Note: Author has academic degree in this change management stuff. So, until he woke up, he was selling this “resistance to change” snake oil.

As detailed in this New York Times set of infographics:
Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to kill thousands, destroy the Twin Towers, harm the Pentagon, and — most importantly — completely change what the world pays attention to and how everyone lives their lives.

Monetary cost to the US so far: $3.3 trillion. That forced one of the most powerful nations in the world to invest about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda invested in planning and executing the attacks. That’s one hell of an ROI.

Of course, we’re talking evil here. We should never forget what has been done to us and the toll it had on our nation, our lives and our souls.

But we can also flop the lessons learned. Turn evil power into good power.

In the world of today’s business: The small and nimble can force the powerful and mighty to completely change how they approach planning, executing, treating their workforce, satisfying their customers. The small, fast and nimble can win the noble war of doing more good for more customers and more employees than those businesses currently in power.

(Full Disclosure: Headline applies to all of us…Including us here at Hacking Work…So it’s always important to seek out diverse views on any subject, and then make up your own mind.)

Information Week recently claimed, “Millennials Aren’t The Little Devils IT Imagines: Research suggests 20-somethings think highly of IT organizations and don’t flout IT conventions as often as some of us might expect.”

They cite new research by GigaOM Pro and IT support vendor Bomgar — (Warning: Go back to our headline, then look at what Bomgar does) — that suggests the Millennials have more respect for the IT organization than most of us give them credit for.

They cited that while about 80% of IT managers think Millennials’ tech expectations are very different than what they provide (…We agree!…), and up to one-third disregard corporate policies (…We found it to between one-third to two-thirds, when including all workers of all ages, an including all types of workarounds…) — yet only 10 out of 400 Millennials described their actions this way.

Duh!!!!

Does a fish describe being in water as being “different” or swimming in his own way as “disregarding Neptune’s policies”????

The data collection and interpretation still assumes a Corporate’s Way/Good, Not Corporate’s Way/Bad way of thinking.

Corporate CIOs: Your Ass is Still Grass
How about asking Millennials something like “Since childhood, is it normal and acceptable and good for you, when using any tech device, to quickly work around it if the device/system didn’t give you what you wanted immediately?”

They’d respond: “Duh. Of course. Workarounds are not ‘different.’ That’s just what we do. Whatever Corporate supplies us with will always be just a starting point. Then we take it from there.”

Also: Doesn’t it defy both logic and common sense to find that 80% of a group of people have different expectations from you than what you’re supplying…And then conclude that all is A-OK…No problems? There’s a lot more benevolent hacking going on out there than is captured by any IT vendor’s surveys!

Think long and hard about which lens you use when interpreting Millennials views and behaviors. Which lens you use could be the difference between a very engaged workforce and a very disengaged workforce.

All of our technologies have Off buttons. Are you using that button enough?

Are you texting or gaming or talking on the phone while you’re walking on the beach? Do you take time to truly hear the rhythm of life in the fwap-fwap-fwap of the waves and hear the call of life in the seagull’s caw-caws?

Is your family dinner conversation an amazing moment filled with deep connections and meaning, or are you taking texts at the dinner table?

These are the kinds of questions MIT professor Sherry Turkle asks us to explore in her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. (Also see here for podcast interview w/ Turkle.)

Each of us must stop and think where technology fits in our lives. It is neither good nor bad. It is our choices that make it one or the other.

Our job is to make choices. Ones that help the world and us grow. Are you making the best choices for you and others right now? Are you sure?

So, I’m working w/ a group of people who I truly admire. They make change simpler for large companies all over the world. (So one would think this story is going to have a happy ending, right?) We’re partnering together. They’ve asked me to keynote a few workshops for them.

So far so good.

Then we go over the agenda. They’ve got me closing the day, with breakout sessions in the middle for the executives attending to work through how to use everything they’ve learned. “But what about the content that I’m providing?” I ask. “If it doesn’t come until afterwards, they can’t use it in their breakouts.”

Not very audience-centered. Not very simple. But…We worked through it and came up with a compromise. Fair enough… I’m pragmatic. I can adjust.

