Even CNN says that you should take it easy, and not work to hard.
Great website on strength-based leadership. I am deeply envious of a last name as cool as “Zinger”.
Philip Greenspun has an excellent piece on early retirement. I say we should all do this intermittently, and work a couple of years, retire for a year or two and then stage a come-back. Semco’s part-time retirement scheme is also cool.
The Wikimania conference is the international conference of the Wikimedia foundation. The 2006 iteration is August 4-6 in Cambridge Ma., and they’re currently calling for papers and topics (the deadline is March 30).
One of my current pet projects is a fundamental rethinking of the way democracy is practiced. A shift from the current top-down political process to one that directly involves large numbers of people bottom-up. I wrote about it here, and there’s a website in Danish about it.
The fundamental meeting place of this party would be a Wiki. This is where policies would be suggested, examined, improved and voted on. I would LOVE to present this idea at the conference, so I submitted the following abstract:
The political process in most modern nations suffers from a number of problems including:
- General mistrust of politicians
- Disengagement and disillusionment by most citizens
- Low voter turnout
Basically, a small group formulate policies and the vast majority of people get to vote every few years.
The solution is to reshape the political process to allow many more people to participate actively in formulating the policies.
This can be done by creating new political parties where the fundamental meeting place is a Wiki, where issues are proposed, examined and decided upon bottom-up involving large number of people. Wikipedia already demonstrates how a community can come to decisions on complex and emotionally engaging topics.
This session lays out a specific plan for a wiki-based political party including:
- What’s wrong with politics today
- The technologies and principles involved in the wiki-based party
- Advantages of the wiki-based party
- How to implement it
- Case studies from nations and communities who practice similar approaches
I would sure love a trip to the US in August to present the idea of the wiki-based party.
Allrighty then, I’m outta here.
I’d love to hang around, but there’s fresh snow in the alps, and Patricia and I can’t possibly stay in Copenhagen and leave those pristine slopes unskied/unsnowboarded by us. It would be against our religion. This time we’re going all out and staying for two weeks of fun in the snow.
While I’m gone, I have a special treat for all the readers of positivesharing.com: I’ve snagged one of my all-time favorite people as a guest blogger.
That’s right, the one and only Traci Fenton, one of the most determined, energetic, creative, fun, visionary people I have ever met, has agreed to blog right here.
Traci is the CEO of WorldBlu, a company dedicated to organizational democracy. She is also the woman behind one of the best conference events I have ever attended, the WorldBlu forum in 2005.
It’s only fitting that Traci should blog here, because we actually met through this very blog – way back in 2003 I wrote about a mention of Traci in Fast Company. Traci saw that and contacted me.
I’ve also pre-blogged a few posts of my own which will come online while I’m gone. Through the magic of technology… (start spooky voice) it will seem as if I’m still here.
And while I’m gone, why not read my best article on happiness at work so far: Make your business rich and happy.
It pays to be happy. Studies show that businesses with happy employees consistently outperform their less happy competitors in the marketplace and in the stock market.
Considering the challenges that modern organizations face, creating a happy organization is the number one strategic imperative and the only way to long-term success.
This article will tell you why happiness is so important for businesses today, and how you can make your business a happy one.
(more…)
I wouldn’t mind seeing my colleagues row past my desk some day.
Nonzero, one of my top 10 books, has a great website with lots of excerpts from the book.
In this great interview, Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki, says that the power of collaborative development has only just begun to be realized, and open-source software will continue to spur more collaboration and more innovation. I will probably surprise absolutely no one by saying I agree :o)
Positive psychology can make you happier and this article by Martin Seligman et al proves it (pdf). With diagrams! The paper studies a number of very simple actions (eg. writing down three positive things each day) and shows that they work very well.
Martin Seligman is the author of the excellent book Learned Optimism (read my review here) and the founder of the positive psychology movement which is based on the idea that psychology should focus more on what makes people happy, rather than focusing solely on curing mental illness. Makes sense to me :o)
A Fast Company article from 2002 tells the story of a Canadian gold mine threatened by bankruptcy:
McEwen [the owner] believed that the high-grade ore … was present in parts of the 55,000-acre Red Lake stake — if only he could find it…
Eventually, the group’s attention turned to the Linux operating system and the open-source revolution. “I said, ‘Open-source code! That’s what I want!’ ” McEwen recalls…
His reasoning: If he could attract the attention of world-class talent to the problem of finding more gold in Red Lake, just as Linux managed to attract world-class programmers to the cause of better software, he could tap into thousands of minds that he wouldn’t normally have access to. He could also speed up exploration and improve his odds of discovery.
He released all his corporate survey data from the company’s land, information that is:
He organized a contest – on the internet – to point out the best sites to dig. Anyone could access the survey data and participate. The first prize was $105.000.
The result? The company has drilled four of the top 5 winners’ sites, and have found gold in all four. Which proves that you can get very valid and valuable results from this approach.
The first prize winners? An australian geoscience outfit who’d never been to the mine – or even to Canada. Which proves that this approach can open new sources of information that you’d not have access to otherwise.
Corporate information is worth little when it’s locked up. Don’t keep all data in your business a deep, dark secret. Insteat, open your company’s inner workings to the world. The good and the bad!
In the information age, many businesses have fallen into a trap: They have correctly identified information as the key to success or failure, but they have incorrectly concluded that the best way to profit from the information is to lock it away from the world. They make corporate information secret by default.
