Archives for September 2022

Self-Care Isn’t Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation

September 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The notion of self-care has received some well-deserved backlash lately. The wellness and beauty industry has expropriated it. Self-care has also turned into a way of justifying indulgence for those lucky enough to afford it. (A last-minute holiday in Tahiti? “That’s self-care!”)

But self-care is determining who you are and your limits are—sometimes at the expense of others’ needs. Self-care means noticing when you’re doing more than you’re used to handling and assessing what you can do to slow down. Self-care is figuring out what enriches and soothes your body and mind and attempting to integrate it into your day or your week.

Self-care isn’t frivolous, selfish, or indulgent. It’s self-preservation. It’s merely doing what helps you put your physical, mental, and emotional health back in check.

Idea for Impact: You deserve self-care. You need it. Be kind to yourself and take those deliberate steps to make yourself feel better. Self-care might seem selfish, but putting your needs first actually allows you to interact with others more healthily.

Dear Customer, Speak Early and Have it Your Way!

September 12, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

At the heart of every successful product is the ability to address a real need or circumstance of struggle—a “job to be done”—in consumers’ lives. Identification of this “job” happens early in the innovation process, as it forms the core insight around innovation development and execution.

Feedback-Influenced Design is a Key Point of Differentiation

Long before its current mess, Boeing was once the pioneer in aspects of product development. No example illustrates Boeing’s inventive stills than the groundbreaking Boeing 777 program, particularly in its use of iterative, paperless computer-aided design, assembly process-planning, and agile product development. Not only that, the Boeing 777 program offers the most high-profile examples of companies tapping consumers as never before to help them create new products.

Knowing very well that the secret to long-term success starts very early in the innovation process, director of engineering Alan Mulally led a “working together” initiative to organize product development around customer input. (Mulally left Boeing after not being named CEO in 2006 and engineered a dramatic turnaround at Ford Motor Co.)

Concept Testing at Every Stage of Development

In the late 1980s, just as the 777 program was being launched, Mulally made a consequential decision to involve its major potential customers in the development of the aircraft specifications. Mulally made up a “gang of eight” comprising All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Delta Air Lines, Japan Airlines, Qantas, and United Airlines. At the group’s first meeting in January 1990, Mulally’s team distributed a 23-page questionnaire asking what each customer wanted in the design. Within two months, Boeing and the airlines decided on a basic design configuration.

The “working together” initiative was a radical departure from the bureaucratic project organization. Internally, Boeing had become bureaucratic and department-focused. Specialists in various departments would design their parts. Then, it was up to the manufacturing team (the system integrators) to figure out how to make it all come together. It was a “throw-it-over-the-wall” environment where the disconnect was a persistent problem.

Having customer input implied that development was centered on customer needs. This would also tear down the walls between departments—designers, suppliers, and assemblers usually separated by organizations or development phases would now be engaged collaboratively and talking and collaborating in real-time.

In an industry where manufacturers classically designed aircraft with only token customer input. Rather than presenting the market with what Boeing perceived as their idea of what was required, customers had direct input. Over the decades, the Boeing 777 became one of the world’s most successful commercial aircraft and continues to be the workhorse of many a customer fleet.

Idea for Impact: Create Something People Want

Whether selling products or services, fast food, or experiential travel, the most innovative companies organize their offerings around customers’ needs. From the very beginning, they tap consumers as never before to help them create new products, and they’re embedding customer knowledge into the business. Early and frequent feedback is one way to cope with the pressure for shorter product cycles and to be prudent about not investing time and resources in unpromising ideas. It also augurs well for the experiences-over-possessions shift in consumer values.

Inspirational Quotations #962

September 11, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi

The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.
—Cesar Pelli (Argentinean-American Architect)

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.
—Ellery Queen (American Crime Fiction Authors)

While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.
—Robert Neelly Bellah (American Sociologist)

A Realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.
—Warren W. Wiersbe (American Pastor, Biblical Scholar)

He who believes in nobody knows that he himself is not to be trusted.
—Berthold Auerbach (German Novelist)

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.
—Jessye Norman (American Soprano)

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don’t suffer, how do we know that we live?
—Sebastian Horsley (English Painters, Author)

I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
—John Cleese (British Comic Actor, Writer)

We’re constantly being told what other people think we are, and that’s why it is so important to know yourself.
—Sarah McLachlan (Canadian Musician)

A wise person should never divulge the loss of his wealth, distress in his mind, malpractices at his home or that he has been cheated or insulted.
—The Hitopadesha (Indian Collection of Fables)

It’s a dangerous thing to think we know everything.
—Jack Kuehler (American Businessman)

Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.
—Robert Frank (Swiss-American Photographer)

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice

September 8, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A variety of psychological factors contribute to people being nasty online. Rider University psychologist John Suler famously argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we usually keep under guard—a phenomenon he called the online disinhibition effect. With names concealed, there’s no pressure to maintain a public facade. Cyberspace becomes a separate dimension where the usual rules don’t apply. Actions no longer carry consequences. There’s no liability for rudeness and inappropriate behavior.

The disinhibition effect is also called ‘The Gyges Effect,’ after the Ring of Gyges, a mythical invisibility device in Plato’s Republic. The ring grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Plato considers whether an intelligent person would be just if one did not have to fear any bad reputation for committing injustices.