Then came the title of my session: They added onto what I had provided (so it mentioned their theme). It became a 16-word title. 16-WORD title! That’s not simple. Barely tweet-able.

The point is: This situation is not unique.

Most every call I receive from most every senior exec goes something like this: “Would you help us with making things simpler at our company?” But here’s what’s unspoken, and usually in between the lines: “BTW, I’m defining simplicity as making it easier for me to get my strategies implemented. Simplicity is really all about me and my success.” It is so rare that an executive would ever think, or say: “My goal is to truly make things simpler for the workforce, because I understand that that’s enlightened self-interest.”

It really shouldn’t be so hard to make things simpler for the people doing the work.

The term sounding board originally comes church design: A sounding board is a structure placed above or behind a pulpit or other presentation platform which helps to project the sound of the speaker. But most of us use this term to describe a person who listens intently to us in order to provide some kind of feedback and insights that might not have otherwise occurred to us.

I recently had a fantastic sounding board experience. Someone had referred me to Mark Levy, a great guy who other speakers have used to rethink how they are positioning themselves.

A magician, a marketer, a great storyteller, but what makes Mark so special is that he is a great questioner and listener. What I thought would be a brief lunch turned out to be about 3.5 hours of fantastic and insightful conversation. Things that I thought I had figured out long ago, suddenly needed to be reexamined, possibly rethought.

Hopefully, at some point, everyone will see the results of what I learned that day — in the form of enhanced positioning and clarity and value from me. But that’s for later.

Here, now, spend a moment pondering: Who is your sounding board? How often do you check in with him or her? Should you be doing so more often? Do you have different sounding boards for different kinds of challenges and situations?

The ultimate sounding board in business was probably Peter Drucker. While he was alive, business leaders would come to sit at his feet and have him as the most simple-yet-profound questions. Among them: “What business are you in?” Most would tell you that it is so easy to answer that question…it’s always the second slide in their standard PowerPoint presentation. Yet the truly smart ones would dig deep into it, with a sounding board, like Drucker, asking many follow up questions until they truly discovered The Truth.

Who is helping you discover Your Truth?

Josh and I have gotten some interesting feedback doing presentations about hacking work.

From “anarchists” to “rule breakers” to “heretics” — because everyone knows at least one story about Black Hat Hackers, baddies who are out to steal credit card numbers or worse, they see all hacking as a malicious act. Not so.

Hacking is merely the pursuit of knowledge, trying to understand how something works by taking it apart and putting it together in ways the original creator hadn’t thought of. In business, that’s called innovation and systems-thinking. In life, hacking is actually quite Zen.

Badhidharma is considered the first Patriarch of Zen, who left India for China around 460AD. He said “In order to see a fish you must watch the water.” That is what hackers do. They observe with what Zen Buddhists call a “beginner’s mind” — freeing oneself of preconceived ideas of how things are, how they must be, and exploring all possibilities.

They also have a great sense of humor! The following is excerpted from Richard Thieme’s Zen and The Art of Hacking. I urge you to read Theime’s entire post:

Hackers are men and women who go where they must go to learn what they must learn.

Often portrayed as rebellious heretics, hackers are in fact faithful followers of three gods:

• Odin, who hung cold and alone in a windswept tree for nine long days and nights, sleepless and single-hearted, in order to seize the knowledge of the Runes. The Runes were symbols of what the Greeks called logos, the creative power of the Word, the magic of consciousness acting on inanimate matter and making it plastic.

• The trickster Coyote, who some call Pan, his wry humor a grin in the shadows, his appetites and passions a firestorm of Dionysian ardor.

• Jesus the man, the earthy Jew, a real mensch rather than a dreamy-eyed Nordic nanny-of-the-planet, who refused to knuckle under to convention or the suffocating constraints of the lowest common denominator of the crowd.

This year, I had the honor of presenting at South By Southwest (SXSW), an amazing overload feast of intelligentsia, music and films. I was thrilled to learn from the other presentations that I was able to attend.