This goes for financial information, project development, new partnerships, strategies and plans and virtually every other aspect of the business. “Knowledge is our corporate, intellectual capital and we must protect it or it will be stolen from us.” seems to be the thinking.
But this approach comes at a cost:
The opposite approach, to make all information public by default and only keep a few select areas secret, makes much more sense. This is especially true in an information-dense environment which carries a high probability that a company’s dirty secrets will be revealed sooner or later.
In fact, as we saw, releasing top-secret corporate data can be a gold mine. Literally. Here’s another example.
Another great example of the open approach is Semco. Yes I know I write about them all the time, but they get it, dammit. They get it and they do it. In his excellent book The Seven-Day Weekend, Ricardo Semler tells the story of a negotiation with a potential customer for a huge contract.
Of course Semco had done their homework and made calculations showing what their profits would be depending on what price they could negotiate. At the meeting, Semler showed the customer these calculations, letting them know exactly how much Semco stood to make from the deal. This honest, open approach impressed the customer and Semco got the contract.
Businesses should ask themselves these questions:
That last question is often left out, as businesses list the dangers of openness and ignore the dangers of secrecy.
If you liked this post, I’m pretty sure you’ll also like these:
Last week I wrote a few thoughts on how being incurably lazy has enriched my life, inspired by Fred Gratzon’s book The Lazy Way to Success. Fred read that post and commented on it, saying among other things:
Your insight about starting many small projects and seeing which grabs you is incandescently brilliant. You are absolutely right when you say that the ideas that happen are by definition the right ones.
Read Fred’s entire comment here.
That’s the first time something I’ve written has been called “incandescently brilliant”. I’m blushing here :o) Thanks Fred.
The smart people at The Well talk about globalization and China and more. Bruce Sterlings comments are particularly insightful. Via Classy.
Superhero action figures from the office. My favorite: Bossman. “Leading a crusade to reach objectives he empowers, implements change and captures mindshare.”
There’s rising Frustration with Microsoft’s Compensation and Review System. Salaries are stagnant, the stock isn’t rising and their review system is “little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight??? for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.” We’ve also been discussing this over at the businesspundit.
Some books get you thinking and Fred Gratzon’s The lazy Way to Success definitely did that to me. Damn you, Fred!
I have seen the light. I now realize that my ingrained laziness has not only been one of the major forces shaping my life, it’s been a boost to almost every important area of my life.
Here are some random thoughts on how laziness has helped me in my university studies, in my work in IT, in leadership and in entrepreneurship.
When I started studying at the University of Southern Denmark (I graduated with a masters in computer science in 1994), I was always envious of the over-achievers. You know them – they’re the people who are always prepared for today’s lecture, have done their homework and never need to do any last-minute, aaaaargh-exams-are-only-two-weeks-away studying. Like I did. Every. single. semester.
I used to beat myself up for not being like them, but in the end I accepted, that I’m just not that person. The final realization came to me while I was writing my masters thesis (on virtual sensors for robots, if anyone wants to know), and I discovered that some days I can’t write. I literally can’t put two words together and have anything meaningful come out. I can frustrate myself nearly to death trying, but I won’t get anywhere.
And other days, writing is totally effortless and both the quantity and the quality of the output is high. I am in fact having one of those days today, I can’t seem to stop writing. What I realized was that this is me. It’s the way I work, and I have go with that.
So I adopted the lazy approach to writing, which is that I write whenever I feel like it. And my output on a writing day easily outweighs the x days where I didn’t get any writing done.
Incidentally, the thesis still got done on time and it got me an A. So there!
Masters degree in hand I went on to become an IT consultant and developer, and I quickly learned this: If I’m programming something and it feels like work, I haven’t found the right solution yet. When the right solution presents itself, the task becomes fun and easy. I also get to admire the beauty of an efficient, simple solution.
Good code is a pleasure to maintain, tweak and refactor. Bad code is hard work. Also laziness means only doing things once, instead of repeating yourself all over the place – another hallmark of good code.
After my IT days I went on to leadership and learned this: If leading people feels like hard work, you’re most definitely not doing it right. The lazy leader adapts his leadership style to the people around him to the point where it feels like he’s doing almost no work and people are leading themselves. I refer you to this classic Lao Tzu quote as proof that this notion is more than 2500 years old.
When I spoke at the Turkish Management Center’s HR conference in Turkey, one of the other speakers was Semco’s CEO Ricardo Semler. He said in his presentation that Semco recently celebrated the 10th. anniversary of Ricardo not deciding anything in the company. It started when he took 18 months out to travel the world, and discovered that the company ran just fine without him. If that ain’t laziness on a very high plane, I don’t know what is and you can read all about it in Ricardo’s excellent book The Seven-Day Weekend.
As an entreprenur, my approach has been this: Start a lot of small projects and see which ones grab me. Rather than try to analyze my way to an answer to which opportunity is the best/will make me the most money/will be the most fun, I float a lot of ideas in a lot of places. Some happen, most don’t. The ones that happen are by definition the right ones, and they are always fun to work on. Always.
It’s common to think that success only comes with hard work, but I’ve found the opposite to be true for me. In my case, success has come from NOT working hard, and my laziness has definitely done me a lot of good. The only difficult part has been to let go of the traditional work ethic and accept my laziness. To work with it instead of against it.
Will the lazy approach work for you? Maybe not. Maybe you get more success from working long and hard, from putting your nose to the grindstone and applying yourself. But if you’ve never tried the lazy approach, how can you know that that doesn’t work even better? Give it a shot, you might like it!
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