From a book review at Amazon on Seth Godin’s new book The Dip:
“Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all.

And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip-a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.

According to bestselling author Seth Godin, what really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt-until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons. In fact, winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it. If you can become number one in your niche, you’ll get more than your fair share of profits, glory, and long-term security.

Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip-they get to the moment of truth and then give up-or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.”

An interesting article of how Marissa Mayer of Google organizes her meetings:

1. Set a firm agenda.
Mayer requests a meeting agenda ahead of time that outlines what the participants want to discuss and the best way of using the allotted time. Agendas need to have flexibility, of course, but Mayer finds that agendas act as tools that force individuals to think about what they want to accomplish in meetings. It helps all those involved to focus on what they are really trying to achieve and how best to reach that goal.

2. Assign a note-taker.
A Google meeting features a lot of displays. On one wall, a projector displays the presentation, while right next to it, another projector shows the transcription of the meeting. (Yet another displays a 4-foot image of a ticking stopwatch.) Google executives are big believers in capturing an official set of notes, so inaccuracies and inconsistencies can be caught immediately.

Those who missed the meetings receive a copy of the notes. When people are trying to remember what decisions were made, in what direction the team is going, and what actions need to be taken, they can simply review the notes.

3. Carve out micro-meetings.
Mayer sets aside large blocks of time that she slices into smaller, self-contained gatherings on a particular subject or project. For example, during her weekly two-hour confab with the co-founders and CEO Eric Schmidt, she sets aside five- to 10-minute segments—or longer, depending on the subject—devoted to such specific areas as weekly reports on how the site is performing, new product launches, etc.

This method offers enough flexibility to modify the agenda just before the meeting, should anything pressing occur. It also instills discipline that keeps the meeting tightly focused. Mayer does the same with members of her teams who might need only five or 10 minutes of her time instead of 30 minutes—the shortest block of time her calendar permits. By setting aside micro-meetings within a larger block of time, she accomplishes more.

Mayer, who has a background in engineering and computer science, jokingly refers to micro-meetings as “reducing latency in the pipeline.” That means if she has an employee with an issue that comes up Tuesday, he or she can schedule a 10-minute micro-meeting during Mayer’s large time block, instead of waiting for her next 30-minute opening, which might not be available for two weeks.

4. Hold office hours.
Mayer brought this idea from her experience teaching computer science at Stanford, where she first met the two guys who would go on to revolutionize how the world gets its information. Beginning at 4 p.m., for 90 minutes a day, Mayer holds office hours.

Employees add their name to a board outside her office, and she sees them on a first-come, first-serve basis. Sometimes project managers need approval on a marketing campaign; sometimes staffers want a few minutes to pitch a design.

5. Discourage politics, use data.
One of Mayer’s “Nine Notions of Innovation” is “Don’t politic, use data”

This idea can and should apply to meetings in organizations in which people feel as though the boss will give the green light to a design created by the person he or she likes the best, showing favoritism for the individual instead of the idea.

Mayer believes this mindset can demoralize employees, so she goes out of her way to make the approval process a science. Google chooses designs on a clearly defined set of metrics and how well they perform against those metrics. Designs are chosen based on merit and evidence, not personal relationships.

Mayer discourages using the phrase “I like” in design meetings, such as “I like the way the screen looks.” Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design performed 10% better.” This works for Google, because it builds a culture driven by customer feedback data, not the internal politics that pervade so many of today’s corporations.

6. Stick to the clock.
To add a little pressure to keep meetings focused, Google gatherings often feature a giant timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. It’s literally a downloadable timer that runs off a computer and is projected 4 feet tall.

Imagine how chaotic it must look to outsiders when the wall shows several displays at once—the presentation, transcription, and a mega-timer! And yet, at Google, it makes sense, imposing structure amidst creative chaos. The timer exerts a subtle pressure to keep meetings running on schedule.

Mayer does have one caveat when it comes to the timer—maintain a healthy sense of humor about it. (The timer was counting down to the end of my interview with Mayer—but she turned it into a fun and friendly reminder instead of an abrupt end to our discussion.)

Martin van der Linden, architect, engineer, CEO, inventor of the WorkVitamins methodology etc…etc… states in his Uncertainty Principle that: “It is impossible to create an office environment where each employee has both a well-defined position and momentum simultaneously.” Classical office design presupposes that exact simultaneous values can be assigned to all physical quantities, ie. a business based on number of people sitting at their desks. Martin’s Uncertainty Principle denies this possibility, the office, the work environment is, in Louis de Broglie’s words, no more than a “macroscopic continuity resulting from statistics operated on the discontinuous elements that are effected by uncertainty”.

Symptoms: There is an uncertainty relation between the position and the momentum of the office employees and their work environment:

There is an uncertainty relation between the angular position and the angular momentum of the office employees and their work environment:

Treatment:

The first, and only step to treatment is really to understand the need of WorkVitamins which is based on the uncertainty principle: offices are not causally determined environments. It is important in getting treatment for the disease is getting a correct diagnosis. This is crucial to do this quickly because our WorkVitamins research has shown that the sooner you get diagnosed and treated the better the long-term outcome. In case of the uncertainty relation between the angular position and the angular momentum will depend on the creativity of the team to design a fluid, non hierarchical work environment.