But that’s also the problem with SXSW: the only way you could see, hear and learn all there is would be to break the space/time continuum, being everywhere, all at once. Yet Ogilvy has helped out with that. They have produced Ogilvy Notes, sending graphic artist note-takers to record some of the sessions. (Alas, not mine…boo hoo.)

Here are 10 Kick-Ass Learnings that I’ve culled from those online records…

1. Agile Self Development must begin with your big vision, and is accomplished through a series of small, quick sprints to get you there. Track your progress dutifully. Keep daily logs or journals.
— Dinah Sanders, Marcy Swenson

2. Anatomy of a Design Decision must always be evaluated from the user’s perspective. What’s it like to be a user of this design?
— Jared Spool

3. How to Innovate at Big Companies: To overcome all the inevitable barriers, build prototypes of your ideas, and find like-minded people to help you prove the model…showing, demonstrating, using the prototypes.
— Gene Kim, William Hertling

4. Better Crowdsourcing: Scaling your idea means letting it go…Allowing other people to own it and do things with it that you could not have predicted.
— Daniel Honigman, Heidi Hackemer, John Winsor, Len Kendall

5. How to Sell Unsolicited Ideas: Nothing great ever happens without passion!… To change their thinking, you may have to change yours… The difference between knowing something and REALLY knowing it is being able to explain it simply, quickly… Avoid short-term compensation, aim for long-term rewards.
— Alessandra Lariu, Hashem Bajwa, John Wimsatt, Nick Parish, Ty Montague

6. Collaboration Over Competition is all about people, relationships and transparency. Collaborate with Frienemies who you can trust on a personal level, even if you have some goals that are different.
— Derek Neighbors, Jay Baer, Kristie Wells, Sally Strebel

7. Design Across Disciplines: Spend a day in the other discipline’s shoes (using and living their processes, procesdures, rules, tools, goals, etc.)
— Ben Yarrow, Elaine Wherry, Matthew Robbins, Stephen Atkinson

8. Creating Serendipitous Innovations Through Check-Ins: Keep asking “How could we make this easier?”
— Dennis Crowley, Pete Cashmore

9. Getting Past Your Fears in the Name of Creation: There is no creativity without risk. Give yourself permission to take the first step, a baby step. Try a quick fail to take away the power that fear has over you. Fear should be embraced as a motivator.
— Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields

10. My Prototype Beat Up Your Business Plan: Investors don’t read business plans anymore… Get something out there! Now. Fast. Yes, it may be full of holes, but others will either make a product to fill the holes (making your product stronger, better) or they’ll help you fill the holes as you go along.
— Ade Olonoh, Jeffrey Kalmikoff, Kendra Shimmell, Kristian Andersen

Want more? In addition to surfing page by page graphic notes online, you can also download the entire set:
• Download Day One
• Download Day Two
• Download Day Three

A few months ago, lead singer Damian Kulash of OK Go wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the changing state of the music business. Can you learn from his band’s strategies? Hell, yeah…

Their World is Just Like Your World: “For several decades, though, from about World War II until sometime in the last 10 years, the recording industry…” “Then came the Internet, and in less than a decade, that system fell.” Substitute your industry name for theirs and these sentences describe the sea-change you’re still experiencing.

Their Challenge/Opportunity is Your Challenge/Opportunity: Read the following, again changing industry names… “Music is getting harder to define again. It’s becoming more of an experience and less of an object. Without records as clearly delineated receptacles of value, last century’s rules—both industrial and creative—are out the window. For those who can find an audience or a paycheck outside the traditional system, this can mean blessed freedom from the music industry’s gatekeepers.” Sound familiar? It should. The massive changes you are experiencing also mean opportunities, if you’re ready to go for them.

Three Quick Tips:
1. You Are Your Brand: Everything you do creates or destroys your own brand image. See yourself as a brand. What do you stand for? How can you get that across in EVERYTHING you do?

2. Revenue Comes from Multiple Streams: If you are still dependent on just one paycheck, you’re dead career-wise. Every employee on the planet should have at least one, possibly several, entrepreneurial revenue streams.

