Strategies for the Workplace

Standards and a Network Effect

By adopting a standard, each party, gains access to the other parties — no need to incur a customization cost for each integration.  As the network grows, competition reigns, innovation is rewarded, and efficiency is maximized.

Single Point of Failure

Recognize that single points of failure and other concentrated risk can exist and to mitigate them through redundancy, distributing authority, and so on.

Statistics Can Mislead

Approach others’ statistics with a degree of skepticism and try to understand what is being reported, and perhaps why it is being stated a particular way.  Similarly, consider how you should report your statistics.

Orchestration

As an exercise, before you are about to send an email, consult a thesaurus and throw in a few synonyms.  Substitute a few less-common words for ordinary ones.

Addressing a Shortfall

Goods and services do not sell themselves, and in the planning process as well as during periodic reviews of progress, you need to consider what barriers are inhibiting sales and how to overcome such hurdles.  What’s more, these comments hold when selling yourself, an idea, etc.

Negotiation Groundwork

t is vital to understand the level of eagerness on both sides of any negotiation. Ideally, you can take it or leave it, and your negotiation counterparty is hungry.  Conversely, if you are eager and they are not, you can expect to get a poor deal.  

Suite vs Product Line

If your organization has a single product or service, you have nothing to sell in response to the question, “What else do you have?”  If you have a set of unintegrated, stand-alone offerings, this can be described as a catalog.  A product line may characterize things that have similar branding and, perhaps, some limited coordination.  A product suite is the name for things that truly work well as a group.

Mismatched Priorities and Interdependent Groups

Typically, you are engaged in more than one task and thus must prioritize among them.  Often, your work depends in some way on someone else’s.  A challenge emerges when the priority level you have assigned to an activity is misaligned with the importance another party assigns to an interrelated task.

Stocks

A stock is fractional ownership of a company.  The stock may provide payments (dividends).  The amount of such payments and the schedule for when they are paid, while not guaranteed, is usually quite predictable.  Should you wish to buy or sell stock, the market will set the price.

Categorizing Without Creating a Quagmire

Categorization comes up often and you need a method for managing the sorting.  In general, the more effective and consistently applied the technique, the more smoothly each categorization process will run, and the more readily the organization will accept the results.