Procurement & Career Guidance
For business professionals, the end of the year can be a stressful time. It is easy to fall into a funk and lose your passion.
One way to fight the funk is to embrace your curiosity. Seek out new information, read new books, take short classes, watch movies…
But another critical step is to share what you learned with your peers, coworkers, and friends. It will help you get engaged and stay motivated.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
The key to time management is self-awareness. But don’t just take my word for it: As Erich C. Dierdorff notes at HBR, awareness, along with arrangement and adaptation, are the skills that “separate time management success from failure.” Research shows that “people struggled the most with awareness and adaptation skills where assessment scores were, on average, 24 percent lower than for arrangement skills.”
I particularly appreciated the action words used by Dierdorff: “assessment: and “adaption.”
“This evidence suggests that awareness and adaptation are not only rarer skills, but are more difficult to develop naturally without direct interventions,” writes Dierdorff. “Additionally, awareness skills were the primary driver of how well people avoided procrastination, and adaptation skills were the primary driver of how well they prioritized activities.”
Saying “no” by either not accepting commitments in the first place or by eliminating commitments that are currently on your plate is your most powerful organizational tool. It’s the equivalent of decluttering your closet before you attempt to hang everything up. By reducing the overall number of items, you make it easier to organize.
When you “declutter” from a time management perspective, you’re not only giving yourself less to fit into each day but also more time to keep the whole system maintained.
Stress comes in four primary flavors. It’s important to identify and understand which one you are feeling. First, there’s time stress. Time stress occurs when you worry about time or a lack of time. Impending deadlines often cause time stress. As a time-strapped leader, you’re no stranger to this type of stress, also called anticipatory stress. When you are concerned about an upcoming presentation or board meeting, you’re suffering from anticipatory stress. Remember Murphy’s Law? If anything can go wrong, it will.
The third type of stress, called situational stress, occurs when you feel you aren’t in control. As a leader, you may experience situational stress when your status drops or you suffer reputational damage. The final type of stress is called encounter stress. It occurs when your interactions with others cause you to feel uneasy. When you interact with a toxic co-worker, you may experience encounter stress.
It’s also important to understand whether you’re suffering from burnout or stress. Burnout occurs when stress continues for a long time. When you’re suffering from burnout, you feel tired and drained. Your immune system is affected, and you are more likely to get sick. You also feel helpless and lose motivation. Stress is less extensive. When you experience stress, you feel that too much is being demanded of you and you may experience physical effects like muscle tension and headaches, but you don’t feel empty and detached like you do when you’re experiencing burnout.
As I get older and more experienced, the adage of life being about the journey resonates with me. I am in motion and flight, but I am not pursuing a figurative or literal destination.
The question, particularly for those of us who spend a lot of time online, is how do you resist the perpetual treadmill that society and your inner saboteur (Thanks, Cody!) try to push on you to be perfect?
You say no.
As a person, as an entrepreneur, an employee, a visionary, you put your foot down.
https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2020/02/21/stop-chasing-perfection/
A female CPO, for example, can expect to earn around 94% of a male colleague’s salary. For regional category managers, women have been found to earn only 69% of a man’s wage.
This tends to get compounded by the ‘glass-ceiling effect’, in which women find it difficult to break through into the higher levels of an organisation. Only 14% of our CPO sample last year were women.
5. The ‘pass off.’
When you are trapped in a rambling conversation, pull in another person to join you if possible. Introduce the topic to the new person, and once the other two get a conversation going, politely excuse yourself and don’t look back.
Department of Defense (DOD) officials increasingly view the Pentagon’s supply chain as a key vulnerability within the defense enterprise, with bad actors seeking to affect systems and steal innovative technologies. This risk extends beyond prime contractors, which have extensive resources to invest in security to medium and small contractors, which in turn may not have those resources.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on affordability often pushes suppliers to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) items, said Frank Kendall, the DOD’s undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.
“All of this presents an opportunity for somebody with a nefarious purpose to get at our products,” Kendall said. “The thing that makes me most nervous is a high-end adversary who finds a way to hide something in our weapons systems and lets it sit there until it can be activated at the worst possible time.”
https://about.bgov.com/blog/dod-knife-fight-supply-chain-security-chief-says/
Showing up day after day, week after week, sometimes for years, as your movement slowly gains steam, as your organization hits speed bumps, as the news goes from bad to worse…
Showing up, it turns out, is the hardest part of making a difference.
