Four Reasons To Beware Of "We Don't Do That Here"

Part of consulting is suggesting new (and hopefully better) ideas and processes. You'll suggest new metrics for tracking performance, or a training program that provides refreshers on a regular basis. These will often be welcomed with open arms, but not always. If your experiences are anything like mine, you'll eventually hear someone in charge say "We don't do that here."

Keep an eye out for this phrase. You'll typically hear it from people in one of two camps:

The Myth of March Madness Productivity Loss

Hey sports fans, here we go again. The NCAA men's basketball season is coming to a close, and the annual tournament is about to begin. It's time for mass media to start spouting off articles about the billions and billions of dollars the American economy loses due to this event. What a load of bull.

Does March Madness create some distraction in the workplace? Sure it does. Just like Christmas shopping season, Labor Day's 3-day weekend, and the Super Bowl. These cultural calendar events aren't happening live on CBSSports between 9am and 5 pm, so they don't get any press.

Where do these productivity loss numbers come from? Well, the LA Times estimated the 2012 tournament caused $1 billion in foregone output.

And as long as we are going two years back in the Wayback Machine, this Harvard Business Review post is a wonderful example of an academic who writes 600 words and doesn't ever tell you a damn thing.

Everyone else is reporting from the annual study by Challenger, Grey, and Christmas, which was predicting $134 million in lost productivity in the first two days of the 2013 tournament. Columbus Dispatch cites a figure of $1.2 billion per unproductive hour this year. Considering this is a three-week tournament, that's $140 billion in potentially "lost" productivity and wages. This seems high. Whatever, we'll accept it.

The US annual nominal GDP is in the neighborhood of $17 trillion. The "lost" money is 0.82% of our annual GDP. It's less than a rounding error.

What can't be attributed to a rounding error is the increase in camaraderie. Employers should welcome March Madness: it's an externally hosted and funded event with national 24-hour TV coverage that they can use to perk up morale. It's office appropriate and nothing foul to object to. Few, if any, big businesses are savvy enough to take advantage of this slam dunk. They could easily guard those three points of morale instead of letting it dribble away. This is a major missed opportunity "overtime". (OK, enough bad basketball puns, I'll go away now.) 

Sports: A socially acceptable time for upset grown men
to stand in public and make farmyard sounds as loudly as possible.

Recommended Reading: Six Common Complaints about Field Service Software

Here's an article I hope you enjoy: http://lnkd.in/b_vT9Et

The Changing Role of Field Service

I stumbled across this Q&A video today. It's a good review of the forces changing the market segment in general. Aubrey Fox, Product Manager of Trimble Work Management, discusses the pressures to which field service businesses are adapting.

What do you think? Agree or disagree with Trimble's view?

Convert Your Mistakes Into Opportunities and Wins

I made chicken gumbo last night for the first time. Bonus points for cooking, right?

Om nom nom.

Not quite. Gumbo was not on the menu. I was trying to make chicken soup. Considering that I had already made the soup and canned it last fall, it should have been a no-brainer. Right out of the jar, it was a little bland. Unfortunately, by the time I was done adding vegetables, and underestimating the amount of water the rice would soak up, and generally not paying attention until it was time to eat...we didn't have soup anymore. Whoops: that shouldn't have happened.

Marketers rejoice: a little rebranding and poof! Dinner is a win again.

I recently read a Forbes article about this very topic. Everyone makes mistakes, but converting those mistakes into opportunities is a valuable skill. It's useful in the workplace and the kitchen, and a whole host of other places.

Keep your eyes out for these chances. One way to be prepared is to think though the worst-case scenario for your actions and decisions. If the worst case happens, you're ready. If not, you're still prepared to bounce back from anything that did not go quite as you had planned.

Field Service Goes Social

I've been writing Field Service is Not Hard for a couple of months now. That's been long enough to realize two things: that Blogger is the armpit of blogging platforms, and that no one really gives a damn about what I have to say. Both things are OK.

I've decided to step up my exposure a bit. I've gone completely social, and I'm doing it the easy way. I've gotten accounts for the blog on a number of social media platforms, and linked them using IFTTT to automate posting. Not sure how well this is going to work, but I'm hoping it doesn't muck things up too badly. Hopefully images and captions come in across platforms.

Feel free to follow me! Oh, and don't bother following them all -- the content will just be duplicated across all the platforms.

