The Economy: A MadLib

1. fine.
2. a nightmarish disgrace.
3. freakishly good.
4. magically delicious.
   

People aren't poorer, they just ___________________ (enter your selection here)

1. like eating mac and cheese from the box.
2. were going to downsize their house to a small walk-up apartment anyway.
3. are giving people--giving blood, that is.
4. enjoy watching channels 4, 6, 8 and 13 only.
5. wanted more family time
   
6. were looking for leisure time to read books...from the library...after having taken the bus to get there.

Besides, we aren't in a recession. This is better termed a ___________________ (enter your selection here)

1. time-out for profitability.
2. stock earnings hiatus.
3. return to Green Stamps and the Dollar Store.
   

Credit isn't tight. It's ___________________ (enter your selection here)

1. being carefully rationed.
2. a valued token of appreciation for people who can jump on one foot, fill out credit apps, and boil water for Ramen noodles at the same time.
3. been rendered invisible and clicking your heels and repeating "The economy is sound" will reveal it.
4. the grand prize for the winner of "Flavor of Love."

See? Isn't that better?

Cross-posted at the American Values Alliance

Brand Analysis for Presidents

A very good article from AdAge on analyzing audience engagement and loyalty metrics for the presidential campaign.

Just like brands and media, engagement and loyalty metrics can be used to measure presidential candidates. The technique is more accurate than traditional polling because it measures what voters think -- as opposed to what they say they think. Our research shows that there are four drivers that define the "Ideal President" and they are:

Action: Does the candidate have a comprehensive, realistic, well-considered plan for solving the problems facing the country?

Compassion: Does the candidate care about all the people? (A nod and a note to one of our alert readers: Attributes and values approximating liking, bonding to and seeing the candidate as being "someone like me" and "for me" resides in this driver along with concern for people.)

Perception: Does the candidate have a deep understanding of the problems facing the county?

Resolve: Does the candidate have the strength and leadership to guide the country?


the rest is here...

Passikoff: Obama Wins Second Debate 116 to 110 - Advertising Age - Campaign Trail

The mistake many web "designers" still make.

Making it look pretty for the sake of the current trend or style at the expense of not communicating the clients brand or not being usable at all.

Web Design: On Essence | 8164

“It looks pretty, but I’m not sure if our audience would feel it’s who we are.”

Design Is More Than Packaging - The New York Times

One of the hardest things to convince clients of is that design is more
than just the pretty skin that is draped over a solution at the end to
make it look pretty. It is more than make-up or aesthetics. Design for
me, is a modus operandi, it is an attitude to problem solving that not
just compliments the scientific approach but it also
fuels the process. "Making it pretty" is not design, never was, never
will be. It's merely putting lipstick on a pig. Making it pretty is the
polar opposite to design thinking.


The first place I learnt design thinking was at the Caribbean School of Architecture. That way of thought is the most valuable skill I have in my lil' arsenal.


not Photoshop,

not Illustrator,

not Indesign or any other program that I know how to use.


The critical thought required to creatively solve a problem or to
deliver new ideas takes a whole lot more than pushing pixels. Disecting
a brief, distilling the elements and desiging an appropriate response
begins long before I fire up my tool of choice on the computer. The NY
Times article makes excellent points on the design thinking approach and
it's place in the workplace. Good to see that this is finally, truly,
hitting the main stream media.


Unboxed - Design Is More Than Packaging - NYTimes.com

“Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about divergence,” says Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of the design consulting firm IDEO, based in Palo Alto, Calif. “Most business processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives. Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can do.”

Unions Want Congressional Pension Protections

The financial bailout of the financial markets, a Hail Mary play to be sure, may cost US taxpayers in excess of $700 billion. That's about $2,500 McDonald's apple pies per American as one late night funster commented. It's also about 220 Rolexes or 175 Prada bags (I need to go shopping).

Already organized labor is positioning itself. Instead of wanting a piece of the $700 billion pie, it wants Congress to add money to the pot to protect employee pensions.

