Saving time, saving money and eating healthy is one of the most popular daily goal for modern families. This month Corina On Work focuses on bringing out efficiency in the kitchen (and next month we will tackle getting the house and office organized so everything you need is handy whenever you walk in). Why? Because the more organized and efficient you are at home with your daily tasks, the better you can handle the demands on your job during the week – and even overtime!
I have asked chefs and cooks in my inner circle, as well as friends who have recently made drastic changes in their lifestyle habits to in order to find out what a person should do to become efficient in the kitchen – in other words, spend less time in the kitchen, and more time doing other things they love. One of their top three answers: mastering basic techniques. This post will therefore review some of the basics that will help you speed up the process:
If you’re really in a rush, making an omelette, a steak and salad or grilled vegetables are options to have something healthy on the table in less than fifteen minutes. That’s faster than calling delivery!
Basic Knife Skills
Most of your cooking time can be diminished if you master the basic tools in your kitchen. Since most recipes start with chopping or cutting of some sort, here is one skill your can acquire that will automatically speed you up no matter what you cook!
Basic Prepping Skills (or Mise en Place)
Lastly, a lot of time can be saved if you become efficient at organizing your time in the kitchen. This goes for prepping everything you need before cooking, to how you design your kitchen and the objects you place in it.
Cooking a meal can be quite fast when you don’t have to scavenge the web in search of inspiration. Here is an idea on how to build your custom cooking-inspiration in your inbox so it’s handy (and searchable by keywords!) when dinner time comes around!
Step 1: Subscribe to cooking emails
Youtube cooking channels, magazines, recipes online databases and healthy living blogs regularly put out content which you can subscribe to be notified about. Look at your favourite sources and see if you can subscribe to their update emails.
Step 2: Create filters in your inbox
The last thing you want is an inbox with incoming recipes flooding your email. The solution: Create some filters for your inbox, which will automatically send your subscriptions to a folder such as “Cooking Recipes” (and skip the inbox!) when they arrive.
Step 3: Chose which labels to display on your Gmail
This may not be a problem if you use Outlook, but gmail has very little space in the margin for your folders to appear, making you scroll to view all. If you have many labels already, you may go in Gmail’s settings, under “labels” to hide, and unhide the labels you want to see.
Note: for this method to be optimal, I would advise incorporating 5 minutes either in your morning routine, at lunch time or before going to bed to quickly scan and ‘mark as read’ your daily digests related to food. This will give you a chance to already get your brain thinking about some options. If you find you do not find anything interesting in a given email digest, delete the email immediately. Only keep the recipes you would actually enjoy cooking, and eating!
What would you do if you ran an Internet-based company that was so successful it resulted in data overload for its users? This is precisely the predicament Facebook and Google have found themselves in recently. Google’s answer was ranking, while Facebook’s was filtering. Either way, both started to monetize their services for getting your message some visibility with some advertising. Linked In has joined the bandwagon too, when it introduced its Premium accounts in 2011. The trend with search engines or social networks: paying for privileged information sharing. In other words, even though the Internet may be free, having an Internet presence may increasingly incur costs for companies.
Facebook’s Solution: Filtering
(Or why you should not pay for Facebook Advertisement)
In 2008 Facebook had 100 million users and in March 2013, it had 1.11 Billion users. From 2012 to 2013 alone, it had a 22% growth rate in terms of users joining. Despite the fact that some of these accounts are false (an estimated 81 000 000 accounts), the challenge for Facebook remains daunting: How to shelter their users from being bombarded with too much information. Facebook’s answer to this problem has been selective filtering, but as the following video explain, this resulted in a conflict of interest when the company introduced its advertisement options for users.
How our Society Builds Internet Trust
The existing systems attempt to filter and rank what is deemed trust-worthy for the user. The problem is that Facebook’s over-simplified vision of what is worthy or not is built on too few metrics. Halim Madi, from the Université de Paris, explains:
The Danger of Free
Google, Facebook, Youtube, Linked would certainly not have had such a steep adoption rate, had they not been free. As viewers, we often are drawn to free material and free tools. Yet many modern thinkers argue that ”free” comes with dangers: dangers of both lower quality, and dangers of filtering and incomplete information for the user (resulting from advertising to support free services). The two following videos explore the psychology of freebies.
