I have subscribed to Seth Godin's blog and i like his posts. They are succinct and to the point. The below post titled ' What's high school for' talks about what high school's should teach. I have given some of the points from the post.
- How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.
- How to read critically.
- The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.
- An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.
- How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.
- Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.
- Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.
- An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.
- The self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.
According to me, the list covers almost all points that, if they were taught, would make our schools great places of learning.
I share it here because i believe this is an useful reminder/checklist for those of us who still want to learn these skills. For those of us who have kids, this is an useful reference list to what we might want our sons/daughters to learn/ be taught.
Seth's blog is here.
Came across this interesting post in HBR titled 'Better Time Management is not the answer'. I find it interesting because of the following points mentioned in the article.
# Management in reality is fragmented and reactive by nature.
# Great bosses dont compartmentalize between handling unexpected problems and doing what they need to do as managers. Instead they follow the strategy of dividing everything that they do into 3 steps.
- Prepare to act
- Act and
- Check the outcome
The idea mentioned above may sound simple and rightly so and is also very powerful. Practicing this idea of splitting every task into 3 steps forces managers to *NOT* act blindly from the perspective of getting it out of their plate; but actually ensures that the problem is *really* solved or concrete steps or taken towards a solution, by spending that extra moment in preparing to act.
I also believe smart managers take the lesson from the outcome and ensure that the lesson becomes a part of their 'preparation to act' for similar problems that they come across in the future. This over a period of time becomes their knowledge base.
When i think further about this, i think of the above as a subset of Deming Cycle or the PDCA cycle. Not that i want to complicate a simple post, but just to point out that great ideas can be applied even for the everyday tasks that we do.
The complete HBR article can be read here.
