42Projects

The U-Bend of Life

2011-01-22T14:29:00.001-08:00

The Economist

Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The Top 10 HBR Blog Posts of 2010

2011-01-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

HBR

10 most popular posts of 2010, as measured by that most inarguable of website metrics, pageviews:

1. 12 Things Good Bosses Believe

2. Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

3. How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

4. Why I Returned My iPad

5. The Best Cover Letter I Ever Received

6. How to Give Your Boss Feedback

7. You've Made a Mistake. Now What?

8. Define Your Personal Leadership Brand

9. Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps

10. Six Social Media Trends for 2011

50 Acts that Enhance Novelty at Work

2010-12-05T18:42:00.000-08:00

Brain Leaders and Learners

50 doables below add brainpower to derail workplace toxins and launch innovations leaders crave for a new era. Understand your proclivity for novelty, and begin to step toward more innovative outcomes for success in a new era.

New research about novelty’s power in the brain – only yields its elixirs to those who take advantage. How so?

Rethinking How We Learn and Work

2010-11-27T06:43:00.000-08:00

Ellen Galinsky Huffington Post

Why, asked psychiatrist and author Edward Hallowell, do we get our best ideas in the shower? He was addressing an audience of educators and families sponsored by the 92nd Street Y in New York City, asking them to rethink how we are raising and teaching children.

Hallowell answered himself. It is the one last refuge, he said, the one place where we aren't being bombarded by media and where we can be alone with our thoughts and feelings.

Why The Best Bosses Are Confident But Not Really Sure

2010-11-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

Psychology Today

You're confident but not really sure. That's a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it's the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the "attitude of wisdom." And it's a good description of some bosses who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting.

Meacham's insight, which was developed much further by organizational psychologist Karl Weick, was that the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.

The Fallacy of the Great Idea

2010-11-19T17:45:00.001-08:00

ChangeThis

The simple truth is that it is quite possible to create a thriving business without a big idea.

Yes, the world needs people with grand ideas who are willing to take big risks to further progress. In truth, most “great ideas” will never make their investors a penny. True, some companies have made billions from a unique product, but close inspection of many world-beating businesses reveals that their unique selling point is hard to pin down. Can anyone honestly tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi? And at the end of the day, McDonalds and Burger King both sell burgers.

In almost any industry you consider, the incumbents will be stuck in their ways. Small, nimble businesses can quickly integrate the latest ideas into their offerings. A lack of resources can act as a great spur to thinking laterally. Make it a mission to implement industry best practice into all areas of your business, and the next “great idea” may be a seemingly minor change you make to an existing industry.

50 Awesome Quotes on Risk Taking

2010-09-13T03:47:00.000-07:00

from Blogging Innovation

1. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe

12. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

21. “The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – William Jennings Bryan

45. “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky

48. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide

Big Smilers Live Longer

2010-08-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

British Psychological Society

Researchers rated the "smile intensity" of 230 baseball professional baseball players. Focusing on the 150 players who'd died by the time of the study and controlling for extraneous factors such as BMI and marital status, the researchers found that those who were flashing a genuine 'Duchenne Smile' were half as likely to die in any given year compared with non-smilers. Indeed, the average life-span of the 63 deceased non-smilers was 72.9 years compared with 75 years for the 64 partial smilers and 79.9 years for the 23 Duchenne smilers.

The question, of course, is does smiling make you healthier, being healthier make you smile more, or perhaps most likely, a smile is a sign of an upbeat personality, which has been linked to longevity in numerous studies -- check out this cool study of nuns in particular.

3 Principles of Goofing Around

2010-08-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Talent Code

We all know at some level that goofing around is a smart thing to do. But there’s an deeper connection to explore here that has to do with the specific kind of goofing that leads to innovation. To put it simply: it’s not about the goofer – it’s about the precise quality of of goofing.

We get some good insights into this from new research about daydreaming. As this WSJ story points out, daydreaming is not just idle time:

“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”

What’s more, daydreaming activity is not all equal. As the ever-insightful Jonah Lehrer points out in this story, daydreaming has been linked to all kinds of creative breakthroughs – if it’s done right.

“The point is that it’s not enough to just daydream,” [Dr. Jonathan] Schooler [a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] says. “Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight.”

College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube

2010-08-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

Khan Academy

Chronicle of Higher Education

YouTube Channel

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon—and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system.

"My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently.

Mr. Khan calls his collection of videos "Khan Academy," and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1,400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

The Importance of Story

2010-08-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

EricBrown.com

storytelling as a mechanism for knowledge capture & transfer within project teams. See a presentation on that subject here -> Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management. Here’s another article on Using Stories to Share Knowledge.

