todo

Just added two feed at my netvibes and now I'm full of todo lists and thrilled to find an answer how to stop worrying and start implementing all my plans.

One more article from John Baldoni To Lead More Effectively, Increase Your Self-Confidence.

From time to time I need to ask myself a couple of questions to boost my self-confidence. Here they are from the mentioned article.

What do you do well?
What have you done to earn the trust of others?

I omit the second question from the article (Why should people follow you?) cause I'm rarely thinking for the whole team, concentrating on personal issues. May be the ability to create the followership defines a leader? Anyway, I decided to concentrate on processes I'm managing. Well, human resources are the part of the process, so are the clients, that makes followership being vital for me.

#100 post

...is full of quotes from articles mentioned in previous post.

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning.

It's hard to do because maybe, just maybe, that next piece of information will be the key to our success. But our success actually hinges on the opposite: on our willingness to risk missing some information. Because trying to focus on it all is a risk in itself. We'll exhaust ourselves.

The world is changing fast and if we don't stay focused on the road ahead, resisting the distractions that, while tempting, are, well, distracting, then we increase the chances of a crash.

Now is a good time to pause, prioritize, and focus. Make two lists:

List 1: Your Focus List (the road ahead)

What are you trying to achieve? What makes you happy? What's important to you? Design your time around those things. Because time is your one limited resource and no matter how hard you try you can't work 25/8.

List 2: Your Ignore List (the distractions)

To succeed in using your time wisely, you have to ask the equally important but often avoided complementary questions: what are you willing not to achieve? What doesn't make you happy? What's not important to you? What gets in the way?

An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
Ritual is a secret power to manage one's life.

Managing our time needs to become a ritual too. Not simply a list or a vague sense of our priorities. That's not consistent or deliberate. It needs to be an ongoing process we follow no matter what to keep us focused on our priorities throughout the day.

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful.
Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus. Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour. When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don't let the hours manage you.

STEP 3 (5 minutes) Review. Shut off your computer and review your day. What worked? Where did you focus? Where did you get distracted? What did you learn that will help you be more productive tomorrow?

Make Your Place Proud of You.

"Do not let what you cannot do, interfere with what you can do." The words are those of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach. When attempting to do anything new, voices inside us will whisper "No, don't do it." Those who give up listen to such voices; those who persevere pay them no heed. When it comes to making big and bold changes, either in our lives or our careers, there will always be those around us telling us no; it is up to us to heed our own inner yes.

"I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives," said Abraham Lincoln. "I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him."

love it

I've discovered a wonderful source of knowledge recently. It has started with Managerial tip of a day from HBR and now I'm in blogs, reading all the stuff I need to read in order to calm myself.

Here are the links to articles I've just gone through and I'm about to enjoy by reading thourougly:
- Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning.
- An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day
- Make Your Place Proud of You.

These are topics I've been thinking for a while recently. Hoping to find some hints.

PS. Good sign that I've started thinking in English again.

I´ve been reading an article about peer pressure as a part of motivation process (tried to found a link in my rss-reader and failed - that is a sign for me - I have lot's of them) and realized about myself that I'm totally peer-leaded person. If I have a wonderful team to be ready for process and changes - and I can show great results. Being put into a team of crying losers I tend to get nervous and loose in effectiveness. May be I'm wrong perceiving myself as a proactive person?

Well, the line between being just lazy (reactive) or just careful not to have wrong map and trying to create something beautiful in a really creepy environment. The only thing I know for sure - if I made a decision to be here, I'd be proactive.

Tradeoff

I have a tough decision to make. The simlest tradeoff between stable position of brand manager with local operational challenges and a very challenging position of strategy consultant, which gives a lot food for brains but also requires a lot personal resources (time, attention).

Yes, after MBA I feel tired. But I had 4 months of my family period and recovered a lot. And passive way of leisure is not a best way for me. Consulting offers a constant thinking process - I love it, the same to challenge. Branding offers me a stable work in a field I know, lower cost comparable to consulting (region location, less requirements to lifestyle).

The only question that is crucial is if I'm ready for stable family life now. Not a professional one, not a financial one.

Phuf...

self ad

Ok, as I promised, here is the list of things I can give to the company I will work for.

- Loyalty. I don't know why, but every time I start working with a company or team, I get stuck to it. I will work for them and with them until something extraordinary may happen. E.g. I wasworking for my first serious company for 5 years. Just because I loved my partners, my product, the things I can do. And despite all the problems that may occure in every company. I left the company when I won a scholarship for my MBA. Extraordinary, heh.

- Result orientation and high work efficiency. I love to achieve. Love to strike out points in my to do list. When I was a child, my father told me that I get involved into many thing and loose my attention to some of them without finishing. Since that I've got a special feeling then I finish the task. I can control my interest to different things. But I prefer to have a tme to finish all of them, that's why I work efficiently.

- Curiosity. I like to dig into the things. This require some creativity along with analytical skills. I love to create different table forms to get better perspective or vision. I love to get information. I like to be prepared.

- Quick mind and ability to learn. I could easily understand how to avoid the paper jam into big professional printer machine with spanish interface (by this moment I've just started studing this language). I can easily become feeling comfortable with any software (it took me one night and half a bottle of rioja vine to understand meta-tag language of wiki programming - I'm still using it while making my fitness diary in tiddle-wiki).

