One of the most valuable military tactics.Involves “personally seeing the front line” before making decisions—not always relying on advisors, maps, and reports, all of which can be either faulty or biased. Seeing the Front improves the quality of insights.

Seeing the Front

A type of warfare in which two parties have different military capabilities or methods of war.In such a case, the weak party must take advantage of its special advantages or the opponent’s weaknesses in order to have any opportunity to achieve its goals.

Asymmetric Warfare

Occurs when opposing forces approach two geographically separate fronts in order to divide and disperse the defenders troops, and create logistical difficulties.WW2 was a good example: Germany was forced to defend two front's when they became enemies with Russia.

Two-Front War

Various tactics and strategies used to combat armed insurgency (violent, armed war against authority waged by small forces).It's the blend of comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to simultaneously contain insurgency and address its root causes.

Counterinsurgency

A situation where two parties are in a stalemate, and neither can make a move without causing their own destruction.Paradoxically, the stronger two opponents become, the less likely they may be to destroy one another.

Mutually Assured Destruction

An armed conflict between two states or non-state actors which act on the instigation or on behalf of other parties that are not directly involved in the hostilities.Example: Cuban Missile Crisis

Proxy War

A form of warfare where small groups of soldiers, such as paramilitary or armed civilians use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run tactics, and mobility, to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military.

Guerilla Warfare

Involves deliberately attracting enemies to a location where they are more vulnerable, like attracting flies to flypaper, usually also directing them far away from your valuable assets.For example, U.S. ground forces in Iraq preventing attacks on U.S. soil.

Flypaper Theory

Armies by default use strategies, tactics, and technology that worked for them in the past (last war).The problem is that what was most useful for the last war may not be best for the next one. This can mean smaller forces prevail with better tactics.

Fighting the Last War

You go to war with the army you have. They’re not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.Organizations hardly ever have perfect resources, but they can't always afford to wait until they have better ones before moving forward.

Rumsfeld's Rule

Stashed ideas

10 important concepts in Military Strategy & War

Saying the word ‘like’ has long been seen as a sign of laziness and stupidity. But its use is actually richly nuanced, goes back to Shakespearean times, and is an indicator of, like, intelligence.<ul><li>People say language is random, but it's not.</li><li>There are patterns in language that you can't just stick a like in anywhere.</li><li>Research suggests that the discourse particle "like" is used more by men than women.</li><li>The word like adds nothing to the meaning of a sentence</li></ul>

We Say LIKE, A Lot

The word like helps with what we call focus. It can be for interpersonal connection, it's checking in that you and I are connecting. If it really were meaningless and had no purpose in a sentence, it would be much easier for us to leave it out.In 2019, one primary school head in Bradford banned the word like because, "When children are giving you an answer and they say, 'Is it, like, when you're, like...' they haven't actually made a sentence at all."Scores of recruitment specialists and public-speaking coaches have publicly bemoaned the rise of this word.

Like, Helping In Sentence Building

Saying the word ‘like’ has long been seen as a sign of laziness and stupidity. But its use is actually richly nuanced, goes back to Shakespearean times, and is an indicator of, like, intelligence

Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

The ability to be resilient is not just a mindset thing: It is an execution thing.

Understanding resilience

Organisations that have some healthy paranoia, where they're constantly looking for threats and opportunities become resilient. Adversity can come from unforeseen market conditions or from internal conditions.  But resilient organisations plan for those things. The more engaged the workforce is, the more resilient the organisation will be to overcome adversity.

Workplace resilience

A quick take on building resilience in the workplace from Brent Gleeson – former Navy SEAL, author, and founder of TakingPoint Leadership. Get the full lesson from Brent Gleeson for your business: https://bigthink.com/plus/ How is a boardroom like a battleground? Both spaces require communication, collaboration, and a high degree of mental toughness. In an article for Forbes, Gleeson wrote that his experience in combat gave him, “a highly valuable and applicable set of tools that translated well to entrepreneurship and leadership in business.” Of course, most people aren't fighting life-or-death battles at their desks every day – but they do face unique and complex challenges. On top of their normal job responsibilities, today's workforce is grappling with an ongoing global pandemic, political polarization, the effects of climate change, and the day-to-day stressors of balancing work and home life. In such uncertain and chaotic times, why are some employees able to thrive while others are barely scraping by? The difference often lies in their capacity to quickly recover from difficulties, a skill that can be taught in the workplace through resilience training.  See the full article on building resilience, here: https://bigthink.com/articles/resilience-training/ Follow Big Think+ -LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/big-think-plus -Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthinkplus -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigthinkplus

Building resilience in the workplace | Brent Gleeson

Work often happens through informal structures, rather than through formal organizational structures. And so, collaboration cannot be understood by looking solely at these formal structures.Connectivity involves how your employees are connected through tasks, cross-functional projects, ad-hoc teams, goals, and different technologies across formal and informal channels. Connectivity is often taken for granted and poorly understood by leaders. Mapping out your organization's connectivity is the first step to understanding how work actually happens and is key to achieving organizational clarity.

