Personal branding - a necessity for happiness

Have you ever thought about personal branding? If you are en entrepreneur, I am sure you have. If you are employed, probably not. In my daily professional life, personal credibility is everything (I am a researcher). It doesn't matter how good my information is, unless people feel that I am trustworthy and exciting. My goal is to be someone other people want to listen to. I thought out the following important parts of my ME Inc. brand: 

• serious impression
• being well informed
• a good friend

Ok, so that is what I want people to think about me. I believe that when other people mention these keywords when asked to describe me, it improves my happiness. Then I lay out a strategy for implementation, or for self-branding. Taking one thing at the time:

Serious impression

• Dress well
• Use polite and articulated language
• Appear confident

Being well informed

• Read newspapers (I have a fair selection at home)
• Use RSS feeds from online news sources
• Talk to people at work about happenings
• Read work-related literature every day

Good friend

• Listen more than you talk
• Invite people out when they are not doing well
• Do fun things together with others
• Have confidence in others, show that you trust them

I could go ahead and just try to live by these guidelines. But do they work? I need to know. And, in order to know, we must measure. Therefore, I want few, but very relevant measures that are easy to track. Therefore, I want one KPI for each element  here. Take serious impression. How can I quantify my impression on other people? I could make a questionaire, but that seems redicilous and impractical. I have found that one that seems to work, at least at work :-) I count the number of people visiting me in my office during the week, and write down whether they are there for socializing or for work-related business. Then I compare the weekly ratio of work related to social visits. I won't reveal what my weekly numbers are, at least not yet. But I am generally happy with it, and I wasn't when I started doing this. Think about it, if the number of social visits is too high relative to work related ones, how can you change this without harming your friends and without killing the time you have to do real work? Bad ways of changing this KPI are:

• Telling your friends to go away (bad move)
• Have meetings all the time to discuss with colleagues (even worse move?)

These seemed stupid to me and they are. What I do, when social visits are dominiting, is that when a visitor goes pure social, I start talking about work-related stuff after he has been there for 4 minutes (unless he is actually talking about something fun, non-work-related stuff, which is seldom). That has not led to this guy stopping from coming to my office, but now he is more often than before coming to discuss work-related stuff. I have increased my seriousness factor. If you use this strategy yourself, remember to protect some socializers, or you will have a very boring day at work. Keep the most interesting ones in the "socializer" category :-)

So, how do I know how far to run this? I have chosen to do it slowly, convert socializers into professional contacts one by one until you feel more happy. Don't convert more than 2-3 per month (you need to make sure you don't overdo it or actually become a sociopath). I am happy now, and I have found a good ratio of work visitors to social visitors to be about 70%.

Of course, if work to social is increasing and I feel unhappy, I need to convert som workers to social visitors. This is more difficult than the other way around, and I have so far had no need to do so. One thing I can think of to do this is to show them a Ted lecture and discuss some funny things. They key to managing people without letting them know is to make them feel well while being managed. 

The technique is thus:

• Define your important goals
• Find a KPI that captures these goals as well as you can
• Find out how to change the KPI without conflicting your true goals
• Find a good value of the KPI to maximize happiness
• Use the actions you identified to change the KPI to adjust it to its "optimal" value

Hope someone out there will try the technique and that it helps managing their lives!

Management and implementation philoso...

Management and implementation philosophy for your life - how it started out

My professional background is as a control engineer. In addition to engineering, I have an interest in business management and how we can organize our lives to ensure happiness. In periods, especially in university, I have felt stressed about fulfilling my own expectations. I have been worried I would not be able of achieving my goals. Towards the end of my Master's degree in control engineering, I found it more challenging to determine how to stay in control of my life and my own happiness, than to solve the technical problems related to my research. Unfortunately, the research did not look good, most likely because of my stressed out state of mind. I had to deal with my inability to focus on what's important. I had to lay out a system. 

