Blog Posts — Page 6

Why Socrates Drank the Hemlock

About 2500 years ago, Socrates lamented the work ethic of the younger generation. Apparently, on the way to his day-job as a stand-up philosopher, he’d stop at the Athens Starbucks and wait in line far too long, while the kid working the La Marzucco machine (who looks like he fell down the stairs with a tackle-box given the number of piercings and jewelry he’s wearing) would casually froth one latte at time. No wonder he drank the hemlock – he was thirsty.

Fast forward in time a couple of millennia, and not much has changed. Anyone over 40 has at least a mild annoyance with those under 30 and how they work. The problem is, the bulk of the population is hurling towards retirement faster than Lindsay Lohan is to rehab, and there aren’t many people in their 30s and 40s to replace them. This means the 20-somethings will be taking over the world in short order – probably well before they are equipped to do so.

Unless organizations get their heads around this, and act soon, our whole society will be immersed in the whims and fancies of people who think popcorn was actually meant to be cooked in a microwave. Here’s what you can expect:

Recognition certificates for anyone who shows up on time for work five consecutive times.
Job title inflation – the barista I mentioned above will hence be called the Vice-President of Local Product Production and Distribution.
Not wanting to work on sunny days will be classified as a disability.
If you ask someone for the 2^nd time to get something done, you will be subject to a harassment suit.

Of course, I might be the wrong guy to comment on this – I spent my whole first day at my first real job walking around with my fly open.

The Bureaucratic Decoder — Unveiled

Several years ago I did some work for a large, bureaucratic utility that had only recently been privatized from being a governmental organization. In some ways, they made the transition to a private enterprise well, but many old bad habits from a public sector culture refused to die.

Perhaps most obvious to those of us from outside the culture was the quantity and poor quality of the meetings. It is not an exaggeration to say that many managers spent every day listlessly drifting from meeting to meeting, and occasionally answered an email in between. This was loosely described as “work”.

Most often, when a meeting was scheduled for 10:00, I would be the only one in the room, causing me to behave like Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman, checking my calendar to make sure I had the right time and place, and repeating the meeting request over and over to myself. I quickly discovered that I needed to run all appointments through the special Bureaucratic Decoder. Here’s the formula:

Meetings that start before 9am are entirely contingent upon traffic and weather. If either one is not cooperating, the meeting will start at 9.30 at the earliest, and perhaps won’t occur at all if conditions are adverse.
Normally scheduled meetings between 10am and 3pm will start at fifteen minutes past the scheduled time to allow people time to use the bathroom, get coffee, and arrive at the meeting. There may be some stragglers, so time was allocated to bring all people up to speed as they drifted into the meeting. For those there on time, they may have to listen to the recap four times before everyone is there, so it was generally agreed that showing up on time was a bad idea.
If anyone had a meeting scheduled prior to your scheduled meeting, they would be at least 30 minutes late, because the previous meeting would never end on time, and they need their fifteen minute “transition buffer” (see bullet above).
If you scheduled a meeting for after 3.00pm, it was considered optional. This is because all meetings started late, and ended late, and there was no guarantee that this meeting would be over by quitting time, which was the only appointment that was regularly respected in the organization.

It sounds frustrating, but the spotty attendance at meetings actually worked out well. Rarely were decisions made, and there certainly was no collaboration. The most important thing was maintaining the status quo, and any attempt at the smallest change was put down faster than rabid Rottweiler next door to a daycare.

If this sounds like your organization, then you better hope you don’t have to compete in the open market. You’ll be put out of your misery faster than the dog I mentioned above. In many cases, meetings are a necessary evil at best, and don’t do anything to move the business forward.

Governmental organizations and big utilities may be able to afford such excess… your organization probably can’t.

The Scarecrow and Labor Negotiations

The Rolling Stones were right – You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But that doesn’t stop many people from trying.

I’ve been watching media reports lately of some Labor-Management issues for the same reason you might slow down to get a quick glimpse of a horrible traffic accident – to witness destruction, pain, and suffering from the air-conditioned comfort of your own space.