Stories have a ton of good qualities. They help set context. They help share values and beliefs. There are lots of good things about stories.

But the most important is one that we often overlook. It’s the importance of YOUR story to your life.

Chris Brogan pointed toward Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (affiliate link) a few months ago.

Chris recently said the following about Miller’s book: “It’s about the importance of living your life as if you’re the main character in an important story.”

A Massive Generational Change in Leadership

2010-08-15T20:26:00.001-07:00

http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/19/bill-george-generations-baby-boom-millennial-leadership-citizenship-ethisphere.html

William W. George, a professor of management at Harvard Business School who is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic and currently a director of both ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs talks about how leadership in business is going through a huge and dramatic transformation as the baby boom gives way to younger executives with very different ways of seeing the world, connecting and working. He also talks about what it takes to be a strong leader in a challenging time

Secret to Success Product Innovation: Keep the Boss Out of It...

2010-08-08T16:27:00.001-07:00

Nielsen http://en-us.nielsen.com/content/nielsen/en_us/news/news_releases/2010/june/secret_to_successful.html

Nielsen’s research of the innovation processes at 30 large CPG companies operating in the U.S. reveals that companies with less senior management involvement in the new product development process generate 80 percent more new product revenue than those with heavy senior management involvement.

BQF Innovation http://www.bqf.org.uk/innovation/2010/07/07/to-boost-innovation-just-keep-the-boss-away/

The Creativity Crisis

2010-08-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

Newsweek - http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

U.S. creativity has been in decline since 1990, as measured by tests formulated by professor E. Paul Torrance. College of William & Mary professor Kyung Hee Kim, who determined the decline through an analysis of nearly 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults, says the drop is "most serious" for younger U.S. children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.

50 Awesome Quotes on Risk Taking

2010-08-01T16:52:00.000-07:00

Blogging Innovation

1. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” – Goethe

12. “Do one thing every day that scares you.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

21. “The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – William Jennings Bryan

45. “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky

48. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – Andre Gide

Lighting the Fires of Management Innovation

2010-07-30T19:59:00.000-07:00

MiX Webinar with Gary Hamel

Lighting the Fires of Management Innovation

Is your organization fit for the future? Is it highly adaptable, endlessly inventive and truly inspiring? In other words, is it as human as the human beings inside of it, and capable of changing as fast as the world is changing.

Helen Keller: The Story of my Life

2010-07-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

Last week was the 130th anniversary of the birth of Helen Keller

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.

Her autobiography is worth reading - and available as a free download

http://www.archive.org/details/storyofmylife005396mbp

John Wooden Memorial - June 26th

2010-06-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

John Wooden: It Takes a lot of Strength on the Inside to be Gentle on the Outside

Leading Blog

“The one who says that something cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.” - John Wooden

In his book, The Essential Wooden, John Wooden tells a story of his Dad’s leadership to illustrate the point that it takes a lot of strength on the inside to be gentle on the outside. It’s a good lesson for all of us:

One steamy summer day a young farmer—20 years old or so—was trying to get his team of horses to pull a fully loaded wagon out of the pit. He was whipping and cursing those two beautiful plow horses that were frothing at the mouth, stomping, and pulling back from him. Dad watched for a while and then went over and said to the farmer, “Let me take ‘em for you.” I think the farmer was relieved to hand over the reins. First Dad started talking to the horses, almost whispering to them, and stroking their noses with a soft touch. Then he walked between them, holding their bridles and bits while he continued talking—very calmly and gently—as they settled down. Gradually he stepped out in front of them and gave a little whistle to start them moving forward while he guided the reins. Within moments, those two big plow horses pulled the wagon out of the gravel pit as easy as could be. As if they were happy to do it. No whip, no temper tantrum, no screaming and swearing by Dad. I’ve never forgotten what I saw him do and how he did it. full story...

"Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable"

John Wooden passed away on June 4th http://www.spotlight.ucla.edu/john-wooden/

When Employers Make Room for Work Life Balance

2010-05-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124611210

"This generation is completely untethered. They have laptops in grade school," says Jody Thompson, a co-founder of Culture Rx, a consulting firm that promotes a completely flexible work style. Thompson says young people today are used to getting stuff done — on their laptops, cell phones, iPods — wherever they are, whenever they want.

"Then we bring them into the work environment and we say, 'Here's this 6x6 square you're going to work in, with a desktop computer,' which to them, by the way, is a gaming computer," Thompson says. "'And here's your phone with your cord. You come in at 8 and you leave at 5, and between 10 and noon, that's when we're creative.'"

