SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE
Habit 1: Be Proactive
Change starts from within, and highly effective people make the decision to improve their lives through the things that they can influence rather than by simply reacting to external forces.
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Develop a principle-centered personal mission statement. Extend the mission statement into long-term goals based on personal principles.
Habit 3: Put First Things First
Spend time doing what fits into your personal mission, observing the proper balance between production and building production capacity. Identify the key roles that you take on in life, and make time for each of them.
Habit 4: Think Win/Win
Seek agreements and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases where a "win/win" deal cannot be achieved, accept the fact that agreeing to make "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees and avoid inadvertantly rewarding win/lose behavior.
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of interpersonal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of one's own experience. Rather, it is putting oneself in the perspective of the other person, listening empathically for both feeling and meaning.
Habit 6: Synergize
Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, one often can solve conflicts and find a better solution than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.
Reference : http://www.quickmba.com/mgmt/7hab/
Thanks & Regards,
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
www.swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Power of Small Teams - Value & Significance
Before i start my blog , i must mention the title of my next blog : Importance of writing your thoughts - Way to success. Hope the title excites you & let you stay connected.
I always start my writings by working on fundamental definition of subject, as the subject says " Power of Small Teams to do miracle" we have the actor as Team . As wiki says :
A team comprises a group of people or animals linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.
A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize his or her strengths and minimize his or her weaknesses.
Types of teams
1 Independent and interdependent teams
2 Self-managed teams
3 Project teams
4 Sports teams
5 Virtual teams
6 Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams
7 Not all groups are teams
Coming to power of small teams , let me ask you what is favorite sports.......think over it as it resembles your thought process. I like playing chess & thereby my strategy building activity can be seen in my work. Whe it comes to building a team we need a leader or a mentor who can positively infuse the energy required to drive the team to the required objective. Now see how clearly things start coming in front of us as we are now focused on setting up objective for team.
# Objective is the achievement of a final set of actions within a given operation
So we have people --> driven by a leader --> forms a team --> to achieve a objective --> In a defined operation. Here operation refers to the journey that we all travelling in.....surely lead by our visions.
The power of small teams to do miracles
The more members you add to a team the harder communication becomes. To that end, it's sometimes hard for me to understand why startups are so focused on growing their teams out during the early stages.
Bezos likes to refer to the ideal team size as "two-pizza teams:" any team that is small enough that they can be fed by a couple of pizza pies, is a model of efficiency and accomplishment. Anything larger is not.
When there is one person both running and operating the entire show, you have 0% communication efficiency loss. The vision is designed and implemented exactly as it was originally conceived. Add a second teammate and you automatically introduce inefficiency into the equation. With each new person added to a team, the potential for communication efficiency loss gets worse as each person creates failure points with every other person. Once you start getting beyond 8 team members, the efficiency loss becomes so great that it can only be made up by throwing additional resources at the problem. In other words, you are not going to see double the output from a team of 15 people as you will with a team of 8 (even though you'd expect it on paper). In fact, you'd be lucky to see even a 25% increase in output, even though your team size has doubled.
Keeping your team small
So what's the overarching lesson? You don't need a huge team to successfully launch a start up. In fact, your chances of succeeding are better, the smaller your team size. You cut out as many communication points of failure as possible and keep your startup costs down.
So how do you keep your team small?
* Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don't try to create a complex suite of applications. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite). Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible.
* Choose people that can wear multiple hats.
Can your designer code?
Can your programmer manage a community?
Can your marketing guru fund raise?
Can one guy do it all?
* Document everything. It's obvious that you will need a business plan. What's not so obvious is that you should also document the seemingly mundane; methods used for team communication, methods used for integrating with potential partners, methods used for keeping a company blog up-to-date and interesting. All documentation should be available via a central location. A wiki can work really well for this purpose. Good documentation lessens the loss from communication failures.