Jimmy Hoffa, Jr's Teamsters Union, which boasts over 200,000 retirees, fired off a missive to Congress this week asking for money to bail out union pension funds which were negatively impacted by losses in the investments that backed those pension funds. If one considers that most pension funds for large-scale employers rake in about 7% from their investments, the fact that these funds have been getting spanked in the markets is a terrifying thought to retirees, let alone active employees. What the Teamsters and other union want is for the government to skip the penalties they would normally impose on employers whose pension fund management decisions preclude their pensions from paying out as promised. Instead, they ask the Feds to give thees employers extra time to make up the shortfall cause by their tanked investments.

Teamsters and other unions also support limits on executive pay. But that's another post.

There's nothing there

John Gruber writes the most insightful piece on Microsoft's new campaign, but most specifically what has been, and I agree, a fatal misstep.

Daring Fireball: There's Nothing There

The problem Microsoft faces today is that they have nothing to hang their brand on. Windows is Windows, so colossal it exists in its own orbit. (If anything, the problem Microsoft faces with Windows is the problem Apple faced a decade ago with the Mac, where the product seemed bigger and more important than the company that made it.) The consensus opinion regarding Vista is that it’s a massive six-years-in-the-making dud. Office is Office. Oh boy, spreadsheets and PowerPoint.

Are you a gatekeeper or a gatejumper

Today, right now, in your business, are you a gatekeeper or a gatejumper. You must answer this question. The future of your business depends on it.

In writing Trust Agents, my book with Julien Smith,
we’ve started to realize six major traits that define a trust agent.
Part of what we’ve noticed through researching the concept is that
trust agents quite often make their own game. What do we mean? Consider
traditional mainstream businesses. They are the gatekeepers of what we
consider the standard, the typical, the recognized. It’s really easy to
look at this when you consider various media properties and their
online upstart counterparts. To that end, I’m going to start a list,
and I was hoping you’d be inspired to add your thoughts and ideas to
it. Maybe I’ll even go back and edit your ideas from the comments into
the main post. read more

Willing Slaves, Pretending to Have it All

I was recently asked to weigh in on the topic of "women having it all."

What, of course, is triggering the increased interest we're seeing on the topic of "work-life balance" (don't get me started) is Sarah Palin's entry into the political race and her purposeful political branding as a "hockey mom" with five kidlings, a hubster and a full-time job.

I have to admit: I had to corral my gag reflex.

I'm often asked, as a speaker, to address this issue. So here's a little of the less "cleaned-up" version of my thinking on the topic.

We are--men and women both--on a treadmill in the workplace, trying to jam more into the average day than our forebears crammed into the average week. We’re information glutted with more raw data in the Sunday New York Times than was accessible in the entire lifetime of a person living just a hundred years ago. On the home front, the advances in technology that were supposed to shave significant time off our weekly chores have us now doing more housework than our great (and sometimes great-great) grandmothers. Voicemail, PDA’s, email and the like have allows work to leave a greater and greater footprint on our personal time.

And things--important things--are dropping out.

I heard from one friend--a man with a demanding job (really, a job he allowed to become demanding) answered his email on his PDA that one last time and his lady love...a truly spectacular and gentle human being, spiked the offending tech. Two points! She'd had enough of being a WINO ("wife in name only"). He was Missing in Action.

How We Got Here
In the late 18th and throughout the 19th, the aim of industrialization was to shift the largely agrarian workforce into wage laborers. Expanding on the need to produce which stemmed, in part from the Protestant work ethic (combined with the notion of Salvation by Works), this great project combined fear of God with fear of want. Wages were kept purposely low to ensure that workers returned the next day.

A class of Willing Slaves was created.

During the next several decades, workers began to revolt over long hours, dangerous working conditions and child labor. Days shrank to 10 hours and then 8, children as young as six were prohibited from work, locked doors (to prevent those slacking workers from hieing-off) were unlocked. Trade unions were formed to negotiate for better pay, benefits and working conditions and employment laws were passed to eliminate—at least in the sphere of public policy—the codified ill-treatment of workers.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, a non-agrarian, family was able to live relatively well on one salary and it became easier to acquire a house and car. These children of the Traditionalists (people born between 1925 and 1945) were the leading edge of the working Baby Boomers and, because of the post-war boom, were in high demand.

Fast forward to the 1970’s and it starts getting very unpleasant. Inflation mushroomed, gas prices exploded and so did the work week. Between 1977 and 1997, the workweek expanded by over 8% (43.6 hours to 47.1 hours a week on average). A 70 hour work week became de rigueur.