Social media has a way of magnifying some of the worst facets of human nature. By allowing masked identities, as Professor Suler points out, abusers avoid accountability for their conduct and dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, combative behavior triggers a victim’s immediate reaction–a change in tone of voice or a counterargument, even aggression. However, these deterrents are missing or delayed in the online world, and social inhibition is removed. Online abusers see their victims as faceless, abstract cutouts with no feelings and undeserving of fairness, compassion, and honesty.

Idea for Impact: Keep away from being nasty online. Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but you should seek out actual human beings who know how to converse intelligently on anything they disagree with.

How to … Overcome the Tyranny of Your To-Do List

September 5, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Long before management consultants made the humble 2×2 matrix their stock-in-trade, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the format to create one of the most powerful productivity tools of the 20th century: take your itemized to-do list, and dichotomize all the items on their importance and urgency. Then, classify these on a 2×2 with urgency on the x-axis and importance on the y-axis. The items in each bucket warrant a different kind of response.

The urgent-and-important tasks in the ‘Do’ quadrant need doing now (e.g., call the fire brigade if your house is burning down.)
The urgent-but-not-important tasks in the ‘Delegate or Automate’ quadrant are best delegated where possible (think booking a hotel or clearing low-priority emails.)
The important-but-not-urgent tasks (strategic planning, training) in the ‘Schedule’ quadrant should take up most of your time. Eisenhower noted that truly vital yet immediate tasks are few and far between: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” That means committing to doing the tasks you schedule. Being effective can’t happen if you keep kicking the can down the road.
The neither-important nor-urgent tasks in the ‘Eliminate’ quadrant are usually time-wasting activities and must be eliminated forthwith. They don’t move you towards achieving your goals.

De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

The Eisenhower Priority Matrix isn’t entirely ground-breaking. Still, it can help you recognize you can deliver yourself by knowing it’s okay not to complete them all, so long as you get the most vital ones done. The challenge lies in being able to determine what’s essential and what isn’t, as expounded tediously in Steven Covey’s First Things First (1994):

Urgent matters are those that require immediate action. These are the visible issues that pop up and demand your attention now. Often, urgent matters come with clear consequences for not completing these tasks. Urgent tasks are unavoidadable, but spending too much time putting out fires can produce a great deal of stress and could result in burnout.

Important matters, on the other hand, are those that contribute to long-term goals and life values. These items require planning and thoughtful action. When you focus on important matters you manage your time, energy, and attention rather than mindlessly expending these resources. What is important is subjective and depends on your own values and personal goals. No one else can define what is important for you.

The key to productivity is to be very selective in what you pick and execute your most important priorities. Be ready to delegate and be quick and not-to-perfection on as many things as possible. You really don’t need to give 110% on everything.

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

The Eisenhower method can be an indispensable weapon in your efficiency arsenal. Your life will never be the same when you internalize clarity of habits. Once you’ve been using the matrix for a while, you can realize a pattern of your own behavior. With some discipline, you can change your behaviors to ensure you’re spending more time on the ‘Schedule’ and ‘Do’ quadrants, improving your ability to plan your work.

Try taking a few minutes each day and analyze your task list. Are there things on there that you can delegate or eliminate? Are you genuinely focusing on the right tasks? It’s incredible how much more productive you can be with a bit of planning and forethought.

Inspirational Quotations #961

September 4, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi

Indolence and stupidity are first cousins.
—Antoine de Rivarol (French Writer)

Where the heart is full of kindness which seeks no injury to another, either in act or thought or wish, this full love creates an atmosphere of harmony, whose benign power touches with healing all who come within its influence. Peace in the heart radiates peace to other hearts, even more surely than contention breeds contention.
—Patanjali (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
—The Upanishads (Sacred Books of Hinduism)

Ideas are the real substance of human life. Ideas guide our actions and even control our movements. It is just as well to put them in order first and then to display their anatomy.
—Jonathan Miller (English Stage Director)

Children read to learn—even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries: it is all new to them.
—Joan Aiken (British Fantasy Writer)

On the neck of a young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.
—Hafez (Persian Poet)

The most popular labor-saving device is still money.
—Phyllis George (American Sportscaster)

Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.
—Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.
—Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese Novelist, Short Story Writer)

Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
—George V. Higgins (American Novelist)

If you are not willing to take pain to live by your principles, there is no point in having principles.
—Marvin Bower (American Business Consultant)

Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
—Greil Marcus (American Music Journalist)

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
—Ingvar Kamprad (Swedish Businessman)

How to … Know When it’s Time to Quit Your Job

September 1, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If there’s an acid test for how to know when it’s time to stop and do something different, it’s this.

When you come home from work, and pretty much all you want to do is slouch on the sofa, order takeout, and watch silly videos on TikTok, it’s time to find something else that meshes with your interests and aspirations more closely.

For many people, the central challenge of work-life should be, “How do I bring more of myself to my work?” Your job should make you sweat a little bit, in a good way.

So, when you start to believe you can’t do better, when you start to feel pretty indifferent about what you’re doing, and it’s sapping you of all energy, it’s time to evaluate whether you have the right job at the right company and whether you’re doing the right thing.

Idea for Impact: Above all, whatever you do, work should add energy to your life, not sift it away. Work at a personal plan, and periodically follow up with those who may be able to open doors for you.

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Archives for September 2022

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Feedback-Influenced Design is a Key Point of Differentiation

Concept Testing at Every Stage of Development

Idea for Impact: Create Something People Want

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De-prioritize Stuff You Shouldn’t Be Doing in the First Place

Idea for Impact: Use the Eisenhower Priority Matrix to Triage Your To-Do List

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