All posts by Steve

Reading

The Crowd

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At one point in time or another we have all wanted to be part of the “in crowd”. However we usually don’t want to be a “face in the crowd”. We know that “two is company, but three is a crowd”. We usually don’t like to be crowded in or crowded out. When we do something good it may be referred to as a “crowd pleaser”. The crowd is part of our lexicon, and it normally refers to the everyman or average person.



No one really wants to be average. We all want to some extent to be different. This is a way in which we are all alike to some extent. I try to encourage everyone to read. This act in itself will separate you from the average crowd. Not enough people read anymore. The more you read the more you will separate yourself from the crowd. I think this is a good thing. Our businesses and our society seem to be predicated on the addressing of the crowd, not the individual. There are several books on group and mob dynamics. I encourage everyone to find one and to read it.
 
There are some very interesting aspects on the way crowds are managed (ever here of the phrase “crowd control”) and the way crowds behave. The crowd, on average is easier to get money from and to manage because they like, and in some instances want to believe what they are told. If you want to be a leader you have to understand this and step away from the average crowd.




Leaders start being leaders by first not thinking as they are told. As trite as it sounds, they think for themselves. The information that we get about Pay Day Loans, Vitamins, Exercise Devices and all sorts of Weight Loss Diets is designed for the average group. This is information for people who want to believe that it is easy to get money, get healthy, and get in shape or to lose weight. It isn’t. Unfortunately for them it usually takes work, dedication and effort. People who do not continue to read and who do not continue to educate themselves will believe all sorts of outlandish claims and will subsequently be separated from their money in return for the easy promise of these items. They will be managed and as they grow they will become managers, not leaders.



This “think for themselves” standard applies to leaders in business as well. They learn to think for themselves. They understand where the information they are receiving comes from and why it is formatted and presented in the manner it is. They recognize who is providing them the information and what their goal is in providing it. It doesn’t matter if it is an individual contributor presenting their monthly report or the Chief Executive Officer presenting the corporate quarterly report, they both have a message that they want to convey and an objective they want to achieve aside from just presenting the information. That message doesn’t invalidate the information being received; it just adds another facet to it that must be considered.




Leaders form their own opinions. They don’t get them from the same place that the crowd does. They don’t get them from thirteen second sound bites on television. They don’t get them from one source. They don’t get them from news papers, magazines or the internet. They create their own. Leaders look at both sides and sometimes multiple sides of a problem. They strive to understand the supply side as well as the demand side of the issue. They understand what they want to do, but also try to understand what others want to do as well so that when both of their “wants”, sometimes competing and sometimes complimentary interact, they are ready.
  



Today the average person in business has been educated to one relatively higher level or another. This education is usually the product of our various educational institutions and systems. These institutions have a prescribed path and set of requirements that were probably developed many, many years ago. It is a tried and true formula that for the most part we are all the product of. It worked well when the process was put in place and it continues to work, right? I am sure that we are all comfortable knowing that the world, and more specifically business has not changed substantially since our educational curriculums were developed.



In case you were wondering, that was just a little sarcasm. Possibly just slightly more than a little.




If institutional education was the only key to success, why is it that new graduates, fresh out of college with their newly minted college degrees are not immediately made executives and put in positions of authority in business? The answer is pretty simple. It is because they have a lot to learn.




The average college degree indicates that its holder is capable of applying themselves toward a long term goal, working multiple years toward it, and actually achieving it. More importantly it indicates that the person has demonstrated the capability to learn. The average college graduate then enters the business world and seems to stop learning. They have been conditioned to expect that they already have learned all the information they will need, or that the information they need to learn to be clearly and cleanly presented to them. This has rarely been my experience in business. Leaders understand that graduating from college is the educational equivalent to an admission ticket to the major league business game, and that the real learning about business is just about to begin.




The average employee looks to receive assignments and fulfill them. They look to be told what to do, and what needs to be done and what is expected of them. Their belief is that by doing what is expected and what is asked of them they will advance. This is what was required of them in their educational institutional experience, and that seemed to work out pretty well there. That may be the eventual case for managers, but they will not ever lead in business by taking that approach. Leaders understand that they can do more. Anyone can do what is asked of them. Leaders do not wait to be asked to take on an assignment or solve a problem. 



Leaders understand that in business you learn by doing. They do more than they are asked to do. They do things that they have never done before. They risk being wrong in what they do. They build on what they have learned before and apply it to the new activities that they must now do. Leaders understand that they must now educate themselves if they are to continue learning, growing and succeeding, and that they do not educate themselves by following a manager.




Learning is a habit that is acquired and honed in school prior to entering business. It also seems to be a habit that many in business seem to forget once they are working. They have a tendency to rely on what they have learned instead of learning what may now be new. Two of the best ways that I have found to stay in the learning habit is to (One) try and add to the breadth of activities that you enjoy. Take up new sports. Learn to play a musical instrument. Go to new or different social events. The new or unfamiliar will force you out of your safe zone and isn’t that what learning is about. By keeping the learning habit alive, even in unrelated topics or fields, you will keep yourself open to learning in business.




The second method for continued learning is to read. Read a lot. Read for enjoyment. Read for professional interest. Just read.




Out of curiosity I did an internet search on the phrase “someone who likes to read”. I thought the results were pretty interesting. The definition of someone who likes to read is a “bibliophile”. Someone who loves books. That one is okay. It also returned “intellectual”. That’s also a good one, but it seems to me to be acquiring a bit of a negative connotation in today’s changing vernacular. “Bookworm” also came up. Definitely a negative connotation. Finally it returned “Dork” and “Nerd”.




I couldn’t make this up. Something that is acquiring that sort of negative connotation has to be good for you.

Expectations, New Ideas, Reacting, Self Analysis

Automatic Default Setting

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I have a friend Leif, who lives up in Wisconsin. He used to live in Texas and moved BACK to Wisconsin of his own volition. This fact in itself should provide some insight into the type of individual that Leif is. Be that as it may, I still consider him a friend. We stay in touch via electronic means. I keep track of him in some small way because Leif loves to post on Facebook. He posts a lot more than I do. Sometimes he posts things that I wish I had posted. I don’t post much on Facebook. Many times he posts things that I am proud to say that I had no input into, no contact with and would not have posted even if I did. It could be said that Leif swings at just about every electronic pitch. When you do that there are going to be a lot of whiffs and foul balls, but on occasion you will make good contact and knock one a long ways. Leif recently posted a Facebook link to a Youtube video about a speech given by David Foster Wallace at the 2005 commencement at Kenyon College called “This is Water”.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmpYnxlEh0c&feature=player_embedded.




This was one of Leif’s home run posts.




I have a tendency to look at the interconnected nature of things and how information that may be applicable in one realm is actually also applicable in another. This may provide some insight into what type of an individual I am. The realm that I usually end up trying to apply this interconnected information to is the business environment. Sometimes I see the hyperbole and Monty Python-esque absurdity of what is going on. I know I am dating myself here, but sometimes there just is no other theater of the absurd that can fit the reality of business like the Pythons with their “Minister of Funny Walks” and “Lumberjack Song”. Sometimes I get what I hope is a real flash of insight into something that may be useful in actually continuing to navigate the difficult business waters. I am hoping that David Foster Wallace, via Leif might have provided me a flash, along with a little absurdity, that I will try to apply to our business world and pass along here.



Mr. Waters in his speech discussed the fact many times in life we will find ourselves on what he called our Automatic Default Setting. He described the automatic default setting as the way we deal with things when we are not consciously thinking. This idea struck a chord with me. The idea that we have an automatic setting in how we deal with the world around us seemed to me to be pretty applicable to how we deal with the business environment as well.




The idea of automatic default setting was used primarily in addressing the mundane such as driving in traffic or standing in line. The net of this approach was that it leads to viewing people in these instances as obstacles slowing you down and being in the way. Is this beginning to sound familiar to anyone’s work environment?




I am going to pause here a moment and note that in business I have found that occasionally…okay, more than occasionally, in fact pretty often this automatic default setting is so accurate that it is painful. What I found particularly interesting and applicable is that Mr. Wallace did not dispute this in life either. What he looked at and brought forward was that people have the ability to be aware of their default settings and instead of perceiving the world through them; they can choose to instead to be aware of them. This will affect how you think. This is always a good thing.



Now this sort of discussion of self awareness is usually reserved for some sort of existential high-brow literary artifice. That is not going to happen here, mainly because I don’t think I know how to act high-brow. People who know me can probably corroborate this statement. One of the points that Mr. Wallace did make was that being aware of your automatic default setting and choosing not to operate at that setting takes effort. It takes a will and a willingness to not to just go along without thinking. You have to be able to consider possibilities that are outside the standard way that you think. However, if someone asks or tells you to think outside the box, you can probably be reasonably assured that they are operating on their standard default setting.




It is my experience that there may be some people who may not be able to operate on any setting other than automatic default even if they wanted to. I am not trying to invalidate Mr. Wallace’s supposition here. I’m just saying.




With this rejection of the automatic default setting, we may need to revisit our beliefs that the Sales teams are a bunch of over promising, money driven, lying swine. We need to realize that they may not in fact be lying all the time but probably only when they are talking. We need to reject the setting that all finance and accounting team members are slow moving, detail oriented, conservative, money driven sloths. We need to understand that we only see them in the business environment and that at outside of the office they may not be entirely conservative, particularly when it comes to decisions regarding their footwear and whether or not they get the oil in their cars changed before, after or exactly on the recommended mileage.




All joking aside, I found David Foster Wallace’s approach to being more aware of the everyday items and thoughts that we take for granted, that we utilize our automatic default settings on, to be scarily accurate. It takes effort and will to think of each event, person and process as a potentially new experience that should not be treated to the same default setting response. If we ever wonder why we, our business or our company seem to continually be asked to solve the same problem multiple times, it could be because everyone has their default settings on and we provide the same responses to what we perceive as the same stimuli.




Changing gears just a little here, we come to Albert Einstein who said something along these same lines. Einstein said:




“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”



Is it possible that we seem to do the same things over and over again because we have our default settings on and don’t bother to take the effort to consider the possibilities associated with something new? We have already seen it, or something like it and it is just easier to revert to our default setting, respond and move on. I don’t know if Mr. Einstein and Mr. Wallace would appreciate me correlating their works, but like I said, I do have a tendency to look at things inter-connectedly.




I have already taken the opportunity to put Mr. Wallace’s ideas into practice. We have all had business issues that seemed to have a circular nature to them. Group A was dependent on Group B for an answer. Group B was waiting on Group C for input. Group C could not get the information it needed from Group A. I am sure we have all been in more than our share of these types of solution merry-go-rounds. They seem to becoming more the norm than the exception. They can go on for weeks. By taking the step back and not accepting that these issues were the norm and by relooking at the “standard responses” we were able to break the cycle and start making progress toward a solution. We took the process off of autopilot, required something other than the default setting response, and started to make progress.




I don’t know if Leif will ever be able to provide another post that will resonate with me the way “This is Water” did. After all, the previous several hundred did not. Just since I started work on this topic he has already posted two more items regarding opportunities and drinking. It is interesting in that both of these later posts seem to have several “Likes” whereas “This is Water” did not get that sort of appreciation. Maybe some of these people need to change their automatic default settings too.

Thanks Leif. I thought “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace was excellent.

Uncategorized

Doing the Job

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My approach to business has always been that you take the business responsibilities that you are given and that you do the best by them and for them that you can. I can say this unabashedly and with some amount of pride. Sometimes you are given big jobs, and sometimes they can seem relatively small. There have been times when I may have questioned the relative value of some of the aspects of the assignment. This feeling usually stems from the apparent increasing focus and effort associated with the process and format of the reporting of the job verses the effort and focus on what is actually getting done. Regardless of what you are asked to do (within the boundaries of legality and conscience of course) and what you may think the relative value is, in business it has been my understanding that you have the responsibility to complete the assignment you are given.



My question now is: When did this change, and why didn’t somebody tell me?




I try not to be a complainer even though I seem to be sounding (at least to myself) more and more Andy Rooney-esque on some of my topics and in some of my approaches to business. I hope Andy Rooney will forgive me for the comparison. I don’t purport to have either the quality or talent that I feel he had. What I hope I do see, and hope perhaps others may see as well is some sort of fleeting similarity of the common sense approach to the issues and topics that I choose to write about.




What I am discussing here is the idea of why it sometimes seems that can’t we get people to do their jobs, regardless of what their jobs are, in business. Having a job, any job, is not a right or an entitlement. It is a privilege. With the possible exception of our elected officials and representatives (who don’t appear to be answerable for their performance to anyone other than themselves – great gig if you can get it), we must all work at our jobs, and if we hope to continue to work and even advance we must meet certain levels of expected performance. This is a fact of life. We all report to people who have the responsibility to sit in judgment of our performance. Individual contributors report to managers. Presidents report to chief executives. Chief executives report to boards of directors. And ultimately boards of directors are accountable to the stock holders. There is a responsibility chain.




I am not going to delve into any esoteric examination of generational work ethics (Baby Boomers verses Generation X verses Generation Y). I am not going to address cultural differences associated with the relatively capitalistic verses the relatively socialistic environments and economies that businesses must deal with. These may be contributing factors, but I think the underlying issue is that we have allowed our business compass to drift from leadership to management, to the point where we now accept management as a substitute for leadership. We seem to be more willing to manage problems instead of doing what may be necessary, or even called for to deal with them and to solve them.




I have been on conference calls (I have probably been on too many conference calls) in the past where if the topic of the call is boiled down to the basics, the net purpose of the call is to figure out how to get certain people or teams to do their assigned tasks or jobs. These types of conference calls seem to have been occurring with greater and greater frequency over time. Perhaps there is a relationship between the seeming increase in conference calls and the apparent decrease in task completion responsibility. I’ll have to think more about that one, but I digress. My point here is that we actually had multiple people on a call trying to figure out how to get specific groups to perform the tasks that they had been assigned.




Now those of you that know me understand that I am a relatively quiet and un-opinionated person. The rest of you must now understand that if any of the people that really knew me actually read that last statement while drinking anything they would now be cleaning up the results of the coughing fit that the statement induced.




Getting back to the previously mentioned conference call, I couldn’t help myself when it came to the discussion on how to get people to do their assignments. I piped up:




“Did you ask the specific individuals to perform the task?” I asked the group.


“Yes” they said. Okay, this is good.


“Did you tell them what they needed to do, and when it needed to be done?”


“Yes” they said. This is also good.

“Okay, they know what they needed to do, and when it needed to be done and they didn’t do it. How do you feel about that?”


“We are angry and frustrated.” They said.


“So what are you going to do about it?”
“We are going to escalate and have the Sr. Vice President send them an email telling them they need to do their job.”



