When in hard times

In hard times you are exposed to some risks. You brain will look for excuses, for easy way out.

It will seem that complaining with someone else (i.e. your boss, your situation, the fact that you would need more money, that you should have done before and now it’s too late etc…) will seem a great solution.

Life is unfair, and you are simply a victim.

This will stuck you in a negative and dangerous state of mind where you must confirm this to yourself, then you will not do anything to get out from the  ”shit”-uation.

When in hard times, just some advices:

1) Don’t talk about problems, especially to your friends or people loving you. Just talk about HOW you are planning to overcome.

2) Don’t stop smiling and looking calm, especially when with people making you nervous. And do not try to be pathetically pitiable looking for some kind words from them. There is nobody able to make you feeling better. Or better there is just one: it’s you.

3) If you realize your situation hasn’t changed, just blame yourself. Then go standing in front of a mirror and tell your self ” what do I missed to try?”

4) When the bad feeling of dissatisfaction jumps in your mind, do not reject it, but mentally list yourself the things you have done to change your condition.

5) if you think you have done everything but anything worked, just tell yourself you must have missed something or maybe you haven’t treated every aspect with the necessary care. Then try to repeat better, much better what you just tried to do without success.

The rest will come.

If you feel the same problem is not solved after some month following the 5 points above, then you maybe do not have the problem you think you have. You maybe just need to feel in hard times. And you need to keep problems alive.

Just ten steps far from gettin’ back to the path you thought you’d lost

1) Think and visualize in your mind where/who/how you want to be in 12 months (15 minutes). You should just dream, don’t let constraints like “hey my wife won’t agree” or “I’d need lot of money” or “my friends would disapprove” enter your mind during this dreaming.

2) Sleep on it (just let it stay in your mind and go to sleep, it doesn’t matter if you actually dream of it or not)

3) Write it down, big font, black text on white sheet, print it.

4) With your dream right in front of you, write down a plan to achieve it, step by step. For each step add the month you should have it accomplished for. Again, no time for excuses or “it can’t be real”. Wipe these useless negatives out of your brain (by simply concentrating on writing down the plan).

5) Give it to a friend. A good one. Not your girlfriend or boyfriend. I mean a good Friend. He should just pick you “dream and plan” and read it carefully at home.

6) Meet the friend, offer him a cup of coffee and ask him “so?”. I mean, the question is not “do you think I can make it?” but should be “do you see something I missed out on my plan?” or “did you notice some point you can help me with?”

7) If your friend is not going to support you, or you realized he did not take you seriously enough, just thank him, find another friend and go back to step 5. If he smiles at you and proposes some support, make him promising he will help you to stay on track for the next 12 months.

8)That’s the hard part. Go to people that matters in your life, like your wife, girlfriend, parents, son or daughter. Be serious and read the project title. Tell them you love them but that you absolutely need to do that. Tell them that this is as important as your life is. Tell them it’s a matter of your happyness.

9) List on a paper all the things and activities that occupy your day and start crossing those not being useful for your project.

10) Pin up the 3 sheets (project in the middle, task sequence on the left and daily things to remove or suspend for 12 months on the right) where you can read it every morning when you jump out or bed and every evening you jump in.

The journey commences.

Good luck, happy holidays and happy new year.

Sincerely Yours,

Consules

When mobile apps get “dirty”

Mikandi is the world’s first App Store for Adults.

Their very first app delivered is a what they called a “FREE multi-speed vibrator system for the Google Android OS Phone/Device”.

Except that to me this sounds just ridicolous, it could be interesting to play a brainstorming game trying to find out how many possible secondary use there could for a mobile terminal.

That’ why I am organizing a brainstorming session with some colleagues to play around with unexplored interactions between the terminal and things we use on a daily basis.

I guess we could make something better than this, or not?

Taken from Mikandi.com

Mikandi app store has been launched one year ago.  They provide a way to the market of delivering adult apps that are not in traditional channels. They have a potential device base of over 6 millions devices. For the time being they only support Dalvik runtimes (Android OS based devices).

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

It took me over 7 months to ready this tiny (about 150 pages) book from Seth Godin.

Written in “blog posts style”, it is a perfect sequence of wisdom. It has really proved me, and I tried to apply every single page during this long period.

What is about? It is about leadership. Not good leadership, not perfect leadership, just leadership.

A sort of “get your fat ass out of that chair and start leading” shouted to all those who are good at finding excuses and alibis.

Technology provides you a almost free and powerful loudhailer, and a window to start the domino effect.

It’s just you and the bravery to start.

Of course it’s difficult, of course it takes energy. But it’s not impossible. The book gives you great examples.

Revolution, according to Seth, start with a tribe. You to guide it.

Doesn’t matter if you appear, or simply keep the wheel moving. Just do it, the fuel is your passion.

I believe it’s good to have no excuses for leading (or not leading).

And it worked for me, at least I started somethign, I have been able to start a tribe.

I have not been able to keep it alive.

I admit, I gave up. But I also know what went wrong. And the book helped me on this too.

A tribe need to share a purpose. Which is not your purpose, it’s something that actually exist beyond you.

The book warned me, all those guys not willing to be in, must be politely invited to get out.

I didn’t, I listened to political correct advices to “keep everybody in”.

That was someelse’s purpose, not the purpose of the tribe. And the tribe refused it.

Leaving me alone, with this powerful book in my hands.

Back to page 1 then, as I want to lead again MY tribe.

It was….AMAZING! I want to make it happen again.

How many mails in your inbox? (always too many)

Today’s menu is “time management applied to effective mail management”.

I have been inspired by Prof. Randy Pausch lesson;

I strongly recommend you to spend 80 minutes on his video inspiring video (here)

I picked this important note from him:

your inbox is NOT your to-do list

How true it is.