People tend to entrench themselves along ideological lines very quickly in labour-management disputes. Without knowing any of the details, or even any of the issues, people somehow feel they are entitled to an opinion. This works well for the people whose views of the world are shaped by their favorite TV show, and who name their children after movie stars. However, people with a brain (with apologies to the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz) need to dig a bit deeper before jumping on any particular bandwagon.

It is very rarely that a labor-management dispute has much to do at all with the substantive issues that each side articulates. More often the disputes are perpetuated by politics, emotional considerations, and issues of procedure that make the Department of Motor Vehicles look like a positively high performing organization.

Perhaps most unfortunately, such negotiations take place on the premise of dividing up a fixed pie. If one side gets more, the other gets less. If both sides could get past the crap, they might figure out a way to bake a bigger pie. But that would require trust, innovation, and initiative — elements in critically short supply in organized labour, and in almost all large corporations.

Don’t Fear Your Numbers

Twenty or so years ago, organizations would hire guys like us to come in and help them define metrics and measures. Often times there were not adequate data collection and storage systems, so we ended up counting a lot of things manually, and then getting our crayons out to hand draw graphs to represent these indicators.

Skip ahead in time a couple of decades, and organizations are still hiring guys like us to help them with the measures and metrics, but now its usually because they have thousands upon thousands of data points, but no ability to turn this data into wisdom, and ultimately better business decisions.

Blame Microsoft. They made it easy to have powerful spreadsheets and databasing capability on every desktop relatively cheaply. Now the guy who runs the janitorial service at the office has a PC with more computing power than the Space Shuttle, and 500 indicators he’s tracking. Bad news – if you have much more than half a dozen metrics you’re following, that’s not a scorecard… that’s a laundry list.

We also see it in any professional sport. Did you know that in games that take place on the road, in the Central Time Zone, on odd-numbered days, in the same month as the coach’s birthday, when the starting line-up all had chicken for the dinner the previous night, the team has posted a win 58% of the time?

Now that’s valuable data.

Professional Sports organizations are very fat with cash – they can afford to waste some on useless statistics. Your organization probably can’t.

You need to figure out what results your organization is trying to produce, and then determine the key drivers of those results. For many organizations, the goal is to make money while minimizing various forms of risk. What are the simple key drivers of these things?

Many managers are scared away from data because their accountant and their stats professor from college teamed up to make sure that any numbers were completely incomprehensible to the average human (and thereby keeping them both employed).

Yet, taking just a bit of time to better understand the key numbers in your business is time extraordinarily well spent. And a fringe benefit is taking those numbers (that you now understand them) back to your stats-prof, or your accountant, and truly baffling them.

Idiots, Maniacs and Me

When I drive my car, no matter where I go, there are only three types of drivers on the road:

1) Idiots – those driving slower than me.

2) Maniacs – those driving faster than me.

3) Me

Of course, the fact that to all the Idiots out there, I appear to be a Maniac, and to all the Maniacs, I appear an Idiot is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that I am simultaneously and Idiot and a Maniac – a pairing that is about as easy to achieve as someone willingly volunteering to go hunting with Dick Cheney. It’s all part of the dynamic of dealing with traffic, and one of the reasons I’m a huge proponent of Public Transit.

I’ve experienced this same dynamic in the workplace.

However you choose to define success, there are three necessary ingredients: hard work, smarts, and luck. The proportion of each may vary widely from situation to situation, but all three elements are always present.

Some managers achieve some success, and think it’s because they’re much smarter than everyone else. These same people are to be avoided at cocktail parties, and are typically very poor listeners.

Other managers are sure they’ve achieved success because they have always worked harder than everyone else. These people are the ones that work insane hours, and expect everyone else to do likewise. They are mostly dysfunctional as human beings, and don’t have time to go to cocktail parties.

Finally, there are some managers who believe they have achieved success because of overwhelming good luck. They likely suffer from Imposter Syndrome, and don’t believe they actually deserve the success they’ve had. They will be really thankful to be invited to the cocktail party, but will stand with their back to wall to ensure that no one sneaks up behind them, and asks them to leave.

There are two important things to take from this.

1) If you’ve done very well, don’t ever discount the role that luck has played.

2) If you’ve faced some challenges achieving success, you may want to try working smarter, or working harder.

Think about it next time you’re driving to work.

