Project Template

Do you keep templates for improving your next project?

I build organizations, teams, destinations on the internet, and publications, and for each project, I have one or several Benefits of Hindsight Templates. With a nod to Professor Keith, I wanta know now what I shoulda known then...

I was talking with Jack about a professional editor’s response to my exact typography standards, when he said, “Well you use them several times a year, of course you know them better than someone just feeling their way.” Those standards have been developing since 1989, when the other Robin Williams published The Mac Is Not A Typewriter. Before that I had been setting standards by eye on the Vydek and then Trash 80. Didn’t do any good to set standards on .dos, because every printer was different.

The other night when I was talking with a magazine editor, who asked for my opinion of her work. I had some specific improvements, and was giving her a string of numbers for changing her typography in both Word and open source software. She stopped me, saying, “Is there open source software I could use for setting my publications?”

Well now, that’s another template. And that template came from my Pagemaker Ninja status, where I learned, “You become a ninja when the sun comes and you hadn’t intended it to.”

The other Pagemaker story was when they ported it to Windows, one of my clients ran out and bought copies for their code wranglers, since they had been been giving me their data, I would go home at night and come back with their finished product.

We tried their Windows version, and it sat there like a lump and blinked at us..

Finally, I got frustrated and started suggesting Mac keyboard commands to the operators. The file started to take shape, but it was hard work.

Eventually, we shipped, and one of the programmers brightly said, “Well that’s the difference between Windows and Mac. Mac has keyboard commands.” Aargh! Something like that.

My Doctor Of Proposals is smart, but that CD with his previous creative solutions makes him a force of nature. He’s like Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, the combining of man and machine.

It’s not the words or data, it’s how they were used, the creative solution, that gets us to the next level. It’s not the length of the wand, but the magic of the magician.

So many people don’t keep their lessons, so they are doomed to repeat them, usually losing details and quality.

The beauty of templates is that all those details that were so brilliant at the time don’t get away. That let’s me spend my time on the new details.

What do you save to take forward?

Moments of Truth – New Strategies for Today’s Customer Driven Economy

Teaching and Learning

I notice that when people get promoted, a story develops about their previous value. It boils down to, “The older I get, the better I was.”

That includes old fools standing up in front of a group, reading fifteen year old notes...with vigah!

In education, value comes from learning, not teaching. That’s a disappointment for teachers.

What if the purpose of education was to maximize learning...for every student? How would that change the teaching business?

I was working with a junior executive, who would look me in the face, nod his head, and take perfunctory notes. He wasn’t learning anything, he was never going to put our discussion to use.

He had learned how to be exceedingly amiable when someone was talking. It had taken him far. Teachers ate it up.

Learners want to take what has been taught and make something important. That often creates mission directed social skills.

According to St Bumpersticker, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History, especially when well behaved means listening to an ongoing recitation of old notes. ]

If learning, not teaching, was what really mattered, what would you change?

Junior Academy – Home Of The Future

New Learning

The Internet has changed the nature of learning. Pre-Internet, the chore was finding facts and then assembling them, an additive process.

Now,we have more facts than we can use, and the game is to subtract the dross to get to what works.

In a similar vein – This month we’ve seen several guys who had been working longer hours for less effect and finally, when they get let go or their organization implodes, they don’t know anyone who can help them. Toby Keith’s I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then... Heartfelt but ineffectual.

A year ago I had a mole my wife didn’t like, so I asked my doc. He said go see a dermo. Took 6 months to see the dermo he recommended. Nobody in her organization wanted to make it easy.

When we finally met, she was too busy with her nitrogen bottle to look at my mole.

Eventually, I went back to my doc and chastised him. He said I should probably go see his personal dermo, not the one the government “recommended” he should recommend.

Two days later, the new dermo says, yup, it’s coming off, pucker up.

Four days after that, yup it was hot, can you get back in here today so we can finish it?

I’m into life, liberty and the pursuit, so heck yes.

Now besides the fact that the 2^nd dermo is actually practicing medicine which includes sudden service, I noticed that the staff was on time, smiling, and spoke up, saying good morning, and how are you with real interest. I like to play that game. It’s an indicator of competence.

I have a friend, an engineer, who retained a lawyer to get him a patent. Mid way through, the lawyer decided to rethink his compensation, and stopped work. It’s now been five years and he keeps sending statements adding interest to the work he never did, which is now useless.

I accept neither a lawyer or an engineer has adequate social skills. I was thinking too bad their wives didn’t know each other. Then this never would have happened.

The new learning is how to pick a winner. Certification means very little.

My key questions are who have I worked with successfully before, and then who do I know who has worked with someone successfully before? If I can’t answer those questions, I figure I don’t have the expertise to make a good choice.

Knowing that, I try to follow Will Rogers advice, “The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your back pocket.”

Sales Lab Resources – How-to’s you can use.

The Difference

Twenty years ago, my advertising agent told me that the difference between cheap Chinese food and expensive Chinese food was the size of the bill. We had been discussing where to have lunch.

That has stayed with me, but yesterday I got a whole new perspective on what it means.