* Arrange your workspace in common areas. Segregating your team in different offices is a recipe for lost communication data and with it, a need for additional people. You'd be surprised at how many roles can be shared by multiple people, so long as they have the ability to communicate instantly and unimpeded with each other. Put people between walls, and those shared tasks will need to be managed by additional team members.
without an example nothing is complete ....we have a successful case study of www.ecademy.com which is a leading social & business networking portal & drives its revenues from subscriptions of over few million dollars a year with a team size of 5 people on board.
Note: Never forget the power social community which comes for no cost but is valuable for positioning your brand in an appropriate way.
More stories & blogs on the way to 2010.
Year of actions & clarity.
Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
I always start my writings by working on fundamental definition of subject, as the subject says " Power of Small Teams to do miracle" we have the actor as Team . As wiki says :
A team comprises a group of people or animals linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.
A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize his or her strengths and minimize his or her weaknesses.
Types of teams
1 Independent and interdependent teams
2 Self-managed teams
3 Project teams
4 Sports teams
5 Virtual teams
6 Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams
7 Not all groups are teams
Coming to power of small teams , let me ask you what is favorite sports.......think over it as it resembles your thought process. I like playing chess & thereby my strategy building activity can be seen in my work. Whe it comes to building a team we need a leader or a mentor who can positively infuse the energy required to drive the team to the required objective. Now see how clearly things start coming in front of us as we are now focused on setting up objective for team.
# Objective is the achievement of a final set of actions within a given operation
So we have people --> driven by a leader --> forms a team --> to achieve a objective --> In a defined operation. Here operation refers to the journey that we all travelling in.....surely lead by our visions.
The power of small teams to do miracles
The more members you add to a team the harder communication becomes. To that end, it's sometimes hard for me to understand why startups are so focused on growing their teams out during the early stages.
Bezos likes to refer to the ideal team size as "two-pizza teams:" any team that is small enough that they can be fed by a couple of pizza pies, is a model of efficiency and accomplishment. Anything larger is not.
When there is one person both running and operating the entire show, you have 0% communication efficiency loss. The vision is designed and implemented exactly as it was originally conceived. Add a second teammate and you automatically introduce inefficiency into the equation. With each new person added to a team, the potential for communication efficiency loss gets worse as each person creates failure points with every other person. Once you start getting beyond 8 team members, the efficiency loss becomes so great that it can only be made up by throwing additional resources at the problem. In other words, you are not going to see double the output from a team of 15 people as you will with a team of 8 (even though you'd expect it on paper). In fact, you'd be lucky to see even a 25% increase in output, even though your team size has doubled.
Keeping your team small
So what's the overarching lesson? You don't need a huge team to successfully launch a start up. In fact, your chances of succeeding are better, the smaller your team size. You cut out as many communication points of failure as possible and keep your startup costs down.
So how do you keep your team small?
* Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don't try to create a complex suite of applications. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite). Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible.
* Choose people that can wear multiple hats.
Can your designer code?
Can your programmer manage a community?
Can your marketing guru fund raise?
Can one guy do it all?
* Document everything. It's obvious that you will need a business plan. What's not so obvious is that you should also document the seemingly mundane; methods used for team communication, methods used for integrating with potential partners, methods used for keeping a company blog up-to-date and interesting. All documentation should be available via a central location. A wiki can work really well for this purpose. Good documentation lessens the loss from communication failures.
* Arrange your workspace in common areas. Segregating your team in different offices is a recipe for lost communication data and with it, a need for additional people. You'd be surprised at how many roles can be shared by multiple people, so long as they have the ability to communicate instantly and unimpeded with each other. Put people between walls, and those shared tasks will need to be managed by additional team members.
without an example nothing is complete ....we have a successful case study of www.ecademy.com which is a leading social & business networking portal & drives its revenues from subscriptions of over few million dollars a year with a team size of 5 people on board.
Note: Never forget the power social community which comes for no cost but is valuable for positioning your brand in an appropriate way.
More stories & blogs on the way to 2010.
Year of actions & clarity.
Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Social & business networking sites are all the rage now
In sight of working towards better online world ….do input your thoughts on safety & code of usage in virtual world.