3. Marketing Matters… Free is the New Path to Being Well-Paid: OK Go is most famous for its YouTube creations. But does that make money for them? “The quick answer is yes,” says Kulash. More important than record sales is the other revenue opportunities that their videos created for them. Same thing applies to you. For the rest of your career, you must be giving things away for free — research, presentations, advice, time, etc. — as a way of marketing for your NEXT job and additional opportunities for personal growth, compensation and more.

According to the most recent Maritz poll on the subject (2010), the picture is bleak when it comes to American workforce attitudes toward their employers.

Only 11% of employees strongly agree that their managers show consistency between their words and actions.

Only 7% of employees strongly agree that they trust senior leaders to look out for their best interest.

And about 20% disagree that their company’s leader is completely honest and ethical, and one-quarter of respondents disagree that they trust management to make the right decisions in times of uncertainty.

Of these findings, Rick Garlick, Ph.D., senior director of consulting and strategic implementation for Maritz, said: “You’ve got to maintain credibility with your workforce as a means of getting them to totally buy in to the mission and vision of your company. Anything less fosters a disengaged workforce that puts self-interest at the top of its list of priorities.”

Net/net: We’re not trusting our execs…nor do they deserver our trust. At least not currently.

November 4, 2010. A day just like any other day. Or was it? When we look back in hindsight — today, next year or ten years from now — will it be seen as the day that predicted our future?

All of the following stories appeared together on the same page in the Nov 4, 2010 edition of the Financial Times.

Tech Companies Need the Discipline of a Dividend.
Story: An uncomfortable truth for tech companies. The transition from being a growth stock to what the market considers a value play is a painful one, taking years to complete. Among first steps in process: Paying dividends. Which is why tech entrepreneurs balk at the idea: It’s like a) confessing to their own mortality, and b) finally coming to terms that they’ve been playing w/ other people’s money.
Biz Future: Whadda concept. We all have to grow up.

MGM Files for Bankruptcy
Biz Future: Whadda concept. After growing up, we’re subject to death. Toto too. And death is hastened if you can’t quickly change to meet the changing world.

Russian Co. Phosagro Attempts to Buy PotashCorp
Biz Future: Even in a bits-driven world, we’ll always need real, physical, stuff to make other real, physical stuff

Google Broke Data Law
Story: UK watchdog declares “significant breach of the Data Protection Act.” Google appoints new director of privacy, improves it’s internal training and made critical changes to its compliance procedures.
Biz Future: Even in a world where “privacy is dead,” these dead will keep hanging on. The slope between exploiting and leveraging data and safeguarding every individual’s, company’s and country’s rights to privacy will continue to be slippery.

And two pages later…

A New Route From Idea to Reality
Story: Apple and Google, while taking completely different approaches to developing mobile apps, are fundamentally reinventing the innovation process.
Biz Future: Reinvent fast, or die

Pepsi Takes Risks by Reinventing Packaging and Product Development
Biz Future: “Individuals who create world-class results for their organizations know calculated risk is necessary” and they know how to take risks.

Book Review: Darwin’s Conjecture
There is more to Darwin that survival of the fittest. Largely ignored by most were his intertwined and supportive ideas on Mutual Aid, Sympathy and Cooperation.

Key messages from Nov 4 2010:
Change is volatile. Change is everywhere. Adapt…Or die.
The nimble and smart don’t die (as quickly as others).

But we survive and thrive together.
No one wins alone.

Said Another Way:
Those In Power Can Find Other Ways to Make Things Work
Besides Forcing Everyone to Do Things the “Right Way”

The other day I was listening to Radio Lab on NPR. They told an amazing story.

The Benrath Senior Center in Düsseldorf faced a challenging problem with their Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients: lost in their memories, they sometimes get disoriented, and wander off. This can have serious consequences…they can get hurt or worse. So the most common solution is to aggressively confront the reality of the situation, which usually involves quickly catching and then locking up the patients. Which just feels cruel. But what else are you supposed to do if you want to keep them safe?

The Benrath Center found another way. They built a bus stop. A bus stop to nowhere. There was no bus, only a bench and a sign.

