kSensei Blog

Busy vs. Productive

Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of mental laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

– Timothy Ferriss

Five Essential Online Trends for Small Businesses » Small Business Trends

Small businesses can capitalize on online marketing and sales trends much like sail ships that are well positioned taking advantage of changes in tides and wind. Here are some current online trends that can be used to your advantage.

Jumpstarting Innovation: Using Disruption to Your Advantage — HBS Working Knowledge

Fostering innovation in a mature company can often seem like a swim upstream—the needs of the existing business often overwhelm attempts to create something new. Harvard Business School professor Lynda M. Applegate shows how one of the forces that threatens established companies can also be a source of salvation: disruptive change. Plus: Innovation worksheets. Key concepts include:

* Jumpstarting innovation is a critical business imperative. Executives realize that radical change is needed but do not feel equipped to make such change.
* Disruptions in the business environment allow new entrants or forward-thinking established players to introduce innovations that transform the way companies do business and consumers behave.
* Disruptive changes that might serve as the source of innovation include technology shifts, new business models, industry dynamics, global opportunities, and regulatory changes.

Mainframe.gr » 24 Freelancing tips (or the alphabet of a freelancer)

Business Logs » Blog Archive » Top 10 Business Blogging Tips

Want to get your business blog in gear? Here are 10 (plus 1 bonus!) battle-tested tips that you can start implementing today.

FO Business logs

Dumb Mistakes that Kill Small Businesses

Fatal small business mistakes often can be avoided, but only by business owners who recognize the danger in time. These are common errors that can doom small companies…

How to Change the World: Ten Things to Learn This School Year

Things to learn before finish the school, to be better prepared for real world by G Kawasaki

FO How to change the world

ChiefInnovatorOnline.com: Better Isn’t Enough - You have to be different

Almost every corporation on our planet is on a quest to outperform its rivals in two key business activities – improve the performance of current business, and create the future for the business. The trouble with this is that few organizations do this well – they are either good at continuous improvement or good at innovation, but not good at both in a strategic, tactical and deliberate way.

The Lean Nature of Google’s Development Practices - Manageability

For the uninitiated, Lean Production is a set of princples and tools first conceptualized by Toyota in the 1980s (a.k.a. Just-In-Time, Kanban system) to support its auto manufacturing business. Mary and Tom Poppendieck subsequently leveraged the ideas and defined a set of seven lean principles for software development:

1. Eliminate Waste - Spend time only on what adds real customer value.
2. Amplify Learning - When you have tough problems, increase feedback.
3. Empower the Team - Let the people who add value use their full potential.
4. Deliver as Fast as Possible - Deliver value to customers as soon as they ask for it.
5. See the Whole - Beware of the temptation to optimize parts at the expense of the whole.
6. Build Integrity In - Don’t try to tack on integrity after the fact - build it in.
7. Decide as Late as Possible - Keep your options open as long as practical, but no longer.

The question I would like to pose is “how close does Google’s development practices match Lean software development?”.

In addition, what does Google do that goes beyond Lean Software Development?

Carlos Peres wrote an interesting article analyzing every lean principle and how Google is applying it to their processes.

Public speaking do’s and don’t’s - Lifehacker

As Jerry Seinfeld once noted, at a funeral, most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy, since public speaking stresses people out more than death. But giving talks doesn’t have to be such a frightening affair.

Whether you’re giving a talk at your local library, updating your colleagues on work progress, or presenting to a large group of strangers, there are some simple steps that should help make public speaking a better experience - for both you and your audience.

First on Lifehacker

The 10 Beliefs of Great Managers - lifehack.org

What do the truly great managers of our world believe in?

1. Managers believe that people are innately good. Without this core belief and faith in people, great management is not possible.

2. Managers believe they do not work on their people, they work with them; they enable and empower them.

3. Managers believe that “empowerment” comes from within, and has more to do with self-motivation and innate talent than with the acceptance of authority. They get their cues from the person, not from the task or process.

4. Managers believe that all people have strengths which can be made stronger, and that their weaknesses can be compensated for to become irrelevant.

5. When it comes to training, the great managers do not believe they train people, they believe they train skills and offer additional knowledge.

6. Managers believe they coach and mentor people, and they love doing so — not “like,” love.

7. Managers believe that the people they manage are more than capable of creating a better future. They hold great faith and trust in the four-fold human capacities of physical ability, intellect, emotion, and spirit.

8. Managers believe in the power of positive, affirmative thinking, and they have a low tolerance for negativity. They are confident and eternal optimists.

