Category Archives: stress-testing recommendations

04-Managing a project team, creativity methods, feedback, stress-testing recommendations, team dynamics, team roles

4 Ways You Can Drive Seismic Performance

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As I reflected on Professor Noonan’s closing remarks last week, I thought about how can I make a difference to my team. How can I bring value not only to my department, but also to my employer. Professor Noonan emphasized that everyone has the potential to make a contribution, to think of some process or task that can help drive results and improve productivity.

I came across this article on Forbes that drove home this point for me, “4 Ways You can Drive Seismic Performance”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericschiffer/2014/08/13/3-ways-you-can-drive-seismic-performance/

The article suggests the following key takeaways:

1) Face Yourself On the Stand And Fire Away – Step back and reflect on what matters most to the company to elevate it. It can be as simple as automating a report.

2) Act to Kill – This sounds a little violent :), but it is just a sensational way that the article suggests that you should be deliberate and consistent in achieving your daily professional goals. Act!

3) Commit or Go Home – Commit and do not fear failure.

4) Rewire the Jet at 36000 feet – Keep progressing even in the face of hindrances.

In essence, “figure it out” and “get it done!”

stakeholder analysis, stress-testing recommendations, team dynamics

3 Ways to Manage Personal Burnout

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Recent polls suggest Americans have had enough at work. The labor market seems to require more and more of the workforce – balancing continuing education, extracurriculars, and networking all while doing the job leads many of us to feel burntout. As a class of Evening MBA students, I’m sure every one of us can relate.

I’m quite a collector of “better living through research” materials and have noticed three burnout coping strategies that have proven themselves useful again and again.

1. Schedule daily quiet time. 

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“Everyday I start off happy, but then your boss is calling, your phone is ringing, and the dogs are barking. You’re trying to write an email and suddenly three people text you about a firedrill involving an SVP and a rejected project proposal. How am I supposed to manage stress if I can’t escape it?”

It’s a stress management trope for a reason: it works. Some call it unplugging, prayer, or meditation but no matter how you label it, humans were not designed to have constant stimuli interrupting their thoughts and functions. I subscribe to meditation twice a day, and have recently picked up transcendental meditation as a way to further my own practice.

2. Make time for nothing. Yes, nothing.

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As my mother likes to say, “It’s your job to take care of you”. Schedule downtime and protect it fiercely. Sometimes that means protecting it from yourself – leave an hour a day to unwind and relax, and resist the temptation to fill that time with distractions like housework or chores (unless that means relaxation to you).

3. Learn to recognize burnout behaviors and have an action plan at the ready.

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“I left the stove on last night, really? Yes, that is a nervous eyelid twitch.  No, I will not stop watching Parks and Rec and eating waffles – Leslie Knope gets me.”

Humans are creatures of habit and when threatened, we tend to revisit the same patterns that make us feel safe – whether it’s drinking too much, sleeping in, or even becoming selectively forgetful; when we’re burntout or stressed, our personal coping mechanisms rear their ugly heads.

If there’s a behavior in your life that seems to appear every time you’re facing a heavy workload or are scraping the bottom of the energy barrel, it’s a safe bet that burnout is on the horizon. Once you recognize these patterns, have a plan ready to address them.

05-Creating & constructing good solutions, creativity methods, stress-testing recommendations

Let the data speak for itself

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I’ve been interested in developing models and using data to drive business decisions, and so I was recently reading “Doing Data Science”, which is available at http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Data-Science-Straight-Frontline/dp/1449358659/.  The book contains a fair bit of math, which might make it seem a bit daunting, but I believe it’s worth the read since the authors offer some interesting insights into how to incorporate data analysis and modelling into solving business problems.   There are two sections in particular that I found useful.  The first is on exploratory data analysis, which is the process by which you start to construct a solution to your problem.  As the author states, “Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is often relegated to chapter 1 (by which we mean the ‘easiest’ and lowest level) of standard introductory statistics textbooks and then forgotten about for the rest of the book… But EDA is a critical part of the data science process…”  One of the challenges for me, especially when facing a (messy) business problem, is figuring out what is relevant to the issue, and so I think the framework laid out in this book for doing EDA gives me a good structure for how to approach this step.  This involves both asking what information might be available to help me develop correlations between with the desired business result as well as strategies for teasing out those correlations.  Related to this is the chapter on extracting meaning from data, where the author effectively makes the point that just asking more questions and getting more information doesn’t necessarily lead to a better outcome/model if the data you are gathering is not relevant to the problem at hand.

The book also includes a number of useful vignettes about the real-life application (and misapplication) of data-driven business decisions.  For instance, here is an example from IBM where they wanted to find potential customers for their online business service:

At IBM, the target was to predict companies that would be willing to buy “websphere” solutions.  The data was transaction data and crawled potential company websites.  The winning model showed that if the term “websphere” appeared on the company’s website, then it was a great candidate for the product.  What happened?  Remember, when considering a potential customer, by definition that company wouldn’t have bought websphere yet (otherwise IBM wouldn’t be trying to sell to it); therefore no potential customer would have websphere on its site, so it’s not a predictor at all…  Doing simple sanity checking to make sure things are what you think they are can sometimes get you much further in the end…

01-Structuring a problem, 06-Building a case, 07c-Telling stories, 07d-Delivering a presentation, evaluating evidence, stress-testing recommendations

“Born to Run”

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If you’re like me, you enjoy getting book recommendations, preferably non-fiction about real people, doing real things, in real places.  “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall is just that and also has several parallels to MP concepts that we can learn from.  It begins with a simple subject of running and it’s impact on injuries and transforms into a fascinating story of McDougall’s search for truth and ultimately lead’s to his conclusion that running long distances barefoot is the key to health, happiness, and longevity.  From utlra-marathons to Mexican cartels, this book has a little bit of everything and is highly entertaining.

The MP concepts are evident throughout the book as McDougall starts with a simple problem, gathers information, build’s a case for his hypothesis, and then delivers it in a fun and entertaining story.  Here’s a link to an overview of the book from McDougall’s website if you’re interested in learning more about it:

 

http://www.chrismcdougall.com/book.html