Connectivity is the first driver of clarity

It involves ensuring that your employees understand and are able to track how their work contributes to broader company goals, as well as your company mission. This understanding is ever fleeting in organizations today. Your employees also need visibility into their work output and they should have the tools to measure this output over time. Technologies that meaningfully assess workload distribution are key for gaining visibility into work output. This type of visibility will enable you and your employees to pinpoint when task, project, and goal performance are veering off track.

Provide visibility

As we embark on new ways of work, it's no longer about executing the greatest volume of tasks--it's about doing the right tasks in the best possible way. Efficiency is enabled by both connectivity and visibility. Peak efficiency happens when employees are connected across different tasks, projects, and geographic and functional silos. And it is fueled by visibility. Visibility into how work happens enables you to build workflows and integrations that leverage automation and AI to empower more efficient work.

Encourage efficiency

The Reason Your Organization Is Underperforming? A Lack of Clarity

Many people see time management as a priority. That means allocating specific times to particular tasks to maximise productivity. But there's a difference between organising time to enhance productivity and viewing it as a goal in itself to define a life well spent. Experts suggest some tasks don't fit into the time management grid. When you are spending time with family or a leisure activity, productivity is not a goal. Hyper-organisation can also have emotional consequences, particularly when it doesn't go according to plan.

The limits of time management

Time management started to gain traction when we began to believe that time equals money. Some tasks don't fit well into scheduling. Tightly scheduling some intellectual tasks can decrease performance and scheduling fun tasks can rob us of their spontaneity and enjoyment.

Why some tasks don't suit scheduling

Too much optimisation can affect how we see time and impact our emotions. <ul><li>When our schedules are disrupted, it can trigger anxiety and annoyance. But if we see interruptions as time worthy, we may see them as beneficial.</li><li>Research also shows over-scheduling can make us feel like we have less time. For example, if we have a meeting scheduled at a particular time, the hours before the meeting will feel insufficient, as if time shrinks towards the task.</li><li>Research suggests feelings of time scarcity reduce our capacity to care about other people.</li></ul>

The emotional impact of over-optimisation

Targeted strategies<ul><li>Perform work tasks back-to-back, then leave large blocks of time unscheduled.</li><li>View the hour before a meeting as enough time to do something, not as wasted time.</li></ul> Reframing how we understand the concept of time management.<ul><li>Use time-tracking as a means to an end.</li><li>Different approaches will fit different personality types. Find what works for you.</li></ul> Giving power back to ourselves as the creators of our schedules instead of letting our schedules rule our lives.<ul><li>Find a happy medium between structured and unstructured time.</li><li>Know what you manage your time for.</li></ul>

Redefining time management

We all want to be more productive. But research shows that schedules don't suit some tasks – and can even make us enjoy them less.

Why hyper-organisation can backfire

James Suzman's book titled Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots examines our fixation with being productive, diving into the reason we are working hard in the first place.
Modern work, according to the author, is analogous with farming, which fundamentally changed our relationship with time, land, history and each other.

Our Fixation On Productivity

The earlier hunter-gatherers were working less but it was by itself a satisfying means to an end, as their work fed them all and required nerves, energy, intelligence and agility. Much like a sport, they were relaxed and able to enjoy afterwards. 
They were tough, adaptive and rustic, tuned with their environment which was routinely hostile.

Early Hunter Gatherers

When people started the farming activity, it was a full-time job with constant issues that needed their attention: lack of water, bugs, bad weather etc.
The concept of dependency, scarcity and surplus became known to man after decades of trial and error with crop failures and weather cycles.

Crops And Farming

It was only when people started seeing scarcity and the various vulnerabilities and risks with farming did they start to value history and the concept of time. They learned to diversify their farming investment so that poor rainfall or too much of it does not spoil all of their efforts.
Farming changed the concept of engaging with the world where the value of something can increase or decrease with scarcity or surplus, something no one had ever thought of before.

The Concept Of Time And Security

The worldview of work, for instance, has changed drastically, with concepts like universal basic income finding mainstream acceptance and even trial runs. 
The productivity-obsessed cycle is now on the verge of being broken, as 21st Century capitalism has issues about inequality and wastage of produce, which are worse than imagined.

The Affluent Society

While countryside people focus on producing, metro cities have experts for handling the expenditure of energy using the power of money. The rich are using capitalism to attain maximum power, success and wealth, always striving for more.
The advertising industry continues to push in our throats the things we don’t need, as many people have started to see the whole ecosystem rearing its ugly head.

Monopolizing, Manipulating And Controlling: Capitalism Is At Its Peak

In his new book Work, anthropologist James Suzman finds some surprising, historical reasons for why we work the way we do.

Time Management

Our Collective Fixation on Productivity Is Older Than You Think

Your to-do list should be an extension of your mind. It's a way of storing away tomorrow's work so that you can focus on what you have to do today.
However, if we don't regularly tidy up our list, it can get cluttered. Instead of a reliable to-do list, it can become a cumbersome task in itself that cease to fulfil the function it was designed for. Learning from Marie Kondo, we can declutter our task list in a similar way she tidies physical belongings.

Decluttering a to-do list

"To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose."

We can't know what is worth doing if we don't know where we are going.
<ul>
<li>Before touching any clutter, visualise what it would mean to have a clutter-free to-do list. Maybe you want to have a successful business, or get in shape.</li>
<li>Then identify why you want to get in shape or have a successful business. Write down your "why". This is what you will use to determine if a task is worth doing.</li>
<li>Break your vision down into several goals for each area of your life, and create a task for each.</li>
</ul>

Before you start, consider your destination

Your to-do list may be stuffed with half-baked ideas, empty projects, and tasks you forgot to check off. Make a complete inventory of all the tasks and projects on your to-do list. Then see what you can delete. The purpose is to cut away the nonessential to make space for what's important to you now.
As you do your inventory, ask yourself:
<ul>
<li>Does this task bring you closer to the life you want to live?</li>
<li>Some items you have to keep, such as doing your taxes.</li>
<li>If you don't want to let go of long-standing tasks, such as writing a book, save it in a "Maybe later" file and archive it.</li>
</ul>

Discard first

Now that you have the right tasks, it's time to sort and organize. Every task on your to-do list should be related to your goal.
<ul>
<li>Keep your projects visible. Seeing every project you've committed to keeps you from adding too many.</li>
<li>Sequence your tasks in a logical order before you get to work.</li>
<li>Add priorities. Some tasks are more important to your goal.</li>
<li>Give each task a due date. As a rule of thumb, estimate how long a task will take, then double it.</li>
<li>Ensure your to-do list sparks joy. Consider the wording, colour theme and emojis.</li>
</ul>

Give every task a place

Once your task list is clear and aligned with your goals, take steps to keep it clear.
<ul>
<li>For every new task that comes to your to-do list, ask if it leads to your vision. If not, discard it immediately.</li>
<li>Unhelpful tasks will sneak in from time to time. Weed them out with a weekly review so you can start each week with a clearly prioritised to-do list.</li>
<li>Check in on your big-picture every few months.</li>
</ul>

Change your mindset first, then your habits

Taking a cue from Marie Kondo, you can declutter your task list in the same way she tidies physical belongings, with the help of Todoist.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your To-Do List

...means getting more out of the limited time you have each day. It’s one of the cornerstones of productivity and once you know how to properly prioritize, it can help with everything from your time management to work life balance.

Learning how to prioritize...

Capture everything on a Master List and then break it down by monthly, weekly, and daily goals.<ol><li>Start by making a master list—a document, app, or piece of paper where every current and future task will be stored. </li><li>Once you have all your tasks together, break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.</li><li>When setting your priorities, try not to get too “task oriented” - you want to make sure you’re prioritizing the more effective work.</li></ol>

Master lists

The matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that answers that helps you separate “urgent” tasks from “important” ones:<ul><li>Urgent and Important: Do these tasks as soon as possible</li><li>Important, but not urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and schedule it</li><li>Urgent, but not important: Delegate these tasks to someone else</li><li>Neither urgent nor important: Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible.</li></ul>

Eisenhower Matrix

Rank your work by its true priority with the Ivy Lee Method:<ol><li>At the end of each work day, write down the 6 most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. </li><li>Prioritize those 6 items  n order of their true importance.</li><li>When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the next one.</li><li>Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.</li><li>Repeat this process every working day.</li></ol>

The Ivy Lee Method

Instead of keeping all tasks on a single level of priority, this method offers two or more levels for each task:<ul><li>Go through your list and give every task a letter from A to E (A being the highest priority)</li><li>For every task that has an A, give it a number which dictates the order you’ll do it in</li><li>Repeat until all tasks have letters and numbers.</li></ul>

The ABCDE method

Once you’ve prioritized your most important work, it’s time to actually choose how to attack the day.How you start the day sets the tone for the rest of it. And often, getting a large, hairy, yet important task out of the way first thing gives you momentum, inspiration, and energy to keep moving.

