TheJoshBJones @thejoshbjones - Tumblr Blog

Client Transitions and Competition

I was responsible for client transitions at my company. The double edged sword for a larger business is that in situations, that would otherwise carry significant emotions by someone closer to it, a healthy objectivity about the client relationship.Our two big rules for this are1) help the client transition as quickly and efficiently as possible2) don’t cause an outage.I see all sorts of…

Invest for Your Future

There are few things more powerful in the world than the power of compounding. If you spend an extra 1% every day for a year(1.01 to the 365th power) you’ll be at 37.7 at the end of the year. That’s a 1377% increase from where you started.Doing something consistently in the same way over time is significantly more powerful than trying to spend massive efforts at random points in time. When…

How We Learn Matrix

How do you feel about learning and how do you help others learn?There are four stages of growth into competency of any activity.1) I think I know.2) I know I don’t know.3) I don’t know that I know.4) I know.There is also a method for each stage of growth.1) I Do. You Watch.2) I Do. You Help.3) You Do. I Help.4) You Do. I Watch.The question today, is who is “You”, and who is “I”? Where are you…

Stages of Success

The other day I mentioned Discretionary Effort Level. I got the phrase from Les McKeown. If you’re a part of a growing an organization and haven’t anything from him or heard of the book predictable success, it’s a great framework for assessing what stage of organizational growth you’re at and what mentality you need to carry in that stage.The seven stages are:1) Early Struggle2) Fun3)…

Busy Monster

When your calendar looks like Tetris.But seriously, how are you guys doing at managing your busy monkey?

Discretionary Effort Level

How do you get the best with your employees?There’s not a single answer to that question. Every team member has their own wants, needs, and goals that inform their actions as to why they show up every day. When team members begin to see the goal of the organization conflicting with their own personal goals you’ll get reduced efforts.One action I’ve found that helps with this is acknowledgement.…

Goodhart's Law

I was talking with one of my staff about some service design issues yesterday. The point that was brought up was about how some action around poor service is coming from a need to present numbers and I brought up the concept of GoodHart’s Law.If you’ve never heard GoodHart’s Law it goes like this “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”This has show to be true many times…

Measure What Matters

There’s a trope that continues to track as sensical.“Measure what matters.”I was talking to someone the other day about a feature in a product and asked about reporting on it. There wasn’t any reporting against the feature yet. e.g. who used it and how it was used. The thing is, if it really was valuable, you’d want to track the results. Are you adding features without a thought about how to…

New Year. Clean Board.

First full week of the year starts now. You have a clean whiteboard. What are you filling it with?

Consipracy Or Just Broken Stuff?

Conspiracy theories are fun and they tend to come out in droves around this time of year. For fun I try to one-up the other person’s crazy. e.g. “The moon landing didn’t happen.” “Oh, you believe there’s a moon?”Here’s the thing, not all conspiracy theories are wrong, and not all are right. Applying Hanlon’s Razor is important “”Don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance.” The…

Seek Wisdom

I’ve been managing a situation with my staff that is causing stress lately. The phrase “most people overreact as quickly as possible” comes to mind. I’ve been using it a lot this week and helping lead people to slow down and take a breath.In the middle of that, I sent one team member this list of old sayings about words. They cannot all be applied together, they’re individual. So you’ll see the…

Stories behind the Stuff

I used to think this house was obscene. Clark Griswold unrestrained. Then I heard the story behind the lights. The family who lived there started this so their daughter could see the lights while in the hospital one Christmas. It’s amazing glow knowing the story behind something, having the context, gives something an entirely meaning.How true is this also for people? What are the stories you…

Make Sense of Negative Turns

Victor Frankl’s thesis about life is that negative turns in a person’s life are always bearable if they have a context, if they’re in a story framework. This is also true about your career. Take some time and think through the positive and negative turns of your career journey. You’ll be able to pull out some patterns that can help inform what you should do in the future and what you shouldn’t do…

Revenue Quality

Not all revenue is created equal and not all money is as green.Business is not about how much you make, it’s about how much you keep.There are times that you face a realistic situation where you drop lower topline and increase earnings below the line. Just takes knowing your numbers enough to see the path.Business owners, ask yourself this: if you took a hit on your revenue but your earnings…

First Principles

Employee asking me about their internet being out for a chunk of Monday. Worried they’re going to get docked pay.First question I had: Aren’t you salaried?Them: Yes.Me: I don’t know why that matters then.Them: Ok that’s cool.Next question I had: In those situations, do you have a laptop?Them: Yes.Me: So you could go offsite somewhere with internet in the future?Them: I can go to ________, or to…

Best Future Skill

The biggest predictor of success in the future of every organization will be delegation. With the advent of agents, even if your over or under on if agents with action will be delivered within 2 years, the ability for every entry level employee 10x their work by delegating tasks to agents is a huge benefit driver.Have you imagined what it will look like for your business’ top line increasing by…

Winning With Projects

don’t like to think about the amount of money i’ve lost on projects. Let me go back, it’s not exactly true. I haven’t lost money so much as eroded margin.That’s the thing with pricing. So long as there is a gap between your internal hourly rate target and your hourly cost, you will always have a margin of error in your projects wherein they’re still profitable, but simply not as profitable.I…

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