9. Managers believe it is their job to remove barriers and obstacles so people can attain the level of greatness they are destined for. They believe that “can’t” is a temporary state of affairs, and that everything is only impossible until the first person does it.

10. Managers believe that their legacy will be in the other people they have helped to achieve worthwhile and meaningful goals. They believe that success is measured in people who thrive and prosper.

That’s why managers matter, and why management is vitally important.

First on lifehack.org

Fixing the Requirements Mess - Editorial - CIO

Mishandled requirements can torpedo a project at any time, from inception to delivery. Start down the wrong road and you arrive at the wrong destination. And even if you’re heading in the right direction, making fumbling changes midstream can be almost as deadly. Not integrating requirements with your test process can have you racing back late in the game to correct problems that might have been solved early on (and more cheaply).

None of this is easy. Business users often don’t know exactly what they want, can’t prioritize what they do want, request things IT simply can’t deliver (because of complexity or cost), or can’t describe their desires in terms that translate accurately into code. On the IT side, analysts, architects and coders regularly try too hard to please and don’t set realistic expectations for projects; they don’t use every means possible to guarantee that what they’re building is what the user really needs, and sometimes they even fail to make sure that they’re talking to all the right stakeholders.

Writing requirements is hard. It will always be hard. But with a handful of smart decisions you can create a requirements process that will produce positive results—and maybe keep your next project from becoming another statistic.

Great article from CIO.COM

How to Choose the Best Deal : Negotiation : HBS Working Knowledge

Weighing different options can seem as difficult as comparing apples and oranges. The first step is to find the equalizer—then proceed from there, writes HBS professor Michael Wheeler in this article from Negotiation.

Allthatscool.com: Why you should start a internet company today.
There are so many reasons to start a company today, but the biggest one is because it’s cheap. You can now rule out having to pay Microsoft for anything because of open source software, like Linux and MYSQL, and all of the free - or almost free - productivity and communication tools like Basecamp and Skype. And, let’s not forget how inexpensive hardware and Bandwidth is. In 1999, we had to spend $500k to build a website that, today, would only cost $20k-$30k . Operational costs haven’t changed that much, but the point is it takes a lot less money than it did only 5 years ago.

Source: Allthatscool.com

Google’s Ambidexterity

In business jargon, ambidexterity represents “the ability to do two seemingly opposing things equally well.” In simple terms, a firm is good at today’s operations and is poised to do well in the future as well.
Professor Mike Tushman of Harvard Business School looks at ambidexterity as being simultaneously good at exploitation and exploration.

I find Google is a contemporary example of ambidexterity as it explores new avenues–look at Google Labs (http://www.labs.google.com/) while exploiting its superior functionality through adwords http://https://adwords.google.com/select/ and adsense http://https://www.google.com/adsense/

Looking through the lens of Google’s 70-20-10 (the way Google employees allocate their scarce resources, time), 70% of Google’s efforts are directed at exploitation of their current offerings while 30% are spent on exploring new avenues or vistas (no pun intended!).

Mapping Emotions

People are shying away from the next “best thing” and opting for products that “work for me.” As a result words like “emotion” and “personal meaning” are finding their way into corporate strategic briefs, in places where words like gigabytes and baud rate used to reside. Even new descriptions of great design — “easy,” “accessible,” “affordable,” “empowering” and “personal” — reflect on the person rather than the object.

Emotional Mapping is a design process that uncovers feelings and attitudes towards products. It gathers information on why people prefer one product over the other. It identifies key attributes, tangible and intangible, overt and subtle, conscious and subconscious, that help connect products and people. This insight can focus a design team’s creativity, add clout to the creative process, and result in more innovative, radical and successful ideas.

Business is a conversation because the defining work of business is conversation - literally. And knowledge workers are simply those people whose job consists of having interesting conversations.

Christopher Locke
Journalist & Author
The ClueTrain Manifesto

Source: Gurteen Knowledge Quote

The Art of Work

What would happen if the best moments of your life happened at the office? That would be “flow,” and thanks to a guy with an unpronounceable name, more and more businesses want to know about it.

Dialing in the VoIP Strategic Advantage : Technology : HBS Working Knowledge

Voice over Internet Protocol has the potential to be the next disruptive technology changing the way businesses communicate. Are you thinking of ways VoIP can bring you competitive advantage? An excerpt from Harvard Business Review.

What Perceived Power Brings to Negotiations : Negotiation : HBS Working Knowledge

What role does “perceived power” play in negotiations? For one thing, it may help all the parties take away a win at the table. Professor Kathleen McGinn discusses new research done with Princeton’s Rebecca Wolf.