Greetings!
Somehow 11 months have gone by and we are forced to confront our performance for 2007 and look forward to 2008. Hopefully you are thinking now about what you would like to accomplish in 2008, the resources and skills that will require, and you are creating a plan to make it all happen.
In spite of grumblings from the Fed, the job market seems to be strong, wages seem to be rising, and I am willing to bet that 2008 will actually be quite a good year. If nothing else, we get an extra day to do something great.
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| Using PositiveWare to Conduct Better Meetings
Engaging Your Team One Meeting At A Time |
 PositiveWare is a great tool for facilitating meetings of all kinds, because all of the information you need for a meeting is available from a report. This means that your meeting is not about reporting, but discussing and deciding. This leads to shorter, more efficient meetings.
For a virtual team it is equally powerful because using a web conferencing service like Ready Talk means the team can all look at the same screen and share the same report without fumbling for different spreadsheets or emails.
Meetings can also be used to create accountability. By keeping tasks in PositiveWare and tracking them there it is easy to know who is meeting commitments and who is not. This allows the manager to move from the taskmaster role to the coaching role, because the interaction is not about "Did Something Get Done Or Not And Why?" but rather "How Do We Make You Successful?"
Our tag line is Give Work Meaning. This means that work is about more then hours billed or projects completed. We hope you use PositiveWare to fulfill the goals of your client, your team, and yourself.
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| Flex Your Project Manager
Release 2.1.6 |
In keeping with our philosophy of fast and cheap, we have released today a new version of the Project Manager built on newer, whizzier technology that is intended to substantially improve the user experience.
To try it out, click on the Project Tab, and then click on New Plan Manager in the blue sub nav. While this project manager reproduces the functionality of the old project manager, we hope that it is more intuitive and puts more information at your fingertips. Of course we would love any feedback on this or any part of the application,
Check out the release notes.
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| Good Looking and Smart, Too
Release 2.1.7
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 Why does PositiveWare look different? After over three years with the
same interface we decided to freshen the appearance. Hopefully you will
notice that the application and the marketing web site now look and
feel the same.
Notably this release also allows users to add comments to a timer while
it is running, which means that you can make comments on the fly.
Finally we have enhanced the functionality of the Plan/Project Manager with Zoom and Drag and Drop.
Read the Release Notes |
| Three Signs Of A Miserable Job
Book Review |
 Patrick Lencioni's latest book may be the best book yet about the PositiveWare tagline, Give Work Meaning.
Fortunately, this is also his best book period. Unlike the fantasy nature of "Five Mistakes of A CEO", this is also patterned as a fable, and yet is totally believable.
Our hero, Brian Bailey, is a CEO who sells a company. In the sale of his company he finds that the acquirer and the banker do not place a lot of value in his belief that it his people that have made the difference in building the company.
Upon his retirement as a golf and ski bum in Tahoe and a subsequent ski injury he finds himself bored and depressed and looking for something to do. He becomes part owner of an Italian food restaurant that has seen better days. He is motivated to do this because the employees in this restaurant appear to hate their jobs, and aren't very good at them. "How do these people get out of bed and come to work every day" he asks himself. In other words, what gives their work meaning?
Using the restaurant as his own management laboratory, he finds that the answer lies in three simple ideas: Immeasurement, Irrelevance, and Anonymity.
Immeasurement is the idea that there is no measure for success for a person's work, and/or that the measure is not timely or under the person's control.
Irrelevance is the idea that a person's work is not important to another person.
Anonymity is the idea that an employee doesn't have personal relationships at work.
The solution is to create daily measures, identify your customer in the business and care about your employees.
The challenging part of this recipe is the cure for anonymity, which involves asking managers to become personally interested and care about their employees. This means a lot of discomfort for HR managers, who are used to forbidding personal questions as part of the interview process, but must relax that stricture on a post-hire basis.
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| Winged Death Box of the Month
Found on our President's wish list |
 Our last feature about flying the Diamond Katana attracted so many click throughs that we have decided to make aviation art a regular feature.
Over Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to break turkey with a gentleman who owns a Beech Staggerwing. The Staggerwing represents the peak of pre-war aviation - comfort, speed and elegance.
A 420HP engine allowed it to carry 5 passengers at up to 212 mph, blazing fast for those days and still great performance today.
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The PositiveWare team wishes you a month of successful execution and thrilled customers!
Sincerely,
Charles Von Thun |
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