I recently attended a service at my place of religious worship. This particular service occurs annually and recreates a New Orleans funeral. The idea behind this is that we are burying 2008 and welcoming 2009. It is a wonderful event with an authentic New Orleans Jazz Band, hundreds of congregants, and a great deal of energy.

While sitting their with my two boys, I was hit with a bit of time-space distortion. It felt to me as only a short time ago since I last sat through this service (which in reality took place a year ago.)

It got me thinking about time and moments. I pictured the two services as two distinct points drawn on a piece of paper. I then mentally drew a line connecting the points. Why in my mind did the two services appear so close together? What about all the other points along that year-long line?

The impact of this was a reminder to pay more attention. To live more in the moment. To stop waiting.

Coincendentally (I think) a blog I read posted this quote soon after: “Stop waiting for happiness. Happiness is right here, right now!”

We are so often focused on the “end” that we miss the importance of the “means.” I for one will be working on creating points along my lifeline.

Moments, memories, and meaning. Happy New Year.

I got off the phone with my wife about an hour ago.  She was just checking in and was telling me about her plans for the day. I had just remembered something I wanted to tell her and started to ring her back when it hit me – I couldn’t remember what she said she was doing today and if she would answer the phone at home or on her mobile. Didn’t she just tell me this only an hour ago? Is my memory failing me as I get one year closer to 40? Or, was I not listening when she told me?

We are all guilty of multi-tasking. Despite trying to rationalize it as being productive, it has been proven to make us less efficient and, when conversing with someone, less attentive.

Here’s a top 10 list from the Dumb Little Man – Tips for Life blog to help improve our listening. Now, if I can just remember where I left my keys…

1. Minimize both internal and external distractions. You can’t always get rid of a headache, but you can close the windows if the driver of a truck is outside revving his engine.
2. Adjust your listening to the situation. If you’re listening to a lecture for an exam in Biology class, you’ll want to pay closer attention than if you’re watching the local news. In the former situation, you’ll probably take notes.
3. Show you’re listening by your nonverbal communication. You might nod, shake your head, or raise your eyebrows. Adjust your posture accordingly. Make eye contact.
4. If you’re listening to a speech or attending a business meeting, determine the most important points and develop a method to remember them. You might repeat them mentally or even jot them down briefly.
5. When you’re listening to a friend with a problem, demonstrate empathy. Show her you understand what she is going through.
6. Realize that people don’t necessarily want you to solve their problem. They may simply want to share how they are feeling. Save advice for another time, unless you’re asked for it.
7. Don’t interrupt. Let the person finish what he is saying before you explain your point of view or ask questions.
8. Don’t prejudge a person’s message by the way he looks. You can learn something from almost anyone.
9. Stay focused on the subject. It’s easy to let your mind wander, especially if the subject isn’t important to you. Train yourself to concentrate.
10. Remain clearheaded, even if the topic is emotional. Perhaps someone is discussing the victories of the recent election, and you were passionate about a losing candidate. When emotions become involved, you may end up in the middle of a shouting match, which will resolve nothing. Present your points calmly. You’ll gain credibility by doing so.

Just the facts, ma’am.

A recent Technorati report provides us with some interesting stats on the Blogosphere:

• 133 million blogs have been indexed by Technorati since 2002
• Only 7.4 million of those blogs have posted in the last 120 days
• 1.5 million have posted in the last 7 days

The numbers are quite interesting for a number of reasons.

1. They show the great enthusiasm surrounding blogging, if not the ease in which one can get started (take for instance how easy it is to start a BlogCentral blog.)
2. They indicate that the initial enthusiasm becomes subdued overtime after the ideas run out or the blog loses its place on the owner’s priority list or the owner realizes that it is a bit difficult to generate content on a consistent basis.
3. The numbers provide a peek into why as consumers of information we can feel overwhelmed with keeping up on the continuing influx of data.

Until recently, ‘the Blogosphere’ referred to a small cluster of geeks circled around a single tool. Now it refers to hundreds of millions of people using a vast warehouse of tools that allow people to behave increasingly online like they do in real life. We have entered the Age of Normalization in the Blogosphere.

Shel Israel
Social Media writer & speaker co-author, Naked Conversations
globalneighbourhoods.net

We have all been through it. We join a meeting in a darkened room..the projector is humming…the presenter is standing anxiously by the screen…slide 1 of 200 looms before us. Something stirs inside of us and we drop into an available seat giving in to fate.

Whether you are the perpetrator or the victim of this crime, now is the time to stop the madness!

The brothers who authored the book Made to Stick write monthly for Fast Company magazine. In a recent article titled “Presentation Pep Talk” they provide some tips for preventing bad Powerpoint that I’d like to share with y’all (and try to start doing more myself):

• “Show, don’t tell” doesn’t mean to seek out the best clip art to help make your point. Adding pictures to a slide is decoration, not communication. Bring reality into the room. Use physical props and stories to emphasize your point.
• If your slide has more text than a King James Bible then you need to focus more on your main points. The authors advise, “Think about yourself as the Director of a play, and you’re allocating speaking parts among your main points. You can create a great dialogue, but if you’ve got 22 characters speaking, you haven’t developed any of them properly.” Don’t sweat cutting out all the supporting content. Give more lines to your main characters.
• Before your audience will value the information you’re giving, they’ve got to want it. You need to create curiosity and pull from the audience. If you put 8 points up on a slide your audience will have read through all 8 prior to you have completed explaining the first one – then they’re bored. What if you put up 8 questions instead?

Interested in seeing some really talented presenters and interesting presentations? Visit Ted Talks at www.ted.com.