Interruptions coming from the mail flow makes impossible to complete even the most simple task.

Look at those guys whose life is completely absorbed and “clocked” by instant messaging and social network.

To me they look like human network element, brain is always busy routing information. But processing is something different.

A great indication comes form this graph (credits to http://headrush.typepad.com/)

Back to our inbox, the recommendation is to always  keep it almost empty.

Consider it like your desk. When it reaches the critical “randomness confusion zone”, you can’t even write a note on it (I saw people using the chair to sign a document with a borrowed pen).

As soon as a mail comes, you can process it first in terms of priority:

Is it more important than what I am doing right now?

Is it really worth reading it right now?

If it is not, just move it into a priority rank folder tree.

I’d recommend you to keep 3 folders, urgent, medium and “indefinitely postponable”.

Just place the incoming errand in one of these.

You have to remember that urgent and important are separate concepts, and you’d better work on a list ranked by importance rather than by urgency.

“Short term response required” on “low importance matter”  means postponable.

Indefinitely, or at least until you have enough time to worry about unimportant stuff.

I wish you never see that day dude.

Consultants as “men of tomorrow”

Dear colleagues,

do you ever think about “the” future? No, I didn’t say “your” future, I said “the future”.

Any chance you can answer this?

Future market

• How will the Telco consulting marketplace look like in 3 years?
• How will the technology scenario be modified (if so)?
• How much of what you are currently working at will still be part of your daily routine?

Future of your job

• How will your company be organized?
• Will your client be likely the same as now?
• Will you most likely be working on the same project?
• What will be your involvment in your consulting firm activities?

Future of your Competitors

• Who will be the leading equipment vendor in your area?
• Who will be the stronger competitor of your consulting firm?

Survivor guilt (with potatoes)

I recently had a discussion with a colleague. He found strange a client had no feelings of survivor guilt when quitting contracts with externals.

I replied that was completely ridicolous and inappropriate context to see survivor guilt.

But I understand that crisis, depression, and the peculiar (WRONG) way consultancy is perceived in Italy can lead to this misundertsanding.

Too often, consultants themselves do not know what their job is, the risks and the characteristics of consulting.

Working on business as usual for so much time tend to make people confusing their role, where they are, and what they are paid for.

This make me listen to completely inappropriate phrases like “we are a great team, we should be never separated” said by a consultant referring to a competitor firm consultant. Or some others saying “my client will never quit my contract, we spent almost every week end togheter with our families for the past 2 years”.

This means that when something totally normal like a contract expiring occurs, they feel completely disappointed, and somehow betraied by their client.

Don’t forget the turkey lesson: he is fed in a warm place with good food and non need to worry about anything….till Thanksgiving day when he goes straight in the oven.

With potatoes.

My name is Gladiator

Sometimes,  the project is a real fight. Stakeholders starts arguing, passing the stress caused by someone, to someone else.

Under pressure, you tend to forget emphatizing with people who normally cooperates and you have been considering cooperative so far.

You risk to fall involuting into a severe and risky series of mistakes. Read this and promise you will never permit other to feel this way.

I wrote this italics for myself some years ago promising I would have never slipped again. It’s hard, but the real winning Gladiator is the one able to avoid this.

“You change your attitude, you get aggressive. You look for a scapegoat, someone to blame. You need him!!!!

It mostly happens purely in your mind, nobody else realize. They simply see you as a moodiness guy having a bad day.

And when your boss calls you for a status update, you literally shower him with issues he is not willing to listen to.

Chiefs are seldom in a bad mood. Their guys are. Would you really like to ruin your boss good day? Too late, you did.

Then it gets late, you are all alone in the office, still sending looong mails explaining it was not your fault (it was the fu@@ bstrd guy from other department  fault!!).

And you include a loooong list of cc readers, each covering a role higher than yours.

Finally, you try to recall the most irritating mail, you fail.

You start feeling bad, you feel deeply sorry, sad, angry, blaming this awful job and wondering why nobody notice you deserve to work in a better place”

Next please

Today I had a presentation to client customer office in order to explain a possible optimization and saving idea and grab a turn key contract.

We did our job. Clean, keepin it simple, straight to the point.

Questions? Managed.

Pending issues? None.

Everybody satisfied for the work done.

What’s then this emptiness feeling…………………. deep inside?

Oh, now I have got it! We did not surprise.

We did not left wide eyes opened wondering “Wow, that is great! That is really new! I want it!”

We forgot to present something they cannot live anymore without.

Everytime you present a solutions, think if this would leave your customer as the very first time you saw a plasma TV or an iPhone.

If it is just a little less surprising, leave it and restart from scratch.

The game rules the rules of the game

Are you consulting for a big firm? Are you consulting at big client organization?

Then maybe you are wondering the wrong questions (and certainly you are meeting guys doin so).

That’s good, fast, TRUE , commentary by Michael Wade, here you should shape your mind on.

I am reporting it to you right here. We all should learn from Michael, good excercise to provide add ons to his list.

 

 

 

Logic: It’s a minor item. It should breeze past the board.
 
Experience: Major items breeze. Minor items crawl. They’ll devote prolonged debate to the minor issues because they think they know something about the topic.

 

Logic: It’s a sensitive assignment. They’ll want the best person for the job.
 
Experience: No, they’ll want someone they can trust. Competence is optional.
 

Logic: Every possible point has been made. The committee will want to vote.

Experience: Dream on. A decision will not be made until everyone who cares to do so has commented on those points.

Logic: They’ll want their employees to have information so a good decision can be made.

Experience: They’ll want their employees to have their officially approved information so an officially approved decision will be assured.

Logic: They’ll want justice.

Experience: They’ll want victory.