The Pamplona china shop, part II

The best side effect of having a dishwasher in the break-room is that hardly any plastic utensils end up in the landfill. I'd finished lunch using one of the honest-to-pete metal office forks, and found myself carrying it back to the kitchen dangling from a loosely pinched thumb and finger. That's how my first grade class was taught to carry scissors (even the rounded-end ones). Which directly countermanded the instructions of kindergarten, where we were supposed to clutch the pointy end in our hands in case we fell.

I don't suppose that in the grand scheme of things, the contradiction matters. In either case, the central tenet is to minimize the damage you do if you fall while holding them, even if you're so egregiously reckless as to be running at the time. I don't know how the current crop of kindergarten and first grade students are being instructed in proper scissor-holding, and I really don't care, so long as they're not taught to fear scissors. Apart from the fact that a phobia of plastic scissors with rounded ends with blades (specifically engineered to take away the forbidden pleasures of cutting cloth and hair) is just, well, lame, that's not the point.

The point, of course, is learning to recognized and respect the power and the drawbacks of any tools that come into your hands. It's not enough to memorize the rules. Before you can know when it's better to break them, you have to understand why and under what context the rules were made. And you have to have some idea of what happens after they're broken.

In the context of software development, I used to think that this largely applied to the folks who wrote the software, more so than their management/support. After all, if you make a point of hiring smart people, you won't have to worry about them making mistakes, right??? Well, then I completely deleted the production database by accident. Certainly I'm not as smart as I used to think. And when you tally the real brainiacs you know, you can probably think of at least one whose raw IQ and common sense are inversely proportional. Case in point: My husband's best friend in high school--the one who pulled a ridiculously high GPA, despite being half in the bag while doing his homework (he claimed Calculus made more sense that way)--also managed to run himself over with his own snowmobile. And that's not the only story I can tell, trust me.

But expecting policies and procedures to save the organization from big mistakes is equally far-fetched. When I begged the senior DBA to please take away the administrator rights for my regular login, he just laughed and said, "You won't do that again, will you?" He was of course right. That wasn't the end of "oopses" I've made with databases, but it hasn't been repeated.

The only silver bullet is to realize that there is no silver bullet, and simply have the means and know-how available when someone accidentally deletes data or screws up source code. Setting up situations where another set of eyes is involved can head off a world of hurt. Again from the software realm: Requiring (or heavily incentivizing) programmers to integrate their work with others' means that you'll see far more small yellow flags than red ones big enough to hang outside a Perkins.

I could go on, but instead I'll hope that I've made my point, that it's important to structure people, processes, and resources around the probability of failure at some point in production. I really wish that the famed Apollo 13 line had been, "Giving up is not an option," rather than "Failure is not an option." It's one thing to fire someone for laziness, shoddiness or willful ignorance. But failure on a managed (and hopefully small) scale should be merely the price of doing business. Particularly in industries like software (where we expect constant innovation), failure is largely an exercise in R&D. In that context, punishing failure is punishing the core process of trying new ideas, and it's the most self-defeating business practice I can think of.

Another "underground" economy

A friend in my old stomping grounds is part of a folk duet, and she and her vocal partner just had a great time donating their talents to a fundraiser. Rather like the belly-dancing ensemble here in La Crosse that has been a prodigious supporter of the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life over the years.

Volunteerism (in both the charitable as well as activist sense) is certainly nothing new. Off the top of my overeducated-and-inexcusably-eurocentric head, I can think of the charitable societies to which respectable women of (at least) the 18th century onward were more or less expected to belong, as well as the tight-knit klatsch that brought about end of slavery in the UK with nary so much as a shot fired. Doubtless, there are other examples, with varying degrees of selflessness and/or social coercion involved.

Anyone who's been personally involved with a cause--in terms of time and appreciable attention-span, rather than a monetary/in-kind donation or Facebook click--understands that that volunteers must be paid, somehow, in a coin that will satisfy them. No news flash there. However, this does hit home in the for-profit universe, particularly where a much more collaborative infrastructure --a.k.a. the internet--has deeper roots.

One early example is in software development. If computer programmers don't have to work within sneaker-netting distance of each other, that opens up all sorts of possibilities. When you throw in centralized locations for refreshing/holding/merging the code-base, those possibilities are exponential, particularly when the programmers in question have the intrinsic motivation to stick it to show off to other programmers and/or stick it to the suits who make their 8-to-8 lives so very frustrating.

One slightly more recent example is crowd-sourcing of content, whether it be news or T-shirt copy. I view the pre-emptive obituaries of the mainstream news with a certain amount of skepticism, but nevertheless, "citizen-journalism" has carved out a rather defensible niche for itself.

