Writers and Readers Should Demand Open E-Reading Devices and Software

The op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal on January 7 had a piece by Holman W. Jenkins,Jr., titled“Game Over for BlackBerry?” Jenkins speculated

“The market may soon become welcoming to manufacturers making a multitude of gadgets for a multiplicity of tastes and preferences without requiring users to forgo membership in the Apple or Android clouds or both.”

The point of his piece was that today’s market requires that we make choices in technology between various hardware items and software items, some of which work with each other and some of which don’t. He conjectured that the movement toward cloud computing could ultimately make hardware and software differences meaningless –in the future he hoped we would be able to choose whatever device we want to use to get our data wherever we are, using whatever software we want. He posited there could be “a coming breakdown in the walls between ecosystems.”

As an author, when I read this piece I immediately wondered whether the current differences between Kindle and Nook and other e-readers will disappear in the future. Will I be able to publish my writing in whatever electronic format I want, and will readers be able to access it on any e-reading device they want? If so, that is a publishing world I want to be a part of.

Books should be accessible to as many people as possible. Technology around the written word –from the Gutenberg Bible forward – has been designed to make books (and the thoughts contained in them) accessible to the masses. The next phase of e-publishing needs to be the development of an open format that all e-readers can use. Just like Word has become a default word processing format that all word processing programs must be able to handle (even if WordPerfect was better).

When will this brave new world of e-publishing reach us?

Discretionary Time: Making a Difference at Home, at Work, and in the Community

I believe in finding inspiration wherever we can. Earlier today, I tweeted an article on leadership using Tim Tebow as an example. This afternoon, I found this post in Legal Rebels by Patrick Lamb, which also struck a chord with me.

As Lamb asks, “What are you going to do about your personal situation? About the world’s?” We each have an obligation to make a difference to our families and friends and colleagues, and also to the greater community in which we live. We all have endless possibilities in how we conduct our lives – at home and at work. And the choices we make are what defines us.

I remember learning of the concept of “discretionary time” about twelve years ago. A diversity consultant was talking to my management team about how improving diversity in our firm was up to each of us – if we didn’t spend time on diversity-related activities in the workplace, no one else would either. And each of us, no matter how big or how small our job was, had some time that we could control, some time to spend on what was important to us.

I’ve tried to apply the concept of discretionary time each day since then. I try to spend some time on an activity of my choosing. Not what my boss wanted me to do, not what my subordinates asked for, not what family members thought I needed to do.

Even if it was just fifteen minutes reading an article on a topic where I needed development, or stopping by a colleague’s office for a casual discussion, or attending a community event, I did something that showed what I thought was important in my life.

What can you do with your discretionary time? Please comment below.

10,000 Hours of Practice

The concept of needing 10,000 hours of practice to master a field, as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, rings true for me. H. James Wilson recently posted an article on the Harvard Business Review blog on the topic. He says you can get your 10,000 hours in a year and 51 days (416 days), but that assumes 24 hours of practice/day – totally unrealistic.

As a practical matter, if you are practicing 2000 hours/year, it will take five years to master anything. You might master it a little faster if you are working full-time at a high pace in your new field, but for most of us, 2000 of new work in a year is about all we can handle. Much of what we do is administrative work that isn’t new. Five years is a good target to shoot for to feel like an expert.

I’ve worked in several fields over my career, and each one has taken me about five years in which to feel comfortable giving seat of the pants advice. Of course, in specialized areas of the field, it has taken longer. And in some areas, I will never feel like at expert.

What have you taken on recently? How far along are you toward your 10,000 and mastery?

And perhaps more importantly, what are you doing to foster mastery in your staff?

Find Outliers on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Self-Awareness & Leadership

Self-awareness is important for leaders.

A good book I’ve used to improve my self-awareness over the last several years is Standing at the Crossroads: Next Steps for High-Achieving Women, by Marian N. Ruderman and Patricia J. Ohlott.  Although this book focuses on a survey of high-performing women and what made them successful, I think its themes apply to everyone. 

Ruderman and Ohlott advocate five steps that high-achieving women undertake to be successful:

1.       They act authentically

2.       They make connections

3.       They control their own destiny

4.       They achieve wholeness

5.       They gain self-clarity

These steps are all intertwined, and all require awareness of what is critically important to each of us as an individual. Only when I know what is important to me can I decide how much of my energy to devote to the workplace and where I want our careers to go.Only then can I go about achieving what I want to achieve.

Self-awareness isn't only important for leaders -- it's important for all of us who work in or with organizations. That's all of us.

Find Standing at the Crossroads at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Ballad of the MAMA Curmudgeon

I recently read “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom,” by Amy Chua. It’s been reviewed in many publications, so I won’t write another review. I simply want to share the perspective of another working mother. (I’m a MAMA curmudgeon, remember?)

What impressed me the most was the amount of time Ms. Chua devoted to being a mother– the daily supervision of lengthy piano and violin practices, the hours of travel to specialized teachers. Who can do that and remain sane? My job was as demanding as Ms. Chua’s, though it must have been less flexible, because I couldn’t have left work several times a day to go transport kids to yet another music lesson.

When my children were growing up, I placed limits on them – one team at a time, one instrument at a time. If they wanted AAU, for example, they couldn’t play for their school. Somehow they thrived anyhow. They aren’t prodigies at anything, but they got into good colleges and are now independent adults making their own way in the world.

I made mistakes as a parent – indeed, some of my biggest regrets come from how I handled my kids. But I’m satisfied I did my part to raise them into productive human beings.

And I somehow kept my sanity.