Category Archives: Personal development & HR

November 8, 2012 · 8:00 am

Do teams make better quality decisions?

As part of a course module I took weeks ago, we carried some exercises on the composition and dynamics of teams. To respond to the question “Do teams make better quality decisions?” we did the following exercise:

Individually, we had to classify 13 professions according to the trustworthiness they inspired on each one of us (1 for the most trustworthy, 13 for the least). Then, we were grouped in teams and had to agree on a common new ranking (*). Then we checked both of our rankings with the ones provided by Ipsos MORI in a recent Veracity Index [PDF, 50kB].

See below the different rankings and relative deviations:

Rankings on trustworthiness.

The individual ranking is my ranking in this case.

The aim of the test is to check if the deviation between the individual ranking and the MORI one is higher than the deviation of the team ranking compared to the MORI one. That is the case with me (46) and my team (32) in the exercise. This is done to prove that the collective thinking will produce a better decision.

I still have trouble with the findings. It is obvious that the team decision provides a more balanced decision, the larger the group, the more balanced it is. But confess that I struggle to accept it as better or of a better quality.

To give you food for thought I emphasized in bold those professions in which the deviations were higher:

  • Ordinary people: who I found way more trustworthy than my team members did.
  • Scientists: who I find more trustworthy (1) than the MORI test does (6).
  • Business leaders: who both my team and I trust more than the MORI responders do.
  • Clergymen: which I found the least trustworthy (13), as opposed to the high ranking given by society (4).
  • Television news readers: who society at large finds more reliable than my team and I do.

Try yourself the test and see what you find :-).

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(*) In my group we opted for calculating first arithmetic averages and re-rank the professions and then we made two adjustment at the request of one member, a compromise the other two members agreed on.

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July 29, 2012 · 8:00 am

Personal mid-year review (2012)

As I mentioned in my 2011 summary post, I set up some objectives for 2012 during January. This year I have 12 main objectives, each with several milestones or sub-objectives attached to it. And as I did in 2011, now it is time to have a personal mid-year review.

After a bit more than half of the year has passed and as happened to me last year I am behind my objectives, though this time much behind. I’ve met 27,9% so far and I’m lagging behind in practically everyone except for travelling, reading, saving and blogging ones. Despite of what it may seem, I am quite behind the running/sports one! And also behind the continuous learning, languages, and the rest.

The objectives were many and ambitious (some will not be met anyway), but the year still has got 5 months ahead and with the coming of Luca to Toulouse in September many habits will change, let’s see how I do in the final review in December.

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December 31, 2011 · 6:00 pm

Summary of (my) 2011

Let me share with you a brief recap of my 2011 (as I already did last year).

If I then characterized 2010 as a learning year, I would say 2011 was a year on the run.

At the beginning of the year I set out my objectives for 2011, of which I have achieved 71.4% (just above my 70% target!). One of them was only to “become again a frequent runner”, for which I set up some modest steps, e.g., buy new running shoes, run 3 days before mid-January, run a 10k popular race before November, lose some 10kg by June… If there was a yearly objective which I widely met, it was this one:

Último kilómetro de los 100km de Millau 2011.

Last kilometre at the ultramarathon "100km de Millau".

  • I ran over 170 days along the year, covering over 1,800 kilometres.
  • I took part in 11 popular races, including 6 of 10km, 2 half marathons, 1 marathon (42km) and 1 ultramarathon (100km). More races and more kilometres than ever before.
  • I found myself running in Granada, Villa del Río, Madrid, Torrelodones, Luarca, Rijswijk, Wijchen, Toulouse, Luz Saint Sauveur, Chicago, Washington DC, Des Moines, Montreal…

Learning. After taking some classes in Madrid, I continued studying French and now I feel more confident when facing shop attendants :-). I had to learn and continue to learn lots of new things every day at the new job where I landed about a year ago.

I still enjoy as learning moments the print weekly issues of The Economist or the monthly issues of Scientific American. I delivered the necessary speeches to become ACB within Toastmasters (though lately I’ve missed more meetings than I should). Finally, I read a dozen books along the year (a bit less than in previous years, though some in the new eReader!), being the ones I liked the most the following: first, second and third.

Investing & helping others. I set myself a high objective of saving and investing: I overachieved it by around 50%. I once mentioned it in Twitter: the best thing behind investing is the discipline of saving that is behind it. I not only dedicated a percentage of personal income to savings but as I announced in a post at the beginning of 2010, I directed a percentage to different charities. I initially set it out to be 0.7% of my income, but after raising some funds and contributing others to charities related to the races in which I am taking part, in the end this percentage has been well over 1% in 2011.

Travelling. We together visited Montreal, Ottawa, DC, Chicago, Omaha, and several places in the south of France and throughout Spain. The moment that I liked the most was attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting, no doubt.

Javi 2.0. I continued to often write in this blog with some remarkable posts. I admit that my twitter account is one of my biggest sources of information / distraction.

Sports. Apart from the running, I recently re-started playing paddle with colleagues, became a kind of fan of the rugby local team, Stade Toulousain, had to subscribe to Canal + not to miss any of Real Madrid matches while living abroad.

Other reasons for joy have been:

  • our friends Teresa & Alberto, María & Óscar, Isa & Pedro got married,
  • we welcomed the newborns Mar, Hugo, Luis and Eneko, while another of our friends is pregnant today (that we know),
  • my sister Beatriz started working as an intern; my brother Jaime continued to enjoy his job in Airbus and moved to a new apartment; my mother Fidela continued to take several courses (and to give wonderful massages) and my father Juan Bautista finally and happily retired (after working for 43 years!).
  • Luca completed all the requirements to become a full-fledged lawyer, winning some court cases in the process.

To close the year, I started taking flight lessons, pursuing another childhood dream. This will allow me to continue learning and experiencing new things!

Now it’s time to update the objectives setting for 2012. This year the exercise will be easier as I already have the methodology and the habit. If the objectives are well chosen and challenging enough, next year’s account will be even shinier.

I wish you the same: a shinier 2012, enjoy it!

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December 12, 2011 · 8:00 am

The best (and the worst) of the first 200 posts

About a year ago, I wrote in the 100th post which were the most and least read of the first 100 posts. Today is another such occasion as this is the 200th post in the blog.

I started the blog in February 2010. Since then the blog has received over 29,000 visits, hundreds of comments while I have enjoyed thinking about what to write and structuring my thoughts to do so.

If a year ago I wasn’t yet sure which kind of posts were better received, now it is much clearer: those related to aviation.

Find below the list of the top 10 and bottom 10 posts:

1. Will Boeing 787 ever break-even?
2. 787 Break Even for Dummies
3. Airbus vs. Boeing, comparison of market forecasts
4. More on Boeing 787 break even
5. FC Barcelona copying Real Madrid
6. Algunas cifras de la industria cultural
7. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
8. An aircraft worth its weight in gold?
9. Boeing commercial aircraft discounts (update for 2010)
10. Beluga vs. Dreamlifter

…

190. Speech about Minifutbol
191. “Playas” in Lima
192. International Day of the Book
193. Bill Clinton endorsing Kiva (video)
194. Three centuries of confusion
195. De Feria en Feria
196. From climbing to merely walking
197. Nothing like a good red wine…
198. Opera with subtitles
199. Book review: Pirate Latitudes

I find it curious that only 3 posts of the 10 most read ones a year ago remain in the top 10 list, however 6 out of the 10 least read ones still remain in that list.

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

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NOTE: the box in the right showing “Current Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last two days, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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October 5, 2011 · 10:00 am

Corporate disconnect

Two years ago, EADS launched an engagement survey based on the proven approach offered by Gallup. In its website, Gallup offers a downloadable brochure [PDF, 0.7MB] about the survey, its questions, results and best practices.