- Ability to work with strategic goals and tactic tasks. I do it in my day-to-day life. I do it during my business activities. I love take a wider strategic perspective and break it down to a set of practical things to be done.

- Love for mentoring and coaching. I love explaining complicated things in the easiest way for people to understand. I love when people can do wonderful things after discussing with me different tasks. I love to get appreciation from those people.

- My experience and skills. As I told during one of my interviews with an employer: "I'm not cute because of my MBA certificate, only because I'm cool, I decided to get it".

BTW, it was a great exercise to make. I feel more confident before meeting my future employers.

funeral management

Funeral requires a lot of management skills to pass through. High emotional involvement combined with high time pressure. Inspite of a limited procedures needed to be done, the stress level is incredibly high.

Just to survive, I used the following tricks:
1. To lower emotional pressure, I dove into physical labor - cooking (in Russia we have a tradition of funera repast, that is normally cooked at home), serving the food etc.
2. When somebody wanted to help me and at the same time started to anny with a phrase "we don't have enough time until..." the only way to limit the hysterics was to give the person some occupation, cause in the case of high emotional pressure there's no possibility to explain for the person to understand.
3. Just remember that this pressure is not endless, the time for pressure is limited wit a traditional set of funeral procedures.

Let my granddad's memory live on forever.

Varsavsky again

The test of self esteem: when you find someone who has done something great, do you feel admiration or envy?

twitter-style

Just realised, that there are two basic styles of thoughts - twitter and let's say blogger. Blogger generally assumes in-depth analysis, even if you write about your breakfast - scrambled eggs with tomato without bacon, I love healthy food and hate animal fats. Twitter is a way to quickly mention the thing without digging in. Just scrambled eggs. Or better say, I had a breakfast.

What is better? The favorite mba-style answer - depends. Giving grades means having a system of assumptions, and this is biased anyway. Think out your goal and drop your tools (Ianna, hi, there).

I just stopped blaming myself for twitter style. This is the reason I decided to classify this. And thanx to Varsavsky, of course, his latest posts are in twitter style.

education

It's very important for people to have their first education at home.
Bibi Russell, the founder of Bibi Production (Bangladesh) during 2nd Social Responibility Forum at IE.

can't stop, really)

Since I have a break with my entrepreneurship project, one more thing to be posted.

The theories often come to my mind during my MBA studies are:

1. Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
2. Sunk cost theory.
3. Customer oriented behavior.

Will develop the idea later.

English

Studying in multinational environment has its advantages and disadvantages. Main advantage is diversity. But sacrifice is the level of English.

You need to express yourself. You care about letting people know your idea. You talk to the guys from 37 different nationalities. And different levels of English, of course.

Well, I've got fluency and freedom of expression, but grammar went down obviously. And since the speed of thoughts now is incredible - I'm fixing everything I need, there is no time for revision.

Put the grammar note on todolist and sighed when was looking at her grammar book.

resilence to criticism

One of the biggest mistake of entrepreneurs is having pink glasses when reviewing own business and idea. I'm the best, others are sucks. Or I have a unique proposition, nobody can give this to you. This leads many of businesses to a failure.

Then a person becomes professional, he/she tends to be more resistant to critical views. In my humble opinion, professional is the person who can still open his/her mind to a new information or view rather then pushing own idea. It's ok to have a stron belief into own idea - that's a reason why you have it. In the same time critical review of the idea can improve it a lot.

Many people understand this position in their own manner. Recently I've seen several examples of making a public access to the document asking for idea/presentation/business evaluation. Wow! Those people are open to criticism, I thought. But then I've read all the comments and authors reaction to them. Resistance. Normal reaction is 'Tastes differ' (universal answer to someone's opinion), or 'What can YOU say to me?'. The person posted the document for discussion therefore has a different aim. Instead of asking for an opinion he/she asks for approval, bragging.

I'm not good in listening criticism to my job. I take everything too personal and prefer to blame person who gives criticism of lacking critique skills. Sometimes it is true, but not all the times although I prefer to exaggerate a lot and count all the cases of criticism I don't like to the lack of skills. And I'm also awful in giving criticism meaning that I try to find weaknesses without mentioning strenghs. When I don't like one job from the person I tend to perceive other his/her jobs in a worse way.

So, here are some rules and exersises I use to be less critique resilent and give a good criticism.

While asking for a critique:
1. Try to evaluate your job without bias. Think about target audience - what are their interests and do they find benefits in your message. Do they have an answer on the question 'What's in it for me?' Make a list of their interests and answer if your documents brings your idea to fit them.
2. Count to 10 after making suggestion about criticism given. Think about the person's interest of giving this critique to you. Is there good sense in his/her comment? What will change if you make suggested chnges? Are they for good or for bad.
3. Remember, those comments are about your document/idea, not about yourself. They doesn't reflect your skills/talent in full, just a small piece incarnated into this document/idea.

While giving the criticism.
1. Evaluate the job, not the person who made it.
2. Make a list of strenghts and weaknesses. Try to provide an even quantity of comments on each part. If you can't provide one of the parts, think deeper.
3. Think out the words you're making criticism. While making criticism, ask yourself about your interests. And interests of a person asking for criticism.
4. Never give criticism when not asked. In ideal world give criticism only if they have paid for it)))