At the risk of my management reading this, here is a little trick which leads to faster promotions.

Plant the “promotion seed” in your manager’s mind far before you think you’re up for a promotion.  This is done by simply asking your manager if you will get a promotion at the next opening.  While it may seem innocuous, by having them think about you getting a promotion, you have planted the seed for consideration of a promotion.

Managers have an internal clock of how long they need to consider someone for a promotion before they act on it.  By making them “consider” you earlier, you have started that internal clock sooner.  This has the double effect of additional pressure on a manager knowing that you expect a promotion from them.  If there is no pressure, then the manager thinks you’re okay with your current level and has no guilt about not promoting you.

Do this whenever you get a new manager, or right after you just got a promotion.  For example, I waited 2 months from getting a promotion before I planted the next seed.

I have 3 models which I use more than anything else in my business life. The beauty of them is that they are simple, yet they are capable of going very deep the more you understand them. Even better, they can be extended into other situations.

• DISC - Helps with human interaction to understand how _other_ people try achieving success
• Twin Pillars - Marketing in its most simplistic form. However, applicable to daily life
• “Strategic Focus” - Strategy in it’s simplest form. Can break down a company quickly with this

DISC: (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientious)

Once you understand how someone goes about achieving success, you can understand how to speak to them so they “hear” you. I love this model because it’s easy to see each of these traits and it is not nearly as complex as Myers-Briggs. For example a dominant personality, will want to achieve success for prestige. So, to influence them, you tell them that by doing something, they will look good to the rest of the organization.

Twin Pillars - Segmentation and Differentiation

Marketing doesn’t get any more basic than this.  To be successful, identify customer needs (segmentation), and then deliver more value to the customer (differentiation) than the competition.  While it seems simple, there can be a large drill-down into each of these pillars.  From my experience, this concept is lost to most technical people.

Strategic Focus

This model says that a company’s strategy must be either operational efficiency (a Dell/Walmart), product innovation (Google), or customer intimacy/relationships (most local businesses).  A good company will focus on one, and do it very well.  If a company is lucky it can do 2.  However, no company can do all three well.  The model says that depending on what a companies strategic focus will determine what it should invest in.

by Mahatma Gandhi

1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle

The ability to make quick and accurate decisions in our daily life is premised on being able to recognize patterns and knowing how to react to them. Otherwise the brain would have to start from scratch and spend time categorizing the input that it sees. When a pattern is recognized the brain can focus on a more in-depth analysis. For example, traders see trends in the graphs of their stocks, lawyers know how to best handle witnesses, and programmers know where to look for bugs.

The value of models is that it allows a person to simplify a lot of information down to something which can be retained in an individual’s head. By “freeing up space” they can focus on the next set of information. This allows a person to retain much more data than they could otherwise. More data leads to a better decision.

The additional benefit of a model is that when another person knows the model, communication is much crisper and clearer. The other person does not have to churn on categorizing what you are saying, but instead can focus on what your point is.

Models also allow a person to jump up the experience ladder when thinking about a situation. They can do an accurate strategy analysis for the first time using SWOT. Not using a model would require years of experience to do just as well.

In MBA school, I learned a ton of models. For the most part, they were worthless because they we too complex for me to keep straight in my head, or else they were too specialized to be applicable in the majority of situations.

A truly great model has the following attributes:

• Simple - 3 or 4 categories tops
• Covers the majority of case - There will always be corner cases which models miss
• Others can understand it quickly - If you need to teach it, it’s quick
• Requires little experience to apply

A great model will not cover the every situation, but it will certainly reduce the need to start from scratch in decision making.

Next time I will cover my favorite models and touch on some of the worse models.

New server, new look, and new inspiration for blogging.

I finally wrapped up MBA school and spent the last few months getting my life back in order.  I’m now ready to get back to blogging.

This blog will now focus on:

• Human Behavior - Understanding why we do what we do
• “Little Things” - Items in life that make a huge difference
• Technology - Trends, Performance, and Emerging Technology
• Entrepreneurship - Business Ventures

Additionally, I will try keeping the posts concise and go for quality over quantity.

I’m looking forward to it.

Wisdom:

I saw an interesting article on how Jerry Seinfeld developed motivation to write jokes and made it into a habit. He took a large calendar and every day he wrote jokes, he put a big red “X” on that day. After a few days a chain developed.

Then his whole goal become to not break the chain.

By not breaking the chain there is not an opportunity to skip a day. Because once you skip a day, it is easier to skip the next day.

This is along the sames lines which of what Tony Robbins talks about. Doing something small everyday keeps your mind focused on it, and your subconscious continues to work on it even when you are not consciously. The small efforts build and soon build into momentum. When momentum develops, that’s when much is accomplished in a short amount of time.

Looking back at some of my major accomplishments, they all came by making small investments early on…and regardless of the fact that I did not see immediate results, I kept plugging away at it and after awhile I started seeing progress. Progress built and built until one day the “landslide” came and not only did I achieve my goal, I achieved far more than I ever thought possible.

Why are some people successful, and others not. Professor Carol Dweck explains the growth mindset.

The US is a very low context culture. Expectations on how a individual should behave and how information is conveyed is spelled out in words (ex. an airport). Contrast this to a high context culture, found predominately in eastern societies, where similar experiences and cultural norms allow for many things to be left unsaid. Information is communicated by the context a person is currently in, and the culture of the society communicates what is necessary (ex. an expensive gourmet restaurants).

This is typically due to a uniformity of culture over generations. However, the US is a melting pot of cultures, and this diversity is why a unified cultural contexts could not exist.

The result of the US being a high context society is the need for “excess” communication to get meaning across. This comes across as Americans being “loud” to low context cultures where these excess words are superfluous. And is much of the reason why these culture do not understand each other.

This idea is also seen in personal relationships. After couples spend time w/ each other, they start knowing what each other is thinking just by the context they are in. This ability of knowing what the context conveys to the other person is created through sharing of similar experiences. As a couple moves through life, they move into a higher context relationship and while they still communicate as much as they used to, they use words less and less.

While Thailand is normally a very peaceful place, they had a bombing over New Years. I had actually flown into the country earlier that afternoon. We went to dinner that night, and then a group of us was planning on going to Central World for the ball dropping since it was only two buildings down from our hotel. Luckily we went back to the hotel first, and our taxi got searched for bombs. We asked them what was going on, and they told us that there was some bombings earlier in the day, and that all New Years celebrations were cancelled. So, we ended up going someplace else instead. When midnight struck, two bombs went off in Central World. Thankfully we were not there.

Too much excitment for me.