The Led Zeppelin Guide to Creative World Domination

2010-05-01T13:29:00.000-07:00

http://lateralaction.com/articles/led-zeppelin/
For some, there has never been a bigger, badder or better rock band than Led Zeppelin.

What you can learn from their example? Wipe that great big ‘excuse me’ off your face. Now get out there and show them what you’ve got. Don’t have a weak link in your team. Have the best in the world filling every role. And yes, that includes you.

Unshackling Employees

2010-04-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/08/07/unshackling-employees/?mod=rss_WSJBlog

…humanity’s most adaptable social system—democracies and markets—are those that extend the greatest freedom to their constituents. In a democracy, you don’t need anyone’s permission to form a new political party, publish a politically charged article, or organize a “tea party.” And in open markets, individuals are free to buy and invest as they see fit. When compared to the typical corporate leviathan, these systems are remarkably under-managed.

Managing with the Brain in Mind

2010-04-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

Strategy + Business - http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09306

Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment in which volunteers played a computer game called Cyberball while having their brains scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Cyberball hearkens back to the nastiness of the school playground. “People thought they were playing a ball-tossing game over the Internet with two other people,” Eisenberger explains. “They could see an avatar that represented themselves, and avatars [ostensibly] for two other people. Then, about halfway through this game of catch among the three of them, the subjects stopped receiving the ball and the two other supposed players threw the ball only to each other.” Even after they learned that no other human players were involved, the game players spoke of feeling angry, snubbed, or judged, as if the other avatars excluded them because they didn’t like something about them.

Leadership and the Generation (X,Y) Gap

2008-11-14T18:18:00.000-08:00

A ‘perfect storm’? A ‘generation gap’? Or something else? Much is being made of a perceived ‘gap’ evidenced in organizations, between the working population and executive leadership. Many suggest this is the consequence of the growing number of ‘millennials’ entering the workforce whose expectations, values and perspectives on life and their careers differ greatly from their employers.

Generation Y (sometimes referred to as "Millennials" or "Echo Boomers") refers to a specific cohort of individuals born roughly between 1980-94. The group is made up of the generation following “Generation X”, especially people born in the United States, Canada and other parts of the world from the early 1980s to the late 1990. Millennials are defined as being peer oriented and seeking instant gratification. The increasing use of texting and IM, social networking via Facebook and MySpace, exposure via YouTube and other instant communication technologies create insight into their reputation. If it is true that cohorts are shaped by the events, leaders, developments and trends of their time, then Millennials may be uniquely defined from Gen X.

In their recent book, Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US:
97% own a computer 94% own a cell phone
76% use Instant Messaging and social networking sites
15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
34% use websites as their primary source of news
28% author a blog and 44% read blogs
97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
75% of college students have a Facebook account
60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod

Millennials represent more than 70 million consumers in the United States. They earn a total annual income of about $211 billion, spend approximately $172 billion per year, and considerably influence many adult consumer buying choices. They may also face a greater degree of direct corporate marketing than any other generation in history.

A 2008 survey by UK recruitment consultancy FreshMinds Talent in partnership with Management Today suggested that Generation Y are generally more ambitious, brand conscious and tend to move jobs more often than ever before. The survey of over 1,000 people, entitled Work 2.0, also suggests several possible misconceptions about Generation Y, including that they are as loyal as their predecessors and believe that their job says something about them as individuals. This is one clear signal to leaders that their approach and style of management may need some ‘tuning’.

The fact that Millennials are more peer-oriented may be a contributing factor to the premium that these workers place on their workplace culture. For our purposes, an organization culture can be defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization. This definition continues to explain organizational values as beliefs and ideas about what kinds of goals members of an organization should pursue and ideas about the appropriate kinds or standards of behavior organizational members should use to achieve these goals.

From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.”[1] The organizational values and culture we reference have trust as a foundational element and key organizational citizenship behavior.

A 2007 episode of the American news magazine 60 Minutes entitled The Age of The Millennials proposed that members of this generation are exceptionally tech-savvy, are especially tuned to their own value in the job market, have limited loyalty to any particular employer, and insist on working in a stimulating job environment. However, these are simply characteristics and attitudes that were previously attributed to Generation X in works such as in the 1999 article "The Hunter-Gatherers of the Knowledge Economy: The Anthropology of Today's Cyberforagers" by David Berreby, so we ask ourselves if these behaviors might be consequences of modern culture or of the modern economy rather than qualities of a particular generation.

