One of the most important factor that makes managers blind is that they operate within an organization. Despite the fact that the “center of business profits” or the factor influencing organizational growth lies outside the organization!  Do you know what it is? It’s your Customer.

The only business results  are produced by a customer who converts the costs and efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or services of the business.

The decision-maker is outside rather than inside the business, yet an average executive fails to see the picture that customer sees and he fails to understand the changing demands of markets. That is why companies find it difficult to maintain continous growth.

The reason for manger blindness lies in the fact that What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality. Even the largest organization is unreal compared to the reality of the environment in which it exists. What really happens inside any organization is just effort and cost.

The outside, the environment which is the true reality, is well beyond effective control from the inside.

It is the inside of the organization that is most visible to the executive. It is the inside that has immediacy for him. Its relations and contacts, its problems and challenges, its crosscurrents and gossip reach him and touch him at every point. Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused. The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified.

Thus it is possible that Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event).

Manager blinds is one of the key challenges faced by executives today. This article is one in the series to make executives aware of the hidden challenges in project management, and to make them able to overcome. If you are interested to read more on “Becoming Effective Manager” subscribe to this blog or bookmark it.

• In 20 min: Your blood pressure will return to normal.
• In 8 hours:  The carbon monoxide (a toxic gas) levels in your blood stream will drop by half, and oxygen levels will return to normal
• In 48 hours: Your chance of having heart attack will begin its long decline. All nicotine will have left your body. Your sense of taste and smell will return to a normal level
• In 72 hours: Your bronchial tubes will relax, and your overall energy level will rise.
• In 2 weeks: Your circulation will increase, and it will continue to improve for the next 10 weeks.

Check out the image below for a complete analysis. (click to enlarge)

Project Management is one of my favorite subjects and I have read many books on the topic. But the most important topic that has inspired me is being “Effective” in your work, especially management. It is effectiveness in action that creates a difference in project management.

The most important thing that I have learnt after much reading is that “Do not confuse brilliance with success or with the ability to execute”.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

Know the Knowledge Worker:

Another important thing that I have learned is to make best use of Knowledge Workers in your company or organization. In modern organizations the Knowledge Worker is the key player in making an organization successful.  Knowledge worker is the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands.

The knowledge workers are the new executives of your company. Their importance lies in the fact that they can make instant intelligent decisions and save “you” and “your time” from being used in everyday tasks and decisions.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.

The importance of the knowledge worker is perhaps best illustrated by a newspaper interview with a young American infantry captain in the Vietnam jungle.

Asked by the reporter, “How in this confused situation can you retain command?” the young captain said: “Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”

In a guerrilla war, every man is an “executive.”

Hence if you can cleverly leverage the knowledge workers in your team then you can surely push your projects towards completion. Putting ideas and strategies into action and to effectively coordinate with the knowledge workers are two tips that I wanted to share with you in this post.

Were you already aware of these facts? or I have contributed something to increase your knowledge and efficiency, share your views in comments.

I always took the position that my boss (when I had a job) worked for me. My job was to do the thing I was hired to do, and my boss had assets that could help me do the job better. His job, then, was to figure out how best give me access to the people, systems and resources that would allow me to do my job the best possible way.

Of course, that also means that the people I hire are in charge as well. My job isn’t to tell them what to do, my job is for them to tell me what to do to allow them to keep their promise of delivering great work.

The major difference between “_setVar” and “_setCustomVar” can be understood by the following chart:

To get most out of new custom variables method, it is recommended that you first understand how  visitor interacts with your content/site over a period of time and how Google Analytics measures this. The point is made clear on the Google Code Site, under the heading “Overview”, I suggest you to read that passage first to clear up the concepts. A complete usage guide is also available there with complete examples and is good way to get started. Check out the article

Benefits of using “Custom Variables”:

• The very first and basic advantage lies in the categorization of content pages, even if the urls are do not include category information. This scenario is most used in content rich sites and blogs for SEO purposes to provide clean and short URLs to Search Engines. But this kind of practice creates difficulties for Web Analyst as he will not be able to analyze which areas of the site perform better/worse than other.
• Similarly using Custom Variables also allows us to analyze the interaction of single user, whether logged in or not, and how they make use of our site/content.

For practical example I recommend viewing the latest webinar recording on this topic, although the audio quality is very poor, but it contains very useful information. Also, if you can’t bear the audio long enough you can skip to the “Case Study” part, it starts from the 30^th min of the webinar, although the rest of the webinar is very useful, but just in case you want to have an idea of the implementation, you should see the last 10 mins first.

Following are steps if you are installing Google Analytics Code on your site for first time and you want to use Asynchronous Tracking.

• Insert the asynchronous snippet at the bottom of the <head> section of your pages, after any other scripts your page or template might use.
  • According to Google the optimal location for the asynchronous snippet is at the bottom of the <head> section, just before the closing </head> tag.
• Modify the _setAccount method with your web property ID. (check screen shot below)And you are done!
• You can get the Asynchronous Tracking code from this post or from Google here.

Migrating or Upgrading to New Asynchronous Tracking:

If you want to migrate/upgrade to the new asynchronous snippet from traditional tracking :

• Remove your existing tracking code snippet and any customizations you have made.
• To reduce errors, it is recommended that you remove the existing tracking code snippet from the include file or mechanism that injects it into your web pages. [TIP] You can paste your existing tracking code snippet in a text file to keep track of any customized methods you use.
• Use the steps defined above to install new tracking code.

To make customizations to your new Asynchronous Tracking code like you have done to your old code, check out this usage guide and side by side comparison from Google.

Asynchronous Tracking in Google Analytics:

Asynchronous tracking is an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. Asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load ga.js so its impact on user experience is minimized. It also allows you to put your Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering.

Although asynchronous tracking uses a different Analytics snippet and a different syntax for tracking calls, it supports the exact same tracking customizations as the traditional snippet. In fact, the asynchronous tracking syntax is also more flexible than the traditional snippet.

The following snippet represents the minimum configuration needed to track a page asynchronously. It uses _setAccount to set the page’s web property ID and then calls _trackPageview to send the tracking data back to the Google Analytics servers.

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(’script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(’script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();

</script>

To use this on your pages, copy the code snippet above, replacing UA-XXXXX-X with your web property ID.

Check out the tips to install Google Analytics – Asynchronous Tracking.

You can search for more Pakistani Google Analytics Certified Professionals, here on Google.

My last post was on potential threats of Google Buzz, and although Google has improved the product a lot more since then I was unable to blog about it. My view about Google Buzz is that it is now pretty much innocent   as compared to past and yet powerful and promising enough as is the case with all Google products. I will be discussing Web Analytics in my coming posts.