Dave's Whiteboard

I’m sometimes confused by mission statements and vision statements.  Sometimes I can’t tell the difference, and I don’t think it’s always my fault.

In a 2005 post at Lifehack, Rosa Say wrote that the difference only matters if you use the the statements.

Vision Statements and Mission Statements can be power-packed drivers in a company culture when they are done right, and when they are used to release the potent energy within the people who make up that company. (Don’t for a moment think that companies are made up of anything else.)

The best missions and visions become mantras for action; they’re catalysts. The worst ones are those pretty, carefully crafted ones up on the walls in frames that are long and detailed: too much to memorize and remember, too much to bother with at all. No one pays attention to them, and no one lives them. Rotate them with famous quotations or snippets from eloquent speeches and no one will even notice, because none of the real people in the company say those things.

She offers these crisp descriptions:

• Your mission is what you do best every day.
• Your vision is what the future is like because you do that.

I wandered sideways into this topic because of Saving Private Ryan.  Though it’s been years since I saw the movie, one scene stayed in my mind as an example of people on the front line understanding the bigger picture.  It’s a brief exchange between Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks) and Captain Fred Hamill (played by Ted Danson), not long after the allies had secured the Normandy beachhead.

That short conversation begins at about the 5:45 mark in this clip.  (I’ve put a transcript of the conversation below.)

Hamill: What have you heard?  How is it all falling together?

Miller: Well, we got the beachhead secure.  Problem is, Monty’s taking his time movin’ on Caen.  We can’t pull out till he’s ready, so…

Hamill: That guy’s overrated.

Miller: No argument here.

Hamill: You gotta take Caen so you can take Saint-Lô.

Miller: You gotta take Saint-Lô to take Valognes.

Hamill: Valognes, you got Cherbourg.

Miller: Cherbourg, you got Paris.

Hamill: Paris, you got Berlin.

Miller: And then that big boat home.

I have no idea if real captains talked like this, but I like the capsulization.  Especially because in under 50 words, it sketches a broad plan while showing that the two men get the plan.  (The landing on Omaha beach was due north of Saint-Lô, roughly where the B is on this map.)

In a completely different setting, Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines said, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds.  This is it: we are THE low-fare airline.  Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”

Chip and Dan Heath, in Made to Stick, note that this idea “isn’t the whole story, of course.”  Many Southwest employees take great satisfaction in their jobs, although Southwest is thrifty to an extreme and “it’s not supposed to be fun to work for pennypinchers.”  A clear, shared sense of purpose can’t hurt.

I have no idea how I ended up at unrefinery.com, “a style, design, and technology filter for gents” where they “like finding cool stuff and making fun of everything else.” I’m pretty sure I’m not their target market; almost none of my clothes have the name of living people on the label.  (And even Leon Leonwood Bean, who died 43 years ago, might not count as a designer.)

Even so, I appreciate their combination of focus, opinion, and attitude.  And that was before I found this compare-and-contrast gem:

To fully appreciate unrefinery’s style, read the entire post.  If you stay here, I’m just going to talk about their slightly tongue-in-cheek decision guide, and about how it relates to learning at work.

To bag, or not to bag?

A reader asked whether a bag in an earlier unrefinery post didn’t look “a lot like a purse.”  The blog agreed that the reader had a good point.

“While there’s no one thing that makes a bag more or less masculine,” unrefinery goes on, “there are a few parameters that taken collectively make all the difference.”

Now, if that’s not a nice way to concretize some tacit knowledge, I don’t use dry-erase markers on my (real) whiteboard.

Here, then, are the factors (“in order of importance”) used in that comparison above:

• Size: the bag you choose should be “at least as big as the briefcase it replaces.”
• Aspect: “wider than it is tall.  No exceptions.”
• Carrying method: padded handles. Failing that, a same-side strap. As a last resort, a cross-body strap (but see the full post for cautionary detail).
• Color: darker and more neutral.  A bag in a lighter color had better be something “no self-respecting woman would ever be seen carrying.”

In under 300 words, unrefinery sets out considerations and provides clear yet nuanced criteria.  (I can’t tell you how relieved I am that the black leather bag I use for my computer meets all four, though I don’t expect to see it featured on their blog.)

Whether you agree with the considerations is another question, but using the points here, you could evaluate any number of bags for men and come up with a judgment that, more often than not, would align with that of the exemplars at unrefinery.

Beyond the bag

Hardly any jobs are entirely made up of little decision guides.  I do think, though, there’s usually a fair amount of this stuff that’s not obvious to newcomers or even people who’ve been toiling in the field for a while.

