Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning

by Peter Bregman

I was late for my meeting with the CEO of a technology company and I was emailing him from my iPhone as I walked onto the elevator in his company's office building. I stayed focused on the screen as I rode to the sixth floor. I was still typing with my thumbs when the elevator doors opened and I walked out without looking up. Then I heard a voice behind me, "Wrong floor." I looked back at the man who was holding the door open for me to get back in; it was the CEO, a big smile on his face. He had been in the elevator with me the whole time. "Busted," he said.

The world is moving fast and it's only getting faster. So much technology. So much information. So much to understand, to think about, to react to. A friend of mine recently took a new job as the head of learning and development at a mid-sized investment bank. When she came to work her first day on the job she turned on her computer, logged in with the password they had given her, and found 385 messages already waiting for her.

So we try to speed up to match the pace of the action around us. We stay up until 3 am trying to answer all our emails. We twitter, we facebook, and we link-in. We scan news websites wanting to make sure we stay up to date on the latest updates. And we salivate each time we hear the beep or vibration of a new text message.

But that's a mistake. The speed with which information hurtles towards us is unavoidable (and it's getting worse). But trying to catch it all is counterproductive. The faster the waves come, the more deliberately we need to navigate. Otherwise we'll get tossed around like so many particles of sand, scattered to oblivion. Never before has it been so important to be grounded and intentional and to know what's important.

Never before has it been so important to say "No." No, I'm not going to read that article. No, I'm not going to read that email. No, I'm not going to take that phone call. No, I'm not going to sit through that meeting.

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. We'll get confused, nervous, and irritable. And we'll miss the CEO standing next to us in the elevator.

A study of car accidents by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute put cameras in cars to see what happens right before an accident. They found that in 80% of crashes the driver was distracted during the three seconds preceding the incident. In other words, they lost focus — dialed their cell phones, changed the station on the radio, took a bite of a sandwich, maybe checked a text — and didn't notice that something changed in the world around them. Then they crashed.

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?

Some people already have the first list. Very few have the second. But given how easily we get distracted and how many distractions we have these days, the second is more important than ever. The leaders who will continue to thrive in the future know the answers to these questions and each time there's a demand on their attention they ask whether it will further their focus or dilute it.

Which means you shouldn't create these lists once and then put them in a drawer. These two lists are your map for each day. Review them each morning, along with your calendar, and ask: what's the plan for today? Where will I spend my time? How will it further my focus? How might I get distracted? Then find the courage to follow through, make choices, and maybe disappoint a few people.

After the CEO busted me in the elevator, he told me about the meeting he had just come from. It was a gathering of all the finalists, of which he was one, for the title of Entrepreneur of the Year. This was an important meeting for him — as it was for everyone who aspired to the title (the judges were all in attendance) — and before he entered he had made two explicit decisions: 1. To focus on the meeting itself and 2. Not to check his BlackBerry.

What amazed him was that he was the only one not glued to a mobile device. Were all the other CEOs not interested in the title? Were their businesses so dependent on them that they couldn't be away for one hour? Is either of those a smart thing to communicate to the judges?

There was only one thing that was most important in that hour and there was only one CEO whose behavior reflected that importance, who knew where to focus and what to ignore. Whether or not he eventually wins the title, he's already winning the game.

The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less

by Tony Schwartz

Human beings don’t work like computers; they can’t operate at high speeds continuously, running multiple programs at once.

People perform at their peak when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal.

Employees can increase their effectiveness by practicing simple rituals that refuel their energy, such as taking a daily walk to get an emotional breather or turning off e-mail at prescribed times so they can concentrate.

If companies allow and encourage employees to create and stick to such rituals, they will be rewarded with a more engaged, productive, and focused workforce.

The way most of us work isn’t working. Study after study has shown that companies are experiencing a crisis in employee engagement. A 2007 Towers Perrin survey of nearly 90,000 employees worldwide, for instance, found that only 21% felt fully engaged at work and nearly 40% were disenchanted or disengaged. That negativity has a direct impact on the bottom line. Towers Perrin found that companies with low levels of employee engagement had a 33% annual decline in operating income and an 11% annual decline in earnings growth. Those with high engagement, on the other hand, reported a 19% increase in operating income and 28% growth in earnings per share.

Nearly a decade ago, the Energy Project, the company I head, began to address work performance and the problem of employee disengagement. We believed that burnout was one of its leading causes, and we focused almost exclusively on helping individuals avoid it by managing their energy, as opposed to their time. (See “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” HBR October 2007.) Time, after all, is finite. By contrast, you can expand your personal energy and also regularly renew it.

