Artikelen & Interviews

The world’s worst boss – Seth Godin [artikel]

by J. Stevens · dec 4, 2010

THE WORLD’S WORST BOSS

That would be you.

Even if you’re not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you’re doing it poorly.

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.

I’m amazed at how often people choose to fail when they go out on their own or when they end up in one of those rare jobs that encourages one to set an agenda and manage themselves. Faced with the freedom to excel, they falter and hesitate and stall and ultimately punt.

We are surprised when someone self-directed arrives on the scene. Someone who figures out a way to work from home and then turns that into a two-year journey, laptop in hand, as they explore the world while doing their job. We are shocked that someone uses evenings and weekends to get a second education or start a useful new side business. And we’re envious when we encounter someone who has managed to bootstrap themselves into happiness, as if that’s rare or even uncalled for.

There are few good books on being a good manager. Fewer still on managing yourself. It’s hard to think of a more essential thing to learn.

Article written by: Seth Godin

Original Source: https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/12/the-worlds-worst-boss.html

No copyright infringement intended.

Kaizen niet alleen toepasbaar in industrie, maar ook in non-profit

by J. Stevens · nov 30, 2010

In het volgende artikel wordt getoond dat specifieke technieken uit Toyota Productie Systeem / Lean ook prima ingezet kunnen worden om op een goede en voor mensen prettige manier, al samenwerkend, tot oplossingen voor problemen te komen in, in dit geval, een charity. Past ook uitstekend als instrument binnen gedachtegoed van ‘zelforganisatie’ en in organisaties in de publieke sector (zeker als die ook nog moeten bezuinigen)!

Original source article / originele bron artikel:
https://www.leanblog.org/

Toyota Applies Kaizen to Thanksgiving Charity Efforts

Here’s a nice story about the Toyota Supplier Support Center helping a charitable organization with their holiday operations: “Toyota applies production know-how to roll out holiday help for needy.” It just goes to show how there are processes in just about any type of organization that can be improved with Lean/TPS principles and the involvement of the people who do the work. Toyota experts helped St. Vincent de Paul improve their food basket assembly:

“From there, it was a matter of getting the SVDP volunteers to share their knowledge of the operation with us and together we created a smooth, efficient and steady flow of goods that would allow us to complete a basket every 15 seconds. That means baskets filled accurately with just the right amount of everything and fast enough to reduce wait time for the customers,” Thornberry said.

Instead of putting together wheels, seats and an engine to assemble a car, the volunteers lined up canned goods, produce and frozen turkeys in just the right order and just the right amount to deliver a Thanksgiving food basket that will be enjoyed by a family in need.

It’s a nice articulation of working together – it wasn’t the TSSC people who “fixed” SVDP, it required the input of all parties, those who know the work and those with an outside perspective. This is the same approach that works in manufacturing, healthcare, and other settings.Again, from the article:

Hideshi Yokoi, president of the Toyota Production System Support Center, pointed out that helping St. Vincent de Paul also helped the folks from Toyota. “It gives our team members experiences applying the Toyota Production System outside of the manufacturing environment and allows us to help improve our community,” he said. “Giving back in the community is also part of the Toyota Way.”

It’s nice of Toyota to share their expertise, but as you see it also benefits Toyota and their people.I can think back, personally, to a time a volunteered with a group of friends at a food bank — the processes and operations were so poorly organized, it was a very frustrating experience. And, unfortunately, as a volunteer, I was in a position to just “do as I was told” and was only allowed to work the way we had been shown. That was the last time I volunteered there.It’s not surprising that some community Lean clubs and groups volunteer their time to get involved with operations-intensive charities like food banks or Goodwill.Happy Thanksgiving!

Time to ditch the blood-sucking social media gurus

by J. Stevens · nov 30, 2010

On the outskirts of a regional city in Britain – Bristol, perhaps – two hundred people gather to discuss “radical engagement strategies”. They are oddballs: a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards. They fire cheap jibes at the Microsoft event they’re sharing a building with, and from which they’ve nicked a few chairs – a fact they crow about on Twitter as if it were some sort of victory over the “evil” corporation.

