In the past few months we have been reading business fables for the Business Book discussion group. Here are a couple of reviews to spark your interest. To get a copy of a business fable or to inquire about the book group call Terry Zarsky at 531-6333 extension 2308.
Juggling Elephants: An Easier Way to Get Your Most Important Things Done-Now! by Jones Loflin and Todd Musig, 2005.
In this fun business fable, Jones and Todd apply lessons from the circus to our everyday business and personal lives. The moral of this story is easy to discern. You are the ringmaster in your own circus, and your circus is made up of multiple rings. Those rings represent the essential pieces in your life: business, relationships, and personal growth, to name a few. This tale escorts you through discovering the rings in your life, the acts you currently have, those you may want to add, and how to manage those acts in a way that is satisfying to you as well as your colleagues and family. In other words, this story will help you become a better ringmaster in your own circus.
The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done by Dave Crenshaw, 2008.
Dave Crenshaw questions the existence of one of our most valued skills – multitasking. He illustrates his point through a business coach and a struggling CEO looking for some pointers in time management. With a few short exercises the coach is able to expose the cost of multitasking in our daily lives.
Dave’s scenario begs us to take a few minutes to look at our day. Where do you spend most of your time? How many times are you interrupted in a day? Who interrupts you most and for what reasons? Is there a more efficient approach?
To answer the last question our business coach provides his charge with several techniques to streamline her time along with worksheets to move her in the right direction.
All in all, this is a brief but informative read, providing a clear depiction of the time management problem as well as the means to overcome it.
by Dave Lakhani, Recorded Books, 2007.
Dave Lakhani covers how to gain more effective use of your day by teaching a concept he calls “Fearsome Focus.” Fearsome focus allows you to focus on one specific task at a time for a period of one hour. You can not allow any interruptions during this time period. Lakhani found during his research that many of us spend six to eight hours a day fighting crises or fielding interruptions in our day. If we learn to plan for time to address crises that come up (the average time spent is two hours a day) and learn to stop or slow down the interruptions that try to control our day we can accomplish much more than we do today. By planning an hour a week (or more) and focusing on making the best use of that hour we can slowly make our to-do list go away and find ourselves with many tasks successfully accomplished.
Lakhani addresses how to focus, think creatively, set the stage and identify and destroy the blocks to getting tasks done. We can use this fearsome focus hour to accomplish the wanted task and by changing the way we choose to address our time constraints we can learn to focus on specific tasks and learn how to accomplish more in our day.
Topics covered include management, time management, customer experience, sales and marketing, making connections, mentoring and giving something back. Examples of successful use of the fearsome focus hour are included by Lakhani.
by Richard Koch, Bolinda Audio, 2007
This book looks at the economic assumptions made that can affect the success of a business. One of the things the author points out is that 80% of errors are made by 20% of the potential causes. He also includes many other analogies that state that economics is not balanced and there has always been an unbalanced relationship to items whether it is 80/20 or 70/30 or 95/5. It is always heavily weighted in one direction. A minority of input or effort leads to a majority of the outcomes or rewards.
What this means in business is that you can look at that 20% and fix it and have a hugh effect on the bottom line. It also means that if you are looking at the other side, the 80% left over, no matter what you do there, you will have little effect on changing things. If 20% of the causes of the bad product are causing 80% of the defects, changing something within that 20% will be cost effective and have long term effects. However, if we choose to address a cause that is causing a very small percentage of the errors because it is easier or cheaper to address we will see very little effect on the outcome. Being aware of the percentages and utilizing them for the long haul will help determine the success or failure of our business.
Koch shows us how to apply this principle to succeed in business and in life. When we are aware of where we are applying our energy and what the resulting outcomes are we can learn to use more of our energy to our advantage and learn to ignore or delegate some of that 80% that needs to get done but has a minimal effect on the final outcome.
By Jones Loflin and Todd Musig, Portfolio, 2007.
Ever feel like you are trying to juggle too many things at once and none of them are turning out the way you want? If you ever feel like your life is a three-ring circus Juggling Elephants will help you decide what to pursue to maximize your time and your energy.
This business parable relates the story of Mark who has promised to take his daughter to the circus and finds it comes to town just when he is busiest. He makes the time for his daughter and realizes that his life is like the three-ring circus he is watching. He has an epiphany when he realizes that the ringmaster is what is keeping everything functioning so smoothly. He meets a man who becomes his mentor and helps him determine how best to keep everything in his life balanced and working for him. Everyone has three rings in their lives which include work, family and relationships, and personal time.
Mark soon comes to realize that the most important part of the three-ring circus is the ringmaster and that is the role he plays in managing what happens in his life every day. A ringmaster who spends the right amount of time and energy on making sure each of the rings gets the time and energy it needs to thrive. He needs to determine which focus he needs to have at all times. Balance in the three areas keeps him energized and committed to succeeding while still having fun.
Mark becomes so adept at managing his commitments that he starts mentoring those around him to benefit from his analogies and experiences.
by Stephen Covey, Franklin Covey, 2007. (Media Player – Playaway)
According to Stephen Covey the phrase “Time Management” is an oxymoron. The phrase should be self management, not time management. Stephen Covey explores the fallacies of time management which are:
1. people who believe that they can find more time to get things accomplished
2. you can bank or save time to be used at a later date
3. people who believe that they can manage time.
You can’t manage time, it marches on when we’re not paying attention and is lost forever. There is always more to do than we have time to do.
So how do we conquer the time we have. Using the techniques taught in this book we can learn to become better self managers. There are four quadrants that make up the designations for every task we do.
This time matrix is
1. necessity quadrant
2. deception quadrant
3. productivity and balance quadrant
4. waste and excess quadrant.
These are defined as:
1. Urgent and important
2. Urgent, not important
3. important, not urgent
4. not urgent and not important.
We need to spend some time placing our tasks in these quadrants and then coming up with ways to drop them or do them more effectively. By doing this we will feel like we can manage time.
Stephen Covey teaches us to use the productivity pyramid to accomplish more of what we want to accomplish. This pyramid includes values, goal setting and daily and weekly planning. The “core four” of the daily and weekly planning includes tasks, notes, appointments and contacts. By learning to direct these four items we will be better able to see where we spend our time and figure out ways to get tasks accomplished without necessarily doing them ourselves. This will allow us more “time” to accomplish the tasks that are most important and valuable to us.