Social & business networking sites are all the rage now. Connecting with friends, colleagues and new people has become so simple with these sites that it’s the new place to hang out. And just like you keep some things in mind to stay safe when you hang out with people in a café or a mall, you need to know a few things to be safe on social networking (SN) & Business Networking (BN) sites as well.
1. The more information you put about yourself, the more vulnerable you could be. So choose what you want to put up. But some things are better not put up at all. Your address, phone numbers, and bank account or credit card numbers, for example. If someone asks you for it, don’t give it out without giving any thought to it. If you are uncomfortable about sharing some information, don’t share it.
2. If all your friends are on some cool new SN site, that does not mean that you have to join in blindly too. Explore how it works, and the level of security and privacy allowed. Check the privacy policies of the sites you sign up for so that you know whom to report if any online abuse occurs.
3. Be sure to read through the policies and understand how the information you have put up is likely to be used. How does the site handle referrals? Can the IDs of your friends be given out to others, which could include potential spammers?
4. Can all and sundry visit your site, or do you have options to control access? Start with controlled access to your information and that too only to people you know, and when you are comfortable with how the site works, you can explore loosening some of the controls.
5. Saving a photograph from the Web is as easy as a right-click. A miscreant can easily change it using any photo-editing tool. So think twice before you put up your pics on an SN site. At the same point paid BN sites are still a place to stay ….recommending ecademy as one.
6. Do not believe everything people post on their web sites. They may not be what they claim to be. So if you don’t know them, it’s best to avoid getting friendly with them.
7. Flirting is fun, but can land you in trouble. Think twice about flirting with strangers and refrain from discussing about sex online. Remember sexual offenders scout SN sites and chatrooms looking for prey. Spoting the light of Nigerian Credit Card fraud ….it is becoming common in BN sites now a days.
8. Be careful if a new online friend wants to meet you. Make sure you meet him in a public place during the day and take along a friend or family member along with you. Concept of rating the users in BN sites is one key factor to know the person better before meeting. Read his/her testimonials , recommendations & much more.
9. If you ever feel threatened by anyone or anything online, discuss it with friends, family or colleagues and inform the police if required. There are options in website even where you can report to webmaster.
10. Do not always run applications and fun stuff being circulated on the SN site. They could be viruses or Trojans which could harm your computer or the data on it.
Its important to form a better world where people work towards online reputation building , so do contribute & make world better by speaking to one.
Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
Social & business networking sites are all the rage now. Connecting with friends, colleagues and new people has become so simple with these sites that it’s the new place to hang out. And just like you keep some things in mind to stay safe when you hang out with people in a café or a mall, you need to know a few things to be safe on social networking (SN) & Business Networking (BN) sites as well.
1. The more information you put about yourself, the more vulnerable you could be. So choose what you want to put up. But some things are better not put up at all. Your address, phone numbers, and bank account or credit card numbers, for example. If someone asks you for it, don’t give it out without giving any thought to it. If you are uncomfortable about sharing some information, don’t share it.
2. If all your friends are on some cool new SN site, that does not mean that you have to join in blindly too. Explore how it works, and the level of security and privacy allowed. Check the privacy policies of the sites you sign up for so that you know whom to report if any online abuse occurs.
3. Be sure to read through the policies and understand how the information you have put up is likely to be used. How does the site handle referrals? Can the IDs of your friends be given out to others, which could include potential spammers?
4. Can all and sundry visit your site, or do you have options to control access? Start with controlled access to your information and that too only to people you know, and when you are comfortable with how the site works, you can explore loosening some of the controls.
5. Saving a photograph from the Web is as easy as a right-click. A miscreant can easily change it using any photo-editing tool. So think twice before you put up your pics on an SN site. At the same point paid BN sites are still a place to stay ….recommending ecademy as one.
6. Do not believe everything people post on their web sites. They may not be what they claim to be. So if you don’t know them, it’s best to avoid getting friendly with them.