Blogger: http://fieldserviceisnothard.blogspot.com
WordPress: http://fieldserviceisnothard.wordpress.com
Twitter: @tj_field
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Field-Service-Is-Not-Hard/518548561600105
Tumblr: http://fieldserviceisnothard.tumblr.com/

NERD ALERT: Google DID Change Search Results Layouts, You're Not Imagining Things

Yes, your Google search pages may look a little odd this morning. Apparently if I read Forbes more often, I'd have been aware of this a week ago. They've done away with underlining links (which has been the standard approach since forever) and ads no longer have that yellow background.

Mashable has more about the changes, including some comparisons. I'd post my own, but I can't get the old results to appear.

Look Like a Genius By Sticking To What You Know

Image credit: Hyoung Chang;
The Denver Post

Yesterday, I stumbled across a 2008 opinion piece written by none other than Warren Buffett. In the piece, he publicly states his commitment to move from 100% US government bonds to 100% US stocks. Now if you recall, 2008 was not a good year for anyone aspiring to be just like Mr. Buffett. The markets were tumbling, financial institutions were going up in smoke like a pack of escaping ninjas, and every week my boss was calling his broker to move another 10% of his portfolio into cash. Good times. Real good times.

In the midst of this, a ballsy Buffett comes out and basically tells everyone, "Hey, I know there have been quite a few people eaten by sharks swimming out here, and many of you are scared to get in the water. You know, historically speaking, swimming is not very likely to get you eaten by a shark, so I'm not worried about it. I just wanted to let you know I'm about to do a kick-ass swan dive." At which point he stripped down to a resplendent yellow Speedo and jumped in like the help at Casa Bonita.

Ten days later or so, I bookmarked a Motley Fool article titled "What to do when the DOW hits 7500" (this from a 2007 high of 14,000+). I still have that bookmark on the main navbar in my browser. Why?

Try Ignoring the Task at Hand In Order to Focus On It

I've written recently about several unconventional ways to boost productivity with a minimum of added effort, including procrastination as a motivator. I accidentally discovered another one today.

This tip comes from that internet cesspool known as 4chan. If you're not already familiar with 4chan, don't bother looking into it. Trust me: it's the original source of LOLcats. Gawker describes its most popular forum, /b/, as a good way to melt your brain. And for god's sake, don't click that link at work; you've been warned.

4chan is also known for The Game. The rules of The Game are simple:

1. The Game is an abstract mental game with millions of active players. In fact, everyone in the world is playing it right now.
2. The objective of The Game is to avoid thinking about The Game.
3. Play is continuous and never stops. You are either losing (when you are thinking about The Game), or not losing (when you are not thinking about The Game).
4. Players who lose The Game (by thinking about it) must tell other people that they have lost.

I lost The Game. Presumably, so did the entire psychology department at a New York college where Cory Antiel turned it into a 27 page paper. How does this help anyone be more productive?

Conquer your anxiety and increase performance by setting multiple little goals

Ten years ago, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi gave an excellent TED talk on the concept of "flow", or the heightened awareness and cognitive ability some people can create for themselves when working. It's a great concept, but unfortunately, I can't always go with the flow. For someone as mentally disorganized as

So...much...frustration...

me, flow comes and goes. Sometimes I'm on fire, other times I can't scrape myself away from reading articles on CNN.com or Lifehacker long enough to remember to eat lunch.

I've written in the past about the benefits of the Easy Way and using the inherent pressure of intelligently procrastinating to get more done in less time. For me, these result in a controlled (maybe even forced) flow state. Unfortunately, these tactics occasionally have undesirable side effects.

LinkedIn hits a home run by granting publishing access to everyone

Two weeks ago, LinkedIn announced that it would open it's publishing platform for all its users. No longer shall it remain the exclusive territory for brilliant minds such as Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Conan O'Brien to be able to push their musings to us via LinkedIn. Over the next weeks and months, all 270 million LinkedIn users will have that magic pencil icon available.

This guy writes for LinkedIn...and soon you can too.

I enjoyed reading the Influencer articles, but on the whole, they failed to connect. Richard Branson's ten island sustainability challenge was a great example. Sure, I understood what he was trying to communicate, but really? Not only is the post woefully short on details, but the thing reads like an advertisement. Does anyone else have the means to work with most of the Southeastern Caribbean countries? Oh, I know: I'll just buy ten private islands and do it that way.

Conan's satire was more useful to me than that billionaire bunk. 

Now the filthy unwashed masses of LinkedIn have the ability to post. This is a masterful move on LinkedIn's part. It's brillant, and here's why: