Personal MBA
Learning the entrepreneurial way
Learning
the entrepreneurial way
The 4-Hour Work Week: Chapters 1 through 6
March 29th, 2008
Title: The 4-Hour Work Week
Author: Timothy Ferriss
Area of Study: Personal Management, Time Management
Chapters 1-6 Summary
I'm listening to the audio version of this book. I find downloading books from iTunes directly onto my iPhone allows me to cover much more material when I can listen to books on my daily commute to and from work. Compare this to reading shortly before bed, after all the kids are put to bed, and usually I am tired enough that I'm lucky to get through more than a few pages before drifting to sleep.
Anyway, on to my synopsis of The 4-Hour Work Week. The author is pretty long winded getting to the point of the book - how to use your time more effectively. The first 4 chapters are essentially the author's saga through his life of business ventures and how he came to know the principles he's outlining in the book. In my opinion, the first 4 chapters could have been summarized in one short chapter.
Starting in chapter 5 he gets to some good points. I will simply highlight the ones that stick out to me. If you're interested in more detail, pick up the book or leave a comment to start a discussion.
1. The time it takes to do a task will be the amount of time allocated for the task. If you have 8 hours to complete a task, it will take 8 hours. If you have 2 hours to perform the same task, it will only take 2 hours. Therefore, figure out the minimum amount of time it takes you to do your essential tasks to complete your business tasks.
2. If you become more efficient and can start doing in 4 hours what you previously did in 8, the author suggests NOT to fill up the rest of your time with busy-ness. After all, you're now making the same amount of money working half the time. Use your extra time to ENJOY life, spend time with your family, not to keep slaving away at work.
3. Cut out all non-essential tasks. You sit around an browse the web reading news for 2 hours a day? Is this valuable? Or is does it just waste your time and delay you from completing your essential tasks? Cut it out. Take a trial and see if cutting out non-essential tasks you identify has any impact on your effectiveness in getting things done. If you find they do, stop wasting that time and spend it on more important things.
4. Eliminate your worst customers. If 10% of your customers produce 90% of your revenue and profit, stop doing business with the lower 90%. This frees up your time and your revenue and profit don't drop much. Then refocus on your best customers and chances are their volume will increase with you. Have a customer that never seems satisfied and you spend a tremendous amount of time listening to their constant complaints and trying to keep them happy? Fire them as a customer. Your time is better spent focusing on the customers that take up little of your time and keep ordering from you.
5. While this isn't completely stated in the first 6 chapters, I get the impression it will come up: outsource as much as you can to other people (if you actually had a staff working for you, the same concept works for delegation). You own your own business and still do the accounting? That's not essential so pay an accountant to do it for you. That frees up your own time to focus on essentials. Still doing your own marketing? Outsource it. You get the picture.
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Lean Software Development: Chapter 1 - Eliminate Waste
February 28th, 2008
Title: Lean Software Development
Authors: Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
Area of Study: Software Development Project/Product Management
Chapter 1 Summary: Eliminate Waste
I read this chapter a few months ago, so this synopsis is after skimming the chapter for a second time and after having a while to reflect on the ideas presented. This chapter was pretty short. The book overall covers various "tools" as it presents different concepts. Chapter 1 covers Tool 1 and Tool 2.
Tool 1 is "Seeing Waste" which touches very briefly on things in a normal business that must be considered waste, including:
- Partially done work
- Extra processes
- Extra features
- Task switching
- Motion
- Defects
Tool 2 is "Value Stream Mapping", a technique to determine how efficient your processes are and the specific steps in any process which are inefficient.
What I Learned from this Chapter
Tool 1: Seeing Waste
The "Seeing Waste" section was very insightful to identify so many activities that are just useless. Since everything has an opportunity cost, whenever something that has little or no value is done (whether it's a process, spending money, etc.) that means there was an opportunity cost that could not be done that was considerably higher business value.
The items that I have seen all over around me in my day-to-day work is partially done work, extra processes, extra features, and task switching. The other topics covered in this chapter, I don't (yet) see as often in my position.
