Steve Prentice's Blog, page 14

What can BitCoin teach about Teaching?

Have you heard of BitCoin? It’s a virtual currency that is taking the word by storm. In the course of just the last 12 months is has transformed itself from a mysterious tool used largely by international organized crime rings to an increasingly legitimate form of money that is being accepted in by a range of businesses from airlines to pubs. Whether BitCoin itself actually becomes the new world currency remains to be seen, but close on its heels are about a thousand other sophisticated virtual currencies, all vying to become the new age alternative to gold, the US dollar or the pound sterling.

What can BitCoin teach us about change in the workplace? A great deal, with the simplest lesson being that change is happening. As new generations enter the workforce for the first time, their expectations around professional development, career advancement, loyalty to an employer, relationships with managers, clients and colleagues, and work-life balance will differ substantially from those who have ten or even five more work experience.

When it comes to your Professional Development strategies for 2014 and beyond, it is essential you choose a company that understands the needs of today’s learner. Interaction, customization and learning according to one’s own personal style have never been more critical. Many of the old-school “training centres” remain stuck in a 1970’s style of classroom delivery, using PowerPoint, canned breakout exercises and paper handouts in an effort to ensure at least 10% of the curriculum remains in students heads by the end of the day and beyond.

At The Bristall Group we have always focused on the fact that every employee sent for “training” is an individual, with specific approaches to learning, and that one size does not fit all. We always encourage pre-session input from employees and managers, we continue to maintain our two-decades-old tradition of unlimited mentorship, and our use of social media and wifi connectivity allows individuals to learn, maintain dialogue, and retain information far more successfully.

Please consider us as a viable and highly efficient alternative to traditional large-scale training centres. We have been around long enough to have built a strong curriculum of highly effective and useful courses, but we remain young enough to ensure that the information is delivered in a method that connects with students of all ages, as individuals and as teams.

Yahoo Password Theft: A reminder to keep passwords safe

On January 31, Yahoo announced that a major theft of password data  – from a third party database – had compromised an undisclosed number of accounts. This link takes you to a blog I posted at CloudTweaks.com, an authority on all things cloud. Here is an excerpt:

With technology getting increasingly more sophisticated and instantaneous, it remains a permanent horserace between those who wish to use the Internet for business, entertainment and life, and those who wish to use it to create destruction, or to fuel crime. To the bad guys, everything is an opportunity. Consider online payments, for example. Most ordinary online consumers, when preparing to pay with their credit card, carefully check to ensure the presence of the “https://” marker at the beginning of a page’s address, which signifies sufficient encryption, and they then carefully type their credit card number into the panel reserved for just such a purpose.

Bad guys, however, see that credit card number window as something much more: it’s an open channel to a much bigger matrix. By entering a different set of code into that same space, they are able to convince the computers on the other side that they should be let in to distribute their payload. It’s known as an SQL injection. Where most people see a single-purpose form, they see a doorway. That is the difference, and it is something that must remain top of mind for all managers, not just those in IT. Passwords, much like bicycle locks, tend only to keep the good guys and amateur thieves away.

Click here to read the full post.

Yahoo Passord Theft: A reminder to keep passwords safe

On January 31, Yahoo announced that a major theft of password data  – from a third party database – had compromised an undisclosed number of accounts. This link takes you to a blog I posted at CloudTweaks.com, an authority on all things cloud. Here is an excerpt:

With technology getting increasingly more sophisticated and instantaneous, it remains a permanent horserace between those who wish to use the Internet for business, entertainment and life, and those who wish to use it to create destruction, or to fuel crime. To the bad guys, everything is an opportunity. Consider online payments, for example. Most ordinary online consumers, when preparing to pay with their credit card, carefully check to ensure the presence of the “https://” marker at the beginning of a page’s address, which signifies sufficient encryption, and they then carefully type their credit card number into the panel reserved for just such a purpose.

Bad guys, however, see that credit card number window as something much more: it’s an open channel to a much bigger matrix. By entering a different set of code into that same space, they are able to convince the computers on the other side that they should be let in to distribute their payload. It’s known as an SQL injection. Where most people see a single-purpose form, they see a doorway. That is the difference, and it is something that must remain top of mind for all managers, not just those in IT. Passwords, much like bicycle locks, tend only to keep the good guys and amateur thieves away.

Click here to read the full post.

