My blog stats – Interesting data

Fascinating – I’d never have thought that of my top posts, “About the 白眉 Guy” would garner top hits with “(Successful) IT People Characteristics” nearly surpassing it.

When I first started this blog, it wasn’t about me, but about my mindless mental musings. But in fact, not many people care as much as I thought! Maybe I didn’t get it.

The other interesting data is collected by the cool ClustrMaps widget and looking at the red dots expand across the globe and some dots expanding in differents continents. How some places have managed to find my blog, I’m piqued.

Thank you dear readers from wherever you are.

Stats
Top Posts
About the 白眉 Guy 689 views
(Successful) IT People Characteristics 688 views
Walt Disney & CMU: Mickey meets Tartan Mascot 144 views
Meaningful Messages 99 views
Simple Change Management Lessons: What we can learn from the US Olympic Basketball Team 83 views
MBWA + MBE = KISS Management[tm] 59 views
Building an IT Team: What are the IT Competencies? 55 views
The PEZ and Managing People 52 views

Current Country Totals
From 17 Aug 2008 to 23 Apr 2009
Top 10:
United States (US) 1,226
United Kingdom (GB) 157
Brazil (BR) 142
Canada (CA) 109
Hong Kong (HK) 63
Italy (IT) 55
Australia (AU) 51
Germany (DE) 45
India (IN) 39
France (FR) 34

Second 10
Mexico (MX) 28
Malaysia (MY) 22
Turkey (TR) 22
Netherlands (NL) 20
Singapore (SG) 16
Spain (ES) 14
Poland (PL) 13
United Arab Emirates (AE) 12
Argentina (AR) 12
Portugal (PT) 11

In-N-Out Burger: Professionalizing Fast-Food — Management by Touching the Fire!

What follows is going to be a mental dump of disjointed thoughts about IT and various other stuffs that came from reading:In-N-Out Burger: Professionalizing Fast-Food – BusinessWeek.

Life isn’t a drive-thru… drive-thru ATM, drive-thru king of the hill, drive-thru CLICK experience…. however, it’s appalling how seemingly so many here go through it as if it were, more so than even when I was years back. People have unfortunately gotten the idea that you can win in the game of life without paying the dues. Lunch is free!!!.

Needless to say, with what’s happened, it did appear so, but in a correction on par with Godly retribution, we find that indeed the normal world order is re-establishing itself and the emperor really does have no clothes! So no more fast tracking unless it’s to the bottom of the black hole and no, your career and professional development means you won’t be Director before you’re age 35. And yes, you do need to put in the hard effort and learn your craft as the tale of the legendary In-N-Out Burger story reminds us. It’s not surprising that it starts from the bottom up – the unsung front line troops who are responsible for the greatness of the In-N-Out Burger and franchise – learning the ropes, bit-by-bit because greatness wasn’t built overnight.

IT services also requires the same painstaking process and steps. Management trainees need to get on the service desk/helpdesk rotation and learn there first. You do not pass go and collect $200 without first taking the front line bullets. Graduating into IT management which so many people do without first-hand knowledge and experience of this, will doom the IT organization somewhere in its life with disastrous results.

This is what I preach — “Management by Touching the Fire”[tm]*. It’s basic – how do you know the fire is hot? You had to touch it, doh. How do you know your IT service – works, is of good quality, satisfies the customer etc? You had to do it yourself – step by painstaking step do it yourself to know through sheer pain of failure, task difficulty, long miserable hours in the effort to succeed for the customer…. and get the feedback that you succeeded and the customer is happy. Then and only then, can you move onward and (hopefully) upwards, only to repeat the unforgiving cycle again…and again…and again…

* Touching the Fire terminology as I mean it, seems to have first appeared in the blogosphere in Andrew Downard’s posting in iSixSigma Blog. I thought I could take credit for it… but I can’t so I agree with Andrew’s posting and message. Heed them, or be forever firefighting.