These are the social media gurus, a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters who are infesting companies of all sizes, on both sides of the Atlantic, blagging their way into consultancy roles and siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions. They claim to be able to improve your relationships with your customers by “executing 360 degree reignition programs”. But who are these people? Where did they come from? And how on earth have they managed to hoodwink so many big companies so quickly and so comprehensively?

Executives see their home-made clothes and the faint whiff of body odour as “alternative”: like programmers, who are expected to look and behave in an eccentric manner, these social media experts must know what they’re doing because, well, you know, only someone really brilliant would look so peculiar, right? So the gurus are hired, and promptly set about cutting and pasting “social media strategy guidelines” into Powerpoint presentations and swanning around the office instructing secretaries about “social media for social good” and how Twitter’s going to change the world, all the while leeching off the productive bit of the organisation.

Social media people are the management consultants of the internet age. One London-based freelancer – let’s call him Nosferatu – recently told me he was proud to have “re-ignited core kindness values through externalised social play” at a large multinational company. Imagine it! Your boss walks into the office one day and says, “I know half of you are losing your jobs, but don’t worry, we’ve hired a ‘social artist’ to ‘break down the silos’ and celebrate ‘creativity and beauty symbiotics’ among those of you who can still pay your mortgages. Oh, and guess what! We’ve got a Twitter!”I am not making this stuff up: these people are genuinely beyond parody. If you were to conduct an archaeological dig into a social media guru, you’d probably uncover layers of life coaches, yoga teachers, acupuncturists and feng shui consultants. That’s the level of business insight and mission-critical expertise we’re talking about here.

One of the conditions that has allowed the faux-academic colloquy of the social media industry to grow so fast is a lack of checks and balances online, especially within social networks. Highly questionable practices go either unremarked upon or purposefully ignored by the Twitter bubble. When someone gets caught with their trousers down, you’re more likely to see messages of support than opprobrium. Plus, the industry is well mobilised, and dishes out a number of ludicrous awards to itself.Why am I banging on about this?

Because the poisonous cult of the social media guru – or, get this, “swami” – is disastrous for pretty much every kind of business: it’s wasteful for large companies and potentially fatal for start-ups. Social media consulting amounts to little more than mastering the art of the bleeding obvious and no company, no matter what its size, should even consider hiring external social media consultants. Internally, the most you need is a couple of interns with laptops.Many of these charlatans are selling little more than common sense. But they’re doing it in such a pernicious and persuasive way that even younger companies are getting tempted into employing them – younger companies who really can’t afford to be throwing money down the drain, but who figure that this sort of marketing might be the way to achieve critical mass for their products. At best it’s disingenuous; at worst, downright fraudulent.

Fortunately, there are signs that the window of opportunity for all this silliness is closing. Firms are cottoning on to people who misrepresent and overstate their achievements and add no value to businesses while showing off to other “like minds” about how many Twitter followers they have. As far back as September 2009, social media people were becoming the butt of jokes in Silicon Valley (warning: video features extreme profanity); we’re starting to see the same thing happen now in London.But there’s some way to go yet. The rot of social media is, in a sense, only just setting in. A lot of corporates are announcing high-level social media-related appointments at the moment, and it will be a long time before brands are able to reliably distinguish useful technical tools like London-based Conversocial from the nonsense peddled by freelance social media morons and, to their shame, many of London’s top digital agencies.

There are several online guides that profess to help businesses separate the good guys from the quacks. But talk about needles and haystacks! In any case, that presupposes social media consultants are in any way useful or helpful. They aren’t, unless your marketing team is so hopelessly incapable of communicating that they need intermediaries in order to say “Hello” – in which case your problems run a little deeper than hiring the wrong contractors.Marketing directors tempted by social media consultants would be well advised to visit one of their extraordinary conferences and watch them as they waffle, endlessly and without any intelligible purpose, about “transformation and inspiration”, almost visibly rubbing their hands with glee. The red thread running through these events is, “I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this.”

In 2007, there were no social media consultants in London. Just a few short years later there are thousands of the blood-suckers clamouring for attention and lucrative contracts. It is offensive to anyone creating value in their company that social media consultants dare use the word “innovation” to describe what they do for a living. How do these people sleep at night?