You Have 40 Days to be Productive this Year

Now that the holiday season is largely behind us, it’s time to think about getting back to work – just for now at least. We have eight long weeks to suffer through before we can turn to our kids’ reading-week schedules for some mid-spring time-off. Then we must all hold on until the summer vacation season, which will carry us through to that annual four-month shopping bonanza, jump-started by back-to-school sales and spurred on by Halloween and Thanksgiving that thrusts us most expeditiously once again into full-on Christmas. This grand-slam of distraction and indulgence careens uncontrolled through the entire Fall, cloaked first in adorable “goodwill-to-men” attire, but soon skidding into January, stripped down to its seedy “Boxing Week Blowout” skivvies, in order to squeeze those last few remaining dollars – be they in cash or on the bulging-end of a credit card balance – back into retailers’ tills before the taxman sucks them away in the sour-grey surge that is tax season. This is not to say we are not deserving of breaks; those of us who are lucky enough to still have full-time jobs, those of us who freelance, and those of us who are looking for work – we all have stuff to get done.

The problem is, as we look across the virgin expanse of a newly christened, post holiday calendar, it seems that we now actually have a year to get done all that needs to get done, when nothing could be further from the truth. It’s surprising just how little time is actually available for productive work. There may be fifty-two weeks in the year, but precious little of that is available to help motivated people generate the type of productivity required to truly thrive.

In fact, when you total things up, as I am about to do, there exists, for many of us, only 40 days of productivity available per year. That’s it. Even for those of us who want to do more, or those of us who think we are doing more by multitasking or by doing extra catch-up work in the evenings – we may indeed be working more hours, but “work” is not the same as productivity. And when you look at the job title printed on your business card, remember it reflects your productivity potential,not the hours you spend working. There’s a big difference.

The forces that battle against true productivity are often invisible, but that doesn’t mean they are without substance, for they sit on your calendar and occupy time – a resource you can never get back. In general, they occupy most of your time, devouring it without reservation and leaving  you with just a small fraction of the original: 40 days. I would propose to you that most people, regardless of – or perhaps because of their desire to be busy, to feel busy and to be seen to be busy, only receive 40 days of productivity per year. Here’s what I mean:

Start with the 365 days generally available in each calendar year. Assuming most jobs hire you for just 5 days per week, subtract 104 days for your non-working “weekend” days. This leaves 261. According to many industry analysts most people take an average 10 days per year for personal or sick days. This amount varies between public and private sectors, so I have chosen an average of 10, and subtracted it from 261, resulting in 251 days.

There are numerous public holidays per year depending on where you live. I will again choose 10, and will subtract that from 251 to get 241 days, since most people generally do not work, even from home, on these days.

Next comes the “Friday effect.” For the 42 weeks that do not have a public holiday attached to them, there exists the Friday afternoon, in which at least 20% of productivity is lost due to the downward slide toward the weekend. The very human need for rest combines with the cumulative effects of sleep deprivation, stress and email backlog to reduce productivity substantially. The same thing, by the way happens on Monday mornings, during which we must ramp back up from the weekend. Humans generally have a hard time hitting the ground running, which is why more heart attacks happen on a Monday. Thus, 42 Fridays and 42 Mondays multiplied by 20% lost equals just about17 days, subtracted from our current total of 241 to yield 225.

The Friday effect also applies to the public holidays, of course, but with greater impact. Starting with drive-time morning radio show hosts breathlessly proclaiming the long weekend to come, we slide through an increasingly distracted week, culminating in both the day prior to, and the day following a holiday in which people cannot help but be forced into a 50% productivity mode, due to the slowing of normal business processes. If we were to again be conservative in this assessment, this 50% effect happens 10 times a year, which can easily amount another 5 days lost. This brings our total down from 225 to 220.

This applies with even greater ferocity during the actual Christmas/New Years period, whether you personally celebrate Christmas or not. Twenty days between December 20 and January 1, each losing on average 20% productivity, removes 4 more days (more, if you or your team take time off during this period). So let’s go with 4 days, to become 216.

All of this might be both acceptable and bearable if the remaining 216 days were used to their maximum efficiency, but sadly that is not the case. Many thousands of people have admitted to me over the years that only a quarter of any day can be truly given over to real productivity, with the remainder consumed by email, meetings, delays, travel, ToDo’s, drop-in visitors, and other non-important but time-consuming activities. One-quarter of 216 is 54.

