One of the things that I never understand is why we are not all on national, permanent and maximum water restrictions, regardless of how much rain falls. We are, after all, the second driest continent in the world.
I was in Wagga this week and they’ve taken an interesting approach to managing water usage. The policy is essentially something like: no sprinklers between 10am and 5pm. That’s it.
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I rang Telstra to cancel my data pack (see the post here for an explanation). The customer service rep, trying to be helpful and service oriented, asked me if she could ask me a few questions about my account usage to determine if I’m on the right package. I said ‘sure’ and this is what followed…
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I was in a cab early on Monday morning this week. We took off and I noticed at the first corner that the meter already had $7 on it, when it should have been about $3.
Like most people, my first thought was ‘bloody cabbie ripping me off’. A thought driven by stereotypes that was circling around in my head making me get more and more annoyed as I watched the meter creep up.
We got to the harbour bridge and I said to the cabbie: ‘Can I ask you something? I noticed that the meter was at $7 when I got in. Why was that?’
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Last week I was a guest in a meeting. Half an hour later, I don’t think a single action or worthwhile thing had taken place.
Notwithstanding the fact that the meeting was run without an agenda, I started thinking about what makes for an effective meeting and how to get the most of them. I thought about the role of an agenda and considered that even with an agenda, the same thing as I saw would have ensued. I even thought about why you would even bother having a meeting since nothing seems to change in the workplace as a result of having one.
Most meetings are run with an agenda, with the view to keep things focussed. They still end up being discussions, albeit generally around the item topic. But nothing really gets done.
It dawned on me that there should be two kinds of meetings (and possibly a third if you’re like me and consider a ‘short’ meeting to always be a good meeting 
):
- Information presentation meetings
- Decision making meetings
Keep reading to find out what these are about… Read more »
In this post, I outline a recent experience in micro managing. As a manager, if you’ve ever experienced the sensation that you can do a better job than your staff, or that your staff don’t seem to spot the obvious or think for themselves, then read on. You’ll be in for a bit of a surprise.
This post shows you how to identify if you’re micro managing people and what to do about it.
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I had an interesting conversation the other day with one of my colleagues, Zoe, who is also a psychologist. We were discussing the importance of introspection and people’s performance.
Why? In managing PTG Global, I’ve found that introspection, the ability to self-reflect on why we do what we do, tends to be a good predictor of performance. This is because it helps people understand and process performance feedback given to them and to incorporate it into their approach to work.
When people don’t accept feedback, it tends to be because they do not see themselves as a causal agent in the outcome about which the feedback is being given (e.g. if they caused a customer service problem). The initial reaction is to reject the feedback and attribute the blame or cause to other people or circumstances (e.g. the customer was especially difficult).
When interviewing new people, this tends to be one of the factors I look for in people. I generally held the view that people had the ability or not.
But I’ve changed my position on this…
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I read this interesting article from the SMH on Jobs, Careers and Callings. It describes how people perceive their job in one of three ways: they consider it just a job and do it for the paycheck, or they see it as a career, where there is a deep personal interest in the work. Finally, there are those who think their job is a calling and have a passionate committment to it. They do what they do for its own sake, rather than for pay.
I consider myself lucky that I see what I do as a calling, particularly epitomised by the project i’m working on.
If you think what you’re doing is a calling, then let me, and others, know…
Recently, I upgraded my laptop to Vista from XP. I have 1GB of memory in the notebook and one of the things I noticed in XP was that there were usually a few hundred megabytes of free memory. My understanding (and expectation) of that free memory is that it is available for a new application if I started one.
Interestingly, when I upgraded to Vista there was no free memory, at all!! The first thing I did, knowing that Vista is memory hungry, is buy more memory and the notebook now has 1.5GB, while I wait for the other 1GB stick to arrive at the store (for 2GB total).
When I checked the memory usage, Vista had immediately used up this new memory, too!! But what I later learned completely changed my thinking – you might think it’s a trivial thing, but it showed me just how much our past experiences are a filter for future experiences and how it’s so easy to misinterpret things if you don’t have the right knowledge.
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General, Opinion, Psychology | Craig Errey | 
May 13, 2007 11:01 am | 
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