Set the tone of the day by “Eating the frog”

Cut out “good enough” goals with Warren Buffett’s 2-list strategy.<div><ol><li>Write down your top 25 goals: life goals, career goals, education goals, or anything else you want to spend your time on.</li><li>Circle your top 5 goals on that list.</li><li>Finally, any goal you didn’t circle goes on an “avoid at all cost” list. These are the tasks that are seemingly important enough to deserve your attention. But that aren’t moving you towards your long-term priorities.</li></ol></div>

Warren Buffett’s 2-list strategy

Humans are especially susceptible to the “sunk cost fallacy”—a psychological effect where we feel compelled to continue doing something just because we’ve already put time and effort into it.But the reality is that no matter what you spend your time doing, you can never get that time back. And any time spent continuing to work towards the wrong priority is just wasted time.

The sunk cost fallacy

One of the biggest struggles in the modern workplace is knowing how to prioritize work. Workloads are ballooning and everything feels important. However, the truth is that a lot of the work we do every day doesn't really need to be done. At least not right away.

Practical Methods To Prioritize Work

How to Prioritize Work: 7 Practical Methods for When "Everything is Important"

<ul><li> Something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of success regardless of the immediate outcome.</li><li>A collection of goals, tools, habits, and methods is not the same as a purposeful system. </li><li>A working system allows you to reduce your tasks to a manageable set of inputs and outputs, and establish some predictability.  </li></ul>

A system is...

<ul><li>If you do something every day, it’s a system. </li><li>If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.</li></ul>

Systems vs. goals

“When you focus on the practice instead of the performance, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time.”

<ul><li>Take yourself mentally from step one all the way to the final step. </li><li>At each step, ask yourself what tools, resources, information, or people you might need access to. </li><li>Put them in a designated space or build in the easiest possible method for getting what you need when you need it. </li><li>As part of the system, plan a regular time to restock the consumable resources that the system requires.</li></ul>

To build an effective system...

Most people have a standard working week of 40 hours (eight hours a day). 4 efficient and productive weeks of 40 hours give you 160 hours a month. That's 160 hours you can use to get more things done every month. Chances are those hours are not being used efficiently.

Want to do 160 Productive Hours a Month? You Need Systems, Not Goals

A lot of the internal things that affect our productivity are out of our control. Our energy, focus, and motivation follow their own path or “productivity curve” throughout the day.  <ul><li>Fighting against your personal productivity curves leads to overwork, feeling overwhelmed, and burnout.</li><li>If you learn to work with your natural peaks and valleys, it can tell you exactly when you should schedule each part of your day.</li></ul>

Personal Productivity Curves

We’re naturally more energetic and motivated at specific times of the day. Researchers call this our Circadian Rhythm. Every person’s rhythm is slightly different, but the majority follow a similar pattern.<ul><li>Waking up. Our energy levels start to naturally rise.</li><li>Around 10 am. We’ve hit our peak concentration levels that start to decline and dip between 1-3 pm.</li><li>Afternoon.  Our energy levels rise again until falling off again sometime between 9–11 pm.</li></ul>

Energy curves

We work best in natural cycles of 90-120 minute sessions before needing a break. When we need a break, our bodies send us signals, such as becoming hungry, sleepy, fidgeting, or losing focus. If you ignore these signs and think you can just work through them, your body uses your reserve stores of energy to keep up. It means releasing stress hormones to give an extra kick of energy.

90 Minute Cycles

Studies have found we’re actually more effective when we’re stressed. Up to a point.The right amount of stress at the right time can make us more productive. This requires awareness of your stress levels and how they’re affecting the work at hand.

Stress curves

There’s a simple curve to how email usage affects our productivity. No email = OK productivity. But as we start to use more email, we become more productive thanks to more access to information and collaboration. But this only works to a point.Once you cross that threshold, more email usage drops productivity to a point where nothing gets done.

Communication curves

How to design the perfect day based on your productivity curves.<ul><li>Discover your daily energy/motivation curve. </li><li>See when you’re hitting your communication threshold. You might want to schedule specific times to check email, like during a break in the morning and again in the afternoon.</li></ul>

When to work

How many times have you started a day on a motivational high, only to hit the dreaded 2pm crash and never recover? Not all hours of the working day are equal. And unless you're some sort of productivity super-being, you more than likely end up riding a rollercoaster of motivation, energy, and focus as the day progresses.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Cash
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10 important concepts in Military Strategy & War

Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

Building resilience in the workplace | Brent Gleeson

The Reason Your Organization Is Underperforming? A Lack of Clarity

Why hyper-organisation can backfire

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Cash @cas_cas

10 important concepts in Military Strategy & War

Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?

Building resilience in the workplace | Brent Gleeson

The Reason Your Organization Is Underperforming? A Lack of Clarity

Why hyper-organisation can backfire

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Cash
@cas_cas