Lords Of Strategy

If you are preparing for an interview with a top tier strategy consulting company, I highly recommend you read the book, "The Lords of Strategy

".

The author covers the origin of strategy as an important corporate tool, the history of various frameworks, the ups, the downs, the triumphs and failures. He also talks about the specialities of every major strategy consulting company in a way the web sites of those companies can never do.

On to the Conceptual Age From The Information Age

I started listenting to the book "A Whole New Mind" by Dan Pink recently. He argues that due to Abundance, Asian Workers and Automation, the American workers need to start doing jobs that  require inventive, empathic and big-picture capabilities.

He does not provide any solutions to the problem though. I'll add more thoughts here soon.

Performance Preview Instead of Performance Review

Prof. Samuel Culbert of the UCLA Anderson business school has written a book called "Get Rid Of The Performance Review". I read his recent article on the subject where he argues that the performance review process is ineffective because, the manager who delivers the review has no opportunity to influence the behavior of the employee and the employee has no reason to trust the manager.

He argues that instead of having a performance review at the end of the year, companies should have a performance preview in the beginning of the year where the manager, the employee and other colleagues have a meaningful discussion about a person's goals and talk about how the person can go about accomplishing those goals.

This approach makes a lot of sense to me and many of my colleagues. I plan to incorporate this concept into the software products I design.

Software design can change behavior using appropriate choice architecture

My friend and colleague Alex Joseph and I were wondering today if software can change human behavior. I argued that while software cannot change how people behave fundamentally, software can be designed to nudge people to do what they already consider appropriate by subtly influencing their behavior. Here is why I think design of software can influence human behavior.

I recently renewed my California Drivers license and chose the option to be an organ donor. I did this because the check box to opt-in was right near the place where I needed to provide my drivers license info. I believe in organ donation. I could have easily gone to the web site for organ donation at http://www.donatelifecalifornia.org/ to opt-in. But I did not do that. The design of the form however made it easy for me to do what I believed was the right thing to do.

Since that experience I read a bit more about the power of choice architecture in the book Nudge. According to the book, 12% of Germans have given their consent for organ donation, while 99% of Austrians have given their consent for organ donation. It is fair to assume that the people in Germany and Austria cannot have such a difference of opinion when it comes to organ donation. The real reason is choice architecture.

Germany has a opt-in rule for organ donation. That is, unless you opt-in explicitly, you are not an organ donor. Austria uses an opt-out rule for organ donation. That is, if you do not explicitly opt out, you are considered an organ donor.

So I believe that good choice architecture in software design can significantly change human behavior in work environment. People can be influenced to share more, collaborate more and participate more by the right choice-architecture.

A Person Contributing To Social Media is a Like a Ship Sending Out Beacons

If you are wondering if it is worth your time participating in social media sites within your company or outside your company, think about this this way. You are good at something. Your manager knows it. Your colleagues know it. Your friends know it. Your recruiter knows it. However, your managers, friends, colleagues and recruiter may not always have the right opportunity for you.

So you need to send out periodic messages to the world, beyond your geographic and organizational limits, about what you are capable of, what you are good at, what you have accomplished, the things you like to do, the things that you are doing, the people you know, the books you read, the people you met and so on.

In the book, The Power of Pull the authors compare social media participation to a ship in the middle of sea, sending out beacons periodically in all directions because it wants something. The ship may want some parts, may want to exchange something with other ships, may want to offier something, may want to let other ships know its location and so on. The key words here are periodic and freequency. It is not enough if you make a lot of noise in one event or to the same few people. It is necessary that you make this a habit and make yourself findable.