At the same time, anti-discrimination laws began to address gender and pregnancy discrimination. Good thing. Because of inflation, the single worker salary was just not enough to cover expenses or sock away a little extra for education or retirement.

In the mid-1980’s the term “work-life balance” emerged to describe the separation (or lack thereof) between work and home. This generation was dubbed the “Me Generation,” called “yuppies” or “yummies” (young, upwardly mobile professionals), “buppies” (Black upwardly-mobile professionals), or members of the “Age of Isolation.” Latchkey and shuttle cock kids were found to have increased attention deficits (over-stimulated and exhausted) and poorer diets. Our kids are getting fatter and (can I say it plainly) dumber.

And a new industry was born.

What concerns me in the discussion of work-life balance is that there seems to be little concern with whether the work we’re trying to balance is important. Sure, moving things from one side of the desk to the other in a particular workday and schlepping the kidlets to soccer/swim/tap/tai-kwon-jitsu seems laudable, but it that what’s really important? Oh, yeah, and can we make all of that work without factoring out personal happiness and satisfaction.

Talking with a group of women, I heard many explain that they had to sacrifice for their children. Why then, I asked, was it only women that are heard having that conversation? There are a few home truths to consider here:

• Can women continue to do it all? Honestly, no. Our personal Kryptonite? "Bad mother/Bad housekeeper/Bad cook/Bad (fill in the blank)"—these words can stop a powerful woman at 50 yards. Rather than determining whether we’re doing the right things, we go like little "doing bots," hauling kids on endless expeditions to every social, sporting and school event imaginable; being the first one called when a younger (or elder) family member hits the skids; doing all the laundry/shopping/cooking/planning...and trying to do it all perfectly (if we don't just give up in despair).
  
• While in doing-bot mode, we inadvertently (and almost unconsciously) teach our daughters that a woman's life is sacrifice and suffering. Just recently, a 14 year-old girl I met, in discussing harried her mother, vowed “I’ll never have children.”
  
• Can men still have it all without women to take up most of the slack? I don't think so. Sad truth on this one...we, as women (the first educators of children) teach future generations of men what to expect from the women in their lives and teach future generations of women how to be those women...such that those expectations fall beneath their—and our—notice (like the air and the grass). If I had a buck for every woman I’ve ever heard who said “I wish I had a wife,” I could buy a Starbucks!
  
• At the same time, I'd like to recognize what a treadmill it can be for men who would rather gnaw off a limb than not "provide for the family"--how that can drive them into being little "doing bots" in their own right.

What Does it Take to Have it All

“Having it all,” as defined by others, takes a whole lot of support.

What I don’t think we’re focusing on is whether people are doing work that matters or that’s workable. As the workday gets filled with ass-covering email tracking, cryptic voicemail deciphering, endless meetings (to “report in” to micromanaging bosses who are poorly deployed), we find ourselves doing less “real work”—work that fulfills strategic intentions and desired outcomes.

When asked “can you really get your two kids to all those events,” I’ve never heard a woman who has been able to say a clean “no—it’s not feasible” or ‘no, that’s too much for a school night” even though that’s their persistent complaint.

Leaders must be selected, placed and trained to better plan, support and counsel, becoming champions of their workers, committed to blasting barriers and garnering needed resources. They must be challenged to be better workload planners, using their prowess to determine how to best use people to fulfill on business strategy—rather than becoming experts at moving piles around. At the same time, in our families, we have to be more focused in the “bigger game” managing our overarching aims: a happy, satisfying family life; personal satisfaction and personal growth and health, well-developed children who can function well in society without becoming time, energy or emotional vampires.

Felisa does not cry easily. When those planes struck those buildings in New York seven years ago it was only the second time in the two years we were together that I saw her cry. That was when the enormity of the attack hit me like a ton of bricks. I said to my self...this is going to change the course of history in a massive way.

The enormity of this act I think is even more incredible because of the physical scar it has left on New York City. As I watched Obama and McCain descend into this void of pain and nothingness I could not help but think of shrieks, and screams, bodies hitting the ground falling from over a quarter mile above ground. It was the most surreal day of my life. Everybody says it....

