Saturday, September 01, 2007

An attention economy inside the firm- end to the attention robbers!

Information is growing at unprecedent volumes. Organizational complexity driven by the need to compete in global markets is also growing at very rapid pace. We're in the process of adapting our enterprise models to a new reality.

What is the scarcest resource in the new environment? Our attention.

I think that our companies should have a mechanism to punish the attention robbers. Here are some examples (you can think about the punish yourself):
1- Those who write endless emails, instead of taking the time and effort of making it short, clear and concise. Why do they assume we have the time to read them?
2- Those who cc everyone in the emails they send just to get noticed. Without asking for it, they require you to devote part of your attention to reading it and then deciding that it was useless for you.
3- Those who celebrate meetings where the outcome for you is zero. Why did they ask you to go in the first place?
4- Those who start the exposition of an issue to be solved with their opinion, instead of starting with the facts. Why don't you let me get to the conclusions myself? It's going to be shorter than listening to your conclusion and crawling back to understand the facts to then get to my own conclusion anyway.
5- Those who IM you or text you with no real issue. They force you to adopt defensive mechanisms like not using IM and just trusting that any real important stuff will find you.

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