Now wait a minute. People are acknowledging not doing their job so the solution is to escalate and see if someone else can get them to do their job? When did this shift in management responsibility happen? Leaders don’t escalate or ask others to handle their problems. Leaders take care of their own problems. I was in this deep in the conference call, so I carried on:




“Did anybody tell these people that if they did not perform the requirements of their job that they would be terminated?” I asked. There was a prolonged silence on the call.
“Well, we don’t want to threaten them. We would prefer to take this approach first.”



Wow. In a business world where the speed of change approaches that which would have been considered the stuff of science fiction in the past and the ferocity of competition rivals the descriptions of the battles contained in those science fiction novels, we are at a point where managers must ask their senior managers to take this sort of time and effort to get their people to do what they are supposed to do.



There will always be those people who would prefer to do less instead of more. Fortunately there are also those who would lead and actually do more than is expected of them. The issue here lies in what sort of message is sent to the future leaders when they see that there is no disadvantage to those who prefer to do less. I have discussed incentives in the past and have mentioned that there must always be a metaphorical “carrot and stick” associated with upside and downside performance.

I am a big proponent of carrot or positive incentives to influence people’s actions and activities. On the other hand leaders cannot shirk their responsibilities when it comes to unacceptable performance. Assignments given are meant to be fulfilled. The time to question the assignment is when it is assigned. Once that period has passed it becomes a question of execution. Failure to perform must be reviewed and understood. Once it is understood, it must be dealt with. These are the “stick” incentives. As much as I may dislike them, I understand that without them you risk the building of a business culture of entitlement and management, instead of a culture of leadership.

Learning, Responsibility, Self Analysis

Learn Young

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I recently read an article by Julien Smith titled “20 Things I Should Have Known at 20”. I thought it was excellent. Where was he when I was twenty? Looking back at who I was when I was twenty (in my case, at my age I require binoculars, very high power binoculars to look back at myself at the age of twenty) his list of twenty items to know reads like a litany of youthful opportunities. Some I was fortunate enough to have taken advantage of on my own. Some others, not so much.



As I read through Julien Smith’s tips I was not only entertained by how well they applied to the world in general, I was also surprised at how well they applied to the business world specifically. This got me to thinking, which as we all know is a dangerous state for me to be in. I’ll provide a few of Julien’s “tips” for twenty year olds and then follow them up with a few of my corollaries for would be leaders in the business world. Hopefully I won’t be reaching too far and Mr. Smith won’t object too much to the way I have chosen to apply his work.

1.    “The world is trying to keep you stupid. From bank fees to interest rates to miracle diets, people who are not educated are easier to get money from and easier to lead. Educate yourself as much as possible for wealth, independence, and happiness.”




I am not going to say that corporations want to keep their employees stupid. That is definitely not the case. They definitely do however want to communicate their vision, strategy and spin on the status of things. That is how they attempt to manage you. Listen to them carefully when they communicate. Understand what they are saying and almost as importantly what they are not saying. Bad news or difficult issues are almost always couched in other or less direct terms.




Educating yourself on your markets, competitors and business trends is going to be a key. Read up on what the analysts are saying, both the good reports and the bad ones. Leaders don’t put their faith in any one specific source. It is your career and you are going to be responsible for making decisions that will affect you for years to come.

2.    “Do not have faith in institutions to educate you. By the time they build the curriculum, it’s likely that the system is outdated– sometimes utterly broken. You both learn and get respect from people worth getting it from by leading and doing, not by following.”



After having just told you to do your research on not only your company but your competitors and the market in general, it is only fair to tell you not to place all of your faith in that information regardless of the source. Where do you think it came from? The very companies that you were researching. There are very few independent sources of information on businesses. Remember the words of every investment prospectus when it comes to information:



         Past performance is no guarantee of future success.




What companies have done in the past is only a guide to their potential future actions. Learn to take input from several sources, including your gut and instincts, triangulate it as best you can, make a decision and get going. Trust yourself. It’s said that eighty percent of life is just showing up, so show up. Once you get things moving you’ll be surprised at how easy it can be to change the course if you find you need to. Leaders don’t wait until a decision is fait accompli or made for them.

3.    “Read as much as you can. Learn to speed read with high retention. Emerson Spartz taught me this while I was at a Summit Series event. If he reads 2-3 books a week, you can read one.”



Twitter, Facebook, texting and email are not reading. Read novels. Read books. Read articles. Read Blogs. You will be surprised at how much of what you read you retain and can apply to work and your life in general. I have observed that you are perceived by how you communicate. Content, grammar and diction may not be important in today’s immediate forms of communication, but it is crucial in business. Poorly written communications and correspondence in the business world will hold you back. You learn not only the content but also how to better communicate by reading books.

4.     “Connect with everyone, all the time. Be genuine about it. Learn to find something you like in each person, and then speak to that thing.”



Chances are that some time in your career that you are going to have to find a new job. It is the new normal in the business world. It is more effective for a corporation to let people go in one group and hire new or different people in another group at the same time. It may be no comment on your performance or anything else other than the corporate performance. It just happens. Be ready for it.