Conclusion
The world of big data is only just starting. Society will need to face changes in the ways we sort through and display very vast amounts of data. With the arrival of datafication, the amount of data collected and generated will exponentially grow. In the economic systems we have developed so far, there are no clear incentives to align high quality free content with advertising in a way that truly puts the interest of the viewer first. With the current system, we risk converging towards a society where information access is controlled and paid for, while our views are ever-enforced on our social networks, thanks to filtering of self-affirming posts. The Internet is soon entering a new era, with, hopefully, new business models, new philosophical concepts and new technological systems to preserve diversity of content and divergences of opinion.
An interesting stream of thought to explore would be the idea of multi-sided platforms, presented in the Business Model Generation Canvas. You can find an interesting article that illustrates it here with the Linked In case figure. Creating a potentially new paradigm might involve a new way to deliver value to customers segments, and generate funding for it. What creative ways can you come up with to solve these problems?
Are you a #1 team when it comes to document sharing? Learn these clever tricks to make your team excel… with Excel!
CONTEXT: You work with documents shared with a team. A same document is passed from one team member to the other.
GOAL: You want to enable the user inheriting of the Excel spreadsheet to (1) Understand at a glance the dependencies on the document; (2) Understand the logic of the calculations on the spreadsheet; (3) Be aware of the impact on the spreadsheet as a whole, should they modify any given cell.
USEFUL WHEN: (1) You are about to hand your Excel spreadsheet to a colleague, either because you are shifting mandates or because you are delegating work to to them or you need their input; (2) You are about to receive a spreadsheet from a colleague and he is not available to brief you on the details of its content; (3) You want to send a document to your boss or client to highlight the impact of a particular functionality or business decision on the cost of the project.
EXCEL CONCEPTS & FUNCTIONALITIES TO MASTER:
The following are the basics you need to complete the goal listed above. Simply follow the links if you need a refresher on the how-to portion of these functionalities.
1. Show formula (or, Clt + tilde ~) : The first thing you may want to do when you receive a document from someone is to make all formulas displayed so you may understand what is the result of a calculation and what is an arbitrary constant.
2. Find and select formulas (F5): To make it even more visible, you may want to highlight all the formulas in your spreadsheet with a color bucket. For instance, show me all the formulas in my spreadsheet highlighted in yellow. Simply hit the color bucket after you have found and selected the formulas. This may come in handy if you want to share a document with a co-worker as well.
3. Find and select constants (F5): Similarly, you may want to highlight constants, meaning number values that were manually entered by the user, and not calculated. You may use the color bucket tool after finding and selecting the constants, to make it easy to spot in your sheet. This may come in handy if you want to share a document with a co-worker as well.
4. Trace dependency (repeatedly): If you want to show a coworker the way modifying a specific cell will impact the entire worksheet, or if you want to make sure you will not affect anything when modifying data on someone’s Excel, you may trace dependencies repeatedly until the computer produces a sound indicating there are no more dependencies. This will create a network of arrows from one cell to another to show the dependencies to that cell.
5. Trace precedence (repeatedly): You may also want to visually show how the cell you are about to format is linked to other cells before it. You may use the trace precedence button repeatedly to do so.
6. Remove arrow: If you have used the trace dependency or trace precedence buttons, you will want to eventually clear the arrows. Use this button to do so.
7. Name Range & Name box: This function is useful either to see the logic in a spreadsheet you’ve received (provided your colleague has entered name ranges) or to prepare your spreadsheet for your client, colleague or boss. You will use the name box on the left of the formula bar to assign a name to a cell, which will appear by name in every formula where the cell is used, as opposed to cryptic ”C5 * D9” formulas. This makes it easy for someone or even for yourself to change the values of variables in your data (ex. tax rates, commissions, price markups, etc.) if the data changes over time.
