Graham Chastney

I have been away on holiday. It was one of those breaks where much of the time is mapped out by events that are happening, Sue’s sister got married at the start of the week, it was a church ladies weekend away at the end of the week.

In between we had a few days relaxing in the Lake District. Jonathan and I managed to cross of a few more Wainwright’s with a long day up Grassmoor.

So now it’s back to work.

I was reading an article from the Harvard Business School today and came across a word I wasn’t entirely familiar with the meaning of: “peremptory”.

I like coming across new words, especially ones that might have a use. I sometimes run an experiment with them to see how long it will be before I hear someone else using the new word.

According to the dictionary it means:

peremptory \puh-REMP-tuh-ree\, adjective:
1. Precluding or putting an end to all debate or action.
2. Not allowing contradiction or refusal; absolute; decisive; conclusive; final.
3. Expressive of urgency or command.
4. Offensively self-assured or given to exercising usually unwarranted power; dictatorial; dogmatic.

I think this might be a word I use again, it describes a number of people I deal with every day. It also one that could be used of me, especially in my ADT moments.

I’ve just finished reading a Harvard Business Review OnPoint called Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform. This talks about attention deficit trait (ADT). The Harvard article comes at a cost but the article in Time has a good overview, as does the CNET article.

Frenzied executives who fidget through meetings, miss appointments, and jab at the elevator’s “door close” button aren’t crazy – just crazed. They’re suffering from a newly recognized neurological phenomenon call attention deficit trait (ADT). Marked by distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience, ADT prevents managers from clarifying priorities, making smart decisions, and managing their time. This insidious condition turns otherwise talented performers into harried underachievers. And it’s reaching epidemic proportions”

Sound like anyone you know?

It seems that ADT is completely caused by our environment, by the office, by the technology, by relationships.

So how do we control it:

• Promote positive emotions
• Take physical care of our brains
• Organise for ADT

ADT is closely related to the way that our brain reacts to fear so it’s important to promote positive feelings through stressful times. Positive feelings are also associated with good relationships. The author recommends interacting with someone you like at least every 4 to 6 hours. That’s an interesting thing for someone who mainly works at home to hear.

I’ve talked before about the physical side of looking after our brain, sleep, diet, etc. It’s a good reminder that I’ve let it slip a bit recently.

Organising for ADT is about creating the space and time to think away from all of the distractions. This isn’t just time management, but it’s also managing things out.

I was talking to someone who runs a huge fund in New York, and he was saying he demands that his employees take several days a month just to think–to leave the office and just go off and think. He wants them to not bring their e-mail, not bring their cell phone–make themselves unavailable. And I think it’s a really smart management strategy.

Organisations used to give people sabbaticals, some still do. In a world that is increasingly asking for for “fast” rather than “right” I think that people are increasingly going to need times to reconnect with “right”.

I would expect most people to be really happy with a proposition of getting something for nothing, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with 64-bit Windows. I wrote about this a little while ago. IDC have recently published an White Paper on it:

One of the biggest missed opportunities among today’s customer base may be the lack of use of 64-bit x86 Windows Server solutions to boost performance, scale, and utilization rates. Overlooked by many customers potentially for the wrong reasons, 64-bit Windows Server solutions offer a compatibility story that can be misunderstood, leaving customers to make deployment decisions that prevent them from enjoying the technology already installed in their shops.

Let me reiterate one of the main points here because many people still do not understand this point – you already have it available.

• The servers you already have are all that you require.
• The licenses you already have are all that you require.

I’ve tried to think of an analogy for this for some time and I’m struggling, I think because it is so unusual for people to ignore what they already have.

• It’s a bit like buying a 160GB hard disk and creating a 2GB partition on it.
• It’s a bit like buying two 4 seater cars to drive 4 people around because you only want to use 2 seats.
• It’s a bit like buying a 4 bedroom house for a family of 4 and everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom.
• It’s a bit like buying a 5.1 surround sound system and only plugging 1 speaker in.

I think you are probably getting the point now.

The graphs of adoption that are shown are striking:

That’s a huge amount of potential.

I tend to have two worlds that I keep reasonably separate – personal and professional. There is, of course, some overlap, but for the most part, my professional relationships are different to my personal ones.

I keep this principle in my online society too. My Facebook contacts are a different set to my LinkedIn contacts. It would appear, though, that Facebook are wanting to change that. Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is making changes that could enable it to know about both sets, but treat them differently:

But that’s changing, fast. First, we noted that Facebook is creating friend grouping last month. By specifying certain friends as professional contacts, a whole different set of content can be shown to them (sans the dating status and pictures of you getting drunk). Or as Nick O’Neil puts it, Facebook may be growing up.

And now Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.”

…

Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.

I’m not sure how I would feel about having one tool and two different sets of relationships. The relationships are different. I might set my status to “Graham Chastney is feeling tired” in Facebook, but that’s not something I would necessarily want to tell all of my professional contacts. I’d also want to be able to mark all of the applications as professional or personal. Take the bookshelf type applications, I might want to tell my friends a different thing to my colleagues. Would I really want to poke a professional contact?