And for those who haven’t had the chance to taste such a great burger, here’s what one of them looks like (trust me, it taste a lot better than it looks):

High-Tech Time Management Tools

So I start my day, a bit late, but I figure it is still my holiday so does it matter?  I guess so – because I came across a special section on BusinessWeek Online about Time Management.  How funny is that – after I just blogged yesterday about how I don’t think tools helps with people behaviors but maybe Grafitter will… and maybe just in case I did not get the message, I’m getting it twice!

A pretty interesting set of articles on time management – all very useful where we’re trying to do more with less, especially with our time …. and as far as I know we still only have 24 hours in a day.   However, on the part of tools, they used a Lotus Notes example and this caught my eye like in “huh?”

The system—which is still in the research phase—lets users of IBM’s Lotus Notes take fast action on e-mail messages by turning them into reminders with just a couple of mouse strokes, or append relevant files so workers don’t have to switch back and forth to read things later.

I thought you could already do that easily (certainly in my old version 6.5.x) where you just click the menu button “Copy Into New” to create a new to-do or calendar entry … ?  That’s just one click??  I must be missing something in the translation. Sometimes, most times(?) maybe or probably (?) it’s “luser” error ?  We have more nifty tools and gadgets and functionality in them that we don’t know what to do with.  Sounding like a luddite here, but look at the mobile phone – as in the iPhone – it’s not a phone anymore, they just call it that because it’s marketing.

The article further goes on discussion email and IM as major time wasters.  It is and it is not – “depends” is probably a better characterization.  Let me point out the obvious that much of what we do at work is communicating.  Whether or not we’re effective or efficient at this is a separate question.  But we do a lot of communicating and there are various ways, tools, techniques, human preference that make us do it a certain way.  So what’s wrong with using email or IM or Twitter or Facebook or other Intranet/Social Network tool to communicate to our virtual and non-virtual teams?*  Isn’t the question, are we effective or efficient at communicating?  If not, then what tools or personal behaviors can we fine-tune to make it more effective and efficient?

At the end Count Results, Not Hours.  The “Just Get It Done” Rule.**

* Social Networking is the Internet “growing up”. We used to have debates whether on-line was real or not real vis-a-vis IRL (aka in real life).  My opinion is that one’s on-line life was just as real as the so-called IRL one.

** Time + Physical Presence = Results. This is something that I’ve been on a mini-crusade against since landing in this part of the world. My experience to date can be described as being “sisyphusian”.

Grafitter: Smiley Award Winner – Carnegie Mellon University

I don’t twitter, or twit, or whatever it is that people do nowadays other than facebook their life away (disclaimer: I’m one such guy who’s in need of a FB 12-step program).

In answering an email from my alma mater to participate in some studies for their researchers, I clicked about and landed in Homepage Stories -> Next-Generation Computing where the twitter based tool called Grafitter grabbed my eye ’cause it said it could make weight-loss easier….  Any tool that can help me change my behaviors is definitely worth checking out.  That’s what innovation is really about — effecting human change.  And any manager and leader would definitely welcome something to help make his or her life easier in this aspect in the work-place.  The last technology that I know which could really change behavior was the gizmo that shocked Pavlov’s dog….  Hopefully we’ve moved on since then.

Well-done Ian Li!  Check out his winner HERE.

Now, having read this, I think I’m forced to eat my words because on another forum, I had written that in my job, one aspect I do alot of, is managing business change and proclaimed that technology tools can’t do it.  Maybe I was a bit too hasty in firing away before engaging my brain because it’s axiomatic that in the corporate life, people aren’t moved by technology.  Business processes and people’s mind-sets must first be changed before introduction of technology tools (to support the changes).  Tools such as software and other business systems so often end up being white elephants because users simply don’t use them… and the business tries again and invests more money and effort into making business improvements through technology.  Probably true, but here we might have a simpler tool that’s more focused to doing one thing rather than many things, according to Ian:

Keeping track of one’s activities detracts from actual work, but awareness of activities can help in managing productivity. I created a system that tracks activities around the work table and correlated them with self-reported measurements of productivity.*

Anything that can make us more effective and more results oriented can’t be all that bad.