An article by Adam Bryant in the New York Times deals with Google’s "quest to build a better boss."  Bryant looks at an effort by Google to mine its own data and figure out what made people better managers.  The list of behaviors, Bryant says, looks "forehead-slappingly obvious" : Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. Help your employees with career development. Be a good communicator and listen to your team. (From the Times, a fuller list of eight good behaviors and three pitfalls for Google managers.) More important is the source of the ideas, and especially their relevance to managing at Google.  The company collected data from a range of observations about its own managers: performance reviews, feedback surveys, and so on.  They coded that data to help uncover patterns.  They conducted interviews with managers to collect more data. One thing they found that they hadn’t expected: a manager’s technical expertise ranks "dead last" among the eight behaviors they uncovered. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers. One drawback to lists of management behaviors like this one is a sort of horoscopic skew: you skim the list and decide that the ones that stand out are the ones that apply to you.  So a person who prides himself on his technical background might believe that as manager of technical people, he or she needs to have high tech skills. That may be true on a project team, but to the extend you’re really managing, I don’t think so.  Think of the tongue-in-cheek definition of manager as "someone who gets other people to do the work."  In a sense, that’s true: the manager is a kind of executive producer, helping to create the conditions in which the group can best accomplish its goals.  An often-overlooked aspect of that is acting as a non-judgmental resource to help people figure out how to solve their own dilemmas. This is one of the main points of a classic article by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass, Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? (PDF).  They compare business problems to monkeys, and discuss ways in which subordinates try to put the monkey on the back of their manager.  Here’s a manager who’s working at empowering his staff (which is where most of the problem-solving should occur): "At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you no longer have a problem. I cannot help a person who hasn’t got a problem. "When this meeting is over, the problem will leave this office exactly the way it came in—on your back. You may ask my help at any appointed time, and we will make a joint determination of what the next move will be and which of us will make it. "In those rare instances where the next move turns out to be mine, you and I will determine it together. I will not make any move alone." - Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1974 Granted, you need to ignore a certain assumed hierarchical bias in HBR articles.  Even so, I’d argue that this, too, is head-slappingly obvious.  But "obvious" is often an after-the-fact label.  It’s easier, more dramatic, and perhaps more fun to pound the desk, to shout, and to act in general like a BlackBerry-toting gunslinger than to do the persistent work of helping people achieve the best results they can.

Guy Wallace said this on Twitter a while back: I always wanted the Client to own the analysis & design data rather than me. I don’t convert their words to mine - or to Noun-Verb patterns. He’s summarized a lot of good ideas about the consulting process.  And his phrase about noun-verb patterns reminded me of  two principles I keep in mind when dealing with performance problems (and with their much-smaller subset, training problems): Behavior you take with you; accomplishment you leave behind.(That’s Tom Gilbert talking.) A result is a noun; doing is a verb. "Doing" is a good example of a fuzzy label, and that’s part of why I’m writing this.  When someone starts talking about what people do at work, it seems to me it’s easy for their focus to shift. Sometimes when someone’s talking about what people do at work, he might mean the actions they perform, the processes they go through.  That’s how a person works.  It’s the doing part of what they do.  It’s a verb. If you need to repair the water damage in your basement, then what the contractor does at work-the verbs he carries out-are things like measuring dimensions, testing materials, inspecting damage, examining structures, considering costs,  and calculating square footage. Alternatively, when someone’s talking about what people do at work, he might mean on the things those people produce, what they accomplish-the result of their work. A result is a thing.  It’s a noun. That’s the case even in so-called knowledge work and in service occupations. From this angle, what the contractor does-what he produces-is an estimate for the job.  Or a list of suggested approaches (on paper, or  verbal), or a series of questions for you to ask yourself-a kind of contractor’s initial consultation. That’s what’s left behind when the contractor leaves. I think this behavior/accomplishment distinction is crucial when you’re talking about performance on the job.  Companies and organizations are crammed to the institution rafters with ritualized behavior that continues in the absence of any real accomplishment except that the behavior got done: sales people are required to make 30 cold calls a day-not because of any company data about the effectiveness of cold calling, but because Veronica, the sales director, had three early successes from cold calls. Working from the other direction, Umberto, who handles accounting for your department, tells you to charge the new software under "training materials."  Not that the software is going to be used for training-but your boss has authority for twice the expenditure under that category than he has under "computer resources."  Changing the accounting codes is such a slow process that not only would the software be out of date, but Umberto and you would both be retired, before it happened.  So Umberto’s helped accomplish a result (software deployed) but if caught you and he will both be sentenced assigned to Purchasing Refresher Training. When you focus on results, you can work backward through the factors that influenced those results.  Sometimes (most of the time, actually) you’ll find that "lack of skill or knowledge" on the part of the performer is not the major hindrance to accomplishment.  That, of course, means you’ll likely be wasting your time (and the performer’s) if you try to resolve the situation through training. As Guy Wallace said, you want the client to own the analysis and the design data.  I’ve said before that while I myself try not to use "understand" as a learning objective, I might go along with the client’s use of it, so long as the client and I can agree on what it looks like (what the results are) when someone "understands" how to perform a FEMA elevation certification. Now, if the client is hell-bent on ignoring any data that doesn’t say "deliver training," I’m pretty sure I’m not the right person to be working with that client. Images adapted from this CC-licensed photo by Sebastian Werner / blackwing_de.  