Shortly after, a patient had an episode, and no one tried to stop her and lock her up. They just let her let her walk out and sit at the bus stop. A nurse came out to wait with her. No conflict. No forcing back. Just hangin’. Eventually, the patient forgot why she was there, and the nurse simply said “Let’s go back in.” Now, the nurses even use the bus stop intentionally, taking the patients there to sit until their episode passes.

The strategy is simple: Why not allow that other world — wherever the Alzheimer’s patient is running off to — to be true, for just a beat… and then lead them back to the real situation. This approach is now being implemented throughout the institution. For example, one patient was a baker before he came down with Alzheimer’s. In the Center, he kept wanting to get up at 2am to start baking. Previously, they used to always correct his “bad” behavior and force him back into bed. Now, they just let him get up and bake, and he’s much happier and the Center is getting great baked goods!

The Big So What:
What’s This Got to Do With How Leaders Lead Others?
Everything.

Everyone in every workplace is going change. Often requiring deeply personal changes. And the normal human tendency is to avoid embracing change until it’s absolutely necessarily. (e.g., The Kübler-Ross Model from Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book, On Death and Dying: The Five Stages of Grief: 1. Denial, 2. Anger, 3. Bargaining, 4. Depression, 5. Acceptance) People are going to stay in the first four stages for as long as they can, or until someone creates a “bus stop” where they can process things faster and move on to Acceptance.

Mostly because they have no other choice, leaders are forcing massive amounts of change on everyone in their company, yet hardly any leaders are building bus stops. The manta is “The bus is leaving. Get on the bus or get thrown under it. Now. That’s your only choice.”

Maybe a responsible leader’s role needs to be different. Maybe it’s building better transitions into the new way of being. Maybe it’s about building better bus stops, and not just forcing the buses to run morebetterfaster. Maybe.

Just before midnight December 16, 2002, Amazon sent its business customers an announcement: “A Harvard module on Time Management is available…come and get it.” By the next morning, it was Amazon’s Number Two seller! Important problem, eh?

The HBR module listed the three phases of effective time management: 1) Analysis, 2) Planning, 3) Follow-up and Evaluation. And then provided a handbook for following this rigorous and disciplined approach. In other words, they wanted you to do the stuff you’d be doing if you had the time to manage your time in the first place!

There is a much easier way to gain control over how each day’s 1440 minutes are used. More direct, too. The best time management practice is Just Saying No.

Can You Name Your Five Biggest Time-Wasters?
I can. Since 1992, I’ve been studying work from the worker’s perspective. Countless interviews and surveys later, I can say with confidence that the biggest blackholes in your workday are:
1. Meetings
2. Dealing with communication from others (Used to be mainly via email…Now there are countless channels, media and ways to reach you 24×7)
3. Communicating to others (Ditto on countless ways)
4. Corporate-centered rules, tools and procedures that are designed around the company’s needs, but not yours
5. Your boss micromanaging or undervaluing you

Your circumstances may change the order, but these are probably your biggest time bandits. And they are a lot more than petty annoyances. Consistently, I have found that Blackholes One, Two, and Three cost people like you at least two wasted hours per day! Non-replaceable hours, gone.

Let’s Simplify Time Management: Hey, you! If you don’t walk out of meetings that waste your time…If you don’t hit Delete on at least 75% of the communication coming at you…If you keep going to All-Hands Town Meetings because you’re ‘supposed to’…If you keep checking emails from home and jumping through communication hoops for others because it’s the politically correct thing to do…Then don’t whine about having so little time! Got it?

With three of the top five time-wasters, you are in control of those lost hours. Not your boss. Not your company. Not technology. You.

No matter how crazed you feel, you don’t need new time management tools or more analysis, planning, and evaluating than you’re already doing. You just need to give yourself permission to say ‘No’ more often, and take back control of who you let use your time, and how it is used. That’s it: the big time management secret of this economy.

Basically, there are three kinds of people who are gaining control over how their time is spent:

PushBack Zealots
Either they were pushed to the point of almost breaking (forcing a career or lifestyle change), or a major health or family situation forced a wake-up call. They are now habitual in pushing back, and continually asking, “Why does this deserve my time and attention?”