I suspect that any number of other industries that largely make their gelt on the creation and control of data/information/content are similarly in a state that ranges from "flux" to "turmoil." All of which indicates re-gearing, not only of the nitty-gritties like processing, but also of management. Think for a minute about why you do what you do to earn a living. Now contrast that with what you do when you're not in the office, either literally or virtually. Unless you're employed by what you're passionate about (and good on you if you are), I'm strongly guessing that these are two different things. In other words, managing the part of someone who's paying the bills is quite different from managing someone who's satisfying her/his other needs.

The folks who are looking to benefit from that second part of a person can't push the buttons on the first part of that person. As much as I dislike Apple in many respects, I will say that they seem to do a more-than-passable job pandering to both worlds. I.e., those who think they can make enough money from an iPhone application before Apple decides to muscle in, and those who give away their work purely for bragging rights. Booyah to Apple for understanding the motivational mix. Adobe, on the other hand, doesn't even rise to the standard of throwing crumbs to the peasants when it comes to involving the open source community in their Flex development platform. Personally, I stopped taking them seriously some time ago, but for the purposes of this post, bopped out to their Flex-for-Linux site just now, and discovered that they hadn't updated their release code in just over a year. Pathetic.

I might be doing a disservice to the folks who are all about "Leadership" or "Change management," but if the ivy-league MBA schools aren't requiring at least four credits at the 300-level that cover managing "volunteer" staff, they're doing a huge disservice to their customers--a.k.a. students. Because even hourly and salaried employees can appreciation "remuneration" like the the very public shout-out for a job well done, or the hand-written thank-you note or even the simple understanding of what's important to them. Things that a volunteer coordinator would instinctively understand.

I don't care what type of organization it is--everything from non-profit to for-profit--there is no such thing as pure capitalism. And the smart manager is has way, waaaaaay more motivational tools in her/his belt than just the annual review. And it's well past time that conventional wisdom caught up with the reality of this underground economy.

The Pamplona china shop *

Here's a visualization, somewhat math-oriented. Remember the X-axis and the Y-axis from Geometry and Algebra? Good. Now imagine the X-axis (the west-to-east one) as a spectrum of how much damage an organization can take before it crumbles. Now imagine the Y-axis (the south-to-north one) as the amount of damage that a single employee can do. We're talking about the lowest-common-denominator employee. Typically, that's the employee who answers phones or stands at a counter or knocks on doors.

"Wait. Why not the janitor or housekeeper?" some may wonder. That's because the folks who clean the toilets are probably contractors, not employees. I'm talking about people who are can be paid, trained, and informed at the minimum required level yet are still "important" enough from an organizational standpoint that some middle-management satrap can't bear the thought of not having them directly under her/his thumb from an org. chart standpoint.

Here's the memo that every suit working for a consumer-oriented business in any society affluent enough to support even cell-phone quality cameras and dial-up internet speeds needs to get: What would be known in geometry as the "origin"--i.e. (0, 0) or dead center--on that X-Y coordinate system has moved southwest faster than a sun-bird pointing an RV for Tempe, AZ in November. I'm not talking about PR debacles like Jimmy the Greek or Don Imus--both were too high-profile. I'm talking about people who have to wear a badge for the customer to know their name.

Now, however, it's not a matter of whether AP/Reuters decree that a slip-up (however public) is news. Witness the Domino's Pizza debacle. Or the Comcast technician falling asleep on the customer's couch. Both went viral on YouTube without the help of the gatekeepers of mainstream media.

Understand that I'm not defending the Domino's...errr...amateur video-makers. I might have a teeny bit more sympathy for the Comcast guy, but not even that much. Ultimately, however, I feel zero sympathy for either Domino's or Comcast. In the case of Domino's: Welcome to the cost of winning the race to the bottom. In the case of Comcast, when one of your own technicians has to wait on the line for an hour, you're merely reaping what you sow. And good shuttance to the both of you and everyone like you who's called out on forgetting who actually pays the bills.

I'll admit that ten or so years ago, I fell for the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe email hoax. The reason being that I trusted the person who had sent the email. The thing about YouTube, however, is that you don't have to receive an email; tagging and links and Tweets will do. And belief depends merely upon your determination of whether or not the video was faked. That's another dimension: The fakes are called out a lot more speedily than they were ten and fifteen years ago. Which is good news for the organizations being slandered. But the bad news for those that aren't is that merely firing the persons responsible and issuing an apology on the corporate website probably isn't enough to counteract the damage.

It basically points back to just doing things the right way in the first place. Once upon a time, it was merely a platitude to say that the customer is always right. But when the customer has a flip-cam and DSL? Well, that's where the rubber hits the road. The problem, IMO, is that most companies still think that it's a PR issue--i.e. a matter of spin. But we're only seeing the proverbial tip of the iceberg. You can only have the CEO fidgeting and reading a script in front of a video-cam so many times before it's evident that there's no commitment to making things right in any permanent sense.