(I was apparently absent the day someone said that virtually all French nouns ending in -tion, like collaboration, gestion, and natation, are feminine. There are a couple of exceptions, like un bastion. I’m still sorry I didn’t learn this 30 or 40 years ago.)

So imagine people in a workgroup whipping up considerations and criteria like this for decisions relevant to the job.

• The effort to make the tacit knowledge more explicit encourages reflection and revision.
• Differences in interpretation and practice become visible.  Maybe there’s more than one way to accomplish something–or maybe the differences have resulted in unnecessary variation.
• Concrete examples help people work their way toward more general principles.

One way to think about learning is that it involves both acquiring information and applying it to a situation.  In the world of style, you might rephrase that as savoir faire.

I’ve been neglecting my cognitive tools.  Admittedly, they don’t need the shot of WD-40 that I use on the garden clippers.  But I’m not taking care of the tools I rely on every day.

My grandfather would disapprove.  He was a craftsman with serious technology (locomotives) and practical technique (carpentry).

I’m sure Jack D (as everyone called him) had plenty of tools, but probably not too many. He’d consider the likely benefit against the cost. His skill meant he could achieve superior results with adequate means.

As for the tools he did have, he had them ready to use.  Blades were honed, sawdust was cleared, dirt was wiped away.  Pegs, racks, drawers, tins were chosen and rearranged to support effective use.

Earlier today, I came across a colleague’s question related to RSS feeds.  To help answer his question, I opened my (often neglected) NetVibes feed reader.  And it’s a mess.

Messy in part because it’s easy to add feeds, so I’ve added lots.  I don’t always step back and thing about what value I get from a particular feed, though.

I do sometimes cluster them.  NetVibes has tabs, so I group learning stuff under one, science stuff under another, “not work” stuff under a third.

I see this tendency to collect things without much reflection in my Delicious tags (513 of them) as well.  And in my Evernote notebooks.

Adding is just collecting.  Grouping is a potentially helpful advance.  It take more time to pause and consider what you’ve got, what you get, what you think about that, and what you want to do differently.

Which reinforced the need for (and the value of) organizing what I’ve got.

If I charged for these posts, I’d call it curating, one of those highfalutin words I enjoy satirizing, like  affordances.

The concept is apt, though; the medieval Latin word curator, related to “care,” meant an overseer, manager, or guardian.  I can’t resist adding that in the Middle Ages, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this meant the care of “minors, lunatics, etc.”

Care is much more than amassing.  In fact, care sometimes includes pruning: cutting back and discarding things that aren’t useful, things that can even impede productive growth.  “Productive,” naturally, is up to you and the results you have in mind.

Or, up to me.  So I’ve got some chunkifying to do.  It’s not always copy and paste, you know.  Sometimes select and delete has a big payoff as well.  If you’re going to keep the saw, then make sure it’s sharp.  But every so often, ask if that’s a saw worth the keeping.

CC-licensed image:
Coffee cup and clippers by Pollyalida.

As an undergraduate, I had a terrific time swimming way over my head in a course on modern sociological thought.  Among other things, we read Talcott Parsons, which is like getting mugged by a noun gang.  I thought I understood what he meant by specific relationships versus diffuse ones, so when Dr. Bauder asked for an example of the latter, I said, “Student and teacher.”  (I mean, it should be a free exchange, right?)

Her reply: “Okay.  What are you doing Saturday night?”

Being specific takes more work

To make the point clear: in a specific relationship, it’s the roles that are specific, and you more or less have to justify including things that don’t fit those roles.  You might shoot the breeze with the grocery store cashier about the weather, or the freshness of the strawberries, but ordinarily you don’t ask about his personal life.

In a diffuse relationship, on the other hand, you have to justify leaving things out.  “You walked right past me and didn’t say a word.  What’s up?”

Many of my professional connections (and some personal ones) are now virtual.  I don’t work in an office; I tend not to have long-term projects.  I don’t have everyday, flesh-and-blood colleagues.  So I need to cultivate my virtual connections: strengthen the existing ones, get the new ones get well rooted.

In the physical workplace, most of your relationships are specific and often defined by various sorts of proximity.  You’re physically close.  You’re organizationally close (same team, same boss, same project, same department).  Or you what I think of as explicit proximity (relative position based on rank) and tacit proximity (based on relative depth of expertise).

As the distance increased (other floors, other departments, other cities), you have to work harder to establish and maintain good working relationships.  People don’t know you.

Reducing friction in your connections

When you cultivate relationships in the virtual workplace, you’re using different tools to increase proximity.  For a long time, we’ve had workplace tools to reduce physical distance and collapse time-zone distance.  Now we’ve got greater (and more frequent) distance, but also more powerful tools.