Once people understand how their supply of available energy is influenced by the choices they make, they can learn new strategies that increase the fuel in their tanks and boost their productivity. If people define precise times at which to do highly specific activities, these new behaviors eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will and discipline. We refer to them as rituals. They’re simple but powerful. They include practices such as shutting down your e-mail for a couple of hours during the day, so you can tackle important or complex tasks without distracting interruptions, or taking a daily 3 PM walk to get an emotional and mental breather.

What we failed to fully appreciate in our early work was that once we finished our sessions with employees and sent them back into the workplace, they often ran into powerful organizational resistance to the very principles and practices we’d taught them. We still believe that enduring organizational change is possible only if individuals alter their attitudes and behaviors first. But we’ve come to understand that it’s not possible to generate lasting cultural change without deeply involving an organization’s senior leadership.

In this article, we’ll describe the transformation we helped initiate at Sony Pictures Entertainment, a company that has embraced energy-building and -renewing rituals at all levels. Based in Culver City, California, Sony Pictures produces, markets, and distributes movies and TV shows. So far, more than 3,000 of the company’s 6,300 employees worldwide have gone through our energy-management program. This summer we’ll reach another 1,700 in Europe, Singapore, and Latin America.

To date, the reaction to the program has been overwhelmingly positive. Eighty-eight percent of participants say it has made them more focused and productive. More than 90% say it has helped them bring more energy to work every day. Eighty-four percent say they feel better able to manage their jobs’ demands and are more engaged at work. Sony’s leaders believe that these changes have helped boost the company’s performance. Despite the recession, Sony Pictures had its most profitable year ever in 2008 and one of its highest revenue years in 2009 (though an industrywide collapse in DVD sales forced the company to do a round of layoffs early in 2010).

The Energy Project

Leaders can easily underestimate how their attitudes and behaviors affect the energy levels of their teams. Because energy is contagious, both the quality and quantity of a leader’s energy can drain or galvanize a team. In addition, the leader sets the tone for the organization. If people see their company president making it a practice to take a walk every afternoon, they feel safer taking time out for their own efforts. To measure your own energy management effectiveness as a leader and get more tips on how to increase it, go to theenergyproject.com/hbr.

As we have done at many other organizations, we encouraged Sony to make two fundamental shifts in the way it manages employees. The first was to stop expecting people to operate like computers—at high speeds, continuously, running multiple programs at the same time—and to recognize that human beings perform best and are most productive when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal. The second was to move from trying to get more out of employees and instead to invest in systematically meeting their four core needs, so they’re fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day. These four core needs are physical health (achieved through nutrition, sleep, daytime renewal, and exercise), emotional well-being (which grows out of feeling appreciated and valued), mental clarity (the ability to focus intensely, prioritize, and think creatively), and spiritual significance (which comes from the feeling of serving a mission beyond generating a profit).

TINO Y TIEMPO

Horacio Marchand


Una regla de etiqueta entre los asistentes a un partido de tenis entre, digamos, Nadal y Djokovic, es que los errores en el tenis no se aplauden. Sólo cuando uno de los participantes gana un punto por habilidad o estrategia amerita un aplauso; pero en los negocios hasta se celebra con champagne.

Es un hecho que a veces el éxito se debe a la torpeza de tus enemigos y también a que tu enemigo simplemente sea superior en la ejecución y/o haya visto algún ángulo en el mercado ignorado por ti.
El éxito no es sólo un tema de atinarle al mercado; tu contrincante tiene un rol clave en definirte e impacta en tu reputación y valor. Si la meta es el cliente, la velocidad y forma en la que te desplazas en relación con tu competencia es la carrera.
Microsoft, por ejemplo, convierte a Bill Gates en el hombre más rico del mundo, hasta el día que decide donar parte de su dinero a fundaciones. Este gran imperio desluce si se le compara con Apple y hasta el "nuevo imperio" Google; se sesga cuando se referencia con el impulso de la compañía de la manzana mordida.
El precio de la acción de Microsoft prácticamente no ha crecido desde el 2001, mientras que la de Apple ha crecido cerca de 11 veces.
Otro ejemplo es el caso de Kmart, donde los analistas y académicos coinciden en que ha sido aplastada como centro de sandwich: Walmart, enfocado a precio y valor, y Target, enfocado al estilo y diseño.
Hace más de 100 años, Kmart contaba con 85 tiendas. Walmart abre su primera tienda en 1962, y para el año 2011 agrupa cerca de 10 mil tiendas (contra sólo mil 382 tiendas Kmart.
Kmart tuvo sus años de desenfoque y optó por la diversificación "porque ya no había mucho a donde crecer", al tiempo que Walmart y Target afilaban el enfoque y seguían creciendo.
Forzado, Kmart echa reversa a su estrategia de diversificación y en el periodo del 1994-2002 mejora notablemente sus operaciones. La rotación del inventario, métrica clave y en particular en menudeo mejora en términos absolutos. Su rotación aumenta de 3.45 en 1994 a 4.56 en 2002, lo que representa un 32 por ciento.
Sin embargo, la rotación de Walmart crece un 57 por ciento pero de una base más alta: aumenta de 5.14 en 1994 a 8.08 en 2002. La rotación de Walmart en 1994 era de por sí mayor a la que alcanzó Kmart en el 2002 (5.14 contra 4.56).
El éxito de Walmart no sólo se deriva de la logística sino de un enfoque coherente, diferenciado y bien posicionado en el mercado: siempre precios bajos.
Target, por su lado, hace hincapié en las tendencias de diseño y moda en prendas de vestir y decoración.
En la mezcla de productos y servicios, Target es similar a Walmart de muchas maneras, pero satisface las necesidades de clientes jóvenes, conscientes de la imagen por el manejo de marcas de diseñadores exclusivos.
Kmart sigue luchando por definir su forma de jugar, se describe a sí misma como una "compañía de las masas, que ofrece a los clientes productos de calidad a través de una cartera de marcas exclusivas y etiquetas". Sin embargo, esa definición podría describir casi a cualquier tienda; demasiado poco, demasiado tarde.
Como cliente de Walmart, sabes que vas a ahorrar dinero, y sientes "que te atiendes sólo". En Target, sabes que vas a obtener productos de moda a precios razonables. ¿Y el nicho de Kmart?