Learn to retain friends and associates. Be out going. Go to lunch. Maintain a business card catalog and periodically reach out to people. I learned this one much later in my career than I should have. It’s not hard and it does not take much time. When the time comes, and it inevitably will, having an extensive network of contacts and relationships may be crucial to your career. Even if there does not come a time where you need to impose on them, you will be surprised by the opportunities that they can create for you.

5.    “Don’t waste time being shy. Shyness is the belief that your emotions should be the arbitrators of your decision making process when the opposite is actually true.”



Leaders have opinions. Good leaders like team members who also have opinions. If you have a studied and knowledgeable solution to a situation or topic, share it. It is not a competition for attention. It is a desire to get the right answers and more importantly get things done. Notice the difference I have noted. Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone has a solution.




Do not allow a fear of being wrong or a shyness to keep you from providing a solution. I think that it probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: If we had more solutions we would probably have fewer problems. Think about it. Good leaders will search for team members with differing opinions and solutions. Differing approaches almost always result in a stronger team solution.




It’s interesting where we can get our inspiration. I think we all have either been, or are going to be twenty years old at one time in our lives. If you ask my wife she would probably say that I still act as if I were still twenty sometimes, usually, okay, a lot. I think Julien Smith put together twenty items I wish I had known. I won’t go through the other fifteen items. You can read the rest of them at http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-should-have-known-at-20/. It is also interesting how things that we should know at the age of twenty are also applicable to business at just about any age in life. I guess that learning truly does never stop, especially in business. I probably should have learned that earlier too. I guess I’ll try to learn the ones I missed and apply them from now on.

Attrition, Change Management, Leadership. Communication

Attrition: Causes and Cures

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Just as every leader understands that each assignment is a step in their career, they also need to understand that the same is true for each of their team members. It is sometimes too easy to fall into the trap of complacency when it comes to team members. As a leader you have spent a significant amount of time assembling the best, brightest and most skilled team possible. Your team consistently produces exemplary results. Now you notice that they are leaving, and not just a few at a time but in significant numbers. There is no question about it. You have an attrition problem. Now what?



As is usual in business if you are recognizing that you have a problem it probably already is too late. This truly applies to attrition. By the time you recognize that there are more people leaving than would be normally associated with standard career transitions, you will have almost assuredly lost more talent than you want from your team, and more importantly you will have a significant number of additional team members that are probably in one stage or another of their exit process as well. The time to worry about attrition is before it happens. I’ll talk about avoiding attrition later. The question now is what to do about an unwanted attrition issue. Once it starts attrition can and will take on a life of its own.




The key to calming an attrition stampede is to understand on what level the issues of discontent are rooted. Is it a corporate wide issue, a business unit issue, or an individual level issue? Is it based on rumor or actual business performance? Maybe they just don’t like you anymore. Whatever it is that is causing good people to leave faster than you want, you had better find out. I said faster than you want because as I noted above, each assignment is a step in everybody’s career. It is usually not their end point destination. There will always be people transitioning on to their next career step. This is healthy for them and the organization. As with just about everything else in the world today though, too much of a good thing can be bad.




If the issue is deemed to be a corporate wide issue, it will usually be caused by either conflicting or ineffective messages being sent by the corporation’s senior most management. In times of senior management change or poor corporate performance a very clear and concise set of messages regarding strategic directions and plans needs to be openly communicated. Team members understand that change may take time and can usually be patient in order to see the results of the changes, to a point. The more specific the senior management actions and activities that can be identified that are to be taken, the more patient the team can be. However the team will need eventually to be able to see and identify progress against the actions in order to feel secure enough to remain through the period of corporate instability.




If the issue is thought to be on a business unit level, a cause will also need to be identified. Business unit attrition related causes are usually attributable to the business unit performance. If the business unit team believes that the unit has been identified as a troubled or “problem” business, they will try to anticipate senior management actions associated with improving business performance (cost reductions, travel freezes, lay-offs, etc.) and look to transition to other opportunities in other businesses or business units that are not so troubled. Again communicating a clear and concise set of actions for the business may help stem the attrition stampede, but there probably truly is no way to stop this one. People usually like to feel that they are part of a winning team, and in this case they will always look elsewhere if they feel the chances for success on their current team will be limited by the overall team perception or performance.




If the attrition is truly localized into one specific organization then it may be an individual based attrition. This is usually the result of an interpersonal or management technique conflict between the team manager and the team. If it is happening to your specific team you had better be able to look in the mirror and ask yourself the difficult questions regarding you and your relationship to the team. If your role is to try and turn around an underperforming team and you are a change agent, then you can honestly expect that some team members may not be comfortable with the new direction and choose to leave. If you are picking up a new team that has been performing well and they are choosing to leave, then you had better understand those issues quickly. Issues such as frustration or a perceived slight at being passed over in the selection of a new leader can be a generating event in the starting of an attrition wave.




