WLP21 Hassan Osman and the Couch Manager

Today's guest covers a wide range of subjects: why he set up his blog The Couch Manager, why everyone should set up a blog for professional, personal and financial reasons and we even talk about failure. He's very recently (yesterday!) set up Ganttopia.

Hassan Osman is an entrepreneur, author of the Amazon Kindle bestseller Influencing Virtual Teams: 17 Tactics That Get Things Done with Your Remote Employees and works as Senior Manager at Cisco. I've kept my introduction extremely short today because our conversation was very meaty and I had little to add on the subject.

Here are the links and show notes.

00:30 Pilar's short intro. 04.20 The conversation starts. Hassan and Pilar catch up. 05:50 Hassan talks about why he set up his blog The Couch Manager where he blogs about virtual work and productivity.

Do something small and just launch. Everything else will be easier after that.

Hassan recommends David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity and Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Work Week

12:00 How the basics of working in virtual teams can be applied to corporations.

13:30 How we can now influence beyond our workplace. Growing your career as a start up. Hassan recommends The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career and talks about being in "permanent beta".

16:00 Hassan explains why he believes every company is now virtual and why we should not lose the face-face connection.

"The fact that you can hire someone virtually opens up a huge talent pool that you can pick from."

22:00 How virtual team working changed in the last four years.

25:30 How writing Influencing Virtual Teams came about and why everyone should start a blog from a professional, personal and financial perspective. (If you are interested in this, check out Mariano Tufro's interview, where he talks about raising your profile through social media.)

29:20 Hassan talks about the popularity of his blog post about how to design the ultimate home office encouraged him to start creating e-books and how he tests the potential of his new products.

35:00 "Making money is a muscle too" and, be ready to fail. Pilar mentions her blog post on "Think Like a Freak".

38:00 Using illustrations to present concepts. Hassan recommends Back of the Napkin: Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures. Check out his post on How to Create Hand Drawn Pictures to Explain Anything Even if You Don't Know How to Draw.

42:30 Ganttopia: Hassan's new project where he offers templates for gantt charts to project managers.

And don't forget that Hassan has a very popular course on Udemy, full of video tutorials on managing virtual teams:  How to Manage and Influence Your Virtual Team.