How do you work? What tools do you use to collaborate with your global team members to effectively work together? Are they the best tools for the way you and your team works?

I recently read a field study article in Fortune magazine (would provide a link to the online article but it is not available.) It asks the following questions:

In the future, what will work look like? Will employees continue to convene daily in office buildings, or will we evolve into species of laptop-toting nomads, roaming desolate corporate campuses in search of the next big project – scrounging for an electric outlet to recharge our batteries?

The article discussed how a team of ethnographers (social scientists who study people in their natural habitats) from Xerox was studying workers as they go about their business in a virtual work environment. The goal was to understand how workers collaborate and communicate across virtual teams.

One thing I’ve noticed about my current employer is the hesitancy to take advantage of the wealth of collaboration tools available in the public domain. For example, it would be invaluable to me to have an externally accessible instant messaging tool or web-based email or document management. Please note I said “to me.” I have certain tool and collaboration preferences for my ways of working that might not match yours. I ask myself how has my company changed in the last 10 years in terms of global collaboration? What will will our ways of working look like in 2018?

I’d be interested to know about how you prefer to collaborate today?

I hesitate to attribute my success in middle-class America strictly to my character or intellect. I have to attribute a significant portion of it to my being a white man in a white man’s society enjoying white privilege.

I grew up in a diverse, middle class neighborhood. Both my parents worked hard, have college educations and raised my brothers and me with strong values and emphasized the importance of our own education. Growing up I didn’t face any particular societal challenges and moved through primary and secondary school with average success. My parents were able to send my brothers and me to college and now we each enjoy a comfortable living in professional careers. The opportunities afforded to me from the beginning came not only from the hard work of my parents (although it was substantial.) It also came from being male and being white.

Being a white man in our society afforded me with a set of unspoken privileges that I only recently came to consciously acknowledge. Until recently they were taken for granted. Not anymore.

The election of Barack Obama is significant. I understand this is an understandment. President Obama represents a different kind of hope and future to me than it does to a black man. The pride I feel for America in electing a black president is still coursing through me. I literally still get chills when I see his beaming smile and intelligent eyes glossing the cover of a magazine.

For me, the hope for a better future was grounded in the belief that this man shares my values and will represent to the world my generation and the future generations of my children better than any other person.

What I can’t imagine is what this moment must feel like for a black man. A man for whom the road might not have been so smooth. A man who had to work harder and prove himself more just because of the color of his skin. My hope is that for this man’s children the road ahead is paved a bit smoother by the bravery of past generations and the symbol of hope and opportunity for which President Obama stands.

Vote for Barack Obama and vote for a future for our children!

First, let me apologize for the gap between substantive posts. I recently completed the Managing Successful Programs course from the OGC and it was quite a time stealer. But, I’m back (for now.)

I’m sitting at my computer at the end of the workday and take a few minutes to browse the news headlines from various sources I’ve subscribed to via iGoogle. What appears to have been slapping everyone else in the world across the face has eluded me for an entire day.  The US House of Representatives failed to pass the obnoxiously large bailout plan sending world markets plummeting.  One news story mentioned the collapse of my own bank (Wachovia) as an aside – guess I’m getting a new ATM card.

What did knock me across the noggin was the surrealness of the moment.  This is super-major news and I’m watching it unfold like a tickler strip across the bottom of my television capturing only a partial amount of my attention.  I’ve spoken to a bunch of people today in both work and personal life and no one mentioned it to me.  Did they also avoid the hand to face impact and living their own surreal life?  To me it comes down to the fact that I’m personally not feeling the sting of the needle.  My “voluntary” retirement is many years away. I’m not directly employed in the financial sector. No one in my immediate circle of friends and family have been hurt deeply by this.

My struggle is trying to shake the fog of disconnect that surrounds me and grasp the intensity of the moment. Watching Onion News doesn’t help, trust me!

[Excerpt from "From the Annointed Few to the Collective Many: How Workplace Communities Will Transform Your Business", January 2008, Mzinga]

“Talent Management” has become an entire industry and is inclusive of subjects such as competencies, skills, and performance appraisals. At a more basic level, though, talent management is about finding, developing, and retaining key talent within the organization. Framed this way, it’s clear that talent management has always been and will always be the cornerstone of corporate success.

In the next 10-15 years, this issue will take on increased significance as the Baby Boomer generation etires. Between 2000 and 2020, 75 million Boomers will reach retirement age. Generation X, with only 45 million workers, lacks the sheer numbers to make up the gap. While these numbers are daunting, the percentages are actually much worse in most other developed countries, particularly in Europe, where over 43% of the population will be 65 or older by 2030 (Kinsella & Velkoff, 2001). For global organizations, therefore, this demographic shift and its impacts will be felt globally, not just in the United States.

[No.5 in a series of posts taken directly from David Allen’s Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done]
When life demands more of people than they demand of life – as is ordinarily the case – what results is a resentment of life almost as deep-seated as the fear of death. – Tom Robbins
“Trying to do it all, have it all, and be it all will exhaust the human mechanism. “More and better” will always stretch out in front of you, as you attain it. To surf on top of the game instead of drowning, infinite “everything you could ever want” must be corralled into doable, physical chunks. Expansive expressiveness requires intelligence and conscious limitation to be sustainable.” – David Allen

David provides us five, succinctly stated things that get in the way of our being productive. Here they are:

1. People keep stuff in their head.
2. They don’t decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about.
3. They don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories.
4. They don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments.
5. Then they waste energy and burn out allowing their busy-ness to be drive by what’s latest and loudest.

Do you think “Busy” is a four-letter word? Check out Kim & Jason: Escape Adulthood blog on the subject.

- Gary