About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Thanks for the kind words,
Thanks for the kind words, Dan. Over the weekend I read a couple more things that feed into what you're talking about here: (1) the original 1993 "deliberate practice" journal article by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, which spells out the realities of deliberate practice in great detail; and (2) the book FINDING FLOW by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which follows on his psychology blockbuster FLOW. In that book, M.C. talks about how "autotelic" personalities -- e.g. Linus Pauling -- come to appreciate the challenges and level of interest that's inherent in potentially ANYTHING we work on. Your comment about the guy bolting on the rearview mirror fits very well with that.
Look for more on this at the BIZ blog soon.