How to Do Great Work | How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It | How to Debate Ideas Productively at Work

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You Might Like � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium How to Do Great Work - Paul Graham    If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it. Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the intersection. And one thing this exercise shows is that it does have a definite shape; it's not just a point labelled "work hard." The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious. The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. Continued here How You Define the Problem Determines Whether You Solve It - Harvard Business Review    New innovations can seem like they come out of nowhere. How could so many people have missed the solution to the problem for so long? And how in the world did the first person come up with that solution at all? In fact, most people who come up with creative solutions rely on a relatively straightforward method: finding a solution inside the collective memory of the people working on the problem. That is, someone working to solve the problem knows something that will help them find a solution — they just haven’t realized yet that they know it. When doing creative problem solving, the statement of the problem is the cue to memory. That is what reaches in to memory and draws out related information. In order to generate a variety of possible solutions to a problem, the problem solver (or group) can change the description of the problem in ways that lead new information to be drawn from memory. The most consistently creative people and groups are ones that find many different ways to describe the problem being solved. Typical stories of creativity and invention focus on finding novel ways to solve problems. James Dyson found a way to adapt the industrial cyclone to eliminate the bag in a vacuum cleaner. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed cubism as a technique for including several views of a scene in the same painting. The desktop operating system developed at Xerox PARC replaced computer commands with a spatial user interface. Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � How to Debate Ideas Productively at Work - Harvard Business Review    Research tells us that cognitive diversity makes a group smarter. Two heads are, indeed, better than one, and many heads are even better, especially when everyone is willing to share their expertise and opinions. While diverse thinking and disagreements can be uncomfortable, they are more likely to lead partners or a team to make progress, innovate and come up with breakthrough solutions than consensus and “nice” conversations in which people hold back what they think. But how do you have a productive debate? By reminding your group to follow four general rules: Remember we’re all on the same team. Keep it about facts, logic, and the topic at hand.  Don’t make it personal. Be intellectually humble. Not long ago, I gave a speech at a company that had been recently acquired and since gone from 300 employees to 1,400. Rapid changes are hard for any organization, but when I asked these leaders what their biggest challenge was they didn’t say “scaling our tech infrastructure” or “hiring good people fast enough” or “integrating with our  parent company.” Continued here

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