Strategies for the Workplace

Accuracy vs Precision

Your focus should be accuracy first, precision after.  The level of precision should also be useful, not so crude as to prevent proper planning or execution and not so fine as to be unnecessarily exact, or worse, convey a level of certainty that is not justified by the data or process.

Moving the Goalposts

“Moving the goalposts” is shorthand for changing the terms of some arrangement.

Do You Want to Play or Coach?

Consider the responsibilities, benefits, and limitations of a staff vs a management role.  Since here we are focused on early-career issues, deciding if management appeals to you is something you should consider soon and, if it is something you want to pursue, let your manager know.

You Can't Unring a Bell

Appreciate that not everything can be undone and, when dealing with the irreversible, proceed with extra care.

Top-Down and Bottom-Up

Recognize the terms, ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ and to think about whether you should apply either or both approaches.

Reports

Think first about what decisions will need to be made, then about what information would support those decisions, then about what kinds of reports would provide that information.

Opportunity and Risk in Partnering

Partnership offers opportunities, to reach new markets, add new skills, enhance your brand through association, manage surges in demand, test-drive a deeper relationship, and so on.  Partnerships also have risks, such as mixed messages to the market, damaging your brand through association, additional complexity for your customers, intellectual property problems, employee retention challenges, revenue impacts, etc.  The point is to think carefully about all the potential upsides and downsides.  There can be a tendency to see most of the benefits and gloss over the risks.  This is not to say that partnership can’t offer great leverage; just look carefully and mitigate potential negatives.

Frog in the Boiling Water

The expression, ‘a frog in boiling water’ is related to two scenarios.  In one case, you place a frog in a pot of cool water.  The frog remains since it perceives no danger.  You slowly raise the temperature of the water and because the change is gradual, the frog never quite appreciates its peril.  Eventually, the frog is boiled to death.  In the other case, you place a frog in boiling water.  The frog instantly perceives the danger and leaps out, saving itself.  The point is that things have gotten out of hand.  If you had been faced with the current situation you would have taken immediate action, but troubles crept up slowly and you didn’t appreciate it.

Structured Thinking Two-by-Two

Organizing your thinking and expressing it in an easy-to-digest form can help you or a team turn something muddled into something clear.  Don’t be afraid to use a very simple format and the humble two-by-two diagram can help.

Necessary and Sufficient

The words necessary and sufficient may be used in business to draw a distinction between something that is required (the necessary part) and yet, alone, is not enough to achieve some goal (thus insufficient).  The point is to recognize that folks may confuse some basic requirements with doing enough to meet some objective; that is, they are focusing only on what is necessary, without appreciating that this alone will not be sufficient.