 

It was like watching a movie....

Now that the day is almost passed and I have soaked up quite a bit of the coverage I have a better perspective on things. The fear has dissipated somewhat and a new war rages thousands of miles away. Whether or not this war should have been waged, whether or not Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power, there are many, many families that miss a Mother, a Father, a Brother, a Sister.

Tonight that absence is felt like cold concrete against bare flesh. The absence of warmth in this world takes many a life and it makes many a life difficult to bear.

In the memory of those that died, may we be the presence of warmth in someone's life every day. I know this may sound sappy to many people. ---BUT--- May we honor the those that were snuffed out on September 11th 2001 by being the smile on a cold Monday morning, opening a door for a stranger, helping in little unseen ways. Submitting self to the greater good. Let us honor the absence of over 3,000 people by being the presence of love.



- yjtw

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Monday Morning Melodies -- Tribute to Isaac Hayes

This week isn't starting off well. First, it was Bernie Mac and now we find that we've lost Isaac Hayes. He died Sunday afteroon after collapsing in his home.

Mr. Hayes was known for his sulty baritone, smoking orchestration and driving beats on such tunes as "The Theme from Shaft."

Here's a sample of what made him great.

Travel safely home, Black Moses. We'll see you on the other side.

 

Is the Brain "Plastic" and What Does that Have to Do with Business?

Several months ago, I tapped out an article on change that mentioned the concept of neuroplasticity: that an injured brain can repair itself or re-map itself to regain or enhance thinking and brain function. Long the bailiwick of neuroscientists, this ability of the brain to generate surprising shifts in learning, thinking and acting, is now the province of business leaders and those who support them. A couple of books, The Brain That Changes Itself and The Mind and the Brain, both written by experts in the brain function/behavior game, discuss leaps in human capacity that are setting the world of brain science on its ear--blind children in India who are learning to see, deaf children and adults who are regaining capacities to hear that are challenging the notion of congenital deafness, people with hemispheric lobectomies (half their brains removed due to disease or injury) who are operating with minimal deficiencies in physical or mental ability.

Our "hardwiring" is more malleable than once thought.

Why this is an important consideration in business is that we've been taught that diminished brain function is a "given" as we age, that older generations are more "set in their ways" and that there's little we can do about any of it...that we're wired to resist change.

Perhaps not.

In business, I see people slavishly doing what they did before, producing diminished results over time. One maxim I operate under (rather than the mistaken belief that people who can't change simply don't want to) which tends to be a "truism" is that an early, long-standing history of success is the greatest predictor of failure in an instance requiring change. Starbucks kept doing what used to work, long after there was clear evidence that the wheels were falling off. We continued to buy and operate larger, less efficient cars long after it was clear that the price of a gallon of gas was never going to see a buck again. Why? Because it used to work so brilliantly. There was a dictinct payoff.

Harvard professor of psychology, Ellen Langer, in her book Mindfulness, laid it out pretty simply: mindfulness--good...mindless--bad. Looking through the prism of business: Operating on "autopilot" in our businesses and our lives can prevent us from seeing opportunities to shift before our mindless behavior leads us deeper into the weeds (where the crocodiles lurk). Her book, like the other two I mentioned earlier in thi blog post, can be dense reads, but are worth it to begin to understand that we're not in a battle just with our competitors: We're at war with ourselves.

Not My Fault. Oh?

We've all heard this sorry chorus (and if we put on our Big Boy/Big Girl duds, we can admit that we've even said things like this):

• That's wasn't my job
• The customer didn't get me the information I needed
• I was drunk, but I wasn't the cause of the accident
• My hard-drive failed
• I have a slow metabolism
• It was the traffic
• It wasn't me.

We belong to a culture of decreasing accountability.

That's why this episode of This American Life stopped me from my Saturday night's reading. When he was 18 years old, Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and More Than It Hurts You, killed a girl. He was driving--sober and straight--along a highway when she swerved her bicycle into the path of his car. There was nothing he could do to save her. He describes his "stomach-turning" behavior at points where he was more concerned about himself--how he might appear--than about the girl the car he was driving struck.

