“That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.

These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet. “

This article really made me think: how am I spending my time? Am I spending time on things that is my calling and I can really make a unique contribution?

I have to say that I have a tendency to be very emotionally invested in my work. Very often when I get home, although I’m physically home I am still thinking about work.

As I’m getting a little bit older (I’m in my mid 30s), more and more I feel a sense of urgency – I want to work on things that really matters. Time is precious – why spend time on things that are not meaningful to me? why spend time with people who you don’t enjoy working with? Warren Buffet said that he chose to work himself because he wanted to choose whom he worked with.

I recently came back from two-week vacation. During the vacation I thought a lot about the importance to consciously knowing and managing how I spent my time everyday.

I’m actually very excited because I feel that a lot of exciting things are in the horizon, but I need to make it happen. I’ll share with you my learning and doing along the way

How are you spending your time everyday? Do you feel fulfilled and enjoyable? I’d love to hear from you.

After spending several weeks of reviewing the business metrics, we determined a very focused strategy. More importantly, we focused on building small wins. Our motto was every order matters – we tried to make a lot of small, incremental improvement in customer experience, marketing messaging, cost control, team effectiveness, etc.

We implemented a team dashboard that took a metric driven approach to run our business. Every week we reviewed our performance and tried to do something to improve our business.

Little by little, the business started to improve. Six months later, we were growing at 4 times of the average industry growth.

The interesting part is that suppliers starts to contact us to give us more favorable terms. We’re getting calls from marketing agencies for lower rates in exchange for longer term contract. We’re getting more brand recognition.

Once we started making improvements and building momentum, it’s like a snowball that keep rolling. The key is to maintain the momentum, and ride the wave.

Do you feel stuck in your career or your personal life? I suggest you to start DOING small things to make incremental improvement to your situation. Once the snowball starts rolling, the momentum will eventually carry you to the finish line.

Give it a try. Momentum is magical.

In the few weeks I heard several similar comments from second generation Asian Americans.

These comments upset me. I am Asian. I have live here for a long time, and I embrace both cultures. However, I will never forget my immigrant experience.

I am who I am today because of my immigrant experience. It makes me hard working, resourceful, entrepreneurial, creative, and taking nothing for granted.

I love working for immigrants, working with immigrants, and hiring immigrants. They are some of the best professionals, entrepreneurs, and leaders.

They are not the poor, pathetic, survival mentality losers. They are my heroes.

They are the polar opposite of each other. Julie is outgoing, passionate, aggressive, go-getter, detailed oriented, and widely popular. Adam is introverted, insightful, absent minded, and socially awkward.

Julie is a star in the company, and her career has been progressing very well.

Adam is competent, but he tended to rob people the wrong people because of his social awkwardness. He is also not very detailed oriented – he is very good at getting 80% of a project done, but he has trouble to finish the project with highest quality.

There has been ongoing tension between Julie and Adam for a long time.

Finally, Julie couldn’t take it any more. She walked into her manager’s office and said “I’m done with that guy! I cannot work with him any more!” She was dead serious.

If you’re Julie’s manager, what would you do? What would you say to Julie?

I’ll write about my perspective on my next post. It might surprise you.

There is nothing right or wrong about this. However, this has some implications to you as an employee:

• When you have interpersonal issues or hold grudges against certain colleagues, don’t naively think that HR will be your trusted counselor to resolve the issue. They come from totally different perspective and motivation.
• HR’s priority and your priority are different.
• When you deal with HR, you need to be business-like and professional. Again, HR is not your personal counselor. Don’t reveal personal, sensitive information to HR. Otherwise, you’re risking your career and your future.

This book is enlightening because it explains to you the reality of corporate politics, and it teaches you how to play politics.

I know this sounds cynical, un-ethical, and depressing. However, we’re all humans. We cannot get away from facing politics. I’d rather to see more honest and ethical people to win the political games.

The further you’re up the corporate ladder, the more important it becomes for you to be politically adept. There is no way around it.

That’s why this book could be a game changer to many of your career. If you think you’re not good at playing politics, you should read this book.

It’s written by one of the most well respect researchers in this field, a professor at Stanford University.

The book is Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t

I had to admit that I hadn’t been a big fan of performance reviews in any shape or form in the past. In fact, one of the most popular articles on this blog is The Dirty Secrets of Performance Review.

However, my perspective on performance review, 360 feedback in particular, had changed a little bit lately. When 360 feedback is done right, it could be a very important and valuable tool for both management and employees.