Decoding Interview Questions

Many years ago when I was working inside a Fortune 100 company (that shall remain nameless, but it’s a major grocery retailer that starts with ‘S’), I was applying internally for a job for which I thought I was well suited. One of the well-intentioned, but tragically naïve HR people advised me to “be myself, and be honest and truthful” in the interview.

“Being yourself” at a job interview is about as smart as making toast in the bathtub, and could produce similar results. Being honest is always a good rule, but you need to tailor the truth to your situation. In a job interview, they don’t want to hear your honest responses – they want to hear the responses they have pre-written.

With the benefit of a couple of decades of hindsight, and having now sat on the opposite side of the interview table, I offer a deconstruction of that interview many years ago:

Question: “Are you willing to relocate?”

My Answer: “Right now, I’m ready, willing, and able to relocate anywhere. At some point, if I have a spouse’s career, or children to consider, then I’ll have to consider all the factors at that time to make the decision.”

The Required Answer: “I’ll move any time, any place, for any reason, and will do so on one day’s notice.”

Question: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

My Answer: “I’d like to be a Facility Manager who is active and involved in his community, and making a positive contribution to society.”

The Required Answer: “I’ll be working morning, day and night in order to scramble my way up the corporate food chain, and any other considerations are secondary. I’ll be an empty hollow shell of a man because I will not have taken a day off in the past five years.”

Question: “What do you think your weaknesses are?”

My Answer: “I sometimes have difficulty towing the line when given certain direction. For example, our parent company sent us directive X last month that is a clear violation of the local labor code, so I could not legally implement it.”

The Required Answer: “I work too hard” or “I’m impatient for results” or any other lie I could have trot out to confirm that I was as dysfunctional as the organization.

Question: “Tell us about a time when you became angry at work.”

My Answer: “My nature is not really that of someone who becomes angry. Sometimes a bit frustrated maybe, but there are so many important issues in the world that are worthy of my anger, that I find it hard to get angry about things that happen in the workplace.”

The Required Answer: “I become inconsolably irate when I see employees not pulling their weight. We pay them a good wage, and they need to earn it.”

I honestly thought these were the responses that were going to separate me from the herd. Nobody has botched an interaction this badly since the Lee Harvey Oswald prison transfer. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

How to Hire Your Next Leader

Some kids grow up wanting to be a fire-fighter, a police officer, teacher or doctor. I wanted to be Mr. Rogers (the children’s entertainer). No eight-year-old will tell you she wants to be a manager when she grows up (and if she does, get her into therapy top speed). Yet there are more managers than there are fire-fighters, police officers, teachers and doctors combined by a factor of ten or more.

So how does this happen?

If management were a profession like others, someone would go to school to study the vocation of management, apprentice for some period of time, and then be deemed fully capable of executing as a manager. MBA schools have failed to do this effectively, and the vast majority of companies develop their managers in a haphazard fashion.

Most people end up as managers by going into to some line of work for which they show some aptitude, and then are promoted to oversee others doing similar work. Somewhere along the line, they might take a course or two, and some companies may even send their high potential new managers to business school.

Most organizations make the critical mistake of assuming that because someone is a proficient practitioner of a certain trade that she will be a good manager. Organizations need to change their focus away from the technical aspects of a particular function (or group of functions), and instead focus on what skills a manager will need to be successful in that environment.

If more than half that list of competencies is focused on technical aspects of the industry or job, then it has been done wrong.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a big fan of pulling people with no industry experience, and placing them in key management positions. I don’t think this approach has worked very often. If organizations are serious about having great management, then they need to select people for management positions with the core competencies required to manage in that environment, and then continually develop them.

Either that, or select tall guys with brown hair, who wear blue shirts. That works too.

Your Call is Important to Us — and Other Lies

I was passing through airport security a while ago, and two of the people that are responsible for my safety in the air were having quite a conversation about how drunk they got on the weekend. I was completely invisible, and given that I was running a bit late for my plane, I made a critically poor decision.

I opted to offer these folks some feedback that they should probably be a little more focused on what we were paying them to do, and a little less on debriefing their leisure time. Much to no one’s surprise, I was selected for “random” additional security screening.

I can only claim temporary insanity at forgetting the very first (and only mandatory) rule of offering feedback: The recipient has to be willing to hear you.