Some of the standard questions asked to employees can be found in that brochure:

  • At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
  • In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
  • At work, my opinions seem to count.
  • In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress…

The results of the first two surveys were widely covered by the press (2009 and 2010) due to the low engagement results showed by the survey. Moral was apparently rock-bottoming. Surely, many initiatives would be launched to overcome the situation. In the end, the same brochure by Gallup offered the clue to what the best companies were doing best:

  • Strategy
  • Accountability and Performance
  • Communication
  • Development

In the last issue of the The Economist I found an entertaining article showing the disconnect between opinions at the top and the bottom of the companies. It reminded me of the big differences in the responses shown by the Gallup survey between groups of low ranking employees and top management.

I loved the following paragraph in the article that summarizes well the corporate disconnect:

Tragicomically, the study found that bosses often believe their own guff, even if their underlings do not. Bosses are eight times more likely than the average to believe that their organisation is self-governing. (The cheery folk in human resources are also much more optimistic than other employees.) Some 27% of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. Alas, only 4% of employees agree. Likewise, 41% of bosses say their firm rewards performance based on values rather than merely on financial results. Only 14% of employees swallow this.

Let’s see if the formula of Gallup it’s indeed proven return on investment.

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August 4, 2011 · 10:00 am

Personal mid-year review

At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about New Year’s resolutions and how this year I was going to take a more structured approach with them. I also explained who and how influenced me to do that.

About 3 weeks ago I started what would be my personal mid-year review and then I shared in Twitter the thought of sharing my approach with you. This is what I want to do in this post.

During some days in January, I brainstormed about what could be my objectives and the approach to be followed. In the end I selected 10 main objectives (“Become a frequent runner again”, “Read over 15 books / become eReader”, “Toastmasters: become ACB & Pres Dis AG”…). Then each of those objectives were split then in about 8-12 milestones to be achieved, each milestone driving me towards meeting the bigger goal.

For example, regarding the running, the first milestones were moderately easy ones as seen today (“Run 3 days before mid January”, “Measure several tracks where to run in TLS”, “Run 8-10 days in January”…) but they meant a great deal of breaking habits or creating new habits.

Once I had the complete list of goals and smaller milestones, I gave a weight to each of them (delivering the 7th speech towards ACB in Toastmasters was worth 12% of the “Toastmasters” goal) and a due date. If I missed the due date but met the milestone afterwards I deducted some amount out of the initial value (that means, I’ll never reach 100% at the end of the year, but if I’m close enough I’ll be more than glad!).

Spreadsheet with goals, milestones, weights, due dates...

Then I set up a kind of earned value management system to track my performance in respect to those goals. This enabled me to see how I was advancing and how I was supposed to be advancing (sure, I said a kind of as there is nothing related to the cost I incurred in achieving those goals, while the value would be assimilated to the weight).

Finally, I not only had this in written but I shared my goals with Luca. This helps in making myself more accountable with those objectives. Sure, you won’t necessarily want that everybody knows your personal objectives, neither do I. But just showing them to someone may help. To me it worked!

Every now and then I get a question from her like “When did you say you would sign up for the French course?”, “Have you already contracted the cleaning services company?”. Those reminders, together with the due dates help me a great deal in catching up with all those milestones that I keep postponing.

Of course, with some objectives I am way more advanced than with others. But let me tell you that the overall result is making me quite happy with the approach, even tough by the end of June I was way behind the schedule!

Goals achievement vs. plan (end June).

Another outcome of the mid-year review has been that I started brainstorming again with myself in order to add new milestones to previous goals (e.g. more running milestones, new trips, more speeches) and adding entirely new goals.

My humble advice: try something similar that fits you, force yourself a little bit, fight the resistance and reap the benefits down the road. See you at the year-end review!

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March 26, 2011 · 8:00 am

The 7 Minute Star (book review)

Some weeks ago I read “The Seven Minute Star”, by Florian Mueck. Florian is a fellow Toastmaster from one of the clubs in Barcelona who I met some years ago in a division conference in Madrid.