A discussion on lrnchat included lots of comments and questions about data collected about people’s performance, particularly in training, testing, or learning situations. I’m always inclined to say you can’t do evaluation if you don’t measure, which means I quickly exasperate people who think evaluating is measuring.  For them, perhaps it is.  For me, measurement is a kind of quantification (Conor weighs 187 pounds, Raylene booked $4.7 million in  sales last year), while evaluation is your comparison of the measurement with some standard (Conor is overweight, Raylene made 125% of quota). That seems straightforward, except for a depressing tendency to assume we’re all using the same standard-and that tendency’s sidekick, the assumption that our measures take in the right requirements.  In that lrnchat discussion, Jane Bozarth mentioned an online course where the instructor based his evaluation in part on the number of comments a student posted.  Naturally, someone set out to put up 100 meaningless posts. What to do?  Well, you could turn to Tom Gilbert, who mused about what he called the dimensions of performance measuring back in 1978 (and probably long before that).  He saw three classes (or requirements) for measurement: quality, quantity, and cost. "When we measure an accomplishment, any one or more of these requirements may be relevant, and one of our principle tasks is to identify them."  In other words: figure out what’s important about the desired performance, which will help you determine what to measure and the standard to use. Gilbert saw three possible aspects to each of these dimensions. Quality, for instance, can involve: Accuracy-how well does the accomplishment match a model without errors? Class-is the accomplishment superior to most in some way beyond accuracy? Novelty-does the accomplishment demonstrate originality?  Does it embody features or aspects that distinguish it favorably in particular dimensions? Quantity or productivity can involve: Rate -accomplishments per unit of time. Timeliness-accomplishment by some end point. Volume-accomplishment when time is not a significant factor (e.g., sales per month). Cost: Labor-the amount spent for the labor and associated items directly related to the accomplishment. Material-supplies, tools, equipment, and so on. Management-the cost of supervision, administration, and support related to the accomplishment. As Gilbert points out, the requirements are relevant only when people’s accomplishments vary based on the requirements.  So running a 10K doesn’t normally involve accuracy. Framing a custom home involves timeliness, and could possibly involve rate, but most often novelty wouldn’t be a requirement. However, class as a quality measure might apply, if the craftsman needs to adapt quickly and successfully to changing conditions: "Leo, this suite needs to be wheelchair-accessible.  Can we move the doorway?" I think it’s useful to have these categories in mind regardless of the type of work you’re considering.  But don’t take my work for it.  Here’s Gilbert: …Jobs which seem unmeasurable are actually mesurable once we identify their accomplishments and relevant requirements.  Many jobs that people say cannot be measures ("you can’t measure show-horse breeding-it’s an art") seem that way only because we are thinking of behavior rather than accomplishment. How would we measure the behavior required in selecting good breeding stock?  I haven’t the faintest idea.  But we can measure results… There’s more to say on this topic, but this will do for a start. CC-licensed photos:Measurement (of coffee) by flyzipper / Steve Michos.Evaluation (of accomplishment) by afternoon / Ben Godfrey.