I was working with a software developer, talking about the shift from enterprise software to open source, which led to a discussion about how technology could expand his company’s marketing footprint at much less cost. We’ve built an excellent direct sales program (well, what would you expect?), and I was encouraging him to further leverage his current market position.

He told me that he severely limited the time he spent thinking about his website, and wasn’t even going near blogs or Google Plus. His experience in the past was that he had spent unlimited time improving the company website and had nothing to show for it.

So he hired people who wanted to do that work, but they didn’t understand what the company was offering, or where it was going. His web presence wasn’t helping.

I’m all for delegation, and understanding mission, vision and execution is a lot more important than a discussion about using tables or stock photos on a website.

I am sure there are diners who can appreciate and savor the differences in Chinese food, but when I didn’t know what to expect, there wasn’t any difference.

How do you become a wine expert? Drink a lot of wine. 

How important is becoming fluent in better use of new communication technologies? Not very important, if you don’t care to learn. Perhaps more important to your successor? 

Where ave you had to develop you sophistication to win?

Changing Education

Video is a powerful educational tool. With internet distribution and storage, a world class video can easily be shared globally. Salman Khan of the Khan Academy has been making short videos that teach specific technical skills to students from elementary school to graduate level. These are available for free on the web.

One of the challenges of internet based video education is that students aren’t really learning, they just feel like they are learning, let’s call that couch potato syndrome. That’s a small, easily addressed problem. The larger problem is presenters faxing in their performance while standing at the front of a classroom.

Sebastian Thrun, who knows something about education, puts it this way, “You don’t lose weight by watching someone else exercise,” he says. “You don’t learn by watching someone else solve problems. It became clear to me that the only way to do online learning effectively is to have students solve problems.”

So lesson one is Go Make Something. Come to think of it, that’s what work is these days.

A major change in learning is information is available anywhere. In the old days, students went to University to learn the Canon of Western Civilization, all three books, because there was a good chance that when they went back home, they weren’t going to see another book again. Scholars were walking search engines. They weren’t expected to work, they were expected to provide answers and educate the baron’s whelps in their downtime.

There are still people who think their job is to have an opinion and opine. Nice work if you can get it.

For most of us, job one is to turn that knowledge into something valuable, on demand.

The purpose of video education is to provide the knowledge. Education comes from using it to make something useful.

Another value of video education is modeling behavior. Kipling provided Victorian behavior modeling through his writing, and The Man Who Would Be King shows heroic behavior, like High Noon, and even Leroy Jethro Gibbs or Frank Reagan.

Let’s take the best parts of video and work it like a rented mule in the interests of better education.

Learn By Doing

When talking about leadership, Dick Davies said “leadership can not be taught – it can only be learned.” It caught me by surprise at the time, but has stayed with me as a fundamental in developing leaders. Learn by doing.

In my youth, I wanted to learn to play tennis and read several books about the basics, strategy, and techniques offered by the luminaries of the sport. When I got to the court I found that my tennis education was just beginning – you can not learn tennis from a book...you must 'DO' tennis on the court to learn to play.

This applies to leadership as well – books and stories help us understand aspects of leadership in a non-dynamic way. This is useful data – but is not usable information if we are not in a situation to apply it...let's call that the real world.

Leadership is learned by doing. The first step is to start with your own personal skills. Presidents Washington and Lincoln did not have a Dummies Guide to learn to be leaders – they taught themselves by developing their personal activities to

support accomplishment and results.

First lesson is – make commitments and keep them. This means you must remember what you have committed to and plan for the delivery as promised. “If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”

Good beginning. How to you approach this task? Write on 3x5 cards each day what is UP – Pending – In Process. Or use your computer, smartphone, or sticky notes to record this information. Are you consistent in writing things down and have a system to assure delivering as promised?

Hopefully it's obvious that you would use your system for your professional commitments – but do you also include your social, family, community, and other commitments on the daily 3x5 system? Keeping commitments for a leader is not just for the day-time job.

When I learn something I like to tell someone what I've learned. Why? By articulating what I've discovered and the resulting benefits, I find it deepen the lesson – something about putting it into words and declaring it to another that makes it real and memorable. In addition, hearing it as a story is useful to the other person – they are exposed to the new-found information as well as the process used to obtain it. Sharing this experience is a gift.

Story goes, there were two woodsmen in the forest chopping down trees – a big strapping new woodsman and an older, seasoned woodsman. They started cutting first light and the young guy was chopping away with great vigor hour after hour, while the older guy would stop every half hour for a few minutes. As the day wore on the older woodsman's pile was getting higher than the young woodsman's – which drove the younger guy to chop faster and swing harder.

At the end of the day, the older woodsman had a huge pile of wood - the younger guy had a significantly smaller pile and was exhausted. Out of breath he said to the older guy – I've been working constantly all day, while you were always taking breaks, but in the end you chopped more wood than I did – HOW? The older woodsman said I sharpen my ax every so often – it cuts better that way.

Learn by doing. Communicate what you've learned to others on the team to help them know more and improve.

Sound like leading?

Do you have a story to share to help us learn more?

More about learning and leading and a tool for doing, communicating, learning:

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