The time to worry about attrition, like forest fires and tooth decay is before it happens. Attrition prevention is far more preferable than having to rapidly implement corrective actions to try and stem the outward flow of talent. Attrition also requires an honest assessment of the issues. Too many times teams will try to equivocate and split hairs as to exactly how the definition, measurement or importance of attrition is to be set. Managers may have a tendency to try and justify higher levels of attrition as acceptable in light of certain factors. They may try to differentiate between attrition of people leaving the group for other groups within the same company and those that leave the company for another company. This direction is normally taken by groups that are suffering from attrition and either cannot or do not have the ability to address the underlying attrition causing issues. Regardless of how it is positioned, attrition is still the unwanted exiting of employees from a defined group or population.




The solution to attrition prevention is very similar to the solution to attrition itself; communication. The difference is that leaders will actually communicate clearly to their teams the challenges in front of them as well as the specific actions that are being put in place and being taken to address them. Managers will usually wait until there is a recognizable attrition issue before communicating. Leaders will be proactive in acknowledging the business issues and position with the team and preparing them for the actions to be taken. In many instances the corrective actions that are outlined to the team may encompass some unpleasant but necessary business activities such as lay-offs and other cost cutting measures. By getting them out into the open early leaders can at least begin to control the realities of what needs to be done and the accompanying rumors (which are almost always worse than the actual truth) can be minimized.




Attrition is expensive in that when people leave they take all that they know and all they have learned with them. They take a proficiency that they have acquired over time that can only be replaced with a similar amount of time and experience. Attrition leaves the remaining team short staffed and over worked (two incremental issues that can add to the underlying attrition causes) while replacements are sought. Attrition reduces the efficiency of the entire team as the replacement is searched for, located, brought on board and then comes up to speed in the needs of the position. Transitions of any type, at the corporate CEO level or the individual contributor all go much smoother when they are anticipated, planned for and executed as opposed to responding to the unexpected exit associated with attrition. The time to plan for and implement an attrition strategy is well before any issues arise, and any attritions starts.

Accountability, Planning, Predictability

Cost Centers

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Throughout history there have always been significant conflicts. The ancient Romans and just about everybody else. The North and the South. The East and the West. Capitalism and Socialism. Yin and Yang. Republicans and Democrats. Dogs and Cats. The list goes on and on. In business the applicable equivalent conflict seems to be between Cost Centers and Profitability.



There appear to be two ongoing schools of thought when it comes to business management structures and organizations. There are probably many more than that but for purposes of the time and space that I have here, I am going to impose the writer’s “power of the pen” and focus on the two that have already alluded to, namely cost centers and profitability (and loss). For the most part just about every other organizational structure is a variant or hybrid of these. You will also occasionally see them referred to as “Matrix” management models and “General” management models.




There are competing schools of business thought when it comes to costs centers. On one side it is felt that it is easier and more efficient to manage your costs when you group them into one specific organization. The idea here is that if you get your costs into one location that there will be several obvious efficiencies and economies of scale that can be taken advantage of to either reduce costs or at the very least slow their growth. As we all know, reducing costs will help improve profitability and creating cost centers is a very seductive argument for reducing costs.



A potential disadvantage to this model is that costs end up being the responsibility of a group other than the business group responsible for revenue or profitability. Because the costs are assigned from a shared pool, the cost center, they may or may not be directly linked to the revenue or business activities that the associated costs are supporting. Here costs are in effect “assigned” to rather than directly associated with the revenue they are responsible for generating.




The other school of thought when it comes to cost centers is that costs should directly be associated with the revenue that they drive. This is the general management model. The idea here is that the revenue, profitability and the costs for a specific business unit should all reside in that specific business unit. In doing this you enable the business unit leader to manage and “fix” his costs in direct proportion to and in association with his revenue in order to achieve his profit objectives.




A potential disadvantage with this model is that some businesses may be too small or may not be far enough along the efficiency curve to endure the incremental costs they require and hence suffer reduced profitability. Because costs are not shared each business unit may in effect be less efficient than they would be if their costs were shared.



So with the lines being drawn and the costs piling up, what do you do? Which structure to implement for the best profitability of the business?




Businesses (and business analysts for that matter) like predictability. They like to know in very specific financial terms what they can expect from their businesses. While the Cost Center and the Profitability models both offer certain aspects of predictability it seems that the profitability model offers the best financial predictability. It is only in this model that all specific and applicable costs are known, defined and fixed within the confines of the business. In the Cost Center model costs are allocated according to some predefined algorithm. While the method or algorithm may be fixed, the actual value of the costs that are assigned can vary. Adding another variable into a business’s cost structure increases the unpredictability of its performance.




As an example, assume there is a cost center that allocates its costs based on support requests. If there are three businesses sharing the cost center and one of the three experiences an unexpected increase in its support requests on the cost center, its costs will rise during that period while the other two businesses costs through no action of their own will go down. Conversely if one of the businesses experiences a reduction in support requests its costs will go down while the other two businesses through no action of their own will go up. In this way cost centers can turn fixed costs into variable costs.




