Intelligent and Lazy? Then You Need To Be Promoted!

One of my favorite books is the 80 / 20 Principle by Richard Koch. The book applies the well-known Pareto principle to various business and career situations.

In the book, the author talks about the 'Von Manstein matrix' which looks like the figure below:


The idea is that people who are 'stupid' and hard-working create more work for themselves and for everybody else around them. We've all known someone in our lives who works on weekends and expects his subordinates to also sacrifice their personal time. Beware of such people. They find devious ways to look busy and act busy. They create new projects and feel good only when they have a cluttered looking desk and busy calendar.

On the other hand, you have managers who appear to be relaxed, confident and almost lazy. They look for things that they can cut out of their lives and projects that they can shut down for their employers. They hire fewer people and embark on fewer projects. The few activities that they do undertake, they undertake with a passion, zeal and committment of the highest order. Align yourself with such people ... the ones who are intelligent and lazy. The ones who know how to prioritize and pick the vital activities.

Cultivate your own laziness. It's not as bad as people make it out to be. Take a day off from work to do nothing. Leave work early one day. And refuse to work on the weekends unless absolutely necessary. And after you think you've mastered the art of laziness, go ahead and ask for a raise.

Good luck and happy lazing!

What's Your Gratitude Quotient?

Many years ago, my Aikido master mentioned that the most important emotion is gratitude. Negative emotions like hate, anger, jeolousy, defeatism, cynicism and contempt can't exist when you're overflowing with gratitude. And maintaining a sense of gratitude to the Universe when you're in the midst of executing a martial move on your opponent is a unique feeling!

Since then, I've consciously attempted to maintain an attitude of gratitude in my daily life. It begins with expressing thanks every morning when I wake up. I thank the Universe for minor blessings (thanks for a good night's sleep!) and major ones (thanks for the new client!) The attitude continues during the day with me expressing thanks to events (thanks for the parking slot received with such ease) and people (thanks to the gas-station attendant for servicing my car.)

When we were young, we were taught that it was polite to thank people . This somehow implied that we needed to thank others in order to have an emotional impact on the person being thanked. However, I've found that you need to thank others and the Universe for your sake and not for anyone else's sake. The act of appreciating has a profound effect on the mood of the person showing the appreciation.

A sense of thankfulness, focuses your mind on the present. It's hard to think about some far-off place, or past or future event while you're consciously thinking about a particular blessing. The added benefit is that such an attitude focuses your thoughts on something pleasant and positive. Our minds are like the Internet with one thought linking to the next. So starting out with an attitude of gratitude keeps you in the pleasanter parts of your mind - an important requirement to deal with the stresses, strains and uncertainties of today's existence.

I posit that in the corporate world, if everybody maintained an attitude of gratitude, corporations would become more productive and entrepreneurial. There would be less office politics and lesser employee attrition.

It would be fun and useful to develop a method to measure one's gratitude quotient. This would be a measure of how much gratitude one feels when compared to the norm.

Perhaps this is a new area of exploration for HR professionals ... What do you say?

The 15 Minute Teamwork Assessment and 360

We've been helping organizations run 360 assessments and teamwork assessments (peer feedback) for over 3 years now. Some of the users for our 360 services have included corporations like Sony Ericsson, the London Health Sciences Center and the Environmental Protection Agency as well as business schools like Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler Business School.) We provide the hosted assessment and reporting platform along with help-desk and support services.

We've learnt a few things during the course of administering thousands of surveys:

1. People dislike very long survey instruments. 15 minutes seem to be the maximum that people can be coaxed into giving for an activity like a teamwork assessment or a 360.
2. The law of diminishing marginal utility kicks in and the insight derived from each additional item on a survey instrument diminishes (in other words, more questions don't necessarily yield significantly greater insight.)

Thus, we've decided to put up a 15 minute teamwork assessment and 15 minute 360 survey for use by managers who want some quick insight into the functioning of their teams. The instrument has been created by the Owen School which has graciously provided us with the permission to share the instrument with others. We've made signing up and getting started real easy. And we hope the reports (including a Johari Style report) will be insightful.

Do take a look ... 15 minutes could change the future of your team or your company.