Deep down, as I was, in the theories of control engineering and performance of industrial machines under uncertainty, the natural approach for me was to take inspiration from process control when setting up a self management and motivation system. In a typical industrial process, there are several layers of decisions, separated by time (how often decisions must be made). First I explain how this system works, then how we can adapt it to less technical problems. 

At the top level in managing an industrial process is economics. Economics can be translated into a profit function, and we seek answer to the question: "how should I set up my production to maximize profit"? Using a model of the process, we can then calculate how much we should produce of our product per time (say 1000 gallons / day of diamond extract) and at what quality we should do so. This doesn't say how to do it.

An industrial process may have certain elements that are unstable. Before anything else is done, these elements should be stabilized. This is usually done using automatic control. One example of an unstable element is a tank with a drain. If we do not control the level in the tank by adding more contents, it will eventually go empty. To remedy this, in industry, we measure the level in the tank and adjust addition of more diamond extract accordingly, to ensure the tank level is within acceptable limits. 

After stabilizing all unstable elements we need to start thinking about out true goal: profit. We know how to set all decision variables (feed rates, temperatures within process equipment, etc.) to achieve optimal profit for an assumed set of conditions. Reality is, however, very uncertain. Making a plan once is not enough. Unforeseen events are going to hit our production machinery, and the question is, what to do then? Such unforeseen things can be change in the ambient temperature which can give more or less heat loss, a change in the feedstock to the process, making it necessary to add more cryptonite to get the diamond extract, et cetera. The point is, when external things change, so does the process. And the optimal way of making profit. 

There are two fundamentally different ways of looking at this:

a) we can try to estimate what all of these conditions truly are and optimize again, and then implement the new plant. Then we wait a while and repeat. In industry, this is commonly done and is known as model predictive control. It requires good understanding of the connection between our actions and their outcomes.

b) An alternative we can try, is to find things to measure that do not change much in their optimal values when the environment changes. We find something to hold constant, and when we do so, the inputs (flow rates and so on) will automatically take on their new optimal values, or at least, almost so. This strategy is often used by businesses. They call such measured variables key performance indicators (KPI).

We are going with the KPI approach. We thus have three layers; 

Optimal planning --> Adjustment based on KPI values --> Stabilization

Let us consider how we can apply this to managing how we live. Our optimal performance is most certainly related to profit, but not profit alone. The overall optimum is happiness. However, it is very hard to see the relationship between our daily decisions, and our long-term, overall happiness. We therefore divide the problem into separate problems that we hope to work with independently. When I first started thinking about happiness, I came up with a few categories that seemed important to me. Those were: 

- Love (I did have a girlfriend)

- Money (being poor is tough)

- My Master's thesis

- How others see me

I have kept all of those, and added a few more. Let us stick to those four and see how we can apply the management philosophy of industrial process to them. Let us start with the bottom one; building a reputation and adjusting your branding strategy when the social climate changes. This will be the task of our next posting. Hope to have the post ready shortly.

Life under control - new blog on self management

People today are often struggling to perform; privately, at work, in the local organizations and even when they are alone. The percieved need to be an achiever can be more than just challenging. Often, people feel bewildered and estranged, often by performance requirements set by themselves. Many of these requirements are unrealistic. Some are not reachable without a good system. When we put down goals that we cannot reach, we feel exhausted, unhappy and out of touch with society. We've all been there. I've been there. However, I've found a trick. Happiness is about systems. We need a system to organize our efforts, much like the systems used to manage companies or to control industrial processes. After all, those are processes seen to be so complex that systematic approaches are strictly necessary. This is obvioiusly true, trying to run a multi-billion-dollar corporation by intuition and no system is a sure way to ruin. But isn't life more complicated than companies are? Isn't life more complicated than industrial machines? I'd say, most definitely. What if we adapt system tools to deal with life's challenges? My experience with the system-based way of self-management has been joyfull and fruitfull. In this blog I let you in on the secret. Who knows? Maybe you will give it a shot and maybe it will make you feel more at ease and more successful. I hope you do.