He is a very energetic speaker and I remember that he came in 2nd in the International Speech contest in that division conference. I have seen him some other times along these years. In one of those occasions, I believe in Porto, he mentioned that he was writing a book. I remember him mentioning something about some stairs, a way to the top, etc. And about a year later here I am, having read the book and writing the review.

The book is a quick guide to become a proficient public speaker by following 15 steps (confidence, transparency, first sentence, eye contact, voice, body language, visual aids, structure, rhetoric, anecdotes, quotations, humor, enthusiasm, passion, and smile). It is a very easy and enjoyable read (~100 pgs.) with lots of stories and examples. If you have no previous experience in public speaking, the book is a very informative guide.

If you are a member of Toastmasters, you may have noticed that the Toastmasters program covers many of those steps in the book, though he adds some more tips: for example, the smile (then you recall having always seen Florian smiling!) or the stress in the use of quotations (though I may disagree in the approach! I would say “read a lot and pick some quotes out of what you’ve read” instead of learning some quotes right away).

Another good point is that in the book he presents some tools he has developed, for example the “speech development template”. I recommend you to pay a visit to his website, where other tools (speech evaluation template) and analysis are available.

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If you would like to know more about Toastmasters and you happen to live in or nearby Madrid, take the opportunity to attend the Division Conference of Toastmasters next Saturday May 7th in Madrid.

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February 9, 2011 · 8:00 am

Start blogging

Today it’s been a year since I started this blog. I wrote the first post on February 9th 2010, and went live a few days later. I had been musing the idea of starting it for some months plus some people close to me encouraged me to do so as well.

In the end I decided to give it a try. Initially, I took it as a learning process: It would force me to learn what that of blogging was, some etiquette about them, etc… Few days after the starting the blog I created my Twitter account and gave it a try with some other tools… still, there are many other tools and applications that I still have to learn and use.

During those days I had the simile in my head of our previous generation: some of them are not even using the internet for as little as 10% of the things we use it for (buying things, social media, reading the papers, watching videos, etc.). It all started because some years ago they did not push themselves to try it, when it was all starting. This was what moved me to start. Who knows how the Internet will evolve from now to 10 years time? But what it is sure is that it won’t go backwards, so we better do as much as we can not to stay behind.

I just finished reading the book “Todo va a cambiar”, by Enrique Dans (in Spanish; I may write about the book soon), in the last chapters you may read the following passage:

“¿Debe […] empezar un blog? La respuesta es clara y concisa: si no lo ha hecho hasta ahora, sí”

Starting the blog is relatively easy; you just need to follow the instructions of any of the free blogging services. Continuing with it is a bit more difficult. You need to be creative, think about more or less valuable ideas that you want to transmit: During this first year I have written 120 posts, about 10 per month or one every 3 days… behind some of them there are hours, of thought, of calculations, of editing. But it has always been fun (as my brother said “you started it because you wanted to preach freely”).

It is fun to think about ideas, that later may or may not be translated into a post, while you are travelling, reading the paper, watching a video, etc. It is fun to see the statistics (over 8,000 visits during this first year), make calculations with them (for an average of 22 visits/day), it is fun to read and reply to comments, and even better to see someone recommending one of your posts.

There are many, yes, many other very good reasons for writing a blog.

Since some months ago I follow in Twitter and read the blog of Connor Neill, a professor at IESE business school. I had the chance to attend a workshop/conference by him at the Toastmasters District 59 Fall conference in Barcelona last November where he spoke about leadership. One of the pieces of advice he gave was to write every day for some time, be it 5 minutes, 500 words…

You may find a very good post in his blog that describes very well that part of his presentation about the importance of writing, where he gives up to 20 “starting questions to use for reflection”.

Should you start a blog? The answer is clear and concise: if you haven’t done it yet, yes.

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December 31, 2010 · 11:00 am

Summary of 2010

Let me share with you a brief recap of my 2010.

