PositiveWare client Rocky Mountain Ventures enjoyed a record quarter - makes creating the next quarterly plan that much more fun

If you fail to plan, plan to fail.

Listening to IT disaster recovery stories - feeling safe at Data393

If you are building a business and in any phase of looking for angel or venture capital, the Colorado Capital Conference is the place to be to present your plan, as well as watch other companies’ pitches.

Learn more here.

The deadline for submissions is April 7.

I have received limitless counseling about how bad our tagline is, and yet I persevere, because I really believe it. Perhaps it’s not that I believe that software alone can give work meaning, but I absolutely believe that work should have meaning, and that the necessary preconditions for this are that a worker must know

Now at first blush, these all seem like trivial points.

Who doesn’t know what they are working on?

Well, the overtasked person doesn’t know what they are working on. When faced with a pile of competing tasks, what are they working on? Alternatively, there are workers who live in a management vacuum. That vacuum sounds like this:

“Mary should know what she is supposed to do, because she is a manager”

Well, Mary may be a manager, but unless she is really special, she is not a mind reader. Neither title, training, gender, nor any other quality an individual has is a substitute for clear direction from a manager.

As to how you are doing, again, isn’t that clear? Don’t you know how you are doing? Well, if everyone knew how well they were performing there would be no basis for the plethora of shows like Heidi Klum’s .

As an entrepreneur I have found that what I miss most is positive, granular feedback about my day to day activities.

Which probably explains why small companies have dogs.

But really, the absence of feedback is crushing. Gallup cites it as a key reason why people leave their jobs. So people really need to be told that they are doing well or poorly. The effect of this feedback is for another post.

Finally, what about why it matters? Doesn’t everyone just work for a paycheck? I don’t think so. A paycheck is necessary but not sufficient to make work meaningful. (And in the case of the volunteer, not even necessary.)

The employee working just for a paycheck is not engaged, not fulfilled, and not staying. Or worse, they do stay, sucking all the air out of the business, dragging down morale, and daring you to make a move.

So what matters? Lots of stuff. The direction of the business, each individual’s contribution to the success of the business, their personal career development, the impact the business has on the market, community, industry, and so on. Without visibility into what is happening in the business, it is difficult to convey what matters.

So Give Work Meaning™. Do it now. You won’t regret it.

Curt Coffman, author of First, Break All the Rules and all around performance management guru, weighs in on the hulalaboo around CEO bonuses in the New York Times.

The Money Quote?

In the meantime, corporate leaders who received a bonus in 2008 should do the right thing and return it to the company. And at the end of the day, if you must pay employees the unearned bonus — do so and quickly show them the door!

Some clients ask me how to run PositiveWare when their computer starts up, or in a way that makes it look like a separate application. The answer to these questions is a Site Specific Browser, such as Fluid for OS X.

Fluid allows you to create a specific browser for PositiveWare, which is saved separately in the Applications Folder. This looks like its own application, and can be dragged to the dock for easy accessibility.

An alias of this can be put in the Login Items to be opened automatically when you login. To add an item to Login Items, click on the Apple Menu, then Accounts. Select the Account that you wish to open PositiveWare, the click on the Login Items. Click on the plus icon to add an item, and select the application you created using Fluid.

Did I mention Fluid is free?

At FRAC, USDA Secretary Vilsack decried the lack of linkage between budget and organizational performance