Antonio Salieri fue un compositor italiano de música sacra, clásica y de ópera, además de un apasionado director de orquesta. Músico de gran valía, dotado de gran talento y autor de música que persiste hasta nuestra era. Sin duda, su mayor falla fue haber sido contemporáneo de Mozart.

The Unwritten Rules of Business

By Jeff Hadden
Business has unwritten rules, too — and violators often are often punished just as swiftly. Here are eight:

1. Never dress above your position. I know — dressing for success is important, acting like you’re already in the job is the best way to get the job, etc. It’s also the surest way to draw the not-so-friendly fire of colleagues or subordinates. Dress slightly “better” if you want — but just slightly. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a shameless climber. The only time this doesn’t apply is if you run your own business, but even then you should dress in a way that enhances your image while ensuring customers feel comfortable.
2. Never show up a peer in a meeting. A colleague proposes an idea. It stinks. Not your job to say so, though. If you’re a supervisor and another supervisor makes a terrible suggestion that doesn’t affect your area or your employees, sit tight. Let someone else, preferably someone above you, shoot it down. Then jump in if you can to modify the idea so it is more workable, giving credit to the other supervisor for raising an important issue, of course. Bad ideas come and go, but professional relationships should be forever.
3. Never sit by the CEO when he comes to visit. You walk into a conference room. The CEO, fresh off the plane, is there. Say hi, introduce yourself, and then sit at least two seats away. There are better ways to get face time. Plopping yourself down by the big guy (or gal) will do nothing for your career and everything to draw sideways glances and post-meeting sniping.
4. Never use your position as an enabler. Here’s a classic example. In many companies, how late you arrive for a meeting depends on where you stand on the food chain — the higher you are the later you arrive and the less likely others are to complain, at least openly. Never use your position to enable discourteous, rude, or insensitive behavior. Everyone notices — and everyone resents it.
5. Never fail to two-way mentor. You have a mentor. Great! Mentors can provide motivation, be a source of ideas, provide counsel and guidance. So pass it on. Mentor someone below you. Otherwise everyone knows you take like a bandit but give like a miser. Think of it this way: You may aspire to someone’s position, but at the same time someone aspires to yours. A sub-set of this rule: If you want a great mentor, first be a great mentor.
6. Never “borrow” someone’s idea. Business owner, CEO, supervisor, entry-level employee… doesn’t matter. Always give credit where credit is due. Steal an idea and the victim neverforgets. And don’t fall back on the old, “Well, they work for me, and we’re a team… so I was just raising the idea on behalf of the team.” No one goes for that excuse but you.
7. Never leave out the negatives. We all like sharing good news. Good news is interesting; bad news is critical. I like to know a shipment went out on time, but I need to know a shipment will be late so I can contact the customer and put other plans in place. (And speaking of customers, always share potential negatives as soon as possible — the fewer surprises the better.) Positives are easy to deal with; negatives can make or break a business if the right people are not aware.
8. Never talk when you don’t have something to say. We’ve all known the guy who must speak in every meeting, even if he has nothing to add. (Okay, we’ve all known a lot of those guys.) You may think you need to contribute just to show you’re involved; the rest of us know you’re just talking to show you’re important. And we think a lot less of you as a result. Think of words as something scarce; use them sparingly and only when they will make the most impact.