Rewarding effort

6 May 2008

We live in a country that rewards effort and this applies to business as much as anything. New Zealand workers are among the least productive in the OECD.

I once asked my accountant a simple question and they came back with an answer … and an invoice for 2 hours of research. There’s this attitude that you pay for the time it takes, not for the value added.  Contract Law doesn’t help either because in B2B contracts, there are no protections about getting what you paid for.

Hard work is good, but smart work is better.  Hard work would be chopping down a tree with a hammer.  I’d rather be the lazy guy who brings a chainsaw and chops down 10 trees then goes home.

Working smart is about being diligent.  Today I read this and it inspired me:

“Diligence is a learnable skill that combines: creative persistence, a smart working effort rightly planned and rightly performed in a timely, efficient, and effective manner to attain a result that is pure and of the highest quality of excellence.”

The bottom line is being able to measure our outputs, not our effort, because how do you reward something if you can’t measure it?  

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Posted by Andrew

You can’t smell email

4 May 2008

This has been said many times and I just read it again that communication is:

  • 55% body language
  • 38% voice & tone
  • 7% words
So, every time we send an email we waste 93% of our communication power. If you use the phone you waste 55%, but talking to someone face to face is the only way to be 100% effective in our communication.
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On the other hand, emails do have tone & ‘envelope’ language, so maybe its just more like this:
  • 55% words
  • 38% tone & language
  • 7% envelope language (single recipient vs group email, order of recipients, cc’ed, bcc’ed, subject, priority etc)
It can be quite efficient to put the emphasis on your words and off your body language, so its a trade-off that we can use when it suits our purposes. Here’s my Sunday night communication scale to put it all in perspective:
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Face to face communication Like enjoying wine with a few friends and some good food.
Telephone Like drinking alone.
Email Like tasting a wine with no sense of smell
Software Documentation Like drinking from the bottle
Blogging Like pretending you can taste the red fruits of the forrest underpinned by savory dried herbs.

1 Comment | Business, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Andrew