Different nutrition suggestions on Twitter

Tab Mix Plus Beta For Firefox 3.5

Why You Need to Fail

Don't meet, work!

On his blog Remarkable Leadership, Kevin Eikenberry cited an interesting study result in his article "Leadership and Meetings": Almost no manager expects productivity to drop if meetings got banned for one day a week. About half of them even think productivity would increase!

In the OfficeTeam survey, 150 executives were asked "How would employee productivity be affected if your company banned meetings one day a week?" The results:

• No change: 46% (blue)
• More productive: 45% (green)
• Less productive: 7% (yellow)
• Don't know: 2% (red)

My subsequent question would be: "So, why do you think those meetings don't add value, and what are you going to do about it?"

Meetings have the purpose of fostering efficient communication. But just coming together in a room to talk doesn't cut it. That's the time, money and drive sink we all dread. As always, you have to do things right to reap the benefits.

Brian lists the most important things you should take care of to stop the waste by ineffective meetings:

• Have clear desired outcomes for every meeting that are communicated before hand.
• Use, and follow an agenda (that is focused on those desired outcomes).
• Hold people accountable for the action items.

So, there are two documents that are crucial for effective meetings: an agenda, sent to everyone in advance, and the meeting minutes (complete with action items and deadlines), sent to everyone after the meeting.

And hey, if you make your meetings really effective, you can have that no-meeting day anyway!

Mac Mini as a baby monitor

via tuaw.com

Lauren Hirsch: What do you get when you combine a new parent on maternity leave with a love of gadgets and Apple products? Why, you get "baby monitor overkill!"

Right.

How to get the customer off your back

Customers become a nuisance whenever they develop a tendency to cling. Suddenly, you find yourself spending a lot of time in meetings and phone calls that you'd rather use for working on your tasks. It doesn't matter if you're a freelancer working for several companies or if your customers sit in the same company as yourself, you'll eventually experience the contact-hungry client.

How should you deal with that need? The request "Excuse me, but could you please leave me alone and let me do my work?" doesn't seem very effective.

Gitte Härter over at unternehmenskick.de gave that situation a second look and switched to another perspective: that of the customer. She found out that often a heightened need of communication comes from insecurity. In detail, she lists the following causes for insecurity in a professional relationship:

• The customer doesn't yet know you.
• The customer made some bad experiences.
• The customer himself is insecure.
• The customer likes to chat.
• The customer wants to dominate you.
• You invoke the feeling, that you're insecure or maybe understood something wrong.
• You failed in posing enough of the right questions, maybe even regarding the core issues that you need to understand to deliver the right solution.
• You seem to walk in another (your own?) direction.
• You failed another time in the past.
• You don't respond promptly to phone calls or emails.
• You're generally too silent.
• You communicate too vaguely.

Over the years, I learned that customers abhore a communication vacuum. So, if you don't communicate the customer expects you to, oftentimes they will take the lead and make you communicate. Unfortunately, this will never be as effective as if you established a steady and controled information flow in the first place.

Gitte has the following suggestions on how you can take the lead and position yourself as a professional partner:

1. Create trust. -- Be present, pose the right questions, show genuine interest in your counterpart. Get all the information necessary to deliver a good job. Also, dare to give honest feedback; for example, explain the customer if his ideas don't hit the spot.

2. Make clear that you'll get in touch when it's time. -- You'll rid yourself of control calls as soon as your customer can trust that you work on their issue and will get back to them when questions, showstoppers or delays occur. Make sure you do! Send short receipt acknowledgements, deliver status reports or give a perspective on when you'll follow up.

3. Be the boss in your area. -- Your customer gives the order and has the say on goal and conditions, but he isn't supposed to interfere on your area of expertise. Stand your ground.

4. Lead the conversation. -- Never be passive in a conversation. Lead the dialogue, show you're efficient. Get to the point. Don't get lost in endless discussions or waste your time in useless chitchat.

5. Summarize what you agreed upon. -- Everytime you talked (or emailed) about something, at the end summarize the relevant points and what each will do until when.

