CameronMathews.com: July 2015

Friday, July 31, 2015

Fun With Conference Calls

If you've never seen this, take a couple of minutes and watch. These guys are great and totally nail the problems that you run into when you sit on conference calls for much of your day.

Have a great weekend.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

5 Ways Reading Books Make You a Better Worker

I like to read. I don't read nearly as much as I think I should, but I still manage to crank through a dozen or more books a year. Usually I read fiction, mystery novels or the like, as I find it an equally if not superior entertainment venue to the television. But over the past few years, I've started picking up more and more non-fiction books and, honestly, finding them helpful in growing.

The financial talk show host Dave Ramsey likes to quote Charlie "Tremendous" Jones with this great saying, "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read." Think about that for a second. If you don't read books, your mind will not be exposed to anything new or challenging, and you will fail to grow as a human being. You will stagnate. You will stay exactly the same. Is that what you want? Couldn't you do just a little better? I think you can, and that's why I encourage you to read more books. So here's a quick list of reasons to read books and how they can help you at work

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Teaching an Old Dog

You've heard the expression "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." The truth is, if that old dog happens to be a person, I think it is capable of learning any new tricks its entire life. The true questions are whether we want to learn the new tricks.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Annoying Things You Can Do To Be Blocked on Facebook

A few days ago, I wrote a post on how to be really bad at Twitter and lose the interest of your followers, mostly by annoying them. I thought I would counter with a few things that are equally annoying on Facebook and can cause you to get blocked there as well. I'll admit, my tolerance for Facebook annoyances may be higher than for Twitter, just because I don't frequent Facebook as often, but I still try to avoid these things where I can.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Build Your Own

I'm a chronic do-it-yourselfer. I love shows like Fixer Upper and Yard Crashers. In fact, I'm certain that the DIY network and HGTV have my picture on some internal memo of a customer profile sheet, along with details like my age, income, and "likely to buy more tools than he needs" or "willing to try any project to avoid paying someone else to do it." So naturally, when things go wrong (whether actual construction or otherwise), my first instinct is to see whether or not I can fix or build a replacement myself. I also won't hide that my wife, who is much smarter than I am, occasionally has to convince me that some things are best done by a professional. When it comes to projects other than the house, though, I have to do some of the evaluation and convincing myself.

Friday, July 24, 2015

One Fish, Two Fish

Red Fish, Blue Fish. For this Friday, I encourage you to relax a bit. I know we just did this on Wednesday with the Recharge Day, but I have a feeling you haven't taken me up on it yet. Here's my Red Oscar and Jack Dempsey just hanging out. Take two minutes or so this Friday to find a friend and hang out. And then do it a bit more over the weekend (these fish do it all day, every day, which may be excessive). Recharge, kill your stress, then come back to start again.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Service to Create Customers for Life

I could list several companies that I try to avoid, either because of a bad experience that could have easily been avoided, corporate policies that result in poor customer experience, or generally unsatisfactory products. I do not plan to list any of those here. Instead, I am going to talk about two companies that helped me out tonight, or at least their employees did. The extra mile they went was such a great experience that I consider myself a "customer for life" or at least for a long time.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

How Not To Be a Needy Employee

As a manager, your job requires that you coach and develop your team. If you do not enjoy coaching and teaching and training, perhaps you should choose a career path other than management. Still, when managing, you can always run across needy employees, who require more of your time than the others, sometimes to excess.

As an employee, it is important to try to avoid being a needy employee. Some might perceive them underskilled, lazy, or just plain annoying. None of those qualities are ones that you want to stick with you around the office. So here are some tips on how to avoid being the neediest on the team.

Monday, July 20, 2015

4 Business Ideas I Got Riding a Bike

A few weeks ago I bought a bike. That is a bike as in bicycle, not motorcycle. Now the honest truth is that I haven't ridden a bike since I was probably twenty years old, so it has been a while. I took it out on my inaugural ride and made it probably a couple of miles out and back before collapsing in a sweaty heap and then subsequently sliding into the pool to cool down. This morning, I went out on the bike again with the family, but as it is already in the 100s here in Texas, even the morning led to excess sweating and water consumption. My return to cycling has taught me a few things, though, and a few of them may even make sense in a business context. Let's see what you think.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Truly Engaging the Audience

Stumbled across this last week and have to share its brilliance. Math teacher Matthew Weathers plays this prank on his class using some pretty well edited video and acting.

Click here if you can't play the video.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

There Are No New Ideas

You stole your latest idea.

I'm not saying someone told you the idea and you then claimed it as your own. I'm not claiming that you even subconsciously took something that belonged to someone else. Rather, your latest idea is the product of your experience, and in business, it likely originated from watching similar activity and similar results to the ones you are hoping to achieve (I hope). If you are stealing ideas that had poor results, then perhaps we should be having a different conversation.