I’ve been trying to get better control over the projects I work on and the data related to those projects.  So this isn’t me avoiding work; this is me reprocessing by talking about the challenges I felt and then about how I’ve tried to address them. What I had wanted to do was: Reduce my paper clutter Reduce my digital clutter, which felt nearly as heavy Reclaim my workspace, both physical and virtual Seize more of the potential of electronic notes than I had so far That sounds like mainly organization and housekeeping, but if you rise above the roadway, it’s managing.  I wanted to do better at managing both work and non-work projects.  I figured if I could accomplish any of those things in the list, and especially more than one at once, I’d be far more likely to get a project done.   Or at least get it moving. What would matter? At GE, we talked about CTQs: the critical-to-quality items that represent a customer’s view about what’s most important for a product or service.  My own CTQs for doing better included: Retention-whatever’s in the system is ultimately in my own custody, not solely a wisp in someone else’s cloud bank. Ubiquity-a system that I could use in my office, on a client site, or somewhere else. Dwell time-an increased ability for me to stay with the task at hand. Was that a wrong note? For some time, I’ve used Evernote, which modestly says you can capture anything, access it anywhere, and find things fast.  (Optional side trip: Evernote’s 90-second intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQP0gkPnEcY .) Evernote lets you create individual notes, store them in virtual notebooks, and access them on your own computer, from any computer, or through a smartphone-hey, ubiquity!  The database with your notes is stored not only on their servers (which you don’t own) but also on your PC, with automatic synchronization. You can cloudify if you like, but having a local copy of the database helps satisfy my CTQ for retention. I’ve used Evernote for more than two years, mainly in that unfocused, plunge-right-in, that’s-kind-of-cool way. (A particular favorite: because I sketch a lot of ideas on flipcharts, I love being able to snap a picture, transfer it to Evernote, and later search for text in the image.) Most of the time, though, I was also making multiple notebooks and creating a myriad of tags.  When it comes to tagging, some people believe that enough is enough and too much is plenty, but for me there’s a real problem with diminishing returns.  (We’ll skip over the issue of typos, as well as the pluralization dilemma: Is the tag finance or finances?) I’d been cruising a predictable arc, from an initial everything-fits enthusiasm to a distressing suspicion that I’d reinvented the junk drawer. To be is to be done? On a separate track, I’d been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done.  I approached this book with hesitation, or more accurately evangeloskepticism, because of the… well, let’s say, the ardor of some GTD adherents.  The people who always say "GTD." If they were Apple users, they’d be the ones who care about the code name for the next operating system. Messy and distractable I may be, but I appreciate the advantages of a system, even if I sometimes appreciate it from afar.  Allen’s approach is more about thinking systematically than about particular tools-though you can, if you desire, buy a set of 43 plastic file folders for only $39.95 (plus shipping).  So I’ve been applying elements of that system, and adjusting the way I work with my paper files and with Evernote, and I’m happy with how the results look so far. Different ways to see your project Two useful, intertwined concepts: first, a task is something you can complete in a single chunk of time. "Peel the carrots" is a task.  If you’re like me, "do the grocery shopping" is also a task; I may have a big list of items, but I get them in one trip. At my house, we have a cluster of grocery-related tasks: plan dinner  for the week, check the ingredients we need, build a grocery list, shop (ideally, with the list).  Getting Things Done calls such a cluster a project: "any desired result that requires more than one action step." Which leads to the second useful concept: you don’t do a project, you do the next step.  From a manage-your-work perspective, think of the project as the goal you want to achieve (groceries purchased, workshop delivered, kitchen remodeled).  You revisit the project to generate thoughts about what the next steps might be.  When you don’t have any more steps, the project’s done. So I create what I call a project page, which is a highfalutin name for a note on which I put a short description of the goal of the project, along with a timeframe (however nebulous) and the tag I’ve chose for that project.  I’ll also use the project page to jot notes about ideas related to the project.  That means the project page becomes a kind of greenhouse where idea seedlings can germinate until they turn into action steps. Action steps (things I can do) become separate notes, each tagged as part of the project.  So do reference items, like email that I forward to Evernote, making the contents of the email more readily searchable.  So do things like PDF documents, which can be dragged into their own note. Now I have a Projects notebook.  I use Evernote’s filtering tools to control what I see when I click the Projects notebook, like this: Previously, I had more than a dozen project-specific notebooks in that sidebar. And if I create a new notebook for any multi-step effort I have (even small one with long duration, like "get a digital copy of the LP that Mom has no turntable for"), I could easy have three or four dozen. This works better.  And I can do the same sort of selective display across multiple notebooks. If it’s not a step, it might be a reference David Allen suggests putting all your project-support material (things that don’t require an action but that you want to retain) into a reference file.  He leaves the form of that file up to you, though he’s quite the fan of a single, alphabetical-order, paper filing system.  