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    Famous By Friday
    Famous By Friday
    Famous By Friday
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Famous By Friday

    By James Breese

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Just graduated from school?
    Just entering the job market?
    Or maybe you've finally found a position where you REALLY want to succeed?

    Wish you had some magic way to maximize your performance out there in the
    competitive world?
    In this little book, you will find the business world's 47 most useful
    problem-solving techniques, distilled and compiled from real-life knowledge,
    gained from real-life experiences, and illustrated with simple real-life
    examples to give you an extra feel for how to use them. The
    information in this book is not just academic theory; it is fact, it will
    work for you, and the results can be yours by next week!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Breese
    Release dateMay 11, 2012
    ISBN9780985581305
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      Book preview

      Famous By Friday - James Breese

      Famous by Friday

      James Breese

      _

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2012 James Breese

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Foreword

      Introduction

      Chapter 1. Techniques for Starting Work on a Problem

      Chapter 2. Five Techniques for Pursuing a Solution

      Chapter 3. Four More Techniques for the Execution Phase

      Chapter 4. Communications While Underway

      Chapter 5. The COMPLETION phase

      Chapter 6. People Aspects of Problem Solving

      Chapter 7. When people ARE the problem

      Chapter 8: The Most Powerful tool—Corrective Action

      Chapter 9. A Special Note to Management: Listen to the experts

      Chapter 10. The Data Tools

      Chapter 11. Summary

      Postlogue

      About the Author

      FOREWORD

      When I graduated from engineering school a few years back, I was a problem-solving machine. I could solve integro-differential equations by hand, I could invert a matrix, I could find a center of gravity. However, as the years rolled by, I noticed that my high-tech formal education had some holes in it. I was lacking some simple tools that would have helped me in my day-to-day problem solving, and these tools took years to acquire. Fortunately, you don’t have to go through the same time-consuming learning process! I have collected my most useful 47 problem-solving techniques and explained them in this little book. The tools that are presented here are simple, and they will be effective in your professional life and in your personal life. This book is distilled and compiled from real-life knowledge, gained from real-life experiences, and illustrated with simple real-life examples to give you an extra feel for the principles involved. The information in this book is not just theory; it is fact, it will work for you, and it can start right now!

      J.B.

      Brief Introduction

      Maybe you’ve heard the phrase: Any job is easy if you have the right tools. Some trivial examples:

      If you are installing a piston in a block, you’ll need a piston ring compressor

      If you are starting to define your path to a rich, rewarding career, you will want to take a test called the Strong Interest Inventory

      If you are analyzing an electronic waveform, you’ll need an oscilloscope

      If you are doing some heavy-duty construction, you’ll need a Sawzall

      and there are jillions of other examples, of course.

      The other phrase which you might have heard is: Knowledge is power. The meaning is simple: if you have the right knowledge set, then you can get things done quickly and easily and effectively, and you’re going to succeed.

      When you have finished reading this little book, you will have acquired 47 knowledge-based tools which will help you in your day-to-day problem-solving. These 47 tools are just like a Sawzall or a Crescent wrench—you won’t need them until you need them, and when that day comes they will be critical to your success. Examine your 47 new tools now, before you tackle your next project or your next problem, and you’ll soon feel the empowerment that your new knowledge gives you.

      Some of these techniques you might already be using; skip the paragraphs which describe them and move on to the ones which you don’t already know. You can absorb the lessons in this book in a couple of lunch hours, and you can put your new tools to work immediately. Have fun with them, and succeed!

      So without any further fanfare, we’re going to jump right in and start describing the 47 tools that will help you in your work-a-day world.

      Chapter 1

      Tools for when you are STARTING work on a project or problem

      In the next few chapters, we will discuss lots of nitty-gritty, real-life techniques for the HOW-TO aspects of improving one's problem-solving capabilities. Many of these tips are pretty basic and pretty obvious, and won’t require much concentration or dedication from you. Some of them may already be part of your day-to-day problem-solving style. Skim the ones that seem trivial to you, but there are probably a few suggestions that you have not thought of before; give a little extra energy to these newcomers until they become a natural part of your day-to-day problem-solving technique.

      There are six techniques offered here in Chapter 1, and they are all aimed at the first part of a problem-solving effort, which is when you must PLAN WHAT YOU"RE GOING TO DO. This is arguably the most important part of an effort, because this is the phase where the general direction of the work will be defined. The techniques that we will discuss here are:

      Deciding priority of the problem to be solved

      Probabilities, and how to use them in your favor

      Make a plan

      Plan must degenerate into work

      Deliverables

      The importance of advertising

      -

      Tool 1: First things first—-figure out the priority

      One of the first things you have to do when you attack a problem is to decide what the urgency is: is this problem the next logical one you need to address, or are there other more urgent tasks which need to be addressed first?

      Tip: watch out for the human fudge factor which can distort the situation—it is human nature to work on the interesting, non-boring problems first, but frequently the other problems, the boring ones with no intrigue and no sex appeal, have much higher priority; the question of what to do first is sometimes a complicated and vexing question.

      There is a helpful technique which will help you to avoid this human-nature weakness: when you're figuring out the priorities, pretend that somebody else is going to do the actual work! If Charlie were doing this, would I ask him to work on Problem A (the one with the FUN aspects) or Problem B (the BORING one) first? This might keep you honest, and make it easier for you to start on Problem B first, even though you don’t really want to!

      This subject of priorities brings up another related situation: when you ask someone to do something for you, make sure they understand how urgent it is. For instance, if your 16-year-old son just got his driver’s license, and you want him to go buy some milk from the supermarket—make sure you tell him WHEN you want the milk. Otherwise, his trip to the store might get extended by his delight in having his mitts on the family car and your milk might not show up until midnight! Same effect holds in the workplace, of course.

      Tool 2: Figure out the probabilities

      The early planning stage is a good time to do a quick estimate of probabilities associated with the problems on your list. If two problems are of more-or-less equal severity, meaning they can cause approximately the same amount of damage

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