Let me tell you a story. John is an experienced program manager at a large enterprise software company. He started working at his current company three years ago. During his six months, he was able to ship two products that had been delayed for a long time. His manager was really impressed. He felt really good about the hiring.

Another six months passed, and John just hit his one-year mark with the company. The manager started to hear complaints. It turned out that pretty much everyone who worked with John didn’t like to work with him. He was rude, abrasive, and had a tendency to rob  people the wrong way. In fact, the situation got so bad that several people had filed complaints with HR.

The manager had a meeting with John. When the manger raised the issues with John, he was completely blindsided. He felt that he was loved by everyone. In fact, he felt that he was very popular among his colleagues, and he couldn’t believe others’ complaints about him.

Fortunately, this company had a very experienced human resource team who care about its employees. The HR manager set up a 360 degree feedback loop for John, and introduced John to counseling.

In the end, John was able to change his behaviors, and significantly improved his interaction with his colleagues.

A key learning from this story is that people have different degrees of self awareness. Some people tend to be more “optimistic”, and feel good about themselves. Some people tend to be more self critical. But, our self perception could be very different from reality. For managers, if you’re not actively seeking feedback from others about your team members, you might be blindsided as well.

When 360 feedback is done correctly, it could provide well needed feedback to both employees and managers. Professionally, I have run into several personnel challenges in the past few years. Almost without exception, lack of self awareness is a key driver for the performance issues. Honest, direct, and fair 360 feedback could play a critical role in raising each individual employee’s self awareness, and improve his or her performance before it becomes too late.

If you have never implemented 360 feedback in your organization before, I have the following suggestions:

• Set clear objectives and expectation before you roll out the 360 feedback process. Ask people to be honest, direct, and fair.
• You should define who will provide the 360 feedback for a particular employee. Are you going to let people to self select reviewers? Or you want to designate certain people to provide feedback? Personally I like to designate certain people to provide feedback. Self selection might lead to employees mutually singing praises.
• Keep each feedback confidential.
• Implement a standard template or tool for the 360 feedback to standardize the process. If you have a small organization, a Microsoft Word template might be enough. If you have a sizable operation, you should consider to implement 360 feedback software package that enable your organization to gather and analyze 360 feedback more quickly and easily.

You can imagine how excited I was last night when the Giant beat the Phillies.  It’s really interesting to note that this was the second time in the past decade that the Giant had made into the World Series. In contrary, Oakland A’s has not made into the World Series for a very long time.

After Michael Lewis published Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Billy Bean has been a media darling. His analytical approach to recruit and build his team has been well documented and publicized. However, his team hadn’t won anything! Similarly, Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rocket, has been trying to apply a similar approach to build his basketball team. They’re not close to wining a championship, neither.

I’m not saying that the analytical approach is wrong. However, I do believe that building a team, or building a company, or building any organization, is part science and part art. Many intangible aspects of building a team cannot be measured and optimized via numbers.

However, I was re-reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger this weekend, and came across the poem “if” that Charlie Munger has always admired.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr.. Munger – if you haven’t read this poem, please read it and let me know if you agree with me.

“If you can keep you head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,

If neigher foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

–Excerpt from the poem “If,” by British author and poet Rudyard Kipling

I have to admit that I’m neither a Seattle Seahawk Fan nor a USC Trojan fan. However, I really enjoyed this quote from Pete Carroll:

“I had been head coach of the New York Jets and the New England Patriots. In both cases, I was fired. I didn’t know if anyone would hire me again. I never lost faith in myself, I just wasn’t sure if others would believe in me.

Getting fired made me come up with my own philosophy of coaching, my own belief system of what it took to win. When I became head coach of the [University of Southern California] Trojans, I was given the autonomy to put my philosophy into practice. Over the next nine years, I had the time of my life. We built one of the most dominant football programs in the country—winning seven straight Pac-10 titles and two national championships. “

A lot of people don’t like Pete Carroll. Put aside your personal opinion about him, I do think that he made a very important point here.

You’ll not become very successful in your career if you continue to follow other people’s steps. You have to develop your own approach and system. It’ll take time, failures, frustrations, and many attempts. But, you need to maintain faith in yourself, and continue to work on it.

If you don’t give up, one day you’ll find your groove – things will come natural to you. You’ll find the winning combination that leverage your strength, experience, natural inclination, and all of the failures you had in the past.

If you haven’t found your groove yet, keep searching!