One concept that’s important to me, as someone who typically works on his own, is the virtual cube-mate.  I like being able to stick my hear around a metaphorical partition to say, “Listen to this.”  Or “Do you know…?”  Or “Here we go again.”

But reducing virtual distance doesn’t mean that distance isn’t there.  And it doesn’t mean your in-person, interpersonal skill transfers to the virtual world.   As the Russian proverb says, your elbow is close, but it’s hard to bite.

I have a pet phrase for asides and parenthetical remarks I’ll make, especially in a one-to-one exchange like an instant-message conversation or a series of direct messages on Twitter: “conversation insurance.”  Things I do or say because:

• I want to make myself clear (or clearer).
• I want to avoid misunderstanding.
• I’m trying to be more like myself.

Some of that’s just common sense (though common sense tells lots of people the earth is flat).  For instance, “I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I just think X applies as well…”  You go a little further because your message is going further.

Some of it, though, is simply engaging long enough (in some complex combination of individual units and elapsed time) that both parties are better able to form a pattern for the other that’s not a bad approximation of face-to-face.  Which, as I think about exchanges over the past two or three days, isn’t so much conversation insurance as connection oil.

I don’t know that there are Ten Quick Tips for this, which is too bad; I could have a workshop.  I do have a couple of notions:

• Walk, don’t run. Trying to connect closely with everyone you know (and everything they know) just makes you one of those LinkedIn Lotharios, the kind of person in whom networking seems like an infectious disease.
• Assume good faith. This guideline for Wikipedia editors encourages people to assume that others are trying to help, not hurt.
• Don’t drive crossways in the parking lot. That was advice from a colleague to his new-driver sons: when you’re at the mall, always drive along the “roads” up and down the parking lot.  Don’t go cutting across the lanes because there’s an opening.  Other drivers may not expect you.

That last point is why I now use emoticons — at least on Twitter.

They’re conventions, not moral failings

I’ve been online a long time.  I’ve never cared for abbreviations like IMHO, YMMV, and so on.  I have a theory that each time someone types LOL, they lose a neuron.  So emoticons ( or, even worse, “smilies” ) made me shudder.

But… as I did online text-chat in Second Life, in French, I worried that my humor (or attempts at it) would be misunderstood.  So I’d add emoticons I saw my francophone friends using.  It hardly hurt at all, and people got to know me.

Likewise on Twitter — especially if I’m making a public comment to someone I don’t know well.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re only thinking of your chosen network, that not everyone knows you as well as you might think (or wish).  I can joke around with some people, but virtual passersby might not understand.  So an emoticon, or a few drops of some other form of connection oil, helps reduce the potential friction.

Online presence is a kind of invitation, but you have to work at figuring out what the invitation means for you.  Sometimes, as with what I call book blogs — HotNewBook.com, set up mainly to promote Hot New Book.  Those are invitations to come in, browse, and buy.  The author probably doesn’t have a lot of time to interact with everyone who’d like to interact with him.

Otherwise, if people are active on social sites, you have to work out how to interact with them.  In other words, it’s just like real life, except the conversation stops if your power goes out.

(I’d like to thank Chris, Dick, Heather, Jane, Kevin, Sahana, and Simon, whose conversations with me this week reinforced for me the value of virtual connections.)

My relationship images are based on this CC-licensed image by Doha Sam / Sam Agnew.
CC-licensed cube-mate photo by el frijole.

Jane Hart’s been collecting reasons why organizations should not ban social media.  I wanted to contribute but didn’t think I could match contributors like Jack Vinson, Harold Jarche, or Jane herself.

As it happens, that glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon anticipated the kinds of objections Jane had in mind.  What follows are some notions.  They’re not definitive or sure-fire.  In fact, “they are yet but ear-kissing arguments” (King Lear).

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(Hamlet)

Will, living in an age of social ferment, was pragmatic.  Yes, you’re accustomed to making your connections in an organization the way your boss (or your boss’s father) did.

I have no doubt whatsoever that 1890s-era managers fretted and fulminated over the pointlessness of Mr. Bell’s contraption.

We will draw the curtain and show you the picture.
(Twelfth Night)

Social media make it possible to provide…well, a fuller picture.  Not just in the sense of images more easily created, shared, and modified, but in the combination of images with other representations.

By comparison, it’s really hard to fax a video.

I’m not saying images will guarantee you’ll communicate better.  (Two words: clip art.)  But sometimes less (text) is more (meaning), and social media can help carry some of your intended meaning in ways more traditional vehicles can’t.

