Leadership Archives

Let’s Invest in Minnesota’s Future

Minnesota’s low temperatures and high taxes don’t make our state the easiest place to do business. Yet, our world-class workforce has made Minnesota a hub for innovation and economic growth. While I think we can and should do more to address other barriers to growth (at least the tax climate), we should start by preserving our biggest advantage—the quality of our people—which is threatened by rhetoric and policies that discourage international students from attending our colleges and universities.

The fact is nearly 70% of Twin Cities college graduates stay in the metropolitan area after graduation. As our current population continues to age, Minnesota businesses need access to talented people from around the world to keep pace.

Unfortunately, instead of looking for ways to attract the world’s best and brightest, the president obsesses about building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to keep out immigrants. It’s not surprising that many top foreign-born students are choosing to skip the U.S. of their own accord—with negative consequences for our economy, particularly our engineering and technology sectors. I’m referring to international students at U.S. colleges and universities who used to come here in record numbers to study STEM subjects.

In 2018, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities ranked 21st of all leading institutions in the country hosting international students, with 7,212 international students. That number has decreased to 5,500 international students today. This distressing higher education trend is happening nationwide.

Why are the world’s brightest students skipping the U.S.?

“Many schools attributed the trend to problems with student visa delays and denials, as well as the U.S. social and political climate and student decisions to enroll outside the United States,” reported the Washington Post (11/13/18). With some education leaders noting, “Trump’s advocacy of immigration restrictions, travel bans and a U.S.-Mexico border wall is not helping the nation compete for academic talent in the global market.”
As foreign-born students say “no thanks” to what they perceive as a hostile United States, many are saying “yes” to higher education institutions in Canada and Australia. Their gain is our loss.

These are deeply disturbing trends to owners of IT consulting firms like me. We compete on a global basis and losing access to some of the world’s most talented science and technology students and professionals is a major blow.

And you should be worried too. Not only do these foreign-born students help grow the U.S. IT industry—IT workers represent about 2.9 percent of the U.S. workforce says the U.S. Census Bureau—but when they stay and start new businesses they create good jobs for people born in the U.S.

There’s another worrisome side effect of this growing trend: the loss of millions of dollars in tuition payments at American colleges and universities, including our own U of M. Since foreign-born students pay higher rates than U.S. students, their tuition dollars are vital to keeping costs lower for students here. If current trends continue, the next state budget might need to include funding support for struggling state colleges and universities.

Leaders in Washington appear to live in a U.S.-centric bubble these days, but here in Minnesota (and the rest of the country) it’s one highly competitive global economy. We need to do everything possible to make foreign-born students feel welcome at our colleges and universities.

Avoiding the Downside of Too Much Focus

In a previous post, Train Your Brain, I shared ideas on focus and productivity. On this post, let’s pivot (a very popular word in today’s biz world) 180 degrees and address too much focus.

Sound like an oxymoron? Not at all says Srini Pillay, an executive coach, author, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and CEO of the NeuroBusiness Group. With those credentials, I decided his thesis deserved consideration – even though I’m a big believer in focus (see my last post!).

Writes Pillay in “Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus” in a special edition of Harvard Business Review, “. . .excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose self-control. This can make you more impulsive and less helpful. As a result, decisions are poorly thought out, and you become less collaborative.”

Yikes.

Before you throw out all the deadlines and head to the beach, listen to the rest of Pillay’s message: “The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions.”

In other words, balance!

Pillay’s thesis goes on to encourage this healthy brain balance with a few tips (I’ll spare you the technical details):

Use positive constructive daydreaming or PCD. – Unlike the garden variety goofing off or simply tuning out, PCD is intentional and, when done consistently, trains your brain to pull out the bits and pieces you may have forgotten but that can contribute to your creativity and ability to solve problems. This sounds a lot like lucid dreaming, which also involves consciously using your mind while you’re in an unconscious state.

Take a nap – There are a lot of theories about napping, but here is what Mr. Pillay has to say: “Not all naps are the same. When your brain is in a slump, your clarity and creativity are compromised. After a 10-minute nap, studies show that you become much clearer and more alert. But if you have a creative task in front of you, you will need a full 90 minutes for more complete brain refreshing to make more associations and dredge up ideas that are in the nooks and crannies of your memory network.”

Pretend to be someone else – Ok, I have to admit this last tip seems a bit far out to me. But on reflection I realized it’s just a slightly updated version of the old advice to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” to get a new perspective. The author playfully calls this “psychological halloweenism” and advises imagining yourself as a “eccentric poet rather than a rigid librarian.” In other words, find a way to get out of your own head and into someone else’s. It just might unlock your thinking and help you to find new ideas and ways out of problems you had not imagined previously.

According to Pillay, most of us spend nearly half of our days “with our minds wandering away from a task at hand,” but he adds, “if we build PCD, naps and psychological halloweenism into our days, we can preserve focus for when we need it and use it much more efficiently. Most important, unfocus can allow us to update information in the brain, giving us access to the deeper parts of ourselves and enhancing our agility, creativity and decision making.”

