Seth's Blog : Conference call hygiene

 

Conference call hygiene

On behalf of the many who have suffered through pointless and painful conference calls, some general principles:

1. When in doubt, don't have one.
2. Everyone now knows precisely what time it is. Show up ten seconds early; one minute late is too late.
3. If you can't live with rule 1, can we live with this one? 10 minutes is the maximum length of a conference call. In, out, over.
4. If the meeting is only ten minutes long, good news, you have time to pull over, time to let the dog out, and time to give us your undivided attention.
5. If you're not planning on speaking, no need to attend. You can listen to the recording later if you need to, or we can send you 8 bullet points and save us all time.
6. While we're on the topic, audio is a truly powerful means of communication, and if you want to record your message and send it to all of us, I'm totally in favor of this. But don't confuse the one-way broadcast power of audio with a pretend meeting where you're talking and we're supposed to quietly listen in real time. That's not a meeting and all the trappings of a conference call detract from the thing you were trying to do.
7. Before you waste a thousand dollars of company time on another conference call, listen to Al's book for $4. Almost all conference calls that involve more than five people are either a lazy choice or a show of power, and should be eliminated. If you want to talk, for sure, please pick up the phone and call me. 

If we work in the plant, we make widgets. And we expect that the making of widgets will be consistent, rational and done with forethought and a lack of waste. Many of us now work in a system that makes decisions, has meetings and markets ideas. The same kind of clarity and craftsmanship ought to exist here too.

This video is funny, because it's true.

       

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Seth's Blog : Measuring nothing (with great accuracy)

 

Measuring nothing (with great accuracy)

The weight of a television set has nothing at all to do with the clarity of its picture. Even if you measure to a tenth of a gram, this precise data is useless.

Some people measure stereo equipment using fancy charts and graphs, even though the charts and graphs say little or nothing about how it actually sounds.

A person's Klout score or the number of Twitter followers she has probably doesn't have a lot to do with how much influence she actually has, even if you measure it quite carefully.

You can't tell if a book is any good by the number of words it contains, even though it's quite easy and direct to measure this.

We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it's pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about. It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

       

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• The answer to, "is that the best you can do..."
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Seth's Blog : On doing the work

 

On doing the work

I'll be blunt: There's virtually no chance I will ever learn to play the bass, or even the harmonica.

It's not because there isn't a huge range of useful instruction available. There is. No, it's because even though I love glancing at this stuff, I'm just not persistent and driven enough to practice, to dig in, to get through the dip and yes, to do the work.

We used to live in an industrial age, a Smithian-Marxist world where the worker sought to do as little as possible and the boss tried to get the worker to do as much as possible. In our self-serve economy, though, that's just not true. All sorts of roads, but you have to supply your own locomotion.

Almost eight thousand people have taken my Skillshare course so far, and the ones that got the most out of it all had two things in common: They did the project worksheets and they actively contributed to the online discussions. Learning is not watching a video, learning is taking action and seeing what happens.

"I'll just watch and take notes," is inconsistent with, "I'm here to learn."

My philosophy is that it doesn't pay to go to a conference unless you're prepared to be vulnerable and meet people, and it doesn't pay to go to a Q&A session unless you're willing to sit in the front row. Reading blogs is great, writing one is even better.

There are more chances than ever to attend, but all of them require participation if you expect them to work.

The magic of this new economy is that instead of your work benefitting a fat cat boss with a mansion and a yacht, your work and your learning benefits you and the people you care about.

PS a great place to start is with this modern classic from Steve Pressfield.

       

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Seth's Blog : Copyediting, line editing and the other kind

 

Copyediting, line editing and the other kind

The copyeditor will fix a misstated fact, spot a typo and get your prose clean.

The line editor will rearrange a paragraph and help you organize a thought more clearly.

And the editor who is your partner will tell you that the chapters are in the wrong order, that you must delete a third of what you wrote, or perhaps consider writing for TV instead. This kind of editor is the one who will tell you your time is better spent doing something else entirely.

It's easier (but not easy) to find a good copyeditor than it is to find someone generous and brave enough to help you figure out your strategy, whether you're working on a book, a career or the structure of your next project.

The copyeditor can tell you that you mangled a few facts early in your presentation. The line editor will help you untangle a complicated story near the middle. And your strategic editor will help you see that a one-on-one meeting would have been better than a presentation in the first place.

Sure, fix my typos, thanks a lot, but what's truly precious is someone able to fix your plan.

Worth noting that most critics and journalists are comfortable being metaphorical copy editors, but it's rare you find someone who speaks up with sensible thoughts about your strategy.

Treasure the folks willing and able to develop a point of view about the big picture.

       

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Seth's Blog : The answer to, "is that the best you can do..."

 

The answer to, "is that the best you can do..."

is always no.

A better question is, "what resource would enable you to do even better?"

When the cost of the resource (time, people, money, freedom, boundary easing) is worth the benefit, then sure, go for it. If you can't make it better, hire someone who can.

       

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• "Bring us your problems"
• Gradually and then suddenly

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