When social media hit its stride a decade ago, the Web 2.0 term was coined and flew around like crazy. It was heady days when everyone thought the entire nature of how the internet was changing. The reality was far more mundane, new technologies added features and functionality but not much fundamentally changed. The real story…
Inspiration is the spontaneous act of creativity
I go through the world looking for inspiration every single day. I have developed a strong trust in my subconscious mind’s ability to process information for me. When the task is complete, it latches onto something around me as a way of letting me know it is done. It may be the way a particular…
One of the hardest things to do is to not take credit for success you caused.
One of the frustrating things in life is not getting credit for the work you do. Married couples know this to be true. I still feel the need to be praised for emptying the dishwasher without being asked. Parents know this to be true as it isn’t until later in their lives that kids truly…
“Technology” is not a valid substitution for “Process”
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke It can be very easy to think that a new technology is going to solve your process problems. This is a drastic mistake. Technology can do a lot of things, but it cannot remove the human element entirely from any problem it is being…
It’s impossible to be behind schedule if you never commit to deadlines to begin with.
The easiest expectations to fill are the expectations that don’t exist. Just because an expectation isn’t written down doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. Managers will often have a deadline in their head for delegated tasks even if it isn’t clearly communicated. But for some projects, the schedule is firmly in the hands of the…
When should you value specialized experience versus generalized experience?
Not all experience is created equal. In the real estate brokerage world, some end up specializing in a subset of their local market and other specialize in the general needs of a business. If you need to understand the exact nuances of the medical office building market in Alpharetta Georgia, you are going to have…
Attention goes a long way to things getting done.
Attention is a precious commodity from leaders. As a rule, what they choose to give their attention to gets done. Tasks with no attention have a low success rate. Time is the most precious commodity in any business. Time used well translates to efficiency, value, and ultimately profit. Poor uses of time results in waste….
Oblivescence
Word of the day: Oblivescence. Definition: The process of forgetting. When I heard this word and read the definition, it sparked a highly visual response in my head. There is a process for forgetting and someone had coined a word for it. Brilliant!
Some problems cannot be solved with IQ and require high EQ.
To many people, a high IQ is strongly correlated to that person being more right than wrong. Surely smart people are going to know more things than others. Book knowledge is different from many types of common knowledge. There are broad swathes of significant problems in this world that cannot be solved through traditional intelligence….
“The system has detected no errors other than the type is was programmed to detect”
It is not uncommon for systems to return an “All Normal” status even while things are going down flames all around it. Just because a system reports 100% success for the things that it was taught to track doesn’t mean that the real success rate is anywhere near 100%. This is because a system can…