I have those, but I prefer keeping digital (i.e., searchable) copies, which now go into a Reference notebook. Allen might be less in favor of a separate location for the work-specific diaries that I call project logs, so if you see him, don’t tell him that’s what I have.  I tend to make the logs for large projects; for small ones, I’ll jot ongoing notes on the project page.  Not necessarily consistent, but, oh, well. More than a third of my Evernote items are in the REFERENCE notebook.  To me, this makes sense.  For active projects, a lot of the relevant material isn’t a trigger for action; it’s project support.  It’s reference material. If an item appears useful to more than one project, I apply multiple project tags.  That way it’ll show up in project-specific searches. I also have a Project Archive notebook.  When I complete a project, I select all its items from the Projects notebook and move them to the archive.  Why?  Because that’s what I’ve always done. In my corporate, cubicle-based days, the bottom of my four-drawer file was labeled Attic. It became a combination of historical record, reference room, and security blanket.  (I’m no hoarder, though;  every year or two, when it got full, I’d weed it back by a third or so.) The Projects notebook and the Project Archive account for another 20% of my notes, which means that together with Reference, half of what I keep in Evernote is in just three notebooks. Not that there’s a prize for Fewest Notebooks Used-though if there were, Ruud Hein would be a real contender.  He wrote an Evernote GTD How To that inspired me to experiment and adapt.  (I also like his tone and his pragmatism.) Speaking of pragmatism, this post is long enough.  I have a follow-up underway with some more examples of what I’ve tried and what results I’ve gotten. Evernote examples are my own. CC-licensed images: dwell time by Owen Blacker. Junk drawer by windsordi / Di Bédard. Archive of papers by Ben McLeod.

One of the lesser-known treasures of Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library, home to scholarly research, to intriguing exhibits about the Elizabethans, and to the Folger Theater, which presents at least three plays each year (this season’s were Henry VIII, The Comedy of Errors, and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano). And every April the Folger throws a birthday party for that glover’s son from Stratford (none of that elitist Oxfordian piffle, thanks). This year’s party is next Sunday, which was as much excuse as I needed to post this now instead of April 23rd. Will never manages to show up (I’ve watched for him), though there’s a red-headed woman people insist on called Elizabeth I who does take part, making pronouncements and cutting a ceremonial cake. (You can number monarchs as you see fit, but Henry VIII’s younger daughter was never queen of Scots, so to me that "Elizabeth I" means a certain wild and crazy grandmother with a lot of corgis.) So here’s… William Shakespeare on: Career choice To business that we love, we rise betime, and go to it with delight. (Antony and Cleopatra) Consulting When I was at home, I was in a better place, but travelers must be content. (As You Like It) Email (or, perhaps, spam) When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions. (Hamlet) Needs analysis Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise. (Troilus and Cressida) The systems approach If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me. (Macbeth) Professionalism Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest. (King Lear) The cult of leadership Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered. (Cymbeline) The cult of thought-leadership Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving. (Othello) Fads and bandwagons The fashion wears out more apparel than the man. (Much Ado About Nothing) Conference keynotes (or, perhaps, blogging) Brevity is the soul of wit. (Hamlet)  

Somewhere, yet another big organization is working on yet another big computer system.  Legions of stakeholders are fussing about what the system needs to have if they’re going to get their real work done. Few of them, alas, are making the case for a robust, easy, and safe way to practice.  A shame, considering the universal desire to have people learn such systems. Instead, people are mired in situations like a financial services project I worked on.  Its banking module, used by the people at a branch, enabled them to electronically open accounts for a customer, transfer funds, and handle loan applications. But there was no way to practice those tasks.  If you wanted to get skilled at, say, processing an auto loan, you had to process an actual one-preferably for yourself, so you wouldn’t need someone else’s Social Security number.  You couldn’t complete the transaction.  Well, you could if you were actually getting a car loan.  Seemed like a mighty rigorous prerequisite.  And training people to do A, B, but not C — quick, hit cancel! — is disconcerting. A practice system, like its first cousin, a test mode that truly works like the actual system, is a kind of performance-support forest that companies can’t see because all the stakeholders are focused on the system-spec trees. When I managed online training for Amtrak’s reservation system, we inherited three imaginary trains that agents could access with a training ID. Granted, learners could reserve seats and sleeping compartments, but not much more.  And the practice provided was suboptimal. Each imaginary train had a consist (a set of cars, with passenger accommodations), but there was no automatic cancellation of the fictional reservations.  In other words, the imaginary trains could sell out. As for transferring skills, the trains didn’t follow any actual Amtrak route.  One went from London to Rome; Another, from London to Dublin-by way of Donegal. More to the point, pretty much all you could do was reserve space.  You couldn’t calculate fares, in part because Amtrak didn’t have fares on the London-Donegal Express, but also because there was no connection between the imaginary trains and other parts of the system. Like fares. During my time as head of online training , we decided to do better.  Leslie, who’d been a reservations agent, worked with John from the Train Operations group.  I’ll discuss specifics not because you need to know about Amtrak reservations, but to show the kinds of factors to consider when planning a sturdy practice system. Realism: Leslie and John created training trains based on real ones: they cloned trains 3 and 4 (Chicago - Los Angeles) as 9003 and 9004 (no real-world trains had numbers in the 9000s).  Same cities, same accommodations, same schedule. Coverage: They identified all the different types of Amtrak accommodations, then created training trains to include them all.  They took in geographic routes, so that while they didn’t duplicate the entire Amtrak system, they had trains in every part of the country.  This country. Integration: the training trains got their city information, schedules, accommodations, and fares from the live system. When the fares changed on the real route, they changed on the training trains as well.  The training ID could access all the information-only parts of the system: fare quotes, current train status, and the like. Resilience: you could make as many reservations as you liked, for whatever day you liked. At midnight, they’d all get purged, so as not to clog the system with imaginary trains filled with imaginary passengers.  And for entire new services, we could clone another real-world train and launch it in the training environment. Security: we built in safeguards against error.  If you logged on with the training ID, you couldn’t reserve space or issue tickets on real-life trains.  Your real-system ID would not let you use or even display the training trains.  The burden of requiring  a training ID for practice was low, and the separate systems meant that even if you forgot which mode you were in, you couldn’t do anything harmful to a real reservation. Continuing the security angle, you could make ticketing entries on the training trains.  That means you could pull up a training-train reservation and tell the system you were issuing tickets.  You couldn’t print the tickets, though, and the financial system ignored "sales" on the training trains. What did Amtrak get out of this? Any Amtrak ticket clerk or reservation agent (more than 2,000 people at that time) could practice virtually any entry, or combination of entries, via the training trains. The new training trains, based on real-world routes, reinforced the layout of Amtrak’s route structure.  You could work with complex fares and experiment with complicated connections.  You could also build skill with accommodations or trains, like Metroliners, that you might not encounter often. As new features went into the live system, they were available immediately in the training system as well. Safe practice in many live systems is harder than it should be.  Often "harder" means "not possible."  Less-safe practice can mean goofy messages going to customers.  Phantom sales inflating revenue.  Accidental cancellations of live orders.  Triple demand for supplies. No matter how firmly your company insists on formal training, your learners and the entire organization  can benefit from support provided on the job by a realistic, feature-rich way to practice skills. CC-licensed images: a few stakes by TonZ; log slices by the queen of subtle; caber toss by notacrime / Gregor Dodson. Detailed map of the London-Dublin Express is mine.

I know, I know, "learning events" is pretty vague.  But I wanted a crisper title than "an idiosyncratic list of face-to-face professional-development opportunities for people in the training / learning / performance improvement field." I don’t get to many in-person learning events.  This year I did go to the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (which was 40 miles from my house), and two years ago I made a presentation at a CSTD event in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The idea of presenting to your peers is a bracing stimulus, a strong incentive to reflect on what you do, what you’ve learned, and what you can share that’s useful to someone else.  Not that I always have to present, but I think sharing what you’ve learned with your colleagues is an opportunity you’d do well to embrace. I find it hard to keep track of what’s happening where (and especially when) in terms of conferences and similar events that I might like to attend.  That’s why I’ve created a calendar of learning events.  It’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs that lists these things in chronological order.   Screen shot: events listed by start date (click to enlarge) In addition to providing a link to the event’s site, the list includes  events that have already taken place; dates in the past appear in gray.  The idea is to retain them for a year.  I figure that will help me estimate when the event will take place next year, even if the organization’s plans aren’t yet available. I did find a few similar lists, but none of them had a feature I really needed:  events sorted by the due date for proposals:   Screen shot: events by due date for submitting a proposal (click to enlarge) I might ask myself why ISPI needs an eight-month lead time for proposals, but at least this way I know that’s their lead time. I thought a list like this might be useful to others, which is why I’ve put it on Google Docs and why I’m sharing a bit.ly link ( http://bit.ly/k0YOvw ) instead of Google’s 136-character URL. The document  actually has several  sheets that you can view (not including a couple of other sheets where I hide the machinery that makes the lists work): A welcome page with contents (links to the other sheets) The list of events sorted by start date The list of events sorted by due date for proposals The (unsorted) master list that the other lists work from If other people find these lists useful, or if they suggest events to include, I’ll be delighted.  That’s part of the reason for the rambly "about this calendar" page: to say more than you’d want to read here about the kinds of event I think would fit and the kinds that wouldn’t.