Of course, everybody says they want your feedback, but in reality, they’re often not all that interested. How many times have you heard:

“Your Call is Important to Us”

“Tell us what you think”

“Your opinions are important”

Yes, we are constantly bombarded with messages that people want our feedback. In reality, people are really keen to receive feedback that tells them they have done well, or that reinforces their view of the world. Any other types of feedback will only begrudgingly be accepted.

Probably the most dangerous thing someone can do, is respond when their boss says, “I’d like your feedback”. That is the professional equivalent of a person’s wife asking, “Do I look fat in this?” In the history of humankind, no one has ever advanced their own cause by attempting to answer such questions.

The last time I was asked such a question, I ran away so fast, there was a Bob-shaped hole in the exit door. It’s like the “room-mate switch” – it has never been done, and we must never speak of it again. (Seinfeld reference – look it up on YouTube)

So the next time your boss asks you for feedback on his presentation, you need to answer as follows:

“I really thought you nailed the messaging, and came across in a powerful way.” If he pushes you for some constructive feedback, you might want to offer something like, “I probably would have opted for the arial font – I don’t think the cambria is as easy to read.”

Either that, or just run away so fast, you put a {insert your name here}-shaped hole in the exit door.

Tales of a Recovering Extrovert

Many people have asked the question as to whether great leaders are born or made. Certainly, we equate leadership success with the same shallow charisma that we simultaneously loathe and demand from politicians. But can an introvert be a successful leader?

Other than questioning someone’s parentage, is there a faster way to insult someone than calling him an introvert? Isn’t introversion something that we need to quickly cure people of by sending them to the Dale Carnegie Course?

People hear “extrovert”, and they think: outgoing, friendly, social, capable, productive, normal.

People hear “introvert”, and they think: shy, withdrawn, anti-social, elusive, dysfunctional, wall-flower.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins reveals the qualities that his research has shown as effective in running great organizations. Interestingly, many of the qualities of “Level Five Leadership”, are found more naturally in people with Introverted preferences.

You might also be surprised who may be a closet-introvert: High-profile leaders, television personalities, sports stars, maybe even one of your friends, neighbors, or family are introverted. They’re everywhere, so beware – you never know when they’ll want to slink into the back corner of a meeting room, and silently wish everyone would stop talking at once. Or perhaps pray that someone will listen to them for 20 seconds before interrupting them. Worse yet, they may think about something before responding to a question creating that awkward few seconds of silence.

So you may be wondering where I fit on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Grid.

As someone who spends a lot of time talking to groups of people, and a person who worked in television (for a short and spectacularly unsuccessful period of time), I am rarely accused of being an Introvert.

I prefer to label myself as a Recovering-Extrovert. We might need to create a new scale for measurement.

Does Business Education Matter?

Does business education matter?

I would hope it is a strong indicator that a person has a minimum proficiency in reading and writing. It probably also means that you survived for an extended period of time on a diet of beer and pizza – excellent training for future business trips.

There is no doubt that Business degrees should be more vocational in nature than they currently are. Therefore, it is up to the individual to ensure s/he gets the most pragmatic training from any academic business program. As a service to anyone considering business education, or is part way through such a program, here are some things I wish I knew before going to business school:

Kraft Dinner is not food.
Liberal Arts degrees may be fulfilling, but they almost certainly ensure a career in a location with a drive-through window.
However, you need at least a few Arts courses so you can learn to write clearly and quickly. This is a skill you will use far more often than the stats and accounting they teach you in Business School.
Likewise, good Project Management skills will serve you much better than anything you’ll learn in an Operational Research course.
Cheez Whiz isn’t something you eat – it’s something you seek out urologist for.
Take a Gap Year between High School and Post-Secondary. This is common practice outside of North America, and it will ensure much higher focus when you do start.
Your Business School Professors have most likely never been in Business.
Take Out and Delivery are not two of the food groups.
Student loans aren’t a bad thing. While it is true that society gets an 8:1 return on any investment they make in your education, you should still pay the bulk of it – your return over your lifetime is 17:1.
Build networks – that weird, awkward guy in your lecture might be building the next Facebook in his dorm room.