8. Convert portion of a table to a single name range (F3): If you are about to perform a series of operations (ex. median, average, etc.) on selected cells in a spreadsheet (ex. a table of rows and columns), you can give a name to the entire set of cells, and just refer to it when you write formulas, instead of having to select the cell ranges again and again.
9. Convert top row labels to name range: A quick way to generate name ranges is also to convert the labels on the top row of your table into name ranges. Then, whenever you apply a calculation to any given row, using the column range names, the formula automatically substitutes the row-specific information to your generic formula. In other words, it will seek the specific value for the cell listed under the generic column name. This makes it easier to perform ”conceptual” calculations and reduces the risk of mistakes when selecting cells manually. It also helps others understand the logic of your calculations.
10. Delete name range: If you notice a certain name range was never used or if you no longer want it to be available to users, you may delete it. Be aware the formulas associated to it will no longer work. To circumvent this issue, you may use special paste options to change your values from formulas into absolute values, prior to deleting a name range.
8. Display portion of the formula (F9): Lastly, this little trick will make your life easier when you are deciphering someone else’s spreadsheet (or reviewing your own), and feel that something is off in the numbers. It is possible for you to highlight a long formula and compute only a small sub-section of the big equation, to see if those numbers make sense. If you’re familiar with the ranges of the values (i.e. what they should roughly be equal to) within an equation, it may help you to quickly spot which portion of the formula is dysfunctional or inaccurate. This is an ”eye-ball” method to spot mistakes, but may be your best bet if you have long windy formulas with no name ranges.
Athletes describe it as “the zone”. Musicians, as “the flow”. And it doesn’t take a Michael Jordan or a Leonard Bernstein to experience this in everyday work. The Flow Theory, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is often framed in terms of making your own job better. What if you could apply the same principles to make your team’s jobs better? Can you imagine the impact you could have on your team, as a lead analyst, a tech lead or a manager?
Concept of Flow
If you have read Csikszentmihalyi’s books, I invite you to skip this section and launch directly to the section detailing the leadership application of this concept. If you do want to brush on the flow, however, keep on reading.
The two charts above represent the founding principles of the Flow Theory. Flow is the sweet spot where the degree of difficulty of a person’s job meet her high level of skills while providing high challenge. Any other combination of challenge and skills will result in non-flow.
As for what flow is, it can be described as very deep, but effortless involvement in an activity where you have a clearly set (and achievable) goal. Signs that can help you identify the state of flow is a state of euphoria, a sensation of being in control, an impression of little effort and much ease, a very deep concentration and focus and a loss of sense of time. This state of flow can be reached through any type of activity, depending on the individual: some achieve it through intellectual work, others through physical activities; some experience it at work while others experience it while partaking in a hobby.
Flow is linked to the concept of intrinsic motivation and is therefore one of the strongest forms of drivers for task completions. If you can help create the type of environment and the type of match with the tasks and skills for the people you lead, then you can create a highly-performing team.
Concept of Flow
Due to the variable and personal nature of the state of flow, there is no universal solution when it comes to using flow in leadership. Understanding the basic framework can, however, help you to facilitate and set the best possible scene for a team sharing a state of flow.
The video below discusses concrete situations and examples where a manager, a lead analyst or a tech lead can break down and assign tasks to various members based on the context:
You may be a pro at excel, or a hard-working newbie, the articles found in this series will be sure to give you a little refresh or an astute new trick for turning your Excel spreadsheets into valuable reference tools for your teams. For analysts, tech leads and managers alike, these articles will come in handy as we explore advanced functionalities and concepts that may help you on your next analysis or costing exercise with the client.
WORKSHOP NO 1: Helping Decision-Makes and Requirement-Gathering Analysts to Sort Through Massive Data
CONTEXT: You have a list of functionalities spread across multiple projects, clients or complex categories (ex. must-have, nice-to-have, like-to-have spread over release versions columns).