An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.
(Richard III)

Here I see advice both for the organization and for the individual.  Speed’s vital: get what you have or what you need, as quickly as you can.  Informal consultation via messaging (Yammer, Twitter, instant messaging); knowledge collection and sharing through vehicles like wikis.

“Plainly told” can also mean “write so you make sense.”  I posted last year about the Washington DC Metro system’s stumbling efforts on Twitter.  The tweets seemed written by a committee, few of whom actually used Twitter.  They’ve gotten somewhat better (see here), though 6 of the 100 most recent tweets were truncated.

(If you’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half and haven’t figured out the 140-character limit, you need to be a bit more reflective.  And maybe when there’s a delay, say “both ways” instead of “in both directions,” trusting that train riders will get the message.)

Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
(Twelfth Night)

Speaking of both directions, Will has in mind the idea of fans, friends, and followers.  Rather than worrying about your own status (as an individual or as an organization), focus on participating in the communities around you.  Share stuff.  Offer value.  Give credit.  Link to others.  Spread the wealth.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
(As You Like It)

One of the tendencies with social networking is that formal status, credentialization, and the like matter less than they used to.  Not that they’re irrelevant: if someone wants to know about nanoscience, then Andrew Maynard is a better starting point than I am.

But you know from ordinary life that very little that’s useful derives from the status or the credential itself.  No matter how extensive someone’s expertise is, I find it’s good to see that he or she recognizes its limits.  As Matt Ridley said of science, I think useful knowledge is like “a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surrounds us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view.”

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
(Measure for Measure)

In my experience, it’s private organizations rather than government that trumpet the value of entrepreneurial thinking, agility, openness to new trends — but it wasn’t the government that kept building Chevy Cavaliers, that fought against home video recording, or that shoehorns all training into the lecture-hall, butts-in-seats model.

Yes, there’s a fear that people will waste time on Facebook or Twitter.  That’s because some people will, just as some people use March Madness as an excuse to do nothing all all on the job but yak about brackets and bubbles.

Another side of this: some organizations (public and private alike) are so deeply baptized in the Church of Best Practice that the notion of trying something for themselves is heresy.  I mean, if you’re a pharmaceutical company, might it not be better for you to experiment with social media in a pharma context than to wait till Business Week features a manufacturer’s experience which you’ll then try cramming down the throats of your people?

The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.
(Troilus and Cressida)

One real shortcoming of social media — as of software generally — is that you can’t rely on it for the long term.  Google Wave, announced at the end of May 2009, is essentially dead.  Facebook may bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, but so did AOL in its time, and CompuServ before that.

So what Shakespeare’s saying here is, “get thou a grip.”  If you’ve never used a word processor, then learning one is a real challenge.  But once you’ve learned one, you’ve able to conceptually handle another one as your company switches from WordStar to WordPerfect to Word to Google Docs.

No, those aren’t the same.  There are significant differences, but there’s enough at the core to help you cope till you figure the rest out.

As Will might have said if there’d been mayonnaise jars in his time, “Keep cool.  Don’t freeze.”

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.
(The Winter’s Tale)

This idea flows from the previous ones.  The ease and informality of connections make it possible to go where you hadn’t imagined you’d like to go.  You get exposed to other viewpoints, to experiments in progress, to the cognitive coalface being worked in other parts of the organization.

Those things are hard to do with the monthly newsletter and Human Resource’s weekly email blast.   (And, by the way, if you’re one of the people perpetrating that last item: whatever made you think “blast” was something that’d have a positive connotation for the recipients?)

Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
(Much Ado About Nothing)

In other words, early adopters, calm down.  Show, don’t tell.  Consider your audience.  Nobody (except maybe you) wants to be using the newest Bright Shiny Object.  Most people want to be getting stuff accomplished, and maybe there’s a way your BSO can help that.

In a similar vein, O grizzled veteran with deep experience (including you, over there, who’ve been on Twitter for three months now):  don’t bite the newbies.  You weren’t born with XHTML coded into your DNA, either.

This above all: to thine own self be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
(Hamlet)

Poor Polonius gets a bad rap.  Even if he was a windbag, at least here the bag’s wafting along some good advice.

First: social media was created to serve the individual or organization, not the other way around.  Using these tools will make you…well, yourself, a person who happens to be using them.

Which is why, if you’re prone to be a jerk, people tend to figure that out whether they encounter you in meetings,  in email, or on Twitter.  (The 140-character limit might help minimize that, but I have my doubts.)

Similarly, if you’re open to new things, if you’re someone who reflects on and shares what you’ve been doing, if you’re participating in spheres wider than your hatband, then social media tools help you to be yourself, and become more like yourself.