Insulated Bosses
You know the kind. They have gatekeepers to say no for them, filter their incoming communication, and shape their outgoing communication. Obviously, this approach has major downsides!

The Famous and Powerful
They have other kinds of problems to be sure, but often others must organize their schedules around these people.

If I could influence just one of your decisions this year, it would be this: Become a PushBack Zealot. Become a claim-back-at-least-two-hours-per-day zealot.

That’s time management simplified.

A recent USA Today lead article cover story said it all… Workers Antsy as Morale Plunges: But employers think everything is just fine. The details included: Employee loyalty is as low as it’s been in years… and… “Businesses are understandably focused on expenses, but they’re taking their eye off the ball on human capital issues, notably what drives employee satisfaction and loyalty.”

What will happen as the economy bounces back?

Will we get a surge of employees doing the equivalent of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” and not just quit in record numbers…but when they seek new jobs, will they act in newly empowered ways and form bond with employers that are permanently based on their needs, not just their employer’s needs?

Or will they seek new jobs, and approach their worker/employer relationship in the same way…a way that ensures the current cycle will repeat itself the next time the economy tanks?

What will happen?

FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO COMPLETELY CHANGE HOW WE ALL WORK

1. Seek two mentors: One twice your age, one half your age.
Technology is changing unbelievably rapidly. Each generation has wildly different tech experiences even within the generation. But tech isn’t the reason. It’s what that’s doing to create wildly different attitudes about personal productivity. With each new tech NextGen, each segment within the population is becoming more bold and cocky about asking for what they need to be their best. (Positive things!) Learn from them. Also, with age comes some wisdom. Do seek out the aging sages in and around you. They will temper that cockiness with ground truths that do not change over a lifetime

2. Question your leaders, often: “Explain to me again how you’re adding value in how my time and energy are being used?”

3. Question yourself, often. “Am I changing enough to demonstrate that I respect and trust people? How much value do I place on other people’s time.” Time and attention are today’s most precious assets that can never be replaced. Most people in today’s knowledge and service economy get their job done by using a portion of someone else’s life. How well do you do at that? Are you mindful, concerned and respectful about how you use their life to get your work done?

4. Get your fingernails dirty, often: Experience your company’s systems, tools, and processes from the user’s perspective. A guaranteed eye-opener! Our rules, tools and infrastructure are becoming more bossy than our bosses. Today’s infrastructures drive everything. Look at what you are handing off to people to use from their perspective. Change the rules, tools and procedures based on what you learned. And if you’re not empowered to change them, hack them… benevolently, of course.

5. Share Open Source, social media and crowdsourcing measures, tools and philosophies with one main goal: Changing the conversation. Before actual change, usually comes mindset change. And the key driver of mindset change is changing what we all talk about. If everyone starts having conversations like “why isn’t it as easy to get my work done here as it is at home, when I get to use my own smart device, when I use the cloud more freely?,” etc. Change the conversation to “How easy is it for me to do great work?” That one conversation will change everything!

(Here’s one conversation starter: The SimplerWork Index. Download it. Share it. Change the conversation at your company.)

SEE ANY PATTERNS HERE?…

1968
“How do you motivate employees?…Forget praise. Forget punishment. Forget cash. You need to make their jobs more interesting…more enriching…. Job enrichment will not be a one-time proposition, but a continuous management function.”
Frederick Herzberg, Harvard Business Review article

1970
“Management by whose objectives?…Most performance systems don’t take employees’ aspirations into account. Is it any wonder that they fail?”
Harry Levinson, Harvard Business Review article

1974
“They talked, and I listened….They talked about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread. For recognition as well as cash. For astonishment, rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of Monday through Friday life rather than a Monday through Friday void. Perhaps immortality was part of that quest. To be remembered is their wish. I was consistently astonished by the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people. No matter how beguiling the times, no matter how dissembling the official language, those we call ordinary are aware of a sense of personal worth, or more often, the lack of it, in the work they do. As Nora Watson said, most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit.”
Studs Terkel, Talking about his 1974 book, Working