Lastly when dealing with cost centers there comes the issue of governance and leadership. In business for the most part we are looking to grow. We want to grow our business, and with it, our responsibilities. When it comes to cost centers we must always ask the cost center leadership to take the contrary approach and reduce the cost center or at the very least limit its growth. In my experience this has seldom been the case with cost centers. If the supported businesses do not have direct control over the cost center growth and costs, they invariably grow at a faster rate than the supported businesses grow.




In the profitability / General Management model all costs directly associated with a particular business are attached to that business. The market doesn’t dictate what costs the business can or will bear. The market dictates what price the business can expect for its good or service. It is then the profitability objectives of the business that dictate what costs the business can bear in the pursuit of the market price. By putting the cost and price controls in the hands of the business owner, instead of separating them into the hands of the cost center owner and the business owner, you will far more regularly get a more efficient and lower cost solution.




There may be questions regarding lost efficiencies, or biases against smaller businesses in this profitability model. These types of businesses may in fact be able to be served by a cost center model, but should be only in a cost center model where fixed amounts of costs are purchased from the cost center by the business. The idea here is that the business must always decide on the amount of cost that it wants or can afford, hence the cost purchase approach to cost centers.



As I noted before, businesses like predictability, and there is nothing more predictable than a fixed cost. It may be good or bad, but it is known. And known costs can be planned for and dealt with. When direct costs are associated with and controlled by the business, they can and will become fixed. When multiple business’s costs are lumped together into a “Cost Center” there will always be a question regarding the efficiency and value received by the business for the amount of cost allocated to each business. There will be the incremental cost of the cost center management that must also be allocated and paid for. There will also be less control over the content and growth of those costs in the cost center, unless a budgeted cost arrangement can be put in place between the served businesses and the serving cost center.



As I also noted, the arguments in support of cost centers are seductive, but in the reality of their implementation they present multiple issues to the efficient operation of a business. Every effort should be made to find a way to directly attach and fix the costs and decisions about the costs to the revenue and the business that is recognizing the revenue for the most efficient and lowest cost business operation.

Accountability, Responsibility

Not My Job

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I don’t want it to sound as though I am a continual complainer about today’s business environment and conduct. There are many aspects of it that I appreciate. It is just that I believe that it might be better if what has already been proven to be effective in the business environment were retained and combined with what the best of today has to offer instead of seemingly being discarded and replaced whole cloth. I also understand that despite what just about every media outlet reports and would like us to believe, that the business environment is still a difficult place and probably will be for some time to come. Despite all this and probably more, there is one trend that I have witnessed in the conduct of today’s business that I just don’t seem to be able to get my head around. I don’t understand how anyone can ever respond to a question, request or assignment with the words “It’s not my job.”



It seems to me that this phrase has been insidiously creeping into our business lexicon. I have mentioned in the past that it seemed that companies prized employees that had a breadth of experience in that they felt it enabled them to take on new roles and added responsibilities. The difficult business and economic times appears to have taught companies that instead of retaining the generalist who may be capable of performing a great many different functions very well and grow into a multi-dimensional business leader, they may now instead focus on the shorter term and opt for a specialist who may be highly proficient in one particular skill, to the exclusion of the others with somewhat less potential for leadership upside.



The equivalent comparison here would be looking at someone who competes in the decathlon, a ten discipline competition, and comparing them to a sprinter who only competes in the one hundred meter sprint. The winner of the decathlon is viewed as the best overall athlete, but today if you need someone to run one hundred meters, you will more than likely choose the sprinter. And tomorrow if you need someone to throw the javelin or clear the bar in the high jump you can replace the sprinter with someone else who better fills those specific needs then. As I said, a much shorter term approach to immediate needs.



I am drawing a corollary between the advent of this corporate preference for business specialists and the beginning of the “Not My Job” mentality. It seems only natural that if you were brought in for a single purpose that you might not be knowledgeable of or have the predilection to perform other jobs or assume other responsibilities. As an example, if you are brought in to sell, your single focus now is to get the customer order. It seems that profitability, margins, availability of product, functionality, deliverability, etc, are now reduced in your hierarchy of priorities. They are now someone else’s job. If the people responsible for those functions are not as good at their roles as you are at getting orders, it is quite probable that business profitability as well as customer satisfaction will suffer due to potentially too low prices and undeliverable commitments. However, there will probably be plenty of these somewhat difficult orders.



I have also discussed in the past the proliferation of the virtual office and being remotely located in the performance of your role. Prior to the advanced bandwidth and networking capabilities that we enjoy today, functions and businesses were usually collocated within a specific building, floor or area. This face to face interaction gave rise to business terms such as “efficiency” and “synergy”. People physically worked together. 



This also seemed to be a period of intense creativity and development. There were many magazine articles displaying pictures of people sleeping at their desks in the California Silicon Valley as they were driving to create their new businesses and business models. As we have evolved to a more “virtual” environment we seem to have possibly lost some of the synergy, productivity and interaction that drove many of the new ideas.