Sometimes, it’s worth the whole week’s subscription to The New York Times just to get the Tuesday Science section.  (It’s certainly not worth it if you’re only going to count how often in a week the Times uses the word "famously"). Science this week included Nicholas Wade’s article In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain, which centers on the work of Cornelia Bargmann. I’m going to summarize the parts of the article that most intrigued me, in part because both the grunt work conducted on a 1-millimeter worm, and the complexity that work has revealed, are probably good to… well, have in mind when you read some breathless "finding about the brain" that means you should never use magenta as a font color. (Click to see NYTimes diagram) Bargmann has spent 24 years studying Caenorhabditis elegans.  Many neuroscientists do, in part because C. elegans has only 302 neurons.  (You, by way of contrast, have 100 billion or so.)  John G. White spent more than 10 years mapping the 8,000 connections between those neurons. At that point, science had a neurological map for the worm, but didn’t know which connections made what happen.  It was like having the wiring diagram for an apartment building. As is, just the wires: not knowing what was connected to any outlet or socket. Cell bodies of the ILR, VL, and 2-neurons (ILR is about 2 microns wide) Bargmann eventually tried the equivalent of flipping circuit breakers to see which lights went out.  She knew that C. elegans "can taste waterborne chemicals and move toward those it finds attractive."  So she started killing one neuron at a time with a laser. The idea was to try to figure out what the neuron did from what the worm stopped doing. Eventually, she did find the neuron that controlled taste.  She also discovered that C. Elegans has a sense of smell, as well.  Like rats, these worms can tell what to eat and what to avoid by scent.  Bargmann learned that neurons, and not odor receptors, controlled the move-toward-good, move-from-bad behavior. This is tough learning.  In addition to the 302 neurons and their 8,000 connections, there’s another system of "gap junctions" involving chemical connection between neurons. And there are neuropeptides (250 different ones) that neurons release to affect other neurons.  Which means the pattern of neural connections changes on the fly. Cell-body image of C. elegans neurons by Thomas Boulin for WormAtlas.

(I haven’t figured out how to embed images in a Google Plus post so they show up where I want, rather than as a gang of photos at the bottom.  I also haven’t posted here in a while, so I thought I’d ignore the figuring and sneak in some posting.) Here’s an easy way to save items from your Google Plus stream to Evernote. Step 1: Get your Evernote email address (the one Evernote assigned to you when you signed up.) Sign onto Evernote. Click Settings. At the bottom of the Settings page, you’ll see Emailing to Evernote. That’s where you’re find your Evernote email address. Step 2: Create a new Google+ circle.  (I named mine "Evernote."  You go wild like that, too.) Step 3: Click "add a new person." Enter your Evernote email address. Enter your Evernote email address.   Step 4: Enter a name for this new "person." Enter a name for the Evernote email address   Step 5: You’ll see the new person in the new circle.  (You can add others, but I didn’t.)  Be sure to click "create circle." Create the new circle.   That’s it for setting up the circle.  Here’s how you use it: When you find an item in your Google+ stream that you’d like to send to Evernote, click the Share button, then select your Evernote circle.  (I made Evernote the first in my list of circles, mostly so it’d show up first in the screen shot below.) Sharing an item in your stream   Google+ reminds you that someone in that circle isn’t yet on Google+.  They mean "your Evernote email isn’t,"  which is true.  You can share the item with additional people or circles, but I’m trying to stay simple here, so I just click Share. Confirmation (part one)   I don’t know if Google+ is being solicitous or just fretful, but when you do click Share, you’ll get a second reminder that someone you’re sharing with isn’t on Google+ and will have to settle for email.   Confirmation (part two), or, are you sure you're sure?   Within a minute of my having shared the item in Google+, Evernote had it in my default notebook.   How it looks in Evernote   The only quibble I have here: the item received by Evernote comes from me — I was sharing stuff in my stream with Evernote, right?  And so, if it’s an item that someone else posted (one that was in my stream, but not originally from me), there’s no indication in Evernote of who originally shared the item. If I click that "view or comment" link in the Evernote note, I will see the item as it originally appeared in my stream — with, in this example, a link to Jane Bozarth, who originally shared the item.   Back to the source   I’m grateful to Beth Kanter, who’s shared a number of useful Google+ tips, and to Vikki Baptiste, whose comment on one of those tips led me to search for the details of how to do this.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to try losing weight by following the Weight Watchers program that my wife had enrolled in. After a few months, I began to view weight management as a kind of performance improvement project (see this post and this one). (Here on my Whiteboard, I focus mainly on topics like workplace learning and performance improvement, areas I’ve worked in for decades.  