Partially done work is pretty straightforward. If something is partially complete, chances are it will never be used and is just more stuff to maintain. This is especially important for producing quality software. If an API is only partially complete, chances are few people will ever use it, yet it still must be maintained. Basically, it increases complexity with out any kind of useful advantage or value.
Extra processes and features are completed features/process that simply aren't used. Again, it's more to test and maintain, yet has no value because you expend effort (think: opportunity cost) on something that no one uses.
Task switching is the classic problem with multitasking -- focusing on too many things, even just two things, will cause both those things to take longer to get done than if they were done sequentially instead of parallel.
Tool 2: Value Stream Mapping
This section didn't get into enough detail to really apply Value Stream Mapping in a real world environment. Because I have read portions of Mary and Tom Poppendieck's second book, I know they go into much more detail in that book on this subject. This topic brings back memories of a Total Quality Management (TQM) class I took way back when in my undergraduate business school days. I remember similar techniques to assess the efficiency of manufacturing processes. This chapter takes similar theories and applies them to software development.
This Chapter Applied in the Real World
The "Eliminate Waste" section (Tool 1) opened my eyes to a tremendous amount of time that was being wasted on things that no one would in the end use. I've done my best to make the necessary call to not work on things that will result in extra processes or features. Of course, often it's only in hindsight where you realize that something is not really used. That being said, there are many times where "groupthink" results in a decision that everyone knows will result in an extra feature yet no one really says anything because the group decided. I've start calling out these features when I see them and more often than not the result is that the feature is killed because the time (opportunity cost!) is better spent focusing on something of higher value.
The "Value Stream Mapping" section (Tool 2) really didn't go into enough detail to perform a real world application. I did, however, read a portion of Mary and Tom Poppendieck's follow-up book to this one and the section on value stream mapping was much more detailed. It allowed a colleague of mine and I to map out our sales process and identify spots of waste in the process. This allowed us to focus on making the less efficient parts of the process more efficient. It also allowed us to not waste time looking at the parts of the process that were already as efficient as they could be (or at least acceptably efficient).
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Lean Software Development: Book Preview
February 26th, 2008
Title: Lean Software Development
Authors: Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
Area of Study: Software Development Project/Product Management
Book Preview
I've already started reading this book, so writing this preview summary is a little bit of cheating. I started reading this a while ago and got most of the way through it. I want to, however, go back a read some parts of it again in detail and skim others. As I do that, I'm going to present a chapter-by-chapter review.
Now on to the real preview of this book. This book is about applying lean management principles to software development projects. The authors seem to have a lot of background in traditional manufacturing environments and somehow made it into the world of software development. This book takes principles of lean manufacturing/management that have been widely accepted for the last 20 years in other areas of discipline and explains how they can be applied to software development projects.
What I Want Out of this Book
My day job is managing multiple software development projects at a time. Some projects are small in scope, some are large. Some the software aspect is a small part of a much bigger business initiative. Others the software is the point of the project (I'd consider this more product development). I'm constantly looking for better and more efficient ways to deliver software and interact with other business stakeholders. To that end I am excited to learn how lean principles can be applied to the management of software projects. The last time I really focused on lean principles was in a TQM class in my undegrad days as a business major, but that was a long time ago.
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Why I'm Doing This
February 26th, 2008
For details about this website, read the about section. For more information about what I plan for commenting on the business books I'm reading, read on.
I don't want these commentaries to simply be a book review. I'm more interested in learning varied ideas across many business disciplines (much like the technique used in BBA and MBA studies -- a vast cross-section of business disciplines is presented with the ultimate goal to tie them all together to show how they are all important to bring products to market). I want to be able to immediately apply at least some of the good ideas presented in the books I read to my day job in order to be a more effective employee, co-worker, and leader.
I learn best by writing. I've always absorbed material by taking written notes or writing about topics. By writing here, it helps me reflect on ideas and think through them for myself. At the same time, hopefully others will also find these subjects interesting and useful as well.
Oh yeah, I'm also a business geek, so learning varied business concepts is fun too.
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