7. Flirting is fun, but can land you in trouble. Think twice about flirting with strangers and refrain from discussing about sex online. Remember sexual offenders scout SN sites and chatrooms looking for prey. Spoting the light of Nigerian Credit Card fraud ….it is becoming common in BN sites now a days.
8. Be careful if a new online friend wants to meet you. Make sure you meet him in a public place during the day and take along a friend or family member along with you. Concept of rating the users in BN sites is one key factor to know the person better before meeting. Read his/her testimonials , recommendations & much more.
9. If you ever feel threatened by anyone or anything online, discuss it with friends, family or colleagues and inform the police if required. There are options in website even where you can report to webmaster.
10. Do not always run applications and fun stuff being circulated on the SN site. They could be viruses or Trojans which could harm your computer or the data on it.
Its important to form a better world where people work towards online reputation building , so do contribute & make world better by speaking to one.
Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
Monitor Your Reputation Online
31 Places to Monitor Your Reputation Online
With the explosion of Social Media in the last 1 year, there’s a lot of new places that marketers and business people need to start monitoring their reputation on. From search engines to forums to social news sites, knowing who’s talking about your company, its executives, your products or services online, is every more important. Social media, whether marketers like it or not, is here and it’s where Word of Mouth Marketing is starting and it also affects Search Engine results. So with that in mind, I compiled a list of places to keep an eye on. Feel free to comment, I’ll add places if I’ve glaringly omitted a site.
Search Engines are the foremost place you should be looking at managing your reputation. Who’s ranking for your company name, executive names, product or services? Your own website should be, if its not, its wise to figure out why you aren’t and another person is. You should also be concerned about who is ranking around you, the classic example is a search for the brand term “Starbucks.”
The directories, although they can be outdated, are still a place to make sure you are being represented in the proper way. When directories list your site, sometimes they misspell things, or get a description of a site completely wrong. If you paid to have your site included, make sure the submission is exactly how you want to be represented.
- DMOZ
- Best of The Web
- Yahoo
- Industry Specific Directories
One of the newest places that you need to keep an eye on for how your company, services and products are being represented. Although there isn’t much you can do to correct inaccurate information on these services, you should be aware it is out there and where its’ being reported.
It’s great when people can bookmark your website’s pages and share them. It’s a headache when they tag them wrong, or put in a wrong description and you start receiving traffic from them for all the wrong reasons. Like Social News Sites, there’s not a lot you can do to correct these errors, but knowing about them is half the battle, and knowing allows you to prepare how to handle the inaccuracies.
Have you secured your company’s MySpace page yet? Yes, as silly as it sounds, a MySpace or Facebook page for your company would be a smart move. It would stop impostors, and you could get the added benefit of being able to spread the “true” news to a whole network of very interested “Friends”.
Photo sharing sites are a great place to share your logos, product pictures, and even photos of events your company is sponsoring. It is also a place you need to monitor for your company’s name, products and services. Like bookmarking sites, tags and descriptions can be added to photos, and although you cannot do much to change someone else’s perception, it’s about being aware of its inaccurate presence.
The wild, wild west of the internet, where a bad name can be created with one blog post, otherwise known as the Blogosphere. The most recent example of this is Jennifer Laycock’s incident with the National Pork Board. Within hours, the blogosphere went wild with this story. There have been other incidents like the Kryptonite Bike Lock incident, Microsoft’s giving laptops to bloggers, and Edelman & Walmart’s Flogging come right to the forefront of my mind. You need to keep an eye on the blogosphere, set up feeds to check what’s being posted about you, or look to see what kind of “buzz” is around your reputation.
Be aware, and come up with a game plan how to fix your problem if one creeps up. Also making sure to “claim” your site/blog/name on services like Technorati and MyBlogLog are essential. The last thing you want is an impostor getting a hold of your brand and doing damage.
There’s a few other places that you should be aware of that don’t particularly fall into a “category”, but are equally important because of either the weight of their “perceived” authority or the viral effects and ability to spread news.
- Forums
- Message Boards
- Wikipedia
- StumbleUpon
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Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com
Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja
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