CEO succession planning
With the tenure of chief executive officers averaging four years, and the best succession-planning practices requiring three years to be effective, boards of directors must remember that they are always in CEO succession planning, says human resource specialist Kevin Cashman. Executive Excellence
Navigate from the left
Web users spend more than twice as much time looking at the left hand of the screen as the right – 69 per cent of viewing time compared with 31 per cent, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen As a result, he suggests keeping navigation tools all the way to the left, the main content a bit further in, and the most important stuff showcased between one-third and halfway across the page, where most attention is focused. Useit.com
Attachments reminder
Forgotten Attachment Detector, an add-on for users of Outlook 2007 and 2010, will signal if you have indicated in an e-mail you are sending an attachment but don't. It can be downloaded for free at www.officelabs.com/projects/forgottenattachmentdetector. Howtogeek.com
Time Management: Three categories of work
If you're distressed about all the work you have to do – and the constant interruptions that keep you from being productive – then stop and ponder the three categories of work, organizing expert David Allen says.
Doing predefined work
This is what you would be doing all day if you had no input or interruptions of any sort. You would be working off an inventory of actions and projects that you started the day with, whether the phone calls you need to make or the documents you need to draft.
Doing work as it appears
This is work that arises when the phone rings and you spend 20 minutes talking to a customer, or your boss calls a half-hour meeting to update you on a new development. You are doing the work as it shows up to be done. “You are actually defining your work rapidly in this case, and choosing to do the new stuff instead of any of the predetermined activity,” Mr. Allen states in his Productive Living newsletter.
Defining work to be done
This is processing your in-tray, e-mail, or meeting notes – taking in input and making decisions about what needs to be done about it. You may take some quick actions, and you will probably add more tasks to your inventory of defined work.
The mistake we make, he says, is to often consider items in the second category as a burden to endure and the third category as irrelevant activities separate from our real work. “I don't get it. It's all the work. Some is done when it appears, and some is done when you choose to do it,” he notes. “And processing input is required to trust the inventory of predefined work.”
The eternal dance of the workday, he says, is deciding how much of each type of work to do, and when.
Leadership: Insensitive CEOs
These days, emotionally intelligent leadership is considered the ideal – leaders who can empathize with and sensitively deal with others. But after British venture capitalist Jon Moulton listed insensitivity as one of his top character traits, Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway weighed in with a call for insensitive CEOs.
After all, she noted, faced with decisions that will hurt others, a sensitive boss may prevaricate while an insensitive boss will act quickly – and sleep well at night.
Insensitive people, she argues, are a lot simpler to deal with – usually very straightforward. “An insensitive boss can be told what his failures are without going into a blind funk. They don't take things personally. And because they are insensitive, they help me behave better. If I know I'm not going to be rewarded for being needy, I have no choice but to tone it down a bit,” she writes.