1999
“Every existing society…takes two things for granted: that organizations outlive workers, and that most people stay put. But…the opposite is true. Knowledge workers outlive organizations, and they are mobile. The need to manage oneself is therefore creating a revolution in human affairs.”
Peter Drucker, Harvard Business Review article

BACK TO BASICS: Wisdom for Today

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana

“Study the past if you would divine the future.”
Confucius

Ten Simple Truths About Simplicity, Doing Less, and Still Accomplishing More

Why these ten truths are so damned important: Much of what you’ve been told and sold about simplicity is a lie — or at best, misinformed. Making things simple isn’t about KISS or dumbing things down or even staying focused on just one or two things.

Making things simple is about power. The simpler something is to understand, the easier it is to push back when things just don’t make sense. The simpler something is to apply, the less someone needs to be managed or needs a manager. The simpler something is to measure at line-level, the more line people can track their own success.

Making things simpler is about making it easier for each individual to make informed, independent, empowered decisions.

Making things simpler is about making implementation easier, not just making it easier to manage and control things. (Which is how most senior execs currently define simplicity.)

Making things simpler is about empathy — always looking at everything from the other person’s
perspective.

* * * * * *
Truth 6: It is no longer acceptable to say that there’s work and there’s life and it’s up to employees to balance the two.
Everything an employer does and asks of you uses a portion of your life.

Truth 7: To build better workplaces, we must first see how the design of work impacts the quality of our lives.
Employers ask you to invest your assets — time, attention, ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks — to make their companies go. We all must examine how well, or poorly, companies use your assets

Truth 8: R-E-S-P-E-C-T now includes how well, or poorly, your company, your manager, and your teammates use the finite time you have available every day.
(And how well, or poorly, you use theirs!)

Truth 9: We live in the Attention Economy; Every project is about bartering for someone’s time and attention.
Employees may tolerate management’s logic, but act on their own conclusions of what deserves their time and attention.

Truth 10: Plan and manage and change all you want.
Just know that execution travels at the speed of sense-making.
Create less clutter and more clarity, or make help everyone make sense of it faster than the competition, and you win

Ten Simple Truths About Simplicity, Doing Less, and Still Accomplishing More

Why these ten truths are so damned important: Much of what you’ve been told and sold about simplicity is a lie — or at best, misinformed. Making things simple isn’t about KISS or dumbing things down or even staying focused on just one or two things.

Making things simple is about power. The simpler something is to understand, the easier it is to push back when things just don’t make sense. The simpler something is to apply, the less someone needs to be managed or needs a manager. The simpler something is to measure at line-level, the more line people can track their own success.

Making things simpler is about making it easier for each individual to make informed, independent, empowered decisions.

Making things simpler is about making implementation easier, not just making it easier to manage and control things. (Which is how most senior execs currently define simplicity.)

Making things simpler is about empathy — always looking at everything from the other person’s
perspective.

* * * * * *
Truth 1: Simplicity is about power.
(The power to do less of what doesn’t matter and more of what does.)
Which means, like all sources of power throughout human history, it brings out the best and worst in people

Truth 2: Simplicity in the workplace is the disciplined practice of empathy and common sense.
It is based on human nature and common sense, not corporate logic. It is the practice of working backwards from the needs of those doing the work.

Truth 3: There are three basic reasons for doing LESS at work…
• “Work is important, but it is not life. I want to focus on all that life outside of work has to offer.”
• “I want to make a difference. The work I do must matter. So I focus only on what I believe matters.”
• “I want to be the best I can be. So I focus on what excites me and helps me grow.”
Which means:
• Doing less and laziness are not the same thing
• Each individual must decide why s/he wants to do less, and live every day according to that decision

Truth 4: In most of today’s workplaces:
Work = Figuring out what to do with finite time and attention, and infinite information and choices.

Truth 5: You have a lot more control over your workload than you think you do.
It comes down to where and how you choose to focus your time and attention. No one but you controls those things.