Onvertaalbare woorden: Jayus

by J. Stevens · nov 29, 2010

Jayus = Indonesisch: Een mop, zo slecht verteld en zo niet-grappig dat je er niets anders aan kan doen dan… te lachen.

Onvertaalbare woorden: Litost

by J. Stevens · nov 29, 2010

Litost = Tjechisch Milan Kundera, schrijver van The Unbearable Lightness of Being, merkte qua betekenis van dit woord op: ‘Ik heb tevergeefs in andere talen gezocht naar een equivalent, maar ik vind het lastig voor te stellen dat iemand de menselijke ziel zou kunnen doorgronden zonder dit woord.’

Een definitie die dichtbij komt is: een staat van beklemming of zielsangst die ontstaat na de plotselinge aanschouwing van de eigen misère of ellende.

Onvertaalbare woorden: Rakeling

by J. Stevens · nov 29, 2010

Rakeling = Nederlands: Tegenwoordig heeft ‘rakeling’ een andere betekenis dan vroeger. Een rakeling is een positief woord voor iets nieuws dat je terecht hebt ondernomen maar dat (nog) niet tot het gewenste resultaat heeft geleid (de verwantschap met het woord ‘rakelings’ is duidelijk). Een gehoorde kreet is wel: ‘Wees trots op je rakelingen’!

Aan Thomas Alva Edison worden veel citaten toegeschreven die met ‘rakelingen’ te maken hebben:

“Vele mislukkingen zijn het gevolg van het feit dat men niet besefte hoe dicht men bij het succes was, toen men het opgaf.”
“Kansen worden door de meeste mensen gemist omdat ze gekleed zijn in overalls en werk lijken.”

En toen hij de gloeilamp probeerde uit te vinden, wat (eerst) maar niet lukte, zei hij tot zijn criticasters:

“Ik heb niet gefaald. Ik heb enkel 10.000 manieren gevonden die niet werkten.”

In de afgelopen 5 a 10 jaar is de nieuwe betekenis voor het bestaand woord ‘rakeling’ ontstaan. Oorspronkelijk verwees ‘rakelingen’ namelijk naar de “resten vlas die op de weide bleven liggen, ze werden met een speciale brede raak of hark bijeen gebracht en ten gelde gemaakt. Dit gebeurde nadat het vlas droog was, samen gebonden en afgevoerd.”

Voorheen was er geen goed Nederlands woord voor dit fenomeen (zie citaten Edison). Je had het woord mislukking of fout, maar dat klinkt negatief. Een poging, of een initiatief, is pas begonnen. Een rakeling herken je pas als je terugkijkt. Uit een rakeling kun je altijd wijze lessen trekken. Volgens de website www.rakeling.be geldt:

Je mag trots zijn op je rakelingen want:
1. Je hebt een initiatief genomen
2. Je hebt er misschien anderen mee in beweging gezet
3. Misschien heeft het je tot iets anders geleid, dat wél succesvol was
4. Er zijn veel rakelingen nodig, voor enkele successen
5. Je hebt er uit geleerd
6. ….. vul zelf in

BRONNEN:
https://www.nlterm.org/neoterm/neologisme_nr257.htm
http:/www.rakeling.be
https://www.helikon.nl/blog/2008/08/18/rakeling/ [hier is te lezen dat het begrip misschien toch wel te vertalen is… Namelijk door het Engelse ‘Nearling‘. In andere talen ben ik het nog niet tegengekomen]. Met dank aan Gijs Hoofs die me via Twitter attendeerde op dit bijzondere woord.

Onvertaalbare woorden: Schadenfreude

by J. Stevens · nov 27, 2010

Schadenfreude = German – Quite famous in Germany and the US for its meaning that somehow other languages neglected to recognize, this refers to the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune. I guess “America’s Funniest Moments of Schadenfreude” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

Spongebob explains the meaning of ‘Schadenfreude’ in the first clip below (song by Avenue Q).

Are you experiencing any ‘Schadenfreude’ yet while watching the second clip below?