Procurement & Career Guidance
Staff meetings are important for morale, but achieving a productive session is not always easy.
At times, a staff meeting can be a “check the box” activity, which is ultimately counter-productive.
I have been struggling with establishing good, meaningful meetings for my staff and this video discusses some basic must-haves and some loftier concepts.
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The Skip Level Advice video that I published two years ago became very popular! I really appreciate the audience feedback and engagement. However, over the last two years there are some elements of the video that I felt needed correction and additional context.
Part of that new content is an easy template to help organize updates for senior executives that I am happy to share with you.
If you like these Rethinking Data concepts, you can book your own class at Avail Advisors.
FYI – I am not affiliated with Avail (nor am I getting paid to mention them) but I was a student and the class was really good!
I wanted to end the year with a quick and useful career video.
Ever find yourself trying to shut down a call quickly by telling people why something won’t work? It may be easier for you, but it tends to make your audience defensive.
The simple advice of this video is don’t start with no. Instead try to improve or enhance someone else’s idea without shutting them down completely.
Brown understood that to build support for the Process within the team, he would have to create a sense of mutual trust. He most famously does this through monthly breakfast meetings, in which players deliver a PowerPoint presentation about a subject of intense personal interest. Topics have run the gamut from tattoos to coffee to snakes. There was even one as serious the Balkan conflict, which touched the life of Croatian power forward Dario Saric.
The point is get to know one other as whole people, not just employees, and thereby make the strategy that assembled these players feel like a part of the team’s core identity. The morning storytelling sessions might seem superfluous, but their ability to get players’ buy-in was real. In fact, it was a player, Tony Wroten, who first used the phrase “Trust the Process.” Those words caught on among the team’s members before spreading like wildfire across the league.
VoiceAI also comes with real-time sentiment analyses and coaching for call centers. For businesses with a large customer service component, this could help expedite calls by “providing real-time recommendations to representatives as conversations happen,” per a press release.
The service will also provide smart notes, which automatically pick out the salient points in a meeting or call, so you’ll know exactly what Elon Musk said about investors and their “bonehead” and “boring” questions during a Tesla earnings call.
Put a Post-It note on your computer or your phone that says the words um and ah (or the words you’re wanting to stop saying) with a red line through them. This will help make you aware when you’re about to say these words.
What you’ll notice after a few days is that you’ll be conscious when you’re about to say these words. After a week you’ll be so aware that you’ll be able to pause and not say them. Awareness is the key to success so when you become mindful when you’re saying these words during general conversations you’ll have the ability to not say them during your media interviews.
Just take a look at the abysmal conversion rates for online content. The New York Times gets 89 million uniques per month, but only has 2.2 million subscribers, excluding crossword and other app subscribers. The Guardian has 800,000 financial supporters, but about 140 million unique visitors at a peak a few years ago. Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation received donations from 6.1 million donors, yet just the English language edition of Wikipedia received 7.7 billion page views last month. That’s 1,300 April page views per annual donor.
The implied conversion rates here are in the very low single digits, if not lower. And that’s no surprise given the extreme lengths people go to get content for free. A friend of mine uses AWS to rent IP addresses to reset his article meter on popular news pages, allowing him to download web pages through a Singapore data center using a custom command line utility. Engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars are suddenly tantalized by the challenge of trying to break through a porous paywall. I have less technical friends Googling URLs, setting up proxies, and other tactics to get to the same outcome.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/13/subscriptions-for-the-1-percent/
Photo by MontyLov on Unsplash
Chinese police theorists have identified specific “extremist behaviours, which include if you store a large amount of food in your home, if your child suddenly quits school and so on,” she said. Train a computer to look for such conduct, and “then you have a big data program modelled upon pretty racist ideas about peaceful behaviours that are part of a Uyghur identity,” she said.
The report “adds some pieces to the puzzle” over what is happening in Xinjiang, where it became clear over the last year “that tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs were disappearing without having done anything illegal,” said Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has travelled extensively in Xinjiang.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/china-using-big-data-to-detain-people-in-re-education-before-crime-committed-report/article38126551/
The dark side of “big data” and “AI” need to be reported on and discussed.
Meetings are expensive — the rent of the office space combined with the wages of each attendee — but a lot of that investment is wasted. A UCLA and University of Minnesota study finds that executives spend up to half of their working hours in meetings and that as much as 50 percent of that time is unproductive. With 17 million business meetings in the United States every day, there are a lot of frustrated workers: 88 percent of people are annoyed by technology problems in meeting rooms, and 20 percent of meetings run late due to those issues, wasting 2.83 working days a year for the average employee.
Also:
Making meeting rooms more interactive and easier to navigate is part of a movement to upgrade our office spaces to better reflect how we work today. Real estate executives acknowledge updating is needed with 86 percent saying they are remaking or adapting offices and another 51 percent are planning to reinvent shared workspaces this year, according to the CBRE’s 2017 Americas Occupier Survey. Employing technology to more efficiently use meeting space is a vital part of those efforts and can make a big impact on a company’s bottom line.
While it’s awesome that we’re all so “experienced,” “passionate,” and “creative,” these labels won’t help any of us stand out. Slinging around the same generic language as everybody else is among the worst strategies for getting ahead.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40538110/everyone-on-linkedin-is-a-passionate-experienced-motivated-leader
4 Signs You’re Trying Too Hard On LinkedIn
The number one sign Marco Montinari, a recruitment consultant at Mason Frank International, sees repeatedly is LinkedIn users trying to be philosophers or motivational speakers. “It usually involves reflecting on their own successes while also advising people to stay humble,” Montinari says. While there’s nothing inherently bad about trying to deconstruct common professional issues or trying to uplift people through motivational words, unless you actually are, you know, a philosopher, what you think is deep or uplifting often comes across as simply trite or self-congratulatory. As Montinari points out: “A lesson in self-awareness is often needed for people who spend time telling others how to live their lives.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/40523265/4-signs-youre-trying-too-hard-on-linkedin
The reason that money demonstratively increases happiness levels up until a point is that it takes a certain salary to feel financially secure.
Having enough money means no anxiety when shopping at the grocery store, going out to eat or paying your rent. This type of security is overlooked when you are used to it.
Remembering and being appreciative of the fact that you are free to purchase things, though, will make you happier even after it has settled in as normal amount of your finances. Fundamentally, having enough money to buy these basic necessities will no-doubt increase your happiness levels.
Photo: Brooke Winters
