Spinning Guyro

Are You Being Social Media Smart?

I ran into a TechNewsWorld report on people being stupid on social networks. Let's look at it from your company's angle - could an employee tarnish your image on social media? The short answer is yes. The long one is that it's you who needs to be smart.

I'm never a fan of big brother approaches. Therefore I preach to accept and embrace the fact that your employees are networking, rather than closing your eyes to it. By making them aware that they are out there representing you, you could even find they become your advocates! Furthermore, by going out and making sure that you represent yourself you'll also be part of the conversation - better than hearing about it in tomorrow's paper.

As Southwest’s Herb Kelleher put it - “The way you treat your employees is the way your employees treat your customers.”

6 Techniques To Deal With Tough Decisions

Our daily activity is littered with hundreds of decisions that we make without a second thought. What to wear, where to eat, who to meet... but once in a while comes a decision that we really struggle to make. It could be a major business deal, your hiring or product strategy - or it could be a personal decision about your career, a significant purchase or your significant other.

So how do you choose? Below I highlight six strategies. Despite the risk of diluting my own points, each of the techniques contains a caveat. This implies that there is no silver bullet here - mix, match and use your instinct as you feel appropriate.

6. Defer

On-the-spot decisions are rarely a good idea. It's not surprising that the first rule of negotiation is to take a time-out. Usually, as time goes by more information becomes available. Additionally, this is the best approach if your decision is a symptom of Shiny New Thing syndrome.

Caveat: defer, don't procrastinate. Try setting a deadline for your decision.

5. Consult

Too often we are emotionally attached, our judgment is clouded and we get fixated with certain concepts. Brainstorming with someone else will help you restore objectivity and give your own approach a sanity check.

Caveat: if it's your decision then ultimately you have to make it - and live with it. As Jeff Pulver put it, don't outsource your life.

4. Choose what not to choose

Often, there is no clear winner between the choices (well, otherwise the decision wouldn't be tough). In these cases, don't compare what you stand to gain from each choice. Instead, for each choice determine what you stand to lose if you pass on it. In this weird revision of the Judgment of Solomon the choice harder to give up is the one to go for.

Caveat: taken to the extreme this technique implies a conservative approach with zero risk. Sometimes, jumping into the deep end can be a smart idea.

3. Choose the lesser evil

So not only is there no clear winner, but all the choices suck. Get over it. Remind yourself that you are choosing the lesser evil, not the saint. By realizing you don't have to love your choice - just prefer it over the others, you can accept it as a legitimate one.

Caveat: there are some special decisions that I would not prescribe this for. For those special decisions the rule is "if you have doubt, then have no doubt". Sometimes it is an all-or-nothing case.

2. Analyze

Especially useful for business choices, there are many methods that break down the costs, benefits and assumptions involved in a decision. The formulas don't decide for you, but rather help you verify you have asked the right questions and factored everything into account. With the results of your analysis, you can make an informed decision and be able to back it up with hard data.

Caveat: logic can only go so far. See #1.

1. Use your instinct

You've taken your time. You have analyzed. Consulted with everyone possible. Looked at the decision from every possible angle. Now, it is time to decide. Even if it flies in the face of your best analysis and contradicts everyone's advice - listen to your inner voice.

 
What are YOUR strategies for tough decisions?

Don't Program With Two Fingers

In his recent post, Abhijit Nadgouda of ifacethoughts argues that touch typing is not a necessity for programming.

I'm going to take the opposing view here: you really, really need to touch-type if you're going to be a programmer. Abhijit correctly points out that modern IDEs provide auto-completion and the like. That covers for the loss of productivity, and many people are comfortable with that.

Where this breaks down, however, is the documentation. Who is going to document their code better - the touch-typist or the two-finger typist? Sadly, the auto-completion engine fails to come to the slow typist's rescue.

So while the slow typist might be successful in writing his code, it's the people who read it later who will find themselves in a pickle.

Happy typing!

Privacy Still a Major E-Commerce Inhibitor

I was somewhat surprised to find, in Lena West's recent post tips to hold on to your online customers, that privacy is still a major concern for online shoppers.

You'd think this concern would have been tackled by now. I've always found that shopping online is about as secure as handing my credit card to the waiter at a restaurant. That is to say, it has its problems but it's no worse than the alternative. The average user, however, does not agree.

What is more frustrating is that many of the past few year's data breaches came not from online commerce, but from institutions to whom the same average user would readily hand over his credit card or personal data, such as universities, healthcare and supermarkets.

So does online commerce really have a privacy issue - or is it simply the easiest excuse for technophiles?

Richard Branson - Business Stripped Bare (pt 1)

Richard Branson is the iconic entrepreneur. Virgin has grown from a small record shop to a $20B group encompassing 200 companies and 40 brands in 30 countries. Therefore it is not surprising that I recently picked up Branson's new book Business Stripped Bare.

As I make my way through the book I will share some of the more powerful lessons. It is of course no substitute to reading the book yourself; whether or not it is worth the £14.99 I forked we shall find out soon enough.

And so, let us begin -

"Every business, like every painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it's because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over."

I'm a sucker for those books with magic formulas for success (which Branson likens to "a prescription for how to paint a picture"). Of course, a week later all but a few fundamental lessons are forgotten. Why? Because the oversimplified scenarios do not play out in reality.

The lesson, then, is to trust your instincts. Mine may get me into trouble on occasion, but when you have that unexplainable hunch deep inside, no amount of logical analysis is ever going to change your mind. It shouldn't.

5 Ways To Finish That Task

Ah yes, that pleasant feeling of accomplishment. Knowing you have done it. Finished. Completed. But wait, you're not there yet! What do you do when you find yourself stalling on a daunting task that is going nowhere?

1. Zoom out Take a moment to dive out of the deep waters you're lurking in and remember where it is that you're headed, and why. Simply putting the current task into the context of a bigger picture will improve your motivation.

2. Zoom in Any task can be made easier by cutting it up into bite-sized chunks and taking it one, small step at a time. Figure out what your concrete next action is and do it. You will find that once you start doing, momentum will come and make it easier to keep going.

3. Consult When I drive, I never ever ask for directions. Frankly, it's about the stupidest thing I do. We tend to get consumed by our own ability to solve problems and end up going round in circles. A fresh pair of eyes, with different thought patterns and ideas, can get you out of those dead ends and right back on the main road.

4. Unplug Close your email, log off from your IM and shut down your phone. External distractions are God's gift to procrastination. If you want higher output, you need to control your input.

5. Know when to stop Remember the Pareto Principle and stop when you reach the 80% mark. The last 20% are usually a time trap. Don't be a perfectionist: set reasonable goals and stop when you reach them.

Think outside the box - if you can unwrap it

Great news from Amazon, who have announced a plan to fight "wrap rage" by shipping items in easy-to-open packages. Apparently this is no laughing matter - injuries arising from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 emergency room visits in 2004, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The article does fail to mention why hard-to-open boxes are there in the first place. They were created to fight theft, especially of small electronic devices which are easy to grab off a shelf and walk away with. A wonderful example of the innocent majority suffering (and getting hurt!).

What's great is that Amazon realized that the same threat of theft doesn't even exist when your products are mail-ordered, so why on earth are the protection mechanisms still there? Well, hopefully they will start to disappear soon.

The lesson? Never be afraid to revisit your old product assumptions. Oh, and unwrap safely...