A recent National Geographic article explored sleep and some of the problems associated with lack of sleep.
Lack of sleep can be dangerous:
… Harvard’s Charles Czeisler. He notes that going without sleep for 24 hours or getting only five hours of sleep a night for a week is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent. Yet modern business ethic celebrates such feats. “We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ ” Czeisler wrote in a 2006 Harvard Business Review article.
This finding matches up with what we’ve discussed about doctors. The problem gets hidden inside the data in the business world because the harsh measurements of death is absent; no one knows what would have happened to the Murphy account if the saleswoman had more rest. Plus, we don’t like to think about how lack of sleep impairs us.
The story I tell about lack of sleep is, of course, one from Ranger School. I think it was the last patrol in Florida phase, and I was the squad leader for a nighttime linear ambush. One of my team leaders was trying to tell me something, and he was literally falling asleep standing up, while he was talking to me. He’d drift off, stumble forward a step, catch himself, wake up, and keep talking. Amazingly I remember being wide awake at the time, and asking the RI about what you might do in just this situation. He basically said “you have to do whatever you can, because sleeping means dying.” Okay, he didn’t say the last couple words, but that lesson doesn’t have to be learned in today’s Army, not since Vietnam.
How might we put these ideas into practice? For one, if leaders delegated more fully to teams, then each team could function independently with the same task, conditions, and standards as the others (three sales teams covering the same region, for example). Let each team leader decide how to manage and lead her people. If the results are what matter, then let the results speak. Senior people shouldn’t get hung up on optics, particularly if the only reason is because it’s easier to count hours in the office than measure sales effectiveness or adjust for the quality of the leads.
So give your teams intentions-based guidance. Let the lowest-level leader decide how they’ll operate (in terms of schedule, responsiveness, mindset), and let the results speak for themselves once you gather enough data to smoke out the externalities that tough working conditions can create.
What is your number one fallback technique for taking care of your subordinates?
Tagged as:
employee,
leadership,
military,
productivity,
wisdom
Confession: I bought an iPad, the smallest wifi-only version. I wanted something that was more functional than my Blackberry Pearl but with a more convenient form factor than my laptop for use during parts of my commute.
Here’s the question: I’ve been using Basecamp for internal (and now external) projects, and I had been of the impression that I would/should get an app to work with that site. I’d seen lists of iphone apps, including basecamp’s own list.
But I was trying to get a handle on which one to get; review seem scarce, and the app store model makes it impossible to try unless the maker has created a “lite” version (see Headquarters and their lite version: the app framework might be one where what used to be called “crippleware” doesn’t seem to be so bad.)
But last night, on a whim that seemed silly at the time, I just fired up the Basecamp website to see how broken it would be. Pleasant surprise: it worked pretty darn fine, just like on my laptop. Now, in fairness, I did identify one missing feature: the ability to rearrange tasks in a to-do list was missing (the little 4-way arrow was not there at all). Maybe that’s the dreaded no-flash problem. I can deal.
What this makes me think about, though, is a couple things: first, I just saved $10 or $12; second, those app companies are definitely confined to a niche; third, apps that access web services have their days numbered as mobile browsers improve (or, in the case of the iPad, screen sizes and keyboard functions).
Where these apps would create an immediate urge to buy would be if they mimicked “desktop” add-ons to Basecamp, such that they could operate offline and upload/sync my changes later. True, part of that feature needs to be implemented in the underlying web service, but wifi and 3G haven’t eliminated the need for the mobile professional to be functional when there’s no connection.
[Ed.: followup-- Outpost claims "full offline capabilities." That's the secret sauce; I think this app will make the cut for a full-fledged review/shootout.]
At ThoughtStorm [http://thoughtstorm.com/], we were fans of Groove (it still lives on my several machines, in fact) because of the online/offline capability. Until a client accepts my excuse of “I couldn’t work on it because I couldn’t get a connection in the subway or on the plane,” people like me will always have a need to maintain local/offline access to our materials, even if they are backed up to, or even exist primarily, in the cloud. (See more on this concern in my review of PlanPlus Online.
When do you decide that you want/need an app vs. just using the website? There are tools to “make an app” from your blog. Does this make sense? Do you use these apps yourself to read favorite blogs?
Tagged as:
marketing,
productivity,
tips
