Adaptovate

When doing anything, doing a few things well compared to a lot of things in a mediocre fashion, is often the best way to go, for the following reasons: - Simplicity: Comprehension by others is crucial in most things and the simpler it is the more chance they will get it straight away. You can always add more features to it once everybody loves it. - Focus: Spreading yourself too thin leads to mediocrity, and a bad product. - Iterations: Most people do not get it right first time, and delivering 'less' quickly so that you can fix it quickly and make a better product is almost always the best path. I will use an examples to explain: - Google is the classic example: They completely wiped the floor with every other search engine at the time, by simply making the search result more relevant, using their algorithm. That was it, one function done well. While every other site was not making search substantially better, and instead creating lots of portals and composite sites...

According to Dan Pink, the latest studies in human motivation come down to the following: Once you pay someone just enough money to take money off the table, you maximise their drive and motivation by providing the following things: - Autonomy and self direction in our jobs - Mastery of a challenge available in our jobs - Purpose for doing our job for this company You can see this animated by RSA Animate on YouTube: Unfortunately, all of these items go against many of the process driven methodologies being taught right now. Or rather to be fair, I should say that the methodologies have a process, and they are implemented badly by managers that find it easier to simply follow the suggest process to the letter, without actually thinking whether it makes sense in this instance. For example, there are a number of rapid application development methodologies in technology development these days, and one of the better ones is Agile. At the highest level the concept is to continu...

Are you a good enough manager to succumb to a natural order of things, and see if the people and the teams you manage, can self organise. Some would call this Chaos, and I think it is the best way to run your business, and mother nature agrees with me. Allowing Chaos to thrive in a team is possibly the most natural and healthy thing you can do to make your team(s) and people successful. We have over-organised our working environment to such and extent, that the natural instincts, intelligence, natural evolution and self organisation of our teams tends to literally 'wither at the vine'. Unfortunately, the business world in which we all tend to work, is still focused on 'the process', we are all process driven. It is always better to 'follow the process', than 'swim against the tide'. 'You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar', 'don't rock the boat'.... one could go on seemingly forever. A good thing (not) is that it gives us a...