Stephan Vanhaverbeke

I've been tracking my e-mail behaviour over the course of one year. In 2009, I've received 38701 e-mails, of which:

• 8340 were from people I knew
• 7010 were from people I didn't knew (yet)
• 12208 were newsletters (to which I subscribed, but rarely read)
• 11143 were spam messages

That gives me an average of 109 e-mails per day that call for my attention. Luckily, only 43 of those e-mails really require my attention. However, If I would spend an average of 3 minutes per e-mail (reading and giving a quick answer), I would spend more than 2 hours per day dealing with my e-mail.

Maybe that's why I (only) sent 4406 e-mails (an average of 12 e-mails per day).

What other good tips do you have for me?

Some interesting ideas I gathered during the conference "The Agile Organization" (De wendbare organisatie), organized by Kluwer Opleidingen on Dec. 2nd.

• Management by yearly budgeting is too slow.
• Enterprises are often like big ships. Agile businesses are more like a fleet of small ships.
• An Agile business requires an agile culture.
• A process should be managed by the people who are responsibe for the process.
  Functional managers should be more like coaches.
• Organisations serve processes.
• A captain who does not know where the ship is heading is a problem for the whole ship. A ship who's crew does not know where the ship is heading is a problem for the captain AND the whole ship.
• Decisions based on symptoms instead of causes are generally bad decisions.
• Management today is like playing a videogame; by trial and error.
• The only constant is change.
• A plan means a future.
• Every year is a revolution.
• Being agile is a cornerstone for strategic thinking for every business today.
• Excellence is not an act, it is a habit. (Aristoteles)
• Getting things undone.
• Girlmotor.com
• Build modular processes; reuse and recombine them.
• The war for real talent rages now more than ever.
• More. Better. Faster. Newer. Longer.
• Volvo : selfguiding teams on the workfloor.
• Praise failures.
• B2B = men to men
  B2C = men to women
• Life is short, eat desert first!
• Senior management's greatest competence is to roll the rocks they have created further downhill.
• Crisis is the unability to handle complexity.
• Old leadership is looking at the battlefield... with caps on your binoculars.
  New leadership is dealing with dilemas. To be able to hold both sides of a conflict.
• Old leadership is: Yes I can!
  New leadership is: Yes we can!
• Putting all the noses in the same direction is dangerous when it's the wrong direction.
• Flow is often managed into destruction.
• Reading the market is a requirement for agility.
• The leader in an agile organisation does nothing else than making connections between people. Making sure that they talk to each-other.
• Dont put people in meetings. Put them in dialog.
• Put your MT half a day on a remote location without a program, and you will soon talk about the essence. This will save you a bill from McKinzie.
• Silence is disbelief.
• Dont talk about reality. Talk about your perception.
• Management is reducing fear and adding desire.
• Remove the rules and poeple will start to think on their own.
• Piramids cannot cope with diversity.
• A new idea cannot walk on its own.
• An answer comes from the past.
  A question takes us to the future.
   

During the TEDxBrussels event last monday, I noted these ideas down for future reference:

• Some of us stare at the stars
  Some of us travel to the stars
  Some of us shine like stars
• We mistake the map for the territory
• I trust people who are like me.
• P2P foundation: product hacking
• Open Everything: the FCF Charter
• One of the problems with Open is that there is no end.
• Education is about Leveraging Children. Most of us look at children as recipiants of education. What would happen if we would perceive children as agents of change?
• I spent a couple of days loading Windows 7 on my laptop. It's no different. It's the same junk.
• Pax Europea
• Aid has contributed to disfunctional governments in a continent such as Africa.
• Information is beautiful
• Time travel produces causality violations
• I am a person who was not killed 20 years ago
• My cat has four legs. My dog has four legs. Therefore my dog is actually a cat.
• Incessant Obsolence Postulation
• How to bluff your way through quantum physics.
• In America, when you drink wine at lunch you're an alcoholic.
  In Europe, when you DON'T drink wine at lunchtime, you're an alcoholic.
• Music is the empathetic language that connects us all.
• Everything is possible if you don't know it's impossible.
• Transhumanism: Singularity University
• We are being sentenced by a map that dictates scarcety of flow, instead of being empowered by the territory of skills and resources.
• www.jameslist.com
• Carbon Neutral Clouds with Amazon S3
• Calligrafitti: a word is an image
• When you come to a fork in the road, take it - Yogi Berra
• Imagine a city Brusselslab.com