6. Acknowledge "good" behaviour. -- A customer delivers all information in time and doesn't question everything? He leaves you especially much freedom? Tell him about your happiness about his behaviour: "Working with you is great: you send everything so quickly and you're open to my suggestions -- thank you!"

7. Always meet deadlines. -- Always. Meet them without exception. So make them realistic. If there's a rare emergency, inform the customer immediately.

So the summary is: Oftentimes, it's not the customer, it's you. Drive or be driven.

Imagine Leadership

Free - The past and future of a radical price

I just downloaded the audiobook version of Chris Anderson's new book from Wired.com.

"Wir sind nicht die Partei der IT-Nerds"

Electrical security

via gallery.wormulon.net

With "security" meaning "It's secured that this fuse will not blow".

Freelancers do it out of passion, not for the money, right?

OpenNMS: Pants optional

 I'm all in favour for checking out OpenNMS as our new system
management tool. They're as crazy as we are. :-)

The Most Epic Twitter Client Ever

Piratparkplatz

http://cruisersblog.de/archives/1000-Piratparkplatz.html

 So eins will ich auch haben!

Architect FAIL

via archdaily.com

WTF? The whole building just toppled?!

Die Ideen der anderen

How to disable journaling on a HFS+ volume

Netzsperren - "Ihnen ist egal, was wir denken" | ZEIT ONLINE

Jörg Tauss tritt aus der SPD aus und der Piratenpartei bei

Untitled

A great Jazz choir performing Toto’s “Africa”, preceding it by an acapella rain storm.

[Fun] Calling all women -- this one's for you

http://www.funfacts.com.au/calling-all-women-this-one/

Beware the periodic wrath of women.

[Fun] Calling all women -- this one's for you

http://www.funfacts.com.au/calling-all-women-this-one/

Beware the periodic wrath of women.

You're not leading when...

Reading some of the many books on leadership that are out there, you get a picture of how it should look like when you're leading. But are you also aware of how it looks when you're not in the lead? You better are, because your subordinates certainly do.

Jon Ferguson made an insightful list in his blog article

You know you are not leading when...:

• You wait for someone to tell you what to do rather than taking the initiative yourself
• You spend too much time talking about how things should be different
• You blame the context, surroundings, or other people for your current situation
• You choose not to speak the truth in love
• You are more concerned about being cool or accepted than doing the right thing
• You seek consensus, rather than casting vision for a preferable future
• You aren't taking any significant risks
• You accept status quo as the way it's always been and always will be
• You start protecting your reputation instead of opening yourself up to opposition
• You sleep a little too sound
• You procrastinate to avoid making a tough call
• You talk to others about the problem rather than taking it to the person responsible
• You don't feel like your butt is on the line for anything significant
• You think what you say doesn't matter
• You ask for way too many opinions before taking action

In short: You're appointed the leader, so act like one. You'll not be judged on your preparations but on your results.

Just watched the new Star Trek

Because Carolin participates in the YCW meetup with Amalia, I can spend the weekend on my own. After cleaning the apartment and doing some laundry, I spent the evening at the movies.

I haven’t been to a cinema for almost two years and Star Trek was the best choice to end that time.

The film brought many smiles to my face. I’d like to thank J. J. Abrams for an entertaining movie, Leonard Nimoy for gracing the movie with his dignity and Chris Pine for a convincing portayal of a young Kirk, Shatner-style.

And thanks to my love Carolin for the courage to spend the weekend on her own, in a tent with a baby that needs a lot of care, giving me the opportunity to go out without a bad conscience.

Shooting closeups with the iPhone

If you've tried to do short distance photos with the iPhone, you know that it can't focus any more if the item is only a few centimetres away. I noticed this shortcoming when I had the idea to photograph all my collected business cards and make them searchable in Evernote. Their OCR just couldn't make sense of those blurry letters.

But I've found a solution. The Griffin Clarify case not only protects my iPhone from hits and scratches, but also adds a lens that I slide over the camera window when I'm going to do closeup shots.

With the Clarify, I've got rid of all business cards. I now can search for a name on Evernote and get a sharp photo of the card back.

Goodbye Rolodex. Hello iPhone.