Unit of One Anniversary Handbook

How To Find Success

Thornton May
Vice President, Research & Education
Cambridge Technology Partners
Cambridge, Massachusetts
tmay@ctp.com

The most precious asset in the cosmos is time, because it is absolutely irreplaceable. The fastest way to become better at your job and in your life is to spend your time more effectively. Learn how to "design for time." That means:

1. Don't be afraid to spend money if it lets you go faster. You can always make more money; you can't manufacture more time.
2. Create performance objectives -- for yourself, your team, your company -- that focus on speed, not budgets or headcount. "Time boxing" deliverables keeps everyone focused on what matters.
3. Audit how you spend your time. If people are wasting your time, get rid of them. If you keep getting information that's not worth your time, "bozo filter" it away.

Harriet Rubin
Founder and Publisher, Currency/Doubleday
New York, New York
hrubin@aol.com

These days, whenever I feel my teeth beginning to grind or my blood beginning to boil, I no longer count to 10. Instead I do what I advise every woman to do: ask for everything.

This is particularly important for women who've never learned how to ask for anything, much less everything. If you want a promotion, ask to be on the board. If you want Fridays off, ask for an employment contract. If someone's being mean to you, ask them to do something for you.

Those you ask are invariably impressed -- or else so stopped by your moxie that they don't know what to do. Their submission juices kick in instantly. And even if you get half of what you ask for, you're still way ahead of the game. And way ahead of the negotiators, compromisers, and most everyone else in the corporate world who's gotten where they are because they've learned how to say "yes"!

Use that get-along corporate spirit for yourself.

James Bailey
Author, "After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence"
Massachusetts
bailey@tiac.net

Take an art course from a serious practicing artist. Not to spiff up your home page, but to experience a different way of processing information. Artists process the world all-at-once, not one step at a time as the Industrial Age taught the rest of us to do.

Numbers, equations, and sequential thought are the wrong tools for the realities of the Information Age, where parallel realms, from the Internet to business ecologies, demand new styles of thinking.

Brook Manville
Partner, Organization Practice, McKinsey & Co.
New York, New York
brook_manville@mckinsey.com

At least once a week forget your own "fast company" and become a "slow person." As the pace of change quickens and everything becomes more complex, appreciate that innovation depends as much on reflection and breadth of mental experience as on "ready, fire, aim."

Find something that renews your business thinking. I'm not talking about a weekend retreat with coworkers, a corporate "outward bound" adventure, or a group-grope to "get in touch with yourself."

Instead, find a way to engage in serious intellectual reflection that exercises your mind with new and different approaches. Some of my most energizing insights about today's organizations have come from a political philosophy reading group I joined. Plato, Thucydides, John Rawls, and John Dewey have lots to say about today's "postmodern" organizational dilemmas.

Your goal should be to find a safe but challenging mental playground. Then let your familiar ideas and perceptions crash against and mingle with a new set of texts and conversation partners.

And remember: speed of learning -- the new competitive advantage -- is not always the same as speed of doing.

Thomas Davenport
Curtis Mathes Fellowship Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Texas
Austin, Texas
tdav@notes.bus.utexas.edu

I was involved in the Last Big Thing -- reengineering -- so people constantly ask me what I think the Next Big Thing will be. Knowledge management, the field I'm now working in, shows all the tell-tale signs. This is good for me. But I'm warning you, in advance, that it's bad for the world.

My advice: instead of desperately seeking the next management hype-o-rama, go back to the eternal verities of business. Better yet, next time you're in a bookstore, buy a novel instead of the latest hot business tome. And put down this fine business magazine -- just for a moment -- and call a customer, a competitor, or a colleague and ask them what's going on.

Betsy Collard
Program Director, Career Action Center
Cupertino, California
bcollard@careeraction.org