GOAL: You want to enable a user to (1) visualize your data from a glance, without reading every single line; (2) perform searches such as “show me functionalities which are found in at least one project”; (3) explore the functionalities in a drill-down fashion (gathering more and more details as you dig deeper into a functionality).
USEFUL WHEN: (1) You are present with a decison-maker and need to answer questions on the fly using the data you have gathered; (2) When you cannot make a meeting and wish to make the data available to colleagues for various possible queries; (3) When you are helping a client prioritize features or a manager determine pricing for a project, and need to rapidly filter the data to get a short-list of retained or feasible items only; (4) When you are working on a long-term project which will need frequent updating and where new decisions may be made over the course of the project, based on results or tracking of items.
EXCEL CONCEPTS & FUNCTIONALITIES TO MASTER:
The following are the basics you need to complete the goal listed above. Simply follow the links if you need a refresher on the how-to portion of these functionalities.
Text Wrap : enables you to fit more columns on your screen by adjusting text to the cell.
Groups & Hierarchy: allows you to drill-down on data by grouping functionalities by categories.
Freeze Panes: allows large amount of rows to always keep the reference row frozen on top of the screen.
Text Filter: allows for quick filtering using values entered by default in your column.
Filter by Color: allows for quick filtering using colour-codes you can have manually or automatically assigned to cells.
Data Validation: ensure others using your file will enter data matching your pre-writen rules for colors and filtering.
Counta and Count if functions: allows you to apply rules and sort depending on the number of items found. For instance, you may sort for a line having one or more functionalities, two or more functionalities, exactly three functionalities, etc.
The following presentation will explore the roadblocks and the enablers for organizations to support teams in their leadership and innovative thinking. The concept of intrapreneurship will be introduced, as well as common practices to encourage teams and high-potential team players. The presentation ends with a slide you can print and bring into a brainstorming meeting with your team, to formalize knowledge transfer and empower your leaders to learn and make better decisions on the go.
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Conclusion
Intrapreneurship is the process by which we cultivate entrepreneurial attitudes in teams of large organizations. Although seldom presented in leadership seminars or MBA programs, this skill contributes to a truly innovative organizational culture, no matter the industry. Companies who invest in intrapreneurship see lower turnover rates and higher levels of innovation in their services and processes, as well as a better knowledge transfer as team members progress in their careers, to new positions within the organization. What will you do today to be a more intrapreneurship-enabling leader? Download the following one-pager as an exercise to be completed with your team, and find out how you can root practices and tools into your organization to encourage your leaders to share and learn from each other.
Because managing and leading are practices, and not science, we learn by example. That is, we often look for the examples of successful professionals to infer successful thinking patterns and behaviours. The following books constitute professional experiences from which you can develop original thinking in the various spheres that are necessary for business success:
(1) Customer-centered service design
(2) Communication
(3) Management philosophy
(4) Entrepreneurial thinking (or systematic thinking for small businesses or departments in large multinationals)
Have a look at each of these books and how they may inspire you by clicking on the image below.
These books will shape your business thinking, no matter you role.
Benchmarking and conceptualizing the sites and applications require a solid grasp of the most used (aka successful) websites currently active in the market. This is where design patterns come in. Design patterns could be defined as common ways to solve a problem. This article aims at pointing business analysts and functional analysts towards resources that will help them develop better websites.
Before an analyst can work with the graphist on prototyping, he or she must conceptualize the website or application to be programmed. This initial phase starts with benchmarking, using high-trafifc sites as references.
What are Design Patterns?
If you are new to design patterns, have a look at this O’Reilly talk first, and then dive right into the resources!
Why are Design patterns useful?
Author Jennifer Tidwell (Designing Interfaces, O’Reilly) gives examples of how design patterns can make your job easier. One of the situations involves using design patterns as inspiration for younger professionals, while the other involves business or functional analysts working with multi-discplinary teams:
If you don’t have years of design experience already, a set of patterns may serve as a learning tool. You may want to read over it to get ideas, or refer back to specific patterns as the need arises.