While there was nothing he could have done, Darin's story repeats this refrain: "the girl I killed." He's clear that, while her bike turned crisply into his lane, he was piloting the car that intersected with her and her bike. He was responsible, as the instrument of her death.

Life has become about "who did it" and "who's to blame," with biz owners, executives, sales reps, technicians, husbands, politician, and children taking sometimes draconian steps to avoid blame...or, better, to shift it to someone else. Jack Welch was lionized as a "genius" for his competitive stance "Be first or second in the market or begone." The detritus of Jack Welch's turn at the GE rudder gave us "rank and yank," an "HR system" based on the Vitality Curve wherein the top 20% get raises and promotions, the bottom 10% get the door and the middle 70% get to keep their jobs. To keep your job, one would have to be either in the first or second ranking. Those on the third rung are dispatched, regardless of their contributions. After several iterations, GE professional and execs, speaking privately, of course, have said that the chorus of "it wasn't me" is deafening, as people struggle to look better than their neighbor as the strongest players in the industry compete with their equally-stellar peers. The workplace culture has become increasingly toxic, with less collaboration, sharing of knowledge assets and mentoring? Who would want to be mentored if that mentor could "turn state's evidence" and become party to one's termination. HR staffers, under Welch's system, were reduced to ranch hands who conducted the annual culling.

I remember a course I took some years ago that served up a brutal take on responsibility. "Responsibility," they said "begins with being 'cause in the matter' of one's life." Here's the entire quote:

Responsibility begins with the willingness to be cause in the matter of one's life. Ultimately, it is a context from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong. There is simply what's so, and your stand. Being responsible starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from the view of life that you are the generator of what you do, what you have and what you are. That is not the truth. It is a place to stand. No one can make you responsible, nor can you impose responsibility on another. It is a grace you give yourself - an empowering context that leaves you with a say in the matter of life.
-Werner Erhard

Claim no responsibility? You're a victim and have admitted that there's nothing that can be done.

Rubbish.

As a result of my participation in this program (drank the Kool-Ade as with a protein shot), I don't offer excuses--really stylized cover-ups--which are about me rather than a sincere apology and offer to make it right, which is about the person I'd fallen short with. No one has ever cared about my excuses and--here's the money shot--most of those excuses could have been avoided.

• Not your job? Tell the boss that there's a gap in the job design rather than letting it be a surprise.
• Missing customer info? Tell them so and that you won't be able to get then what they need in a timely way
• Drunk and talking to the police? Suck it up and blow, hard, into the Breathalyzer
• Hard-drive failure? Set up that backup you've been talking about and pretending wasn't a priority
• Got a slow metabolism? Move!
• Heavy traffic and you've got a meeting? Leave earlier. Most of us in Indy know where the trouble spots are on I465. Traffic is just an excuse.
• Not you? Who else, then?

In an instance I got to hear a leader take responsibility back. Their company had deleted my text messaging ability, then my picture messaging, and finally -- Poof! -- there went my ability to make phone calls. After serveral calls, several reps and several hours, it was finally corrected. Then, I got a call from those people's manager. He had listened to recordings of the calls I'd made and was completely chagrinned: "That's not the kind of service we're committed to." He said, baldly, "We dropped the ball and sucked up a whole lot of your time" and promised to retrain his staff and to credit my plan for the days of lost service.

I was so stunned I couldn't speak.

Full Episode: Darin's piece is about 9 1/2 minutes into it.

There Are Things Bigger than Us All

I saw this and couldn't stop weeping at the love and faith of these men and this big cat.



This is just right on so many levels.

Notes from the Productivity Industrial Complex

My friend, Nwokedi, suggested I read this (below). Like the diversity workshops that were legion during the 80's and 90's, productivity discussions tend to focus on what's in the best interest of companies and not in the best interest of people. To take a deeper cut at that, they tend to focus on "getting things done" but not as much on "getting the right things done." Even the Covey workshops. the self-appointed Gold Standard of the Productivity Industrial Complex, doesn't have much to say about how a lowly employee, having happily sorted their tasks into A, B and C priorities, can prevail upon their leader to moving the C items off everyone's list. As workplaces continue to contract, workers are doing more, but very little job redesign is happening.