Train Your Brain

If you’ve read my book, The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership, or just read my posts here from time to time, you know I highly value work-life balance. In fact, that’s the topic of the very first chapter in The 100. Achieving balance means working efficiently, having discipline and knowing how to prioritize and focus.

A recent special edition of Harvard Business Review (sort of an HBR “Best of”) includes an intriguing article, ‘Train Your Brain to Focus” by Paul Hammerness and Margaret Moore (co-authors of the book, Organize Your Life, Organize Your Mind: Train Your Brain to Get More Done in Less Time).

I read it with relish and indulged in a bit of guilty pleasure when some of my own long-held views were validated by research. Chiefly, multi-tasking is a myth. Sure, you can try to do multiple things at once, but there’s a price. As Hammerness and Moore report “. . . (multi-tasking) makes us more likely to make mistakes and miss important information and cues, and less likely to retain information in our working memory, which impairs problem solving and creativity.”

So when you tell your kids to turn off the video games while doing their homework, you’re not being a curmudgeon – you’re teaching them an important lesson in training their brains to focus. When it comes to your team, you can insist on distraction-free meetings—ban laptops, mobile phones, tablets and other gadgets. They might resist, but when creativity and thoughtful input increases you’ll know you’re on the right track.

Easy enough, right? Sure, when you control all the variables. But life often throws us—and our employees—curveballs: events that trigger emotions like anxiety, sadness, anger and more. Functional brain images reveal that these negative emotions make it extremely difficult to solve problems or do other cognitive work.

But the authors offer a useful exercise to help keep our brains on task when negativity threatens to derail our focus and it’s as easy as A-B-C. They advise:

Awareness of your options. You can stop what you’re doing and address the distraction, or you can let it go.
Breathe deeply and consider your options.
Choose thoughtfully: stop or go?

Only a monster boss would expect any employee to keep cranking when a loved dies or similarly devastating news is received. But less drastic negative events can be managed, the authors argue, by taking the time to decide how to react, versus simply reacting.

I also appreciated their practical advice to start meetings with a bit of humor (not that I’d ever tell a joke myself of course!). Turns out “positive emotions improve everyone’s brain function, leading to better teamwork and problem solving.”

Who knew?

Next time: Avoiding the Downside of Too Much Focus

Software Development: Making Software Development Centers Work

Last time I shared a bit about the concept of Development Centers for software development. Because we effectively use this model at my firm – we call it “The Intertech Way” – I thought I would share the best practices for making it work.

The fundamental criteria for an effective Dev Center model is using defined methodology (and following it, of course!). I recommend several levels of leadership to ensure that the younger professionals (think of them as apprentices) are supported at every project level and, most importantly, that clients or end users (if you are interested in using the Dev Center model within your corporate IT department) receive quality software on time and within budget. Levels of accountability within your Dev Center might look like this:

Delivery Manager to ensure a standard process is followed on all projects and that quality standards have been met before project delivery.
Director of Consulting to ensure that each apprentice is paired with a dedicated senior professional
Dev Center Manager to mentor, help bolster technical skills, and to ensure all apprentices can operate at a consistently high technical level.

Maybe you will want a slightly different organizational structure in your Dev Center, but the key is to ensure you have more than simply a senior professional paired with an apprentice. The other roles are necessary to ensuring that younger team members develop consistency in their skills and the overall process they use to make software. We have found this model is working well and consistently results in turnkey solutions.

When I began this series of posts on the perils and challenges of software development, I lamented the high level of failed IT projects and my theory that offshore development is largely to blame. I noted that instead of providing a cheap, fast turnkey solution, offshore software projects frequently are bedeviled by poor management, confusion about team roles, and quality standards well below what U.S. companies (and consumers) expect. (In fairness to lower-paid offshore IT professionals, language barriers, and time zone and cultural differences are tough hurdles to overcome.)

And yet many are holding tight to the offshore model hoping to save money. Ironically, instead of cost savings, we’re now seeing costs shift from the actual development work to the writing of requirements and quality assurance – and development takes longer because of the time lag in communication when team members are located around in the world and in different time zones. Also, not surprisingly, people writing such detailed requirements must be more advanced (i.e., expensive) to anticipate issues a lesser-skilled developer might face during a project.

The only true benefit with off-shore development is that it forces business leaders to think holistically about what they expect from an application on the front end. That helps to prevent costly changes in mid-stream. But the negatives of off-shore development still outweigh the benefits.

I’m convinced that guided learning and mentoring, in the matrixed leadership approach I described above, allows younger developers to be exposed to every aspect of a project (a good way to build your department’s expertise) while providing the guidance from deeply experienced IT professionals – and the level of accountability necessary for quality outcomes. With an offshore model or a completely outsourced model, however, there is no accountability at the individual level where it matters most.

Archive for category: Leadership

Let’s Invest in Minnesota’s Future

Avoiding the Downside of Too Much Focus

Train Your Brain

Top 2018 Posts, Articles, and Resources

Software Development: Making Software Development Centers Work