The technology required to actually make something invisible is so complex and unreliable that it isn’t worth the bother. The “Somebody Else’s Problem field” is much simpler and more effective, and “can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery.”
This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.
Douglas Adams – Life, the Universe and Everything
When I read about SEP fields in Life, the Universe and Everything it resonated with me.
We miss opportunities every day because we have our personal SEP fields turned on. Almost every time someone is rewarded for “doing a great job” they are not being rewarded for doing their jobs; they were being rewarded for seeing beyond their job, beyond their SEP field and tackling things that were not their problem, not anyone’s problem, but needed tackling.
We are all surrounded by tremendous opportunity to excel if we look. Your employer pays you to do a job, you need to do that job to the very best of your ability and if you want to excel you also need to turn off your SEP field.
Have feedback? Please e-mail me; I look forward to hearing from you.
Think a friend would like this post? Please send them the link
I love politics but this is not about politics, its about basic leadership and a groups total inability to play as a team to achieve a goal.
This is an exert from Jon Stewart’s show last night..
let me see if i have this straight..
You need to replace perhaps the most beloved liberal in the history of the Senate with a candidate that believes Curt Schilling is a Yankee fan because If this lady loses, the health care reform bill that the beloved late senator considered his legacy, will die.
And the reason it will die..
[regains composure]
lets continue.. Read the rest of this entry »
Could you measure your team leadership skills with email analytics?
At boarding school I played Rugby (loosehead prop). Different members of the pack have set positions in the scrum depending on their abilities. The pack works as a unit to achieve a shared goal and those with their heads down need to trust those around them to succeed.
Creating team cohesion is a primary leadership task. Read the rest of this entry »
You sit down at your desk or work-bench and begin, at some point you feel it must be time for lunch but when you look at the clock you realize it’s time for dinner; you lost track, completely absorbed in what you were doing.
Flow is the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced in his book of the same name Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He studied thousands of athletes, artists and workers from all walks of life; Surgeons and line workers, programmers and mechanics from all over the world. Through his research he identified what he calls the eight common characteristics of flow.
The books hypothesis is that by recognizing the common mechanics of flow we can all achieve it in most of the tasks we do each day, therefore making us more productive, focused and happy.
Both personally and as a team leader I find the idea that the state of flow can be manufactured intriguing. The first three characteristics from the eight I think of as the framework needed to achieve a state of flow in any task. Read the rest of this entry »
This is my second post inspired by Louis V. Gerstner’s Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, the first was learning to move to fast.
Gerstner stated a few times in the book that people do what you measure, not what you ask. If that’s true deciding what to measure is tantamount to defining the goals for your organization. I find this idea intriguing.
As a leader you define strategies and choose metrics to measure their effectiveness. If you tie compensation to the metric positively affecting it, not executing on the stated strategy, could become the focus. Read the rest of this entry »
Today’s post is written by Linda Bonanno, Linda is an inspiring leader and I am thrilled that she agreed to be my first ever guest writer. Thanks Linda!
Many years ago at an all company meeting I attended a Vice President of Engineering once said: “It doesn’t have to be perfect, we just have to make sure that it is good enough.” He was right. Perfection is never possible. Good enough can be achieved by mere mortals. In engineering or development organizations there are a few different types of perfectionism that can impede progress and ruin your chance of success.
- Requirements & Design Perfectionism – How many times have you procrastinated your way to never even starting a project because you wanted it to be perfect from the start? Well, guess what – it will NEVER be perfect – some customer somewhere will find a problem no matter how hard you try to design in every possible contingency up front.This happens all the time in engineering organizations. People hold endless meetings discussing what the “real” requirements are. Read the rest of this entry »
3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment. Read the rest of this entry »
