Afaik gmta and there is somethin in the contract that shud b changd. IMO, the 2nd para shud read, “…excluded to protect the guilty.” The exsting language provides tmi. Plz make the chnages and forward a revizd cpy to r atty.

TYVM,
name

So do you understand all that? This is an e-mail I received from a manager at a client company. Yes he’s a youngster (relatively) and I surmise he does a lot of instant messaging, of which I do very little.

There is something about e-mail that causes one to adopt a conversational tone that they would not use in a standard business letter. E-mails are not spell checked, emoticons and abbreviations abound. I don’t like e-mail that is not edited nor spell checked prior to sending. I also don’t care for the “cutsie” slang, abbreviations and shortcuts.

So before you send out your next e-mail, please:

1. Create a meaningful subject line.
2. Put important points first.
3. Write in complete sentences, using proper grammar.
4. Read your e-mail out loud and revise what doesn’t sound right.
5. Spell-check.
6. Proofread one more time

Taking a few extra moments will help you ensure that you always make the best impression. And if you need the above deciphered:

As far as I know, great minds think alike and there is something in the contract that should be changed. In my opinion, the second paragraph should read, “…” The existing language provides too much information. Please make the changes and forward a revised copy to our attorney.

Thank you very much,

If you are at all interested in mindmapping you need to check out the rash of blogs that have sprung recently:

• Writing about Art is like Dancing about Architecture
• Hobart’s Mindjet Weblog
• Beyond Crayons
• The Mindjet Blog

And if you haven’t discovered MM yet, the postings, discussions and comments will drive you to explore.

How do you know when to reengineer a process? I get this question posed to me during every engagement, usually about a specific process, and mostly from company executives and managers whose business has stagnated. As people start to view processes as a critical success factor for business, they naturally want to improve their processes to better fit their way of managing the business.

Business management is process management. If your management style does not include process management in your organization, it should.

Here are some factors to mull over when deciding how to handle a process change:

• size of the change,
• number of and specific people involved,
• your organization culture,
• single or multiple organization involvement,
• complexity of the current process,
• can technology be applied,

impact of results you seek.

You must question each step of your process. Getting down to whether or not each step adds value to the overall process, is a painstaking process in itself. Ask yourself when deciding to reengineer, whether you have the knowledge, the time, and the patience to walk through all the steps one by one, probably with multiple groups multiple times. While your department, division or management group may have something to gain, another group may end up feeling like they lost. Remember, just because you have figured it out and realize great savings can be had, your peers and associates may well take some hard convincing. So improve that process when you see huge gains from cutting or mutating many steps, when your change may make the difference between success and failure, or when adopting a new technology will allow you to leapfrog your current, out of date, processes.

Where and When Do You Get Your Best Ideas? is a poll on what triggers your ideas. There are 35 choices you can rate 1 to 5 and even a space to write in your own. Then check out the poll results. Looks like “Brainstorming with others” is a popular choice, but “Showering” is up there also.

In my continuous search for how people use mind mapping, there’s an interesting discourse about it at How to Save the World.

There’s something about a quickly-produced yet elegant, legible, organized and flexible ‘picture’ of your thoughts that just seems to evoke more, faster, from both sides of the brain. In a business and social culture that is increasingly oral, and aspires to become more collaborative, the current explosion in use of mind mapping is likely to continue, and the ability to use these tools will probably become a skill you can add to your resume.

The author, Dave Pollard, mentions three mind mapping tools, one of which is my favorite, MindManager. But he also mentions FreeMind, which has an excellent selling point of being free!

Most managers give their staff a year-end or year-start review, which hopefully you’ve completed by now. You review past performance and discuss upcoming performance requirements and projects. But what about your vendors and subcontractors? Are they delivering the value and reliability you expect? Are you happy with them? Do you rank them? Do you discuss upcoming projects, material requirements, manpower requirements?

You should! It’s a buyers market. Vendors need to do more for their clients, and clients need to demand more.

Outsourcing and offshoring have been the big headline-grabbing business processes for the last several years, coming to a head during the last presidential campaign. The mainstream press ignores the foreign jobs coming onshore and common outsourced jobs that are being insourced to our working citizens. Insourcing has been growing more quickly than outsourcing, but it’s still below the political radar.

And if you’re tired of talking to heavily-accented helpdesk personnel on the phone, you may be surprised to have a down-home country boy answering your next call. Why home-shoring may be the next big thing talks about companies using home-based personnel for call-center work. Other industries may soon find these workers and score some good PR along the way.

