Some people consider me to be handy around the home. It's quite a compliment. In an effort to help other be handy, I thought it would be a good idea to share my secrets for home handyman success.

• 5 tools from downstairs, all retrieved one at a time
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I need
• 1 new tool (price >= $20)
• 14 parts I thought I would need
• 2 hours futzing around understanding the issue
• 2 minutes calculating whether it actually would be cheaper to call a professional.
• 1 trip to Canadian tire to get what I actually need
• 1 idea to rip it all out and "do it properly" -- tried and abandoned
• 1 other job done as a procrastination tactic
• 2 parts that I really did need, usually one of which is improvised from junk I have around home (see I was keeping that for a reason!)
• 15 minutes actually fixing the problem

And yes, Joanna, the sink is now fixed.

The amangement team at work, decided that in the interest of self improvement, we would start a book club. The GM, Bobbi, had done it at a previous workplace and found it to be a good way to get people on the same page. I personally always seem to have one more book that I'd like to read then I can read, and often find that months have passed since I've finished any books, so a little work related pressure was welcome.

Winning, by Jack Welch. Jack Welch was the CEO of GE for a very long time (81-01), and during some pretty successful years. I've never really heard much about him, likely because I was still working my way through university when he retired.

The book is basically addressed to management types and aims to impart Jack's experiences as a manager and the technique that he found worked well. Suffice to say that his experience was always with a company multiples times bigger than RevenueWire but hopefully the principles scale down.

So my three take aways from the book "Strategy is just a general direction, then you have to implement like hell" Having done a few strategy sessions now, I do feel the weight of this sentence. The plan, even a great plan, is just a plan. It is going to require dogged effort to bring the pieces of even the simplest plan into being.

"Candor" - This is the quality of having open and honest communication with your staff and partners that is completely devoid of sugar coating. This is one that I am trying to take to heart. A change to simply be as positively straight forward as humanly possible. Leave no room for mis-understandings. Being a straight shooter might mean delivering news people don't want to hear. But better to deliver bad news without uncertainty than to deliver ambiguous news and then later confirm people it (or worse, leave them hanging).

"Keep the hierarchy as flat as possible." Jack recommends every manager should have 10 direct reports (or more if they are good). After some discussion, it was clarified, that in bigger companies the managers just manage. They don't actually do any on-the-ground work themselves. That helped me understand. Lord knows with so many direct reports there really would be hardly any time left over for anything beyond simply managing the people. The thing that I did like about this idea was from the companies perspective it really does create enough resources (at least ten people) to be able to give the workers the time to simply work and (hopefully) not be subject to meeting after meeting doing metawork as the manager holds that responsibility. (Picture Credit to CanadaGood

The book had many other good nuggets, and plenty of anecdotes from Jack's time at GE, which were quite interesting. If you're interested in some fairly clearly written (and undoubtedly effective) guidelines for management, it's a good read. Particularly if you're part of a big organization.

In an interesting turn of motivation about a week before I had finished reading my last book (Winning by Jack Welch) I started reading Rework. Partially my motivation to get started on the new book was to get ahead of the rest of the class, but partially it was just because the style of writing was so much more conversational (read interesting). The book is full of bold statements, many of which seem like they amount to common business sense for our time. And the times have changed like I read in Here Comes Everybody The internet is changing the costs associated with doing things and the capital and investment required to get attention. I totally enjoyed reading it and I hope to read less and start chronicling my personal doings as opposed to just my reflections on other peoples writings about what they have done.

The book is broken down into thoughts (2 or 3 pages), which are collected together to make chapters on productivity, promotion, culture, hiring ... Really tough to draw out highlights, everythird page is kind of a highlight, but here's a couple.

Pouring yourself into your product is the easiest way to avoid trouble from the competition. Cause personality, that is hard to replicate and people want to feel like they have a real connection with some one.

"Making decisions is making progress" that's one that struck me pretty hard. As I have a tendency to try and obsess over making the right decision. A like the idea of deciding doing and getting feedback quickly, doesn't everyone? But it seems so often we get stuck making long long term plans which may or may not come to be and then having to change those plans later anyways, or they just get forgotten. We're trying a one-page-plan strategy at work right now. Certainly keeps the plan short in length. Hopefully, it'll also keep the plan front of mind and achievable. I'll keep you posted.

One of the more generalized ideas I took out of the book, is that there are a lot of conceptions about what a great business is (and isn't) and those guidelines might not fit your business at all. As a consequence, it is likely best to just ignore the preconceived notions about what a business ought to look like and just focus on what is right for this business. This kind of taps into my long standing dislike for the professionalization of everything (ie I'm not able to fix my leaking tap, I need a professional to do that... baloney!) and applies it to business. I like that. I liked a lot about this book, it's a great tool for occasionally kicking one's own butt into action. (Mr. Think #6 by eaubscene)

In a fit of healthy inspiration, I've sworn off sugar for a month. I simply love sugar just a little more than I'm comfortable with, so for the sake of trying to loosen my addiction to it. No white death for a month, starting April 25th, 2010. The recent January/February Nutrition Action issue was pointing out the possible downsides of eating too much sugar, namely getting fat, increasing blood pressure, etc which I'll admit was a factor as well.

Parameters: Avoid Most of the Added Sugar

Cutting sugar out of my life entirely is going to be pretty much impossible as sugar is in everything. I'm aiming to limit myself to things that have 5g of sugar per serving. I'm not generally a label looker so I'm sure that I'll be making a lot judgement calls on the fly at time, but hey this is just an excercise and I'm pretty sure that I can see the sugar coming in at least 70% of the food that I eat and avoid it. Of course anything with natural sugar (hello fruit) is going to be fair game for eating.

Apparently, I'm not even close to the being the first person to give this a try. But this is this first time that I've ever tried to cut back my sugar intake.

Sweet Results

What am I expecting? If I felt significantly different I'd be a bit surprised. Mostly, I'm hoping to break the cravings that I have for sugar each morning, noon and night. It would be nice if I built up the self control to not eat the three jujubes left on the counter from the night before at 7:30 in the morning after I just finished breakfast. I would call that progress.

I'm also interested to see what happens when I'm forced by social situations to refrain from eating dessert or some other treat.
I'll keep you posted if I find anything else that is interesting in this experiment.