No one in his right mind would pay me for advice on cardiovascular health, weight-change dynamics, or the physiology of nutrition and exercise.  I’m extrapolating from my experience to make a point about accomplishments at work, not telling people they should eat less or exercise more.) I’m no longer such big deal Although I didn’t say so at the time, my ultimate goal was to lose 60 pounds, 50 of them in the first year. Some 20 months after I started, I’ve lost 43.  You could say "that’s great!"  Or you could argue I’ve fallen short of my goal.  I’ve felt especially frustrated by months-long stretches where I didn’t seem to lose any weight at all.  This in spite of what I think of as the bank-account approach to weight: there are 3,500 calories in a pound, so reducing your daily intake by 500 calories should have you losing a pound a week, give or take. The New York Times recently ran Why Even Resolute Dieters often Fail, in which Jane E. Brody reported on a study by Dr. Kevin D. Hall and his associates. The study, which appeared in the August 27 issue of The Lancet, makes a number of striking points.  (By the way, that link to The Lancet leads to a summary of the study.  For the complete study, use the free registration option at the bottom of the summary.) Among those points: That 3,500-calorie model leads to "drastically overestimated expectations for weight loss." Overestimated, as in predicting "about 100% greater weight loss" than the model that Hall and his colleagues set forth. Weight loss requires much more time than many people expect (and more time than many diet-plan promotions imply).  Although my 60-pound goal is reasonable for me, Hall’s study suggests I’ll see only "half of the [desired] weight change being achieved in about 1 year, and 95%…in about 3 years." I’ve read Brody’s article several times, and gone over the Hall study in detail; they helped me understand my own situation.  More to the point here, they offer me an opportunity to compare weight management with improving performance at work. Training is like dieting: not a bad way to start When I say "training," I’m usually thinking of a deliberate effort to close an existing, important gap between current skills and those required for a newcomer to achieve acceptable results in the workplace.  I’ve worked on lots of projects where such training made sense for people like reservation agents, field salespeople, and health-claims adjustors.  What I think these projects have in common is that it was possible to help people gain new skills so they could produe acceptable performance in a relatively short time.  They aren’t going to be master performers right away, but they’ll be good enough for now.  And they’ll be more likely to improve in the future, because they’ll no longer be complete novices. What such workers tend to have in common is that they have lots in common: they do similar work,  they have similar job-relevant experience, they have similar skills, and they lack similar skills.  Often they’re in a few physical locations (like, say, central offices or reservation centers), or the organization can assemble them for training (classrooms, workshops) or assemble training for them (online learning). As for the skills they need to acquire, those are predominantly procedural: how to check availability, how to manage customer accounts, how to conduct intake interviews. How is this like dieting?  If you’re overweight (e.g., have a BMI over 25) or obese (over 30) and you’d rather not be, there are lots of approaches you can take at the outset.  Noting your caloric intake and decreasing it, so that you’re not taking in as many as you expend, is one approach that may be good enough for starters.  If you don’t have other serious health issues, and if a principal cause of your current weight is a caloric imbalance, then a deliberate reduction in overall calories-a diet-will likely produce results. Don’t just take my word for it.  "All reduced energy diets have a smiliar effect on body-fat loss in the short run," Hall’s study says.  "The assumption that a ‘calorie is a calorie’ is a reasonable first estimation…over short-time periods." Even in that short term, you have choices that are more effective and choices that are less so.   For example, the real-world Mayo Clinic Diet (as opposed to the "miraculous," grapefruit-laden one) for example, will likely produce better results than the kind of "diet" that has you eating nothing but rutabaga and rockfish.  To me, that’s analagous to the difference between "any training is better than no training" and training based on task analysis, needs analysis, and effective ways to help people learn. From apprentice to journeyman (Deterline was right) Thus far it seems that Brody, Hall, and I are in agreement, which is pretty classy company for me.  It doesn’t seem to matter much how you start on weight management.  Many different paths will produce results that are good enough in the short term.  In the workplace, though, short-term thinking rarely pays off long term.  Likewise with job-related skill: good enough for a novice, after a while, isn’t good enough.  If you think of the newcomer to a job as an apprentice, you want him or her to eventually move to the journeyman level: more skilled, able to deal with a wider range of problems, and competent in skills that are not simply procedural. That’s not easy.  