This was a heavy learning year, to name a few learning experiences:

  • I continued to study French,
  • Toastmasters: I delivered some speeches at Toastmasters, received the CL and ALB awards, and attended 2 District 59 conferences and 1 Division H conference.
  • I went to several EOI conferences and others, including one with the economist Robert E. Lucas who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995 and the TEDx Madrid event.
  • I read over a dozen books, many of which I commented here (being the 3 ones I liked the most these ones: first, second and third). At the end of the year I was given an eBook so I expect this trend to continue.
  • I continued to enjoy the subscription to The Economist (frankly, one of the best decisions I’ve taken in recent years) and subscribed to Scientific American for a dime.

I also had lots of fun reading and learning things related to aerospace & defence, to investments, and enjoyed supporting some charities and especially seeing some friends starting to support them as well.

Travelling. Either we together or I visited for the first time Porto, Morocco, Tunisia, Poland and Egypt. We also spent some time in Luxembourg, Brazil, Netherlands, Sevilla and France. Travelling well over 65,000 km last year (equivalent to 1.6 rounds to the Earth). Of all the places we visited, the view that I liked the most was the falls of Iguaçu, no doubt.

Javi 2.0 Encouraged by Luca and some friends I started this blog in February 2010 and a twitter account shortly afterwards. I reckon that my twitter account has become one of my biggest hobbies and sources of information apart from a communication channel with friends. I even saw some friends (here and here) and my sister starting their own blogs!

In the sports side… even though this has been a great year for Spanish sportsmen, it hasn’t been so for Real Madrid: not for the football or basketball section (being the last year I attended with the season ticket). On the personal side I competed in two championships of Minifutbol but won neither one, the same applies to paddle tournaments… the best sports moment was completing once again the San Silvestre race.

Other reasons for joy have been:

  • our friends Amalia & Paco, María & Alberto, Janine & Rients, Leyre & German got married,
  • we saw the newborns Paula and Javier, while two of our friends are pregnant today (that we know),
  • my sister finished her bachelor and continued studying a master; my brother finished his MBA and joined my company; my mother continued to take several courses.

To close the year, I got a new position within the same company in another country, where I moved a month ago. This will allow me to continue learning and experiencing new things!

I use to tell my friends and family that since long ago I feel that I enjoy more and more each coming year and am happier with time; this year, with a few bad moments included (including some sad losses), has been no exception to the trend. Thanks to all of you who contributed to it. As I say, if it continues like this, I may explode one of these years :-).

Now it’s time to make some few resolutions for 2011 as well… I have thought of 5, that if I manage to fulfill, next year’s account will be even shinier. I wish you the same: keep learning and enjoying your time.

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December 15, 2010 · 11:00 am

The best (and the worst) of the first 100 posts

Today is a symbolic day for the blog: this is its 100th post.

I started the blog in February 2010 and about 15 posts ago I thought: “what could I write about for my 100th post?”.

A reflection: To be honest, after 100 posts I still haven’t got a clear idea of which post topics you, the readers, like more and which less. What do you think? In this post, I will just give you the list of the ten most read posts and the ten least read ones…

1. An aircraft worth its weight in gold?
2. FC Barcelona copying Real Madrid
3. A Kiva success story
4. Mi adiós a Ibercaja
5. Boeing forecast for A380
6. Most common letters in English and Spanish
7. TEDxMadrid 2010
8. Venture Capital & Crowdfunding
9. 3 wishes to Nosso Senhor do Bonfim
10. My flat-renting decision process

…

90. Giving feedback at Pixar
91. From climbing to merely walking
92. Sao Paulo from the top of Banespa building
93. How rain determines olive tree economics
94. Nothing like a good red wine…
95. Speech about Minifutbol
96. Three centuries of confusion
97. Opera with subtitles
98. Book review: Pirate Latitudes
99. Book review: La Hermandad de la Sabana Santa

Some stats from this period: over 5,700 visits (~18 per day), being the day I announced that I moved to Toulouse the most visited one.

Let’s see what I’ll write in the next 100 posts…

 

NOTE: the box in the right showing “Top Posts” shows the most read ones in the last week, not the all-time most read ones (the ones above).

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