If you talk to users, engineers, or managers about UI design, or write specifications, then you could use the pattern names as a way of communicating and discussing ideas. This is another well-known benefit of pattern languages.
Being creative is often seen as something positive. Take the following video for instance: The Hope Soap is obviously a very creative person’s brainchild – and it helped reduce 70% of illnesses in the South African community where this product was made available.
The Issue with Creativity
If you are a project manager or director, you know that creativity has potential for huge payoffs while having an equally huge potential for risk! This is because the road best known is usually the fastest one when we are pressed for time or have very little margin for error. Creative people tend to disturb teams because they take routes no one has taken before – and hence represent a danger for incurring additional costs, or delays in a project.
Tips for Creative People
The following tips, hence, all revolve around this basic principle: if you are a highly creative person, you will benefit from both understanding your environment’s reluctance to non-conventional solutions, and from finding a way to minimize risk for your team.
(1) Understand which portions of your job can and cannot accommodate creative thinking
To view creative thinking at one end of a continuum, and analytical thinking at the other, is a misconception: in truth, many jobs require both skill sets. For instance, in my role as a functional analyst, I need to be very rigorous when writing the technical documentation, so that both the client and my programmers and designers teams understand the work we are trying to accomplish, with precision. Creativity has no place in reforming the template of a use case, or the methodology with which we engage with clients (stories and scenarios, use cases, etc.). Creativity is however needed in the conceptual design of the solution we thus document with such rigour; most design patterns will come from industry standards, but there is always this peculiarity in each project which forces you to think out of the box. Focus on investing your creativity there, and avoid reinventing the wheel for everything else.
(2) Identify the ‘core’ of things
On a recent mandate, we were asked to imagine a revolutionary idea, and think out of the box, for a very forward-thinking client in a conventional industry. I had to think for a moment before designing my website and mobile app concept, to understand what their company represented at the core – allowing me to pretty much change every single thing about the service, except for that core element. To illustrate what I am describing, have a look at the following video. By understanding what absolutely needed to be there in terms of content, and what their brand stood for in terms of identity, Virgin was able to revamp its security video- creating a completely new, out-of-the-box product, while staying consistent to their brand and industry regulation:
THE VIDEO
THE MAKING-OF
(3) Surround yourself well
Diversity means success. Teams gain a lot from both creative and analytical thinking. Being able to team up with peers that are better at the analytical side may help you achieve a lot more than by yourself, because you will each have complementary skills that, together, will create a better finished product. Seek out people who admire your creative or conceptual side, and who have the analytical or grounded skills you admire and may or may not have. Similarly, look for team leaders who value your creativity (perhaps a creative team leader himself!) when picking your next assignment. This will ensure your creativity is seen as a strength for the team, and that it will be used to its fullest potential.
(4) Present your ideas well
When presenting your ideas, evaluate who your target audience is. If you are working with fellow creative team members, then present your ideas with enthusiasm and excitement. If you are working with less creative-oriented people, downplay the innovativeness of your idea and present it as close as you can to what they already are familiar with or what is already in place. Show the team how you are limiting risks and show you have thought out the plan carefully.
(5) Look for Fit
If all else fails, you may have to reconsider whether you are where you should be. I believe creative professionals have a duty to adapt to their environment and to share their skills with others on their teams. I believe, too, that creative professionals also have a lot to gain from not only forming partnerships with analytical thinkers, but also to learn from them and to develop that side of their personality, if it is not a skill-set they also have. However, a creative person must be supported by his or her environment. A culture which allows a certain amount of risk and even failure, and that values high returns over conventionality and safety, might prove a nurturing environment for an out-of-the-box thinker. Certain industries, too, may be more fit for creative thinkers.
CREDITS
This article stems from personal reflections after seeing the inspiring presentations of Sylvie Geneau, from CRÉnO-Innovation (“Créativité en Entreprise”) and Louise Laforce (“Mobilisation des Équipes”) at the Institut de Leadership en Gestion’s course ”Certification en leadership et habiletés de direction ” (Learn more at http://www.institutleadership.ca).
Corina on Work 