Last week, I was traveling back from vacation and looking for a quick lunch. There are two options near the house. The best choice had a line that was backing up into the main street while the lesser choice had only 6 cars. Choosing speed over value, I jumped into the short line. Everyone reading this…
Author: davidmusic_6fsw2h
Do you keep track of the political capital you have?
Political capital is an interesting topic because it doesn’t really exist in any sense of the words. Political capital is basically a possible future IOU. If you take care of people, they’ll take care of you. This is more commonly known as “doing the right thing” or “being a friend.” Things do change slightly when…
Time and a blank sheet of paper…
Sometimes there is no starting from existing materials. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to start over. A blank sheet of paper gives you the opportunity to sketch out the new ideas that need to come together. The other key ingredient is time. Nothing new happens in an instant. You cannot build a…
Sometimes you just get it done so the box can be ticked.
There are plenty of business as usual activities and tasks that we do only because it’s on a checklist somewhere. We could spend hours railing at the uselessness of the activity to maybe have a 50/50 shot at getting it changed. At the end of the day, simply doing it saves time and allows you…
You know how well you are doing by seeing how people react to your vacation.
I’m a big believer that heroics are an unsustainable business process. If the business breaks because one person is out on a wrong day or for a week or takes another job, they didn’t do a good job. No one should be irreplaceable. All processes should be able to survive turnover. I’m going on vacation…
When what they are selling doesn’t match what you really need…
When buying something that you don’t have today, it’s really hard to figure out how this new thing will actually fit into your world. For example, moving from Excel-based Lease Administration to a formal Lease Admin system seems like a no-brainer. Listening to a sales pitch, it has all the same functionality but better! But…
Every job requires two reports: what you actually do and how you tell leaders what you do.
We all have a day-to-day job that we do. It’s composed of tasks, activities, communication, thinking, doing, etc. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s exciting. Most days are the same. We try to do our best against the objectives that we have. This is true no matter what level you are within a given organization. One…
The best recommendation I can give @geteero is that I never have to think about my wifi router.
I pre-ordered 3 Eeros for my house when they were announced. I installed them as soon as I got them in early 2016. A bit over 2 years in, it’s like a good Facebook friend: it pops up when you need but you don’t communicate for the most part and you are both comfortable with…
This is simply the way that buzzwords work
A buzzword is any word or phrase that seems to have a commonly understood definition and doesn’t need explanation. In real estate buzzwords include agile, flexible, productivity. In business, generally, you get holistic, efficiency, utilization. In technology there is platform, cloud, SaaS, powered by, and user experience. In the media today, it’s things like deep…
Never design for a theory, always build the solution around reality.
Reality can be a cold, hard, vicious thing. Plenty of ideas that work in theory fail miserably once they are introduced to the cold light of day. It’s a situation that is easy to pretend doesn’t exist but it’s the cause of so much failure. My favorite example of this is in technology roll-outs. In…