I’ll include my thoughts inline with the quoted text:

Alternative Productivity’s Tenets (David Allen):

1. “Productivity” is an Industrial Era economics term that applies to factories, machines, and economies. When applied to people it often has a dehumanizing effect and negates both individual differences and unique talents.
   
   Lalita: Amen. I found myself concerned about the entire concept of "productivity." As an economic term, it refers to a ratio of outputs to inputs, like labor productivity as the relationship between results and the work that went into their creation. People aren’t machines and even a machine can’t simply be tasked to produce more without looking at upstream and down stream inputs and outputs as well as system capabilities. We are more concerned with equipment failure from being over-stressed than we are about burning out people.
   
2. If your productivity increases, but your pay stays the same, then you’re effectively taking a pay cut (same goes if you begin working longer hours for the same pay).
   
   Lalita: This is a conversation I have with consultants constantly. One bragged to me about his hourly rate. When I asked him to calculate how many hours he was working this billing cycle and how much money he was getting, he quietly began scribbling (“I’ll show you.”). You can’t imagine the look of horror on his face when he figured out that his effective hourly rate was one-fifth his rack rate. We had a long talk that afternoon that shifted his world.
   
3. The 40-hour work week hasn’t changed since 1940 and is ridiculously outdated.
   
4. If you’re consistently having trouble focusing, it’s often because you’re focusing on the wrong things (i.e. things you’re not passionate about or things that aren’t best suited to your skillset).
   
   Lalita: Trouble focusing may be a symptom of memory erosion as our plates get more and more full. People today have access, in one issue of the New York Times, to more information than was available to the average human being in an entire lifetime just a century ago. As hoards of new information are being fed in, other information is organized for long-term storage--even if that information is needed for short-term, immediate use. Add in stress, which has been proven to reduce retention and attentiveness, and it gets even...um, I forgot what I was writing about....*
   
   Frankly, we aren’t experiencing a focus deficit: we’re experiencing too much garbage on the plate with little leadership support to move it to the trash where it belongs.
   
5. Increased productivity should equal less time on the job. If you’re getting more done, you should get more vacation time.
   
   Lalita: Not sure how this follows as employers are able to set up, within legally-prescribed limits, any kind of work rules they choose. Besides, there is an important external driver pressuring leaders to produce more: stockholders. These “owners” are interested in one thing and than it increased revenue for their investment. Few leaders at the C-Suite level are willing to buck their boards or say “No mas” at stockholders’ meetings where initiatives are being put forth that will impact the footprint the job takes up in a worker’s life.
   
6. Most best-selling productivity gurus are working in the interests of large corporations and often advocate values and approaches that are not in the best interests of individuals.
   
   Lalita: Working in the best interests of companies? Not if these productivity gurus aren't tying their programs to retention. As people run out of bandwidth, they leave. In droves. Over a decade ago, HR strategists started seeing an increasing trend for “downshifting” where career climbers chose to shift career tracks to paths that would allow for more time to engage in other pursuits (see how I didn’t say “work/life balance”—a term I despise...but that’s another post).
   
   A rule of thumb for calculating the cost of turnover is to take an employee's salary and divide it by 30%. That, very roughly, is base cost of turnover for that one position. Add in a recruiter’s fee or executive signing bonuses, stock options or Golden Parachutes (like a prenupt for the C-Suite set) and the percentage continues to climb. In addition, it can take months for a newly-placed staffer to gain proficiency in a new corporate and departmental cultures and the expectations of the job.
   
   Then there’s the matter of proof. Most productivity workshops have never been vetted for validity (measures the right things) and reliability (measures consistently over time). They "work" simply because the guru has collected anecdotal information from participants that says so.
   
   Just a tad self-referential, no?
   
7. Increased productivity should result in greater carefree time, more vacations, and more time away from work. Most of the time, however, it does not.
   
8. We are living in a time and place that is more “productive” than ever before, but high levels of productivity aren’t making us any happier.
   
   Lalita: Please. “Productive” is not the same as “effective.” You can be doing a lot of things, but not the right things.
   
   You and I both know people who, during meetings, answer phone calls and respond to or send emails. By not focusing on the people in front of them, meeting durations balloon as topics are started and stopped over and over again. In addition, there’s the little matter of credibility. Doing everything else at a meeting but conducting the meeting is seen as incredibly rude, impacting future promotional opportunities and damaging key relationships.
   