Next Installment: Truths 6—10

THE NEW WORK CONTRACT
OUR VIEW, FROM THE WORKFORCE TO LEADERS

DEAR LEADER:
A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.

Your emphasis on productivity and cost-cutting forced us to change how we think about the war for our talent. For that, we thank you! Your ability to stay focused on the bottom line has inspired us.

We had gotten lazy about controlling our own destiny. We figured if we focused on customers and profits, continuously changed and grew, drank the corporate Kool-aid, and did great work — we’d be the masters of our own fate. Boy, are we glad that the 2008-2010 financial crisis woke us from that fairy tale. Wasn’t a fun way to get it, but get it we did.

So we watched what you do. We studied how you constantly push for greater returns on investment to ensure your own future. Based on what we learned, we have rewritten our work contract. You are not effectively managing the assets we provide, and we’re calling you on it.

Decent pay, appropriate benefits, great culture and leadership — all are givens in this contract. Important… but baseline issues. After that, it gets interesting, and personal.

This new covenant between us cuts to the heart of who owns, controls, and sets the rules for productivity. Specifically, how much value you create for us when you organize our work.

It’s pretty simple, really.

More and more, a big piece of the working capital you leverage to get stuff done is ours. You want us to spend our assets — our time, our attention, our ideas, knowledge, passion, energy, and social networks — on work that you think is important. That means, more and more, we’ve got to think and act like investors.

We are students of the marketplace, have learned quickly, and need to audit your efforts: Are you making productive use of our assets? Would an hour invested in a competitor’s firm provide a better return? Are you creating better communities than we can find outside in the networked world?

We were becoming slaves to your infrastructure: That which was supposed to help us now dictates too much of what we can’t get done. The tools we have outside of work are leapfrogging past what we have at work — your love of lingering bureaucracy, legacy technologies and deeply embedded procedures are killing us.

Throw out much of what you thought you knew about creating a “great place to work.” A new work contract is hitting your shores. We call this new covenant Work 2.0. Our relationship with you must return more value on our working capital.

And here’s the thing: Don’t treat us like investors and we’ll hack our work. We’ll join the underground armies of top performers who are bypassing your sacred structures and breaking all sorts of rules just to get their work done. Like them, we’ll take matters into his own hands to increase our own productivity and achieve better results that way.

Three Laws of Workplace Behavior
Each of these three laws come from the findings of The Jensen Group’s ongoing study, The Search for a Simpler Way. They are undeniable patterns of behavior that occur in most workplaces, and drive how most stuff gets done — regardless of how policies, procedures, and dictates say it should get done.

LAW 3:
Once begun, work follows the path of least resistance.
Most of us manage our daily workload through triage: We avoid or postpone all but the most pressing decisions and tasks. And when everybody is in triage mode, the path of least resistance is to just keep things moving, passing work on to others as quickly as possible, even if that work comes up short in focus or importance. Because the biggest wall of resistance comes from stopping the flow and telling our bosses what they want us to do isn’t focused, important, or valid.

The Big So What: Why should you care?

WHY EVERYONE SHOULD CARE
WHY SENIOR EXECS SHOULD CARE
(Same basic reason for both groups…)
You absolutely must push back on much of the work you are being handed! (See Law 2.)

But the key is to do so in a way that does NOT sound like you want to slow down the project. (Like suggesting rethinking some idea or pointing out something that you know should have been addressed earlier.) That will get you nothing but trouble! Instead, the way to embrace this law, and use it to your advantage, is to constantly clarify immediate, short-term next steps.

Push back by saying something like: “Sure boss, I’ll get all those 4,321 things done. Absolutely! (Ahem.) But which one or two do we need to be focused on this week? Oh…those? Great! Now here’s what I’d do next on those two… does that make sense to you?”

Essentially, you’re pushing back on the stupidity of way too much to do, or too much that’s unfocused, but you’re doing so in a way that your boss (or coworker) won’t be challenged or upset, and in a way that provides you much greater focus.

Remember two key things: 1. You absolutely must push back! Most work that lands on your desk has followed the path of least resistance. 2. Do so in a way that seeks to clarify. Never appear to slow things down!