Make a list of the organizations and voices and movements that have made a difference. How old are they? How long have they been at it?
Creating impact, building something of substance, changing the culture… this is the work of a lifetime, not merely a fun project.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/11/hang-in-there.html
“A full-blown Amazon parcel delivery operation would likely take years to complete, so we believe [FedEx] and UPS would have time to react,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahoney previously told Retail Dive. Similarly, although UPS and FedEx have decades of experience, Amazon’s entry to the logistics market comes with a learning curve, particularly when it comes to aircraft operations and regulations.
The earliest signs of success, however, may come through the cost-to-sales comparison made by Seeking Alpha. If Amazon seeks to compete with UPS and FedEx, the company needs to see a downward trend in the metric, which would indicate the logistics services are driving profit to the company.
http://www.supplychaindive.com/news/Amazon-logistics-UPS-FedEx-cost/429408/
Photo: Katie Montgomery
Amazon announced plans at the end of September to help continue this growth by creating a center of technology in downtown Detroit. The tech giant plans to build a corporate office to bring more full-time technology jobs to Michigan. And as a friendly introduction to the city, Amazon donated 30 Amazon Fire tablets to the Carver STEM academy program in the Detroit Public Schools, as well as $10,000.
Leading companies approach IT outsourcing strategically, taking an aggregate approach to managing IT services spending rather than making such purchases on a piecemeal basis. By doing so, they achieve four to 15 percent savings on these services annually, according to the GAO. While this report noted that efforts by these federal departments to better manage their IT outsourcing has improved in recent years, with each agency designating officials and creating offices to identify and implement strategic sourcing opportunities, it found that most of these agencies’ IT spending “continues to be obligated through hundreds of potentially duplicative contracts that diminish the government’s buying power.”
1. Nearly half of critical infrastructure organizations DO NOT conduct IT vendor security audits on a regular basis. These are the very firms that provide us with electricity, financial services, health care, telecommunications, etc. Very scary.
2. Critical infrastructure organizations are especially lax around the security of third-party distributors. This is especially troubling since distributors not only source IT products as a proxy for customers but also provide value-added services (i.e. configuration, customization, installation, etc.). This gives distributors absolute carte blanche to corrupt otherwise clean hardware and software.
Good coaches don’t let an error overshadow what the player has done right all game. They complement the athlete on something they did well that half or an aspect of their game that they are improving. This shows the athlete that the coach isn’t just looking at them when they mess up, but that they recognize and appreciate the athlete’s strengths as well. The same is true in the workplace. Support your teammate and let them know where they have been excelling. The rule of thumb is five positive comments for every negative one. Interestingly, research on relationships both in and out of the business world has found that a similar ratio works for delivering criticism. Psychologist John Gottman analyzed married couples and found the single biggest determinant of divorce is the ratio of positive to negative comments the partners make to one another. The happiest couples demonstrated a ratio of about five positive comments for every negative one they delivered.
CIOs didn’t get it, or chose not to, so Box initially circumvented CIOs, taking the product to departmental line of business managers. And when the software went viral, seeping its way into other parts of the business, Levie and his sales team would call the CIO and tell them. That angered CIOs, who often blocked Box. So Box ceased calling IT departments, quietly building up its technology features and bolstering security to make the software more palatable for enterprises. Now a mature, public company itself, Box counts General Electric, AstraZeneca, Proctor & Gamble and others among its customers. “I feel your pain now, I understand why you blocked us for so long,” Levie told the audience.
Innovate, disrupt, re-think. These are all key phrases in leadership buzzword bingo these days. Yet, all too often, companies don’t create a culture that really empowers people to take the healthy risks needed to bring about this kind of change. Speaking from personal experience, I was once fired for speaking my mind and challenging the status quo at one of my previous employers.
You never know where the next great idea in your company might come from. So, it’s critical that leaders create a culture where employees know they will be heard and, more importantly, supported in seeing their ideas through to fruition.
Photo: Jordan McQueen
But the financial outlook is also bleaker than their 1980s counterparts: The are much more likely to live with a parent, be unemployed (though they are more likely to have a postsecondary degree), and have lower salaries than any of the previously surveyed generations.
http://io9.com/how-millennials-stack-up-to-the-generations-before-them-1666809424
You multiply your time by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow.You don’t just think, “what are the most important things I have to get done today or this week?” Instead, you ask the question, “what are the things that I could do today that would free up more time tomorrow?”