I thought about this the other day as I learned about a new methodology, which happened to be an existing methodology that I was already familiar with spun up with a couple of innovative, yet derivative tools. To me, it was nothing particularly new or different, though through a different filter or perspective, it could have been groundbreaking.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

What Wikipedia Can't Tell You About Management

Go ahead, look it up. Wikipedia describes management as:

Management in businesses and organizations is the function that coordinates the efforts of people to accomplish goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively.

From there, it takes a very clinical and scientific approach (this is wikipedia after all) to describing basic management functions and structures. The article does well to describe Planning, Controlling, Commanding, Coordinating, and Organizing as basic management functions, but it leaves out a few things that I have noticed over the years, particularly at larger companies.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Being Awful at Twitter in 8 Easy Steps

Have you ever wondered how you could be worse at social media? I'm no master, by far, but even as a common user, time and time again I come across people who struggle with Twitter. Here are several things they do that could be hurting your Twitter following.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Stealing Scrum: How to Perfectly Size Your Team and Organization

If you aren't familiar with Scrum, it's a methodology that IT teams use for Agile software development. It has some basic tenets and subscribes to the core essentials of the Agile Manifesto. As I have learned more and more about Scrum, I have started to see patterns that I think could be applied across other departments as well.

One of those areas is organizational design and team size. Scrum originally recommended a team size of seven, plus or minus two, so five to nine individuals. From what I can gather, that number was really based on a psychology paper by George A. Miller called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information." If you want, you can download the paper here for personal use from the University of Toronto. Miller's basic premise is that humans have a natural upper bound for being able to keep concepts in working memory, and that upper bound is, in many cases, nine. Alongside that, seven items are truly in a sweet spot of sorts. If you don't want to read the paper, but are interested in Miller's Law, you can read the Wikipedia synopsis here.

Friday, July 10, 2015

An Easy 4 Step Plan for When Things Go Wrong

Sometimes things don't go exactly as planned. For example, yesterday, my blog auto-emailer sent out a version of my post that was missing some edits (noticeable mainly from the half words in there that looked like gibberish). Then a friend noted on the Facebook page I launched earlier this week that I had not edited the about section of the page before I launched. I'll be honest, I just did not remember. Sometimes we can blame the technology. Sometimes we can blame ourselves. Sometimes it's the complicated processes. Regardless of the reason, sometimes, things just go wrong. When they do, what can you do?

Thursday, July 9, 2015

The One Constant in Business

There is but one constant in the world, and business is not different: Things will change. I'm not sure whether to attribute the idea to Hericlitus in 500 B.C. or François de La Rochefoucauld in the 1600s, but the idea persists. The world changes, while all of us in the world fight to keep it the same.

Why do we do this? Status quo is easy. It is understood. Change is difficult. It requires development. New thoughts, new skills. It requires a level of discipline of the self to understand that change is necessary to grow. What if the caterpillar refused to change? No butterflies. What if the market refused to change? No innovation. What if we all refused to change? The world would be at a standstill.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Three Keys to Attracting a Following

My bad cell phone pic of the Killdares at the Dallas Zoo

We've all heard of building a following. It's a good phrase for it, as it takes patience, persistence, and constant production of value. I also think that it is equally viable to say you attract a following rather than build it. If you build something, it implies you have raw materials and just construct it from scratch. To attract something, you need a lure, bait, something that it finds irresistible.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Early Hat Tricks and Disruption

If you watched the FIFA Women's World Cup on Sunday, you witnessed an event. Carli Lloyd of the U.S. team managed to score three goals in the first sixteen minutes for the first hat trick in Women's World Cup history, and a faster hat trick than any in the Men's World Cup as well. Augmented by an additional score from her teammate Lauren Holiday, the last goal put the U.S. up 4-0 over Japan. The momentum of that quick start gave the United States team what it needed to roll to a 5-2 victory at the end of the match and their third World Cup title.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Facebook

Sure, announcing that I have a new Facebook page might be like telling you I got a cell phone in terms of cutting edge developments. That said, it does provide a new avenue to have continued discussions around business, productivity, and management away from the blog. I'm also working on auto-publishing over there so you can get blog updates when I post them.

Feel free to jump over there to Facebook, like the page, and add to the conversation.

Not on Facebook? You can also find me on Twitter and Google + or subscribe to email updates here on the site.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Holiday Traffic

Monday was not a holiday. But as I drove into work (and even more pronounced in my work parking lot), it sure seemed like it. Several people have taken off for what may be the entire week. And that, in my opinion, is great for them.

My wish for them is to use the holiday to enjoy and recharge. For me, their time off allowed me to take advantage of the light traffic. As fewer people clogged the highways heading to work, the drive passed by quickly.

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