Finally it is essential to factor in physiological contributors to time loss such as cumulative sleep deprivation, stress, overload, fear, multitasking, distraction, poor eating habits, illness, conflict and boredom, which means that any given time, peoples’ capacity for productivity is at only 75% at best. And 75% of 54 is 40.

Thus we come to the magic number of 40 days of productivity per year. This is pretty shocking, given how much we expect of ourselves and how much we are expected to do. It can also be argued that my numbers don’t apply to everybody, and that they could easily be rejected under the “lies, damned lies and statistics” maxim. And if I had made all of this up, then such a rejection might be plausible. But after teaching people Time Management and Project Management for two decades, it is not me but you who have provided these data to me. Our days, which seem so full of promise and potential are in fact littered with roadblocks and barriers, most of which go unnoticed by the sheer momentum of our desire to work.

The good news is that productivity can be vastly increased beyond this 40-day mark, but it requires a combination of planning and communication skills along with a decision to pro-act rather than react to all aspects of life around us. As with many life changing events, it has to start with a sober, realistic look at what is really going on and then both the desire and the techniques to implement change.

Time Management: The Importance of the Single Calendar

I write for Time Management for iPad Magazine, an authority on Time Management. This link takes you to the January 2014 issue, which includes an article I wrote on the importance of maintaining a single calendar. Here is an excerpt:

So long as there is only one of you, that is, only one human being that is “you,” there should only be one calendar. As soon as people start using more than one device to keep track of appointments, conflicts can occur. With a calendar at work and another for home and yet another on the smartphone, it can be easy to double-book. But beware – calendars are not the only things that threaten to swallow your time. Think about those emails in your inbox. Almost every email requires some type of action, from a quick response to more involved work, but the time required to deal with email is seldom noted on a calendar. Yet these tasks still take minutes or even hours to complete. Therefore, email responding time should be assigned time on a calendar. Be realistic. If it takes you two hours per day to deal with all the emails you receive then you owe it to yourself to block off two hours per day on your calendar page to handle them.

To read more, please click here.

Time To Learn More About Learning

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. My most recent post focuses on an excellent white paper produced by the Gartland and Mellina Group, on the ineffectiveness of most professional development teaching styles and how collaborative environments may usher in a more dynamic approach to active, personalized learning. As someone who has delivered professional development workshops for almost 20 years, I am thrilled to observe the tipping point moving ever closer. Here is an excerpt:

The paper focuses on the need for financial services companies to take full advantage of collaborative learning environments to engage learners while reducing costs. Quoting former General Electric CEO and management icon Jack Welch, the paper states, “An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

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The Classic “Forgetting Curve”

The paper starts out by highlighting some of the classic problems found in traditional corporate teaching methods that primarily use passive learning – in other words, “sit at a desk and pay attention to the teacher.” This includes the fascinating “forgetting curve” which reveals just how little knowledge is retained when students are unable to interact.

Active learning, by contrast, focuses the responsibility of learning on the learners, once they have been given sufficiently engaging material to work with. This is usually built out of a combination of instructor-led and interactive elements known as blended learning.

The significance of effective learning to the financial services sector is huge. For example, the GMG paper states, “In 2010, it was estimated that 61% of all compliance training and 23% of all executive training was done online.” It is essential that in such a crucial area of business that learning objectives are met properly and cost-efficiently.

To read more, including access to the white paper itself, please click here.

How the Collaborative Economy beats Death by Meeting

In addition to my own posts, I also write for CloudTweaks, an authority on cloud computing. My most recent post focuses on the collaborative economy and focuses on new technologies that will help remove the tradition of Death by Meeting. This article was written in support of the ZeroDistance initiative. Here is an excerpt:

For decades now, busy working people have struggled with time and tasks in the workplace. Meetings have been especially difficult, in that for all their great intentions, they are still identified as one of the greatest time wasters of all (followed closely by email). Consequently there is a strong economic incentive to refine the way meetings are run. However up until recently, there existed no practical alternative to the act of stuffing a collection of people in a room with the goal of having them emerge with some level of consensus.

But now the age of ZeroDistance has arrived, and disruptive technologies are challenging the way things are done, breaking down the walls of a long-established status quo and replacing them with more productive alternatives. Perhaps there is no better example of this than the very common scenario known as the “meeting.”

To read more, please click here.