Tokyo Syndrome describes the behavior of office workers who, over time, become sympathetic to their most horrible office environment. The name derives from a 1966 office incident in Tokyo, Japan. At the end of the regular eight hour workday, several workers actually resisted going home, and even refused to be paid overtime.
Symptoms: Captives begin to identify with their office environment, initially as a defensive mechanism, out of fear of going back home. Small acts of kindness by the managers or coworkers are magnified, since finding perspective in a workplace is by definition impossible. Telephone calls by family members are seen as a threat, since this is perceived as hindering their career within the company. Tokyo Syndrome is a survival mechanism. The men and women who get it are not lunatics. They are fighting for their lives. They deserve compassion, not ridicule.
Treatment: The treatment of Tokyo Syndrome, has two stages: first, the victims need to feel welcome return home. To do this they (a majority of the victims are male), need to cure their wives of the Cockroach Husband Syndrome, which in itself is a tremendous task. The second stage is the use of group therapy in which the victims should be helped to integrate both disassociated ’sides’ of the work environment. The therapy should assist him in giving up his dream that the relationship will become what he had hoped it would be. Japanese companies, under pressure from governmental groups have introduced drastic and far reaching methods, the most radical being switching off the lights in their offices after midnight.

Why do they call it a “building”? It looks like they’re finished. Why isn’t it a “built”?

Desk envy: A new employee notices the strikingly visible and well-proportioned desk of a manager or senior executive immediately recognising it as the superior counterpart of his or her own little desk and from then on he or she is subject to desk envy. They have seen it, knowing that they do not have it, and want it.

Symptoms:
In desk-dominated organizations, patients displaying the symptoms of desk envy express a wish to take possession of a larger desk at any cost. Management within these organizations have learned to use this uncontrollable urge for a large desk as a motivational tool and have started introducing a variety of desk sizes within the office, while keeping the largest desks for themselves. To paraphrase Jean Cournot the thing about which there is most consensus in this world—much more than the notion of common sense—is the difference between desk sizes. Recent research has empirically shown that emphasizing the difference in desk size can become fatal to an organization.

Treatment: The cure is very simple by keeping all the desks the same size the organization will avoid desk envy. Care however should be taken not to make the desks too small as this might lead to a desk inferiority complex. Patients who suffer from a desk inferiority complex might catch, while visiting other companies, office envy.

Functionalitis is a very common condition, affecting up to 70% of the workforce in an organization. A sufferer of functionalitis is under the illusion that an office should have functional requirements only. Care should be taken when diagnosing the diseases as often the upper management including the CEO has been infected. The exact cause of functionalitis is still under debate, but it is believed that the roots can be traced to Frederik Taylor’s Scientific Management and Josef Stalin. (Stalin was admirer of Taylor and suffered from functionalitis, but in most books on Stalin his condition is called: a five year plan)
Symptoms:
The disease is extremely infectious and it will spread throughout a company infecting staff without discrimination. The sufferer will at an advanced stage of functionalitis isolate him or herself by creating a wall of boxes, stacks of paper and files. When the topic of removing documents, printers from the workplace is discussed sufferers will often violently oppose any change. Patients with functionalitis often have other types of mental disorders including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and substance abuse (usually excessive printing).
Treatment:
Only very drastic measures should be taken to root out functionalitis. Due to its high contamination it is useless trying to isolate individual patients. Due to it complex nature, functionalitis usually requires a comprehensive treatment plan including verbal and nonverbal communication about thoughts, feelings and emotions related to the work environment. Receiving support from the upper management and outside consultants is important because often patients with functionalitis are in denial and resist treatment, believing they do not need help.

Please contact us immediately if you think you and your organisation is suffering from Functionalitis

Is this Japan in a nutshell? Yesterday and last week Obayashi, one of Japan’s largest construction firms was investigated by police in another round of bid rigging scandals. Alex Kerr has written extensively in his book “of dogs and demons” on the way the Japanese government has initiated an inward development by creating jobs in the country side of Japan through an endless stream of construction works. Kerr notes the countless roads, dams, embankment works etc… that have concretised the Japanese countryside. All the major Japanese construcution companies have been riding a wave of steady prefectural work since the late 70’s. Dango, as bid rigging is called in Japan, has been more or less accepted as part of the process. An interesting paper on dango here.
These days however, the government seems to be cracking down on this practice and heads are (literally) rolling. Some jump to their deaths and some, like the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries hang themselves. Obviously these people did not see another way out, except for an easy death. Takeo Obayashi, however, CEO and chairman of the Obayashi construction company is being “demoted” to board director and Norio Wakimura, president, will leave his post to become an “advisor”. Even though Wakimura’s resignation will be the first time that a head of a construction company takes responsibility for bid rigging, it all looks too convenient to me.

I found this sign at a building where we are doing a project at this moment. There is a tiny park next to the office tower. Someone has been very creative in thinking of all the things that one can not do in this park. (some of the pictographs are just downright silly) Wouldn’t it be more interesting if this person had been conceiving ideas of all the fun things you actually could do?