In other words, any business that relies on consumers has to realize that it's a china shop in the city of bulls. Those that don't install bulletproof glass and blame the employees for the smashed china are pretty hard to feel sorry for when they go toes-up. (Not, of course, that they necessarily will: My own incompetent ISP--CenturyTel--is avoiding the consequences of its own suckiness by growing bigger--and presumably even more sucky and less responsive--with EMBARQ. At which point the hapless consumer either tries her/his luck with the other 800-lb. gorilla in town or hopes for disruptive technology to plant them both in the fiscal graveyard.)

---
* Apologies for the belated post: CenturyTel was sucking--on steroids--last nigh. Today started out at 55 mph and hasn't slowed down until now.

Frivolous Friday, 08.28.2009: Worst business titles ever

Purely fictitious, of course.

Got that, all you hack writers out there with your addiction to over-burdened metaphors and dilettente's grasp of history?! I'm kidding, yo! Kidding! You know, like "Ha-ha, funny!" Kidding. Seriously--kidding.

• Leadership Secrets of Lord Voldemort
• Think Yourself Rich!
• Princess Leia, CEO
  
• Fund Management for Dummies
• The Bohemian Club Book of Etiquette
• What Would Torquemada do?
• The Bailout Billionaire
  
• Swim with the Ramoras
• The 2010 Guide to Making a Fortune in Commercial Real Estate
• Rich Dad, Plutocrat Dad
• How to Survive the Coming Collapse of the Cheap Plastic Junk Market
  
• Chicken Soup for the Rock Star CEO Soul
  
• Story-telling Your Way to Success
• Investing with the Celtic Zodiac
  
• Everything I Need to Know about Management I Learned from my Cat
• The Art of the Screw-over
• The Club Fed Guide to Power-Networking
• The One-Minute Mogul (newly updated for Twitter)

(Please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please-with-a side-of-fries just don't let me see these the next time I stroll through Barnes and Noble...)

Nerdiversity

There's this old, old joke:

Q: What's the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?
A: The extroverted programmer looks at your shoes.

[obligatory rim shot]

Needless to write, reality is considerably more nuanced than that. The reason largely being that "computers" are no longer multi-room behemoths that eat data by way of punch cards or tape and spit it up again--like some digital ruminant--in greenbar-paper reports. In other words, it's a lot easier to chat them up nowadays.

My boss proudly refers to us as "The Island of Misfit Toys," and that actually gives me warm fuzzies, even years on. Because it translates to the kind of place where the rules of the recess playground largely do not apply. Ultimately, that's one of the most efficient work environments I can think of, one where you're not distracted by having to put the periscope up every half-hour to see whether the alliances or pecking-orders have shifted. That's assuming you're not wasting even more energy and attention on trying to fathom them n the first place. Which would be me.

But as important as it is to be ruthless in hiring people who will fit into the overall culture--if you need a particular skill-set Right This Very Nanosecond, well, that's why consultants are made--it's important to understand what, personality-wise, the potential new hire is bringing to the mix. The last time I was hired by someone who didn't already know me, behavioral interviewing was only starting to come into cant use. In the years since my abysmal performance on the guinea-pig interview I did for the experience, I've arrived at a much higher appreciation of its nuances.

Hiring for skill is important, but for me, it comes in third after cultural fit and personality type. When I talk about personality type, I'm not talking about the Myers-Briggs or whatever pidgeon-holing glorified Facebook quizes are out there. (Although if someone is so reckless as to let me interview people again, I might not be above something like "Which Harry Potter character are you?" 'Cuz I'm just evil that way.) I'm more interested in specifics like

• What was the last thing they had to argue against their peers (or superiors) to have done a certain way?
• On a scale of 0% to 100% true, is "'Good' the enemy of 'Done'?"
• If we come to loggerheads, will they shoot me in the face or stab me in the back (metaphorically speaking)?
• What's their preferred learning style (structured classroom vs. O'Reilly University vs. Find something close on the internet)?
• What makes them "weird?"
• What was the last easy, medium, and hard problem they had to solve, and how did they attack the problems? How would the solve them more quickly/efficiently next time?
• Which professionally-germane columns or blogs do they keep going back to and why?
• What types of co-workers make them less effective?
• How many people could they be responsible for?
• Where do they fall on the doggedly single-minded vs. flibbertigibbet spectrum?
  