The Psychological Value of Execution in Project Management

I write for PM Hut, which publishes writings from experienced project managers.  This link takes you an article I wrote on the psychological importance of the “Execution” phase, where a project actually gets underway. Here is an excerpt:

The Execution or kick-off phase is a project manager’s opportunity to establish leadership and credibility with the project team, as well as to inspire vision, enthusiasm and commitment within the team members, all of whom likely have other priorities and tasks to take care of in addition to the project. Napoleon was once quoted as saying “an army marches on its stomach,” meaning that being well-fed contributes far more to a campaign’s success than does training or discipline. For as important as training and discipline may be, they fall by the wayside when a team feels less-than-optimum. People need to be satisfied, food-wise, in the case of a marching army, or confidence-wise in the case of a project, and there is no better time to reaffirm this than at that moment when the entire team has your attention.

To read more, please click here.

Redefining the Foot in the Door

I use a spam filter, as do most people these days, to keep out the emails from people with whom I do not wish to communicate. It makes sense. After all I tend to lock my front door, my car and my phone for the same reasons: my space is my own, and other people are allowed in only with permission.

Yet every week I receive plaintive requests from  account reps – ok, let’s call them sales reps – who really, really want to put me on their bulk mailing list in order to send me information about the products they have to sell. They knock on the lintel of my inbox after having been rebuffed by my automatically-generated “you’re not on the list” reply. They ask to be included. At least two of them are my direct competitors. I don’t think they know who I am. I don’t think they realize that if I permitted them to send me their mail, they would be in fact delivering competitive intelligence, including price lists and product descriptions and their innovations, right to my computer.

I think they think they are being all “in” with social media simply because they have the tenacity to knock at my door. Think they think this is what CRM is all about.

But you know what? I didn’t allow your email to come in six weeks ago. I did not allow it to come in five weeks ago. Or four. Or three. Do you see a pattern here? The odds are extremely good that I will not want to receive it next week either. This is not what “establishing rapport with a prospect” means.

The days of using tenacity and persistence to win the 2% return on your mailings are over, just like the days of jamming your shoe in a closing door are over. There are no customers anymore, there is just a customer. That customer will likely have a spam filter on his or her inbox and will likely never answer a phonecall from an unknown number.

What I would like to see is a sales rep who takes all of these rebuffs and puts them in an electronic pile, and then assigns some time to learn more about these prospects. What can be learned about the company they work for? What is happening in the industry? What is the pain that this company is feeling? What solution can the sales rep deliver?

Now wait a moment! That doesn’t sound like new-age sales innovation;  that sounds like something Zig Ziglar might have said. Or Og Mandino. Or Neil Rachkam. It’s sales 101. The time it takes to get to know a customer increases the chances of making a sale, and then a repeat sale, and then a referral sale.

So my question is, with all of the approaches now available to learn about prospects and clients – with all of the methods a sales rep has to demonstrate how much better my life would be as their customer, why are they still knocking?

Statistics show that people now buy more than ever from referral – including from a credible referral they have found on Twitter or FaceBook or Pinterest. I would suggest to any sales rep in the vicinity that I would be more interested in hearing from you if your post-rebuff “knock knock” email invited me to read one of your company’s blogs or tweets regarding a product or trend that affects me. That’s going to generate a need, and that’s what is going to make me want to seek you out.

A sales rep is a human conduit to a product or service, and there exists a universe of social media tools available to reinforce that human connection. Let the smile and dial philosophy go back to the 1950′s where it belongs. Show me instead why I need you; not by showing me what you know about your products, but instead what you know about my needs. For no matter how much technology comes and goes, the ancient human instinct called trust will ultimately make me open up to you. Being tenacious will not win that trust. But understanding me might.

Planning: There is no Substitute.

I write for Time Management for iPad Magazine, an authority on Time Management. This link takes you to the December 2013 issue, which includes an article I wrote on the value of planning. Here is an excerpt:

…Pilots are highly regarded. They are able to do something that very few of us can: make a machine full of people fly. And although flying itself seems like a very free and wild experience open only to Top Gun style daredevils, the truth is that it is a business governed by planning and preparation.

Planning is not a natural act for most people, although action, or rather reaction is.

It is difficult for people who find themselves in a mindset of action to discipline themselves to sit down and think things through, but in fact, this is where success comes from, because in truth, planning is an action unto itself. It is the act of writing the history of an event that has not yet happened, complete with contingencies and allowances for the unexpected…

To read more, please click here.