Strategy

One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes.  When we are at a place where people are quiet, say a church or a library, we’re quiet;  when we are at a sporting event where it’s loud, we’re loud.

Why then, when we try to make changes at work do we, almost always, focus on people changing rather than on changing the environment.  Often, changing the environment is the easiest way to effect meaningful behavioral change.

For this week’s Tuesday Reading, we turn to a Harvard Business Review blog post by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback “Better Time Management is Not the Answer”.  Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professof of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Lineback has spent many years as a manager and executive in business and government.  They are co-authors of Being the Boss – The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader.

Are you up for a challenge?  Josh Linkner in a recent Fast Company blog post, “The 5% Creativity Challenge”, challenges each of us to schedule two one-hour thinking sessions each week.  Linkner is the author of Disciplined Dreaming - A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity and CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners.

The reading today, “Take ownership of your meeting experience”, appeared in the Facilitate.com blog and comes from the keyboard of Danuta McCall, a senior member of the Facilitate.com team. 

The reading’s key point is that we, each as individual participants in a meeting, play a role in whether that meeting is successful or not.  We do this through four choices:

Today's reading focuses on building a practice to increase your daily personal effectiveness.  The IT Leaders Program emphasizes being intentional and planful with the use of your time.  Specifically, we've suggested identifying and formally setting aside regular times to plan your week/day.  For example, you might schedule time Sunday evening or on Monday morning to review the coming week to make sure you have reserved time to address your priorities.

To some extent, and more so for some than others, we are all problem solvers.  Most of the time we use ad hoc, informal, personal processes to solve problems.  And, these often work at the “good enough” level.  However, sometimes we miss good solutions, and even fail to identify the problem correctly in the first place.

Wayne Turmel, writer, speaker, president of Greatwebmeetings.com, begins today’s reading, “Virtual Meetings Are Like Broccoli” <http://bit.ly/icPr7O>, by saying “Running good meetings for remote teams is like eating our vegetab

Have you ever been in a meeting to make a decision and before the context can be outlined, a few meeting participants have taken over and are going deeper and deeper into a solution based on a suggestion of one of the individuals?  Today’s reading, ”Go Broad Before You Go Deep,“ from Roger Schwarz’s Fundamental Change Newsletter and found below, considers just that issue.

Six months ago, Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science at Stanford University and author of a new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, had a blog entry “12 Things Good Bosses Believe. ”  You can find that entry at <http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/12_things_that_good_bosses_bel.html>.

Today’s reading is “The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (and Very Few Have)” <http://bit.ly/beWaWF> by Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps individuals and organizations fuel energy, engagement, focus, and productivity by harnessing the science of high performance.  This entry appeared in FastCompany’s Expert Blog on October 15, 2010.  (It and other blog entries by Tony Schwartz can also be found at <http://www.tonyschwartz.com/blog.php>.)