While there are some 4 million people working in call centers in the U.S., there are also about 100,000 home-based phone representatives on U.S. soil, according to IDC. And the stigma against offshore outsourcing, as it relates to fewer jobs for Americans, is making home-shoring, or home-sourcing, an increasingly attractive option.

U.S. workers may cost more on an hourly basis, but are often productive enough to more than overcome that price disadvantage, especially for the most complex and lucrative services. But remember, the problems with insourcing are the same for outsourcing: poor planning, lack of project management skills, lack of control and poor requirements definitions are the main problems with any projects and processes that fail.

The New Year always brings a slew of meetings — strategy meetings, budget meetings, working meetings, lunch meetings and the I-don’t-know-why meetings. If you’re addicted to meetings hopefully one of your New Year’s resolutions is to stop your addiction. While some face-to-face meetings can’t and shouldn’t be canceled, one of the easiest ways I have found to reduce the number and length of meetings is to cost them. Once you see how much money is wasted during an ineffective meeting, you’ll first be reluctant to ramble on for two or four hours at a time, but you’ll also be more selective in scheduling a meeting!

Before you schedule another meeting, ask yourself a few questions:

• Has a goal been set for the meeting?
• Do you have an agenda?
• Who will be attending?
• Can I cover this in an e-mail or memo>

It’s essential that you prepare and distribute an agenda before any meeting, so participants have time to prepare. If you can’t come up with an agenda, do not schedule a meeting.

If you do come up with an agenda, stick to it! Don’t let your meeting wander off-track because if you do, you end up accomplishing nothing. The majority of meetings today simply exchange facts or information about a specific topic. Consider using e-mail to update or share information with the individuals who would have attended the meeting. They will all thank you and you’ll save some money.

An organization, be it a business, a school, a non-profit agency, is a collection of processes. These processes are the natural activities you perform that produce value, serve customers and generate income. Managing these processes is the key to the success of your organization.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not set up to manage processes. Instead they manage tasks. Think about it. Isn’t your company organized around functions. . .the accounting department, the engineering department, the sales department, the customer service department?

As a result, people tend to focus on departmental concerns instead of the company-wide needs of customers. Sub-processes evolve within departments without consideration of other functional areas. Layers of communication and management are created to ensure desired outcomes, thereby adding to costs and lengthening cycle and customer response times.

Inefficiency and waste become part of the system. They rob your organization of profits, productivity and its competitive advantage. But, there is a way out.

Process mapping is a simple yet powerful method of looking beyond functional activities and rediscovering your core processes. Process maps enable you to peel away the complexity of your organizational structure (and internal politics) and focus on the processes that are truly the heart of your business. Armed with a thorough understanding of the inputs, outputs and interrelationships of each process, you and your organization can:

• Understand how processes interact in a system
• Locate process flaws that are creating systemic problems
• Evaluate which activities add value for the customer
• Mobilize teams to streamline and improve processes
• Identify processes that need to be re-engineered

Properly used, process maps can change your entire approach to process improvement and business management. . .and greatly reduce the cost of your operations by eliminating as much as 50% of the steps in most processes as well as the root causes of systemic quality problems.

As you put your plans and goals for 2005 together, re-invent your business.

Brainstorming is a tool we all use for problem solving. It doesn’t require you to be logical with the ideas you come up with, and a little craziness may even help.

When you come up with ideas or solutions that defy logic, reason or break the rules, you give yourself the freedom to be creative. And you will be surprised with what you come up with.

But, when your ideas start to get mundane or you’re stuck and can’t storm anymore — start arguing — with yourself or with other members of your group. Arguing with your associates isn’t the kind where you pick a fight with him or her. In this context, it’s bouncing off ideas with someone else until you’ve exhausted all possibilities, no matter how silly or illogical they seem to be. Or if you’ve just come up with an idea and you hear that little devil inside saying, “That’s not gonna work,” or “That’s no good,” start to argue with it. Tell that contrarian you’re right. Then come up with reasons why you believe you are right, and even better, write them down on a whiteboard or a piece of paper.

The next step is to switch sides — take your peer’s or inner devil’s point of view and start arguing for that view. And keep writing them down. Remember that the purpose of brainstorming is not to come up with only one solution, but to come up with all possible solutions to your problem. And when you’re done, you can choose which you want to pursue.

This whole idea comes from the Wright Brothers, yes, Wilbur and Orville. When they had problems of flight, they argued. After cooling down, they would switch sides and take the other’s point of view and argue again. The result? They were able to come up with ideas and solutions from all angles, and then they both bought into the ideas, passionately and objectively.

So next time you brainstorm, don’t forget to argue.

P.S. And if you’re going to argue with yourself, may I suggest IdeaFisher.