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` metAskIll FIVe: Assessment

We’ll end with this skill, because it often gets underestimated (possibly
because people and organizations don’t have good assessment skills?).

Hone your cost/benefit analysis skills so you can make good purchase
decisions about adopting new mobile devices or buying into new appli-
cations. Sensitize your abilities to review critically all the new devices

the marketers are trying to sell you. How well do they fit your long-
term platform? What’s their life cycle? Learn to do this deeply but also
quickly, like a rancher buying cattle. You need to be able to make quick
decisions based on solid assessment of the pros and cons involved.
Technology has infiltrated our companies through our employees’

interest, through our phone systems, mobile carriers, Internet provid-
ers, hardware vendors, and software licenses, just so we can compete
and stay current. Ten years ago we only had to worry about the soft-
ware version that would get us started, such as operating systems and
software for word documents and spreadsheets. Today there is a blend
of technology that updates on the fly, automatically, pinging us to tell

us what the software is going to do. We have a choice; we can say “no,”
but eventually the software is back asking again, just like the cable
guy who knocks on your door to sell his service of cable—eventually
everyone has cable. You have to be able to assess and decide based on

long-term benefits, not just because something looks sexy at the time.