We also have to ask ourselves….are we oversimplifying what we see? Are the complacency, low morale and overall dissatisfaction voiced by workers a function of age, generation or a reflection of the state of leadership? Many studies have been done that suggest overall worker morale and job satisfaction are low, and one wonders if this is reflected in low worker productivity. If this is true, could improvements to trust and the basic elements of an organizational culture, result in improved worker satisfaction and higher productivity? Would the ‘bottom line’ improve in a measureable way, if a key element of an organizations culture - trust... was a focus for management behavior and leadership? Simply put, in a trusting environment, can you reduce cost, be more productive and become more profitable?

It would be easy to explain the ‘disconnection’ between workers and their managers as a function of a new class of workers, highly educated/skilled, game centric, whose iPods, MP3, PDA habits defy the email based communication style of their managers. Certainly worth studying, but it may mask the underlying issue plaguing corporations and manifest in low productivity in a struggling economy (a perfect storm).

A fundamental premise for our experiment (42Projects) is grounded in trust as a significant element of organization culture than can influence how workers perceive their work environment and behave/perform within it. We believe it may be less about the ‘gap’ and more about the evidence of trust in the workplace.

[1] Charles W. L Hill, and Gareth R. Jones, (2001) Strategic Management. Houghton Mifflin

Join the Friends of 42Projects.org alias

2008-08-21T19:23:00.001-07:00

Join the Friends of 42Projects.org alias here

42Projects.org up and running

2008-08-09T09:43:00.001-07:00

The 42Projects web site is live. The design and content is still in flux, but the site is running.

http://www.42projects.org

Presidential Blink Game

2008-01-28T19:23:00.001-08:00

The following game is inspired by the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

There are a number of ways pair wise comparisons can be used in software development, but we've applied things here to get the "crowd" to order a list – in this case, presidential candidates – and have used a timer to, as Gladwell puts it, leverage that

"rapid cognition" – "the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."

So check out
	Pairwise comparisons - 2008 US Presidential Candidates Vote on which US Presidential candidate you prefer in a series of pairwise comparisons.

And send us feedback at mailto: preventions@defectprevention.org

And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared

2008-01-07T18:22:00.001-08:00

Interesting excerpt from the end of the 1994 Genrich Altshuller book "And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared - TRIZ, The theory of Inventive Problem Solving":

"Does an Inventor need science fiction?

One day a letter came to the publisher of the magazine Pioneer Truth saying that there was a debate in the classroom as to whether or not students should read science fiction stories. Many students said it was a waste of time because such stories were not real. This opinion is very common – and is a mistake. Science fiction writers are trying to see the future, even when it is so remote it is not realistic. They have described airplanes, submarines, television, and more when nothing like them had as yet existed on earth. Writers have written stories about journeys into solar systems, about robots, about the reconstruction of the human body. Today, many of these ideas have become reality. Science fiction is a searchlight into the future. Those who go to school today will live in that future. There is unreal fantasy, too, of course. But even that is very useful because it helps to develop imagination and teaches us to think freely. It is impossible to go to the moon inside a gun shell. However, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote that the first ideas about rockets came to him after reading a novel from Jules Verne called "From Cannon to the Moon". Fantasy is needed to make real inventions and discoveries.

The power of the mind

Fantasy is mobility of thought. The contemporary inventor has to read books about science fiction because they reduce the psychological inertia and increase the power of imagination. Fantasy can be developed using the methods described in this book: Operator STC (Size, Time, Cost) , MMD (Model with Miniature Dwarfs) and IFR (Ideal Final Result).

We live in an "Era of Technical Revolution." The main point is that this revolution lies not in the appearance of new machines – that has happened before. The method of developing new machines is changing. Organized ways of thinking replace the old chaotic ones. Every step in the thinking process should be as accurate as the movements of a pilot flying an airplane.

At the dawn of the human race, mankind conquered fire. Now we are learning to conquer something much greater. The power of mind capable of penetrating an unknown future."

Welcome to 42Projects

2008-01-07T18:20:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the 42Projects Blog…

"Businesses are human institutions, not plush buildings, bottom lines, strategic analysis, or 5 year plans. They are living organisms. The company's real existence lay in the hearts and minds of its employees. (It) is a corporate culture, cohesion of values, myths, heroes and symbols that mean a great deal to the people who work there.

We need to remember that people make businesses work."

One of the challenges for a lot of organizations is that they don't have this approach to strategy. They don't think about strategy as a numbers game in which the likelihood of generating a rule breaking idea is totally dependent on the number of way-out ideas the company created at the start. In fact, most companies would like to believe that they can avoid the experiments and the semi-failed projects by putting some really smart people in a room and asking them to think really hard. This is just one myth that gets in the way of a company's innovation potential. Breakthrough thinking is everyone's responsibility.

The goal is simple: to mobilize and monetize the imagination of every single employee.