As Bill Deterline once observed, "Things take longer than they do."  Part of the path from apprentice to journeyman is learning to recognize and deal with complexity.  In the weight-management world, here’s some of the complexity revealed by Hall’s study: When an overweight person begins consuming fewer calories than he expends, he loses weight-but the rate of loss slows as the ratio of fat to lean in his body changes.  (Weight loss is not linear; steady progress is unlikely.) The same increase in caloric intake will result in more weight gain for an overweight person than for someone not overweight-and for the overweight person, more of the gain will be body fat.  (You risk regaining, and you’ll regain quickly.) Here’s how Hall’s study suggests you think about goals for weight loss: We propose an approximate rule of thumb for an average overweight adult: every change of energy intake of 100 kJ per day will lead to an eventual bodyweight chage of about 1 kg (equivalently, 10 kcal per day per pound of weight change) with half of the weight change being achieved in about 1 year and 95% of the weight change in about 3 years. How does that rule applies to my original goal?  Let’s assume I was consuming just enough calories to maintain my starting weight.  Yeah, let’s assume that.  To lose 60 pounds would mean: Reducing my intake by 600 calories a day (a kilocalorie is the scientific term for what dieters call a calorie), thus… Losing 30 of those pounds in the first year, and in theory… Losing 58 pounds-by the end of the third year. From Hall’s viewpoint, I’m on track-I’m more than halfway to my goal, and I’ve managed to maintain that loss.  In a sense, I’m no longer a weight-management apprentice.   What happens after a good start I said that training is like dieting.  But I’ve implied (and I’m now stating outright) that most of the time neither one is sufficient for long-term results.  "Diet" in the traditional sense is a short-term planned restriction on caloric intake in order to produce weight loss.  "Training" in the traditional organizational sense tends to be a group-focused, short-term effort to provide people with mainly procedural skills that they currently lack, in order to produce acceptable results on the job. Just in case it’s unclear, I keep harping on "acceptable results" because if training doesn’t relate to on-the-job accomplishment, I don’t quite get why the organization bothers.  I keep harping on a lack of skill because if people already have the skill needed but the organization is "training" them anyway, mostly what people learn is that the organization isn’t all that bright. The Brody article and the Hall study reinforce what I think of as a movement from losing weight to maintaining health.  On the job front, it’s like the difference between a hotel employee’s using the hotel reservation system correctly and that same person successfully resolving a customer service problem. Even entry-level positions involve some judgment, some decision-making, some degree of tacit knowledge.  You can’t train for these things specifically; you need to develop models, offer examples, offer opportunities to practice and reflect. Thus Hall’s 3-year timeframe is one tool that an individual can use to set his or her own expectations regarding the rate of weight loss and the likelihood of plateaus, along with similar research-based principles like these: We can’t estimate a person’s "initial energy requirements" (daily caloric need) without an uncertainty of 5% or even greater.  (Your reduced-calorie target is only an estimate.) People are often inaccurate in describing or recording their food intake, either before or during a weight-loss program.  (Your munchage may vary.) As Brody points out in her New York Times article: Studies of the more than 5,000 participatns in the National Weight Control Registry have shows that those who lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off for many years relied primarily on two tactics: continuing physical activity and regular checks on body weight. How about that?  Behavioral change, the specifics of which vary, the results of which are higher levels of caloric consumption.  And a monitoring system to track data and assist in further analysis.  (I weigh myself at the same time every day that I’m home, and have done so for 20 months.  Not only does the momentum of the practice itself carry me along, but I have a good sense for what the typical variation is.  Of course, if I’ve gained weight, that’s just a fluctuation, but if I’ve lost weight, that’s progress.  You go with the evaluation system that makes the most sense.) I do think there’s a role for formal organizational learning (in my mind, a much better term than "training")-though it’s a narrow role, in the same way that diet-as-restriction has a narrow role in managing overall health.  Both may in certain circumstances be good enough to start with, but both are likely to fall short over time. In other words, I believe that letting new hires figure out the inventory-management system for themselves is probably a suboptimal approach.  You’re deluding yourself, though, if you think you can procedurize your way to workplace mastery .  If you’re trying to increase your organization’s effectiveness, you have to do better than telling people to eat more grapefruit. CC-licensed images: Balance-beam scale by wader. Car-hire image by Send Chocolate (Tina Cruz). Nighttime road by Axel Schwenke.