Pleasantries: Why? Be Direct, It is Safer.

The one thing that you notice when having worked in different countries is that the social and professional conventions used in business are not the same in every workplace.  Body language is different in Africa and the USA etc etc.  Understanding this is a pretty basic skill and most professionals get it.  Well most of them ....  but that is another post for sometime in the future.

There is one thing that fascinates me about many people - their innate preference for avoiding the truth.  Is it because they just cannot express themselves, or are they just socially inept as managers (or maybe just introverts in disguise)?  Most of the time they seem simply not to want to either listen, or deliver the basic message - without all the disguises that are typically used and then described as just being polite. They then are baffled why messages get misinterpreted and things go off the rails.

Focus on what you really should do ..

Quite often in the midst of a what seems to be a vast amount of reading that it standard for any student, the odd article resonates and sticks in your head.

I came across one of these today ...  " Just because you can doesn't mean that you should" on HBR.  It has a really simple but profound message that is captured in the title.

Add this pearl of wisdom to your management mantra and you have a really useful governor to keep you on the straight and narrow.  No matter how senior you are in the organisation - this article is relevant to every single decision that needs to be made.

Worth a read.

Principles for Decision Making

Product managers often work in an environments where clear management demarcation lines seemingly do not exist, or are at best, blurred.  Matrix management, cross functional teams and dotted reporting lines are just a day to day reality. Add to this the current economic climate, restricted headcounts and tight budgets, getting decisions made and making them is often very challenging.

I was browsing the HBR blogs a couple of days ago and came across a posting by @tonyschwartz in which he outlines 10 principles by which you can benchmark your decision making process. These are: