The ultimate sales machine – Half way through and impressed with the focus on selling to meet customer needs versus hawking the programs you offer. A little like Drucker’s “outside-in” thinking and much needed by Extension professionals. Amazon link here. I’m listening to the Audible.com version on the iPod.

What would Google do?- Ok, I’m a sucker for the title, but I liked the Business Week article focusing on the auto industry (listen to the podcast here). I have the book & the Audible.com version on the iPod. Amazon link here.

Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. I’m supposed to be reading this for an online book club in Booksprouts, but have fallen behind. Neat read on how transaction costs have changed the structures we use to organize. Wikipedia link here.

There are others lurking in the shadows, but these are at the top. One thing I have noticed is that I seem to be listening to books more lately at the expense of podcasts. I need to figure a bit of balance out about that, but it is so, so nice to hear books played 25% faster on the iPod. Gaining 15 minutes for each hour is a big difference in books that are several hours in length.

Good advice for Extension professionals caught in daily white water. If you can’t at least focus on your key commitments for at least some of each day they will slip away.

In this issue of Choices, we offer two collections of papers. One theme covers the topic of setting the stage for the next farm bill, by updating the justification for farm programs, reviewing policy issues likely to affect the 2007 Farm Bill, projecting the effects of continuing the 2002 Farm Bill with less spending, and examining new program options based on land stewardship programs. The other theme addresses changes in fresh produce marketing and small farms’/firms’ response strategies in order to remain competitive, profitable, and economically viable in this changing market. This issue also contains articles on obesity lessons from Japan and on formula versus grant-based funding for agricultural research.

Click here see past and future content.

Kevin addresses this very directly: “The status quo requires no leadership.  Think about it.  If everything in the current situation was great – if there was no need for change – how much leadership would be needed?  Leadership is required because we want to move somewhere.” Other good tidbits include brief discussions on modeling learning and how being a better leader leads to becoming a better human.

It’s also a good post for Extension Professionals working with leadership and management groups.  You might want to also check out the other posts on Rosa’s blog and take a look at what Kevin is saying on his blog.

Drucker really pushes this in the Effective Executive. While that book was ahead of its time, it’s really tough in today’s environment for busy Extension Professionals to have the luxury of “checking out” and devoting long blocks of time to specific projects.

So what is the answer? To middle ground options that I’ve been playing around with are “chunking” and “time boxing”. I think that both can be good tools for Extension Professionals to test. Here is a quick summary of each.

Time Boxing

I found time boxing through

Dwayne Melacon’s link to this post on Dave Cheong’s blog. Time boxing refers to setting a pre-determined time frame for each project or task. Dave’s post has a good overview of the process. I like the idea because I think we in Extension tend to suffer from Parkinson’s Law , which generally states that “work expands to fit the amount of time allotted to its completion” (see interpretations applied to other uses here). I really liked Dave’s connections to doing the most important things first and his discussion of “null time”. 

Chunking

Related to time boxing is chunking. I found this via

Lisa Haneberg’s blog. Lisa talks about chunking your day into blocks of time as an alternative to multi-tasking. See her post here for her idea of chunking and a tool she uses.

Both of these tools are closely related and can benefit Extension Professionals by allowing more time for them to focus. If you’re an Outlook user, you might want to look at this post for a brief description on how to create 30 minute chunks of time in Outlook.

It was time well spent. Given the fact that most Extension work is done via teams (and committees) we really need to focus on ways of improving our teams’ performances. As an institution that touts science-based research for decision making, we do a terrible job of actually looking at the literature for teams and applying it to our own work. Leholm and Vlasin do just that in Chapter 2 of their book. This chapter has a very good and very succinct overview of the literature about teams. It is so succinct that it is easy to miss the density of detail it contains. The book also has several case study chapters, including one discussing two Extension High Performance Teams (one at Michigan and the other in Ohio).

The book will be especially valuable for those interested in developing longer term, self-directed teams. Much time was spent discussing the differences between self-directed teams and single-leader teams. And the organizational architecture required to have true self-directed teams. And the time frame – maybe two or more years – to really get the team humming.

So without giving the book’s contents away, here are some key concepts. It is possible for organizations to “increase the odds” of developing high performance teams. But they need to truly empower them, build trust and commitment among team members, and help provide the context to develop clarified and realistic team expectations, rules and team purpose. To be truly self-directed, teams must have an infrastructure to keep them focused on performance. And that infrastructure is their own formalized (read written) purpose and operational statements.

To get a better understanding see this 2004 presentation by Arlen and Ray to. For twenty bucks, the book is a cheap investment for Extension professionals.

here, here and here for some examples). Manager Tools has also evolved a really neat blog and comment feature into their site. Mark Horstman (50% of the Manager Tools partnership) has posted this neat feature on reading. Mark is reading about 200 books a year despite a busy life as a consultant. He explains his formula for reaching that number. I really like the post although I’m not quite on board with his reluctance to use audio books. Mark feels that commuting time should be better spent on the phone building relationships. I certainly cannot disagree with that concept, but I regularly listen to book and podcasts on my iPod while working out, cooking, etc. Plus some commuting time is often outside of normal business hours. I’m usually on the road between 5-6am, then again after 6pm. I do make several calls during these time periods (often very productive ones to people’s voicemails that saves email and other time), but I also find it a good time to get some listening done with audio books. I’ve reached the point where I read limited numbers of fiction books, but listen to a few every month just to relax and get away. Mark does make a valid point that we read faster than we can listen to books. iPod users can overcome some of this by selecting the faster reading option on their iPod. This increases the reading time to 125%. Conversely, people with listening difficulties can reduce the time to 75%. Unfortunately, this only seems to work with audio books and not podcasts.

For Extension professionals that are on the go, Mark’s article will be really useful and inspirational. There is never enough time, so pick wisely. See also my book notes on Steve Leveen’s The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life. And do what else Mark suggests – turn of the TV. Or at least use a DVR to record shows and time-shift your viewing to a better time for you.