The list could go on, and it still wouldn't address the central issue of what holes need to be filled in the team at the moment. Do you have too many people willing to take orders and not enough willing to give them or vice-versa? Is the get-it-done-now faction outnumbered by the i-dotters and the t-crossers? Are the champions of shiny new things being unduly grounded by the Old Guard? Those sorts of things. And I don't think that it strictly applies to technical folks, either.

All of which makes me glad that I'm not in management, and thus can bloviate from the comfort and safety of my own untested opinions. (In the same spirit, can give reams of advice on child-rearing, too. Just ask my sister.)

"Sorry" on steroids

As a recovering Technical Writer, one of my top peeves--apart from the confusion of "its" and "it's"--is when instructions are just plain wrong.

My husband and I are filling out a big, nasty application, with all the hoop jumping you'd expect of anything that involves gate-keepers. But we're trying to be diligent so as not to throw off the timing--including not only reading the instructions on the printed portion of the application, but also the advisory "callout" info. that's embedded into the PDF document itself. So all the supporting info.'s been scraped together and everything bundled off for its once-over before it's officially submitted. No dice--it's batted back to me, directly contradicting the instructions in one of the call-outs.

That and the fact that the person "quality-checking" it referred by my husband by his middle name probably made my tone a trifle frosty when I suggested that perhaps they should change the call-out's wording to prevent future nuisance/delay. Surprisingly, I not only received an apology for the naming mix-up, but also a thank-you for pointing out the error in the instructions and the note that it will be corrected "immediately."

When's the last time you heard a front-line employee--i.e. someone who deals directly with the public all day--say something of that nature? A rather pathetic--if telling--commentary on the standard of "customer service," when a middle-class, middle-of-the-road person like me is actually blown back a little by a near-immediate fix to a problem.

Too many organizations, IMO, are afraid of their customers. Why? People have too many buttons, and they vary from person to person. And, worse, those buttons don't always do what their labels--if there's any label at all--says that they do. Worst of all, Marketing and Sales just want to know which ones make the wallet pop out and open. They just want to keep their lives simple by homing in on button-labels like "American Flag," "Kittens," "Christmas," "The Jones Don't Have This (Yet)," and "Does This Button Make Me Look Fat?" And they'll hammer 'em 'til they don't work anymore.

But beyond that, what the other buttons do when unintentionally pushed by the product or service...well, that's Someone Else's problem. And that Someone Else probably works for a minimal salary with minimal training (because they'll just leave for something even slightly less sucky at the drop of a hat anyway, don't you know?) who is "empowered" merely to pop out apologies like a Pez dispenser pops out Kool-Aid-flavored chalk.

All of which carries a staggering opportunity cost. From the management side of things, I can't imagine any single better way of making sense of your customers' buttons than spending time doing customer service or tech. support. A few days' worth of time, even at management salaries, has to be less expensive than paying consultants to compile the latest Twitter or Google Ad Sense trends. Or for that matter, less expensive than losing customers over problems that no one was "empowered" enough to fix before they became a PR nightmare.

An overlooked fringe benefit

Some folks may prefer a highly structured work environment where what they do pretty well matches up with what they expect to do, even if it's the same thing week-in and week-out. Personally, I'm waaaay too much of a flibbertigibbit for that extreme. But, some people are happiest that way, and it's least disruptive (in the near- and nearer-terms) to keep them that way.

I would wager, though, that most folks like more variety, particularly the ones who are expected to create stuff, and I'm not strictly talking computer programming. Why, then, do we see management apply the Henry Ford assembly line specialization model to places that are supposed to produce innovative designs, techniques, content, solutions, what-have-you? If you have knowledge workers reporting to you, what brain-fever would prompt you to create an official R&D department?

Because when you make it official, you're doing two flavors of damage to the organization:

1. You're basically off a playground area and letting only a few kids in it, with no recess for the others. That's sheer poison by itself, let alone the damage even a single remark from the "privileged" kids to those slaving away in the coal mines and mills next door can wreak.
2. You're also teaching those in the playground that it's someone else's responsibility to sell the ideas to the rest of the organization, and to see them through actual implementation.
   

Short story: Don't be that manager. Yes, 3M and Google are famous for "giving" their employees a hefty amount of "play-time" (while, naturally, adopting their choice of the brain-children thus born). Not every firm can afford that. But equitably spreading the satisfaction (and responsibility) of creating "new" things among those who enjoy that sort of thing has another payoff beyond morale: If you require cross-clique collaboration as part of the process, you've removed some of the communication friction that normally builds up in organizations, particularly ones without a lot of churn. (That would be particularly true right now, when hiring is abysmal, and those who still have jobs are far more leery of jumping ship.)

Yes, it costs something (if only in terms of vigilance and, maybe, political capital) to gamble on an untried person or group. But I can pretty much guarantee you that doing anything else is most certainly not a gamble--it's a sure-fire loss in the long run.