   Measures of effectiveness can easily been found in most process improvement initiatives with a clearly-defined outcome stated in advance and work to reduce variation around that stated goal. Not so in productivity workshops, which tend to operate at the tactical level rather than the strategic.
   
9. Productivity should be designed around our lives, not the other way around.
   
   Lalita: Productivity should be designed around systems of increased effectiveness inside a value chain which should connect to desired outcomes which should connect to the strategic mission of the department, the business unit and the company.

10. The workforce is laboring for more hours and for less pay, taking fewer vacations, and generally burning out.
    
    Lalita: Yup. In another entry I scribed, I detailed the differences in vacation for the major developed nations. The US leads the pack of industrialized nations in the lack of vacation time: That’s less than France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Japan and Canada. A whopping 26% of US workers take no vacation at all. Many who do, spend more time with their Blackberrys than they do their families, fearing that if they’re too disconnected (1) people will figure out that they’re expendable and (2) the workload when they return will be insurmountable.

11. The best way to increase productivity is often to quit a lot of things.
    
    Lalita: Good idea, but most leaders are unwilling to insist on job re-design or to challenge their leaders on the best use of their staffers’ time.

12. Productivity often poses as the self-development genre but it is not. Self-development and productivity are two very different things. What is best for us as individuals is often bad for productivity.
    
    Lalita: Huh? People development and the resulting impacts on productivity are connected.

13. The societally scripted routes to success via productivity are failing us.

14. Products marketed towards busy people (e.g. “Productivity for Busy People,” “Cooking for Busy People,” etc.) only serve to reinforce the problem and often glamorize, excuse, and support the unnecessarily busy life and cult of hyper-efficiency.
    
    Lalita: Is there really something “sexy” about scurrying about like a rat in a maze? Really? Telegraphing that you can't get meaningful work done in a humane way is glamouous? Indeed.

15. Hacks, tweaks, tricks, etc. have emerged from a productivity hobbyist culture, are largely insufficient at solving bigger life problems, and often do not increase productivity. These hacks etc. are vestiges of the largely "techie" demographic of the early (but self-reinforcing) blogosphere.

16. Early to bed, early to rise does not necessarily lead to greater productivity. Contrary to several blog posts advocating early rising as a means to greater productivity, the practice of early rising can actually be harmful.
    
    Lalita: Cookie-cutter fixes assume that we’re all the same and have the same requirements. Not so. I get some of my best writing done late at night. Telling me to go to bed at 10 would have me running out the door with my hair on fire. However, an early bird who’s staying up late, can benefit from supports to get to bed at their earlier bedtime.
    
    In a conversation with a fledgeling business owner, he asked me my opinion about something his "coach" (a marketing consultant who had decided--damn the skillset--to hang out a shingle as a business coach) had said. "Lalita, he told me to play business development CD's in my car while I'm driving." When I asked him what he really liked to do while driving he said "Listen to music." Guess what I told him to do? And I'm looking for his "coach" to suggest he stop treating his clients like they're all him.

17. More technology often leads to decreased productivity.

18. Hyper-focusing on productivity often gets in the way of the messy, circuitous, and discursive routes of personal development.

19. When most people speak of productivity in the office, they’re usually speaking about a specific kind of productivity: cubical-land, desk-job, information-worker productivity. The methods used to produce this kind of productivity often do not generalize to other contexts.

20. No productivity system can put you in a zen like, meditative, or mind like water state. A calm, focused, and meditative mind leads to greater productivity, but productivity systems cannot create a mind like water.

21. Too much productivity can turn you into a real tool.

22. Massive value creation often happens during times when no work is ostensibly being accomplished and productivity levels are ostensibly nil.

23. What makes people productive varies considerably from person to person.
    
    Lalita: Huzzah! Truer words have not been written. Task -related productivity is the "booby prize." Figuring out the right things to do and then getting the barriers out of the way so we can focus on the most effective ways of doing those things--that's the juicy cherry.

24. Productivity is often a necessary evil: if you dislike your job, you’re going to need a water-tight productivity system in place to keep you on task.
    
25. Productivity should be designed around lives, not the other way around.