Google: Ten Golden Rules – Newsweek – Newsweek: International Editions – Issues 2006 – msnbc.com

“Getting the most out of knowledge workers will be the key to business success for the next quarter century. Here’s how we do it at Google”

# Hire by committee.
# Cater to their every need.
# Pack them in.
# Make coordination easy.
# Eat your own dog food.
# Encourage creativity.
# Strive to reach consensus.
# Don’t be evil.
# Data drive decisions.
# Communicate effectively.

Just wanted to giver you all a heads up on two pieces of software that I came across recently: Cinch and Divvy.

Divvy · Window management at its finest.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it is as simple as calling up the interface, clicking and dragging. When you let go, your window will be resized and moved to the relative position on the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you’d like that resize and move your windows in exactly the same way.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Irradiated Software – Cinch

Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as ‘hot zones’. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size.

I use Cinch, as it is simple and suites my needs perfectly. If you needa bit more control or functionality, Divvy might be for you.

Jerry Weinberg is a legend in Project Management and Consulting circles. Here are his 10 Laws of Trust:

1. Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
2. Trust takes years to win, moments to lose.
3. People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.
4. The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
5. People are never liars—in their own eyes.
6. Always trust your client—and cut the cards.
7. Never be dishonest, even if the client requests it.
8. Never promise anything.
9. Always keep your promise.
10. Get it in writing, but depend on trust.

Conferences That Work | Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust

I am enjoying the podcasts from the American Management Associations (AMA) podcast series Edgwise.

Today I listed to an interesting interview with  Dr. Graham Jones, an world expert on Mental Toughness. Well worth a listen.

What does Lebron James have in common with Warren Buffet? Whether we’re getting ready for the big game or the big meeting, we all deal with high pressure situations; it’s natural to everyone on the job and a reality of the workforce. In his new book Thriving on Pressure: Mental Toughness for Real Leaders, Dr. Graham Jones encourages us to channel that pressure and make the hard decisions.

Dr. Jones is formerly professor of Elite Performance Psychology at the University of Wales in Bangor. An author of 150 White Papers in publications on the subject of high level performance. He is the Founding Director of Lane4 Management Group Limited, which is a leading performance in consultancy that has offices in the U.S. and around the world.

Dr.
Graham Jones on Mental Toughness » AMA Edgewise

This is another presentation from Jeff McNeill (who brought you the Drucker and Goldratt Concept map).

This one is an introduction to Information Graphics, a topic I that has fascinated me ever since coming across Edward Tufte and recently stimulated by Dan Roam’s superb Back of the Napkin series of books on Visual Thinking.

This is a concept map showing the key ideas and relationships between Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive and the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt (The Goal, It’s Not Luck).

It was created by Jeff McNeill using IHMC Cmap Lite. Another concept mapping tool is Sciral’s excellent Flying Logic visual planning application.

The map is well worth downloading and reviewing at full size.

Came across a great little app today that allows me to take control of my iMac screen from my Macbook Pro across the network

Teleport:

“Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs.  Simply reach an edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your nearby Mac, which also becomes controlled by your keyboard. The pasteboard can be synchronized, and you can even drag & drop files between your Macs. “

A quick tutorial on setting it up is here:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2135941_one-mouse-keyboard-using-teleport.html

I was chuffed to see one of my favourite blogs suddenly posted about “my” area , Cloud Computing.  Global Dashboard has this to say:

VoxEU explores the emergence of “cloud computing” and its potential impact on our lifestyles, business innovation, and economic growth. Charles Leadbeater assesses the associated rise of “cloud culture” and the importance of guarding this new space from the overbearing influence of government and big business. Elsewhere, over at Brookings Mark Muro wonders if the rise of Amazon’s Kindle could be a “symbol of American decline”.

Its obvious in retrospect, but for years I have always manually added up figures in columns I was working on in Microsoft Word (e.g. a payment schedule in a contract).

This week I was getting sick of recalculating figures every time I made a change, and googled the problem.

Word Tips has just what I needed: Summing a Table Column .

1. Click the table cell you want the formula in
2. Click the Layout tab on the ribbon.
3. Click the Formula tab in the Data group. Word displays the Formula dialog box.
4. Insert your formula , default is “=SUM(ABOVE)” which sums all the cells above.
5. Click on OK.

Dear readers,

I just wanted to to wish you a very happy and prosperous new year.

Kind regards,

Jonathan