efficient meetings (credit: http://www.ilovenewwork.com)

One of the skills I developed the most while at the European Space Agency was how to manage my time,  have EXTREME respect for others time and ALWAYS have clear agendas and objectives for meetings.

Translating this into actions:

• Nobody would wait for you if you were more than 5 minutes late for a meeting.
• Every meeting would have a concise agenda with clearly stated objectives.
• People would terminate a meeting at the exact time it was scheduled to end. To me this point was far more important than the start time. People could not keep on discussing forever and were forced to make decisions if they intended to go through all the items in the agenda. I was always amused on how the last 10 minutes of each meeting were extremely productive.

Well, contrast this to the horror I am experiencing in Portugal. People are always late for their scheduled meetings, most of the times have no idea of the objectives of meetings and there is no time for a meeting to end.

Today I have experienced the following behavior:

• A meeting was scheduled for 14:30. I arrived 5 min earlier. Waited outside. The person I was waiting for signals that he is just finishing a conversation with someone. OK I think we have 5 mins. Well..the meeting only started at 15:00 and that after I almost threatened to leave!!! All this while the person was happily chatting away!!
• Another meeting I was invited to. Although there was no written agenda (my fault) I assumed that it would be a follow up from a previous meeting. To my surprise the team I was meeting with states: “we have really not thought about the xyz subject” but still wanted to have the meeting!!! What was the pointing of having a meeting then if the homework was not done!! Waste of time..

While these might seem little details I find them to be extremely important for the efficiency of an organization and society. I have spent a substantial chunk of my afternoon either forcing people to start a meeting or “chit chatting” with people because they have not done their home work and the meeting has no clear and objective goals…

Now, you pile up these little details and multiple by the entire population and you get with some organizations/countries are far more productive than others…

FeedZai@Ovo de Colombo from feedzai on Vimeo.

High performance teams

Team performance stages

The difference between top performing team and a so-so team are appalling.

Saying this is quite easy and one can read about it in the literature (see Wikipedia article).

However building a team and ensuring that this happens is quite a challenge and it is a lot more related to the personalities of the team members and team leaders than it is to simply applying a formula or recipe.

My team at FeedZai is now performing as a fine tuned machine and the results it delivers are simply impressive. I leave you with a video of the surprise they have made to me on Friday.

Reading of the week

Word of Mouth Marketing

The reading of the week goes to Word Of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.

For someone building a company from scratch, as I am with Feedzai,  where resources are scarce this is the main if not only source of advertising you have at your disposal.The holy grail of marketing is that your users/customers act as your main source of publicity and that they tell their friends or customers/partners how great you and whatever your are selling are.

If you are in the same situation go and read the book as there are many easy to use techniques that you can apply the next day.

As most of you already know I am now leading FeedZai, a company trying to enable you to see your world in real time, with you being a business or an individual.

At FeedZai, we enable business of all sizes to know what is going on at all times and react in real time when things do not exactly behave as expected.

We have some pretty disruptive technology that we will make public in the near future, however until then we are keeping everything wrapped inside  the blankets of secrecy.

We will also work in the area of visualization and how can these massive amounts of data be plotted and consumed by users.

There are some examples out there that I simply love.  Just take a look at the below video that shows the plotting using an heat map approach of all the traffic in the city of Lisbon. This has been done by Pedro Cruz who is not affiliated with FeedZai.

Traffic in Lisbon – emphasis on sluggish areas from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.