.

i-TFTD #312: Ideas Need Action

#312-1. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do.
-John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)

#312-2. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career—it’s a life!
-Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple (1955-)

#312-3. You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
-Anon

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These quotes are especially aimed at those of us who are idea generators, love conceptual thinking or like to do thorough pros-and-cons analysis. Highly action-oriented people should review this along with earlier posts such as On Effectiveness and Thinking, Thoughts on Thinking, On Intelligent Thinking, Thinking Deep and Wide and Degrees of Positive Thinking.

i-TFTD #311: Productive vs Reproductive Thinking

How to See What’s Not There
Sunday, February 10, 2008
From the blog of Tim Hurson, author of Think Better (highlights mine)

The other day I participated in an innovation day for the supply chain management division of a large company. The morning was spent on several presentations about how the group had innovated over the past year. One of the major innovations was a regular meeting in which suppliers and customers could talk with one another.

Now, I think this is a great idea, and I'm sure it made thin! gs more efficient for everyone. But as good an idea as it is, a regular communication meeting is not breakthrough innovation.

I see this kind of thing a lot — companies patting themselves on the back for breakthrough innovations that are really incremental improvements. Incremental improvement is powerful and positive, but it's not the same as breakthrough innovation. Incremental change results from Reproductive Thinking. But for game changing innovation, you need Productive Thinking. Here's the difference:

Reproductive Thinking is a way to refine what's known. Think of continuous improvement, Six Sigma, or positive incremental change. It's what you need for ferreting out inefficiencies, improving quality, and ensuring consistent outcomes. Reproductive Thinking is characterized by what the Ja! panese call kaizen, or good change.

Productive Thinking is a way to generate the new. Think of big AHAs, eureka moments, and breakthrough change. It's what you need for seeding innovation, disrupting the marketplace, and changing the rules of the game. Productive Thinking is characterized by what I call tenkaizen, or good revolution.

Both types of thinking are useful, but if you want to create something truly new, Reproductive Thinking is the wrong tool. You need Productive Thinking.

When you were a kid, you probably had a thaumatrope. A thaumatrope isn’t a childhood disease; it’s a toy, popularized in Victorian England. It consists of a small disk with a picture on either side, mounted on string that lets you spin it. If you get the disk spinning fast enough, the two pictures merge. A common thaumatrope shows a bird on one side and an empty birdcage on the other. When you twirl the disk, you see the bird in the cage. Although there is no! actual picture of a bird in a cage, you see it as clear as can be. You see a picture of something that isn’t there.

Productive Thinking is like spinning a thaumatrope. It's a way of combining old ideas and insights to make something new.

Striving for reproductive efficiency is great. By all means, go for it. But don't think that's the same as game-changing innovation. You can't fool yourself into being innovative. You need to learn how to think productively.

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Useful to distinguish between small continuous improvement and radical innovation. Both are necessary but their characteristics vary. Kaizen has to become a philosophy in our daily behavior in all spheres of life. I can decide that whatever I get involved in, I will leave my mark on it, it will be improved. Periodically one has to challenge the basic assumptions and think completely afresh rather than getting into a ! rut. Some of us are good at one and not the other so we have to borrow other people's inputs to manage around our limitation. Doing neither for a long time is bad, boring and a route to complacency and stagnation.

i-TFTD #310: On the Use of Data

#310-1. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.
-Ronald Coase, Nobel prize-winning British economist (1910-)

#310-2. Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
-John W. Tukey, American statistician (1915 – 2000)

#310-3. The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.
-Sherlock Holmes, brilliant fictional detective created in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish author and physician

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Statistical methods can be misapplied to create the illusion of conclusive proof, especially due to the wide availabil! ity and ease of use of tools to make charts of various types. In recent years I have keenly followed the explosion of infographics and data visualization.

For any non-trivial issue, it is important to spend time in formulating the right question before jumping to finding answers or gathering data. Many creative thinking techniques rely on redefining the question or problem statement, which can lead to interesting new dimensions to explore to come up with innovative solutions.

An interesting tidbit about John Tukey: He is credited with coining the word "bit" as a contraction of binary digit and a handier alternative to bigit and binit! He also coined the term "software".