We may also be seeing the beginning of a corrective movement associated with the virtual office world. In February Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo Issued a directive that all virtual or remote employees in that company need to come into an office to work. She was worried about not only the creativity that was lost when people stopped physically working together, but also the productivity that was lost. We’ll see how this “virtual” reversal goes, but I find it very interesting that a technology and digital bellwether company like Yahoo, a company that was a leader in the new digital age has adopted such a contrary stance to virtual office working.




The corollary that I am drawing here is that psychologically it is easier to say things over the phone than it is to say them in person.  With the advent of virtual offices and conducting the preponderance of work either by phone or electronic media, we have made it in effect “easier” for people to say “Not My Job”. They get to say it over the phone instead of face to face.



Perhaps it was a different time, but I see it even today in that there seems to be more collaboration and less job responsibility deflection in a face to face meeting than in a conference call. A set of disembodied voices on a conference call do not seem to engender the same kind of commitment that is achieved when people are in the same room. An even greater level of commitment seems to be created when people leave the conference room and know they will need to continue to face their peers in the office area. It seems when you hang up the phone everyone is “gone”. It is easier to say “Not My Job” because you rarely if ever have to face them.




Perhaps it is also the advent of the more matrix oriented business structure that has given rise to the “Not My Job” growth. In the past general management or more hierarchical business structures, when a request was made if it was not already a given job responsibility, it was positioned as the addition of a new job responsibility. In today’s somewhat more matrix and consensus oriented business structures, where there is more functional specificity, as well as far more functional overlap, managers seem to be structurally encouraged to focus on only those activities that fit cleanly within their responsibility definitions.




Instead of having a business structure that promotes the addition and incrementing of new responsibilities, we now have one that encourages ever tighter focus on a specific set of responsibility definitions and processes. The result seems to be more and more “Not My Job” responses.




Despite what the typical business RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) may state, leaders when asked take responsibility. It may not be in their job definition. It may not have been anything that they have done before in the organization. But when they are asked, or when they see a business or performance gap that needs to be filled, they step up. If the requirement is truly outside the bounds of their expertise, they don’t say it’s not their job. They take on the responsibility to find out who has the required expertise and see to it that they get the job done.




There is always a time and a place for pushing back on assignments, but in business now, if a job needs to get done it needs to be everyone’s job to see to it that the job gets done. I think if we heard more “I’ll do that job” and less “It’s not my job” we would make much better progress.

Decision Making, Management, Management Style

High Maintenance Managers

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We all work for someone. Sometimes we work for people that are leaders and create an environment where we can grow and flourish. Sometimes we work for managers that seem to feel it is their responsibility to keep track of our every activity. These are the managers that for whatever reason seem to consider themselves the center of the group’s processes and the core of its activities. They appear to think of each member of the team as to be some sort of appendage or digit to be controlled or told what to do. These managers want to position themselves as the control point and decision making hub of their organization. These are the types of managers that I refer to as High Maintenance Managers.



High maintenance managers can present a significant issue to responsible and capable leaders. In addition to managing downward into their team, high maintenance managers also seem to focus on reporting upwards into their management. Most leaders understand that there is a trade-off between how much time and effort is spent getting work done and how much time and effort is spent reporting how much work is getting done. The obvious point here is that the more time that is spent reporting, the less time that is spent actually doing. Most managers do not see this trade-off as an opportunity cost / productivity issue. High maintenance managers seem to thrive in the reporting arena to the point of almost seeming to place a higher priority on the reporting of the work than the actual work accomplished.




I once heard it said that “Those who can’t do, teach.” This always intrigued me. Being someone who enjoys and appreciates golf, I looked at some of the professional golfers and their beautiful rhythmic swings for inspiration. They all seem to have swing coaches of one type or another. I always wondered if these swing coaches were capable of creating these great swings in others, why they couldn’t create one for themselves and start winning. It would seem to indicate that there is more to golf than just the physical / mechanical aspect of being able to swing a golf club correctly. Hence, they teach.




I would propose that the business corollary to “Those who can’t do, teach” is “Those who can’t do, report.” It is my experience that high maintenance managers love reports. They love to get them. They love to give them. They want reports from their team members weekly, monthly, ad hoc, you name it. They want project reports. They want progress reports. They want to have meetings and conference calls to discuss their reports. They seem to want to know what everyone is doing, all the time.




They are almost information junkies when it comes to their areas of responsibility. They can’t seem to ever know enough about what is going on. This might be an acceptable situation if the information that is gathered is used for the purpose of directing or affecting the performance of the business. More often than not it is not used this way. High maintenance managers seem to try and gather all the information that is available for the purpose of creating more reports.




High maintenance managers seem to live for the opportunity to present reports on their own and their teams activities. It is not uncommon for these managers to have multiple drafts and even multiple dry runs on presentations and reports that they will be presenting to their reporting structures. They are experts at crafting an activity report (or just about any other type of report) that not only conveys what has been done, but also does it in such a way as to amaze and astound their management with the images, prose and flow of the presentation. It seems how things are said and done are just as important, if not more so than what was actually accomplished.




Contrary to what you might expect it has been my experience that high maintenance managers do not want to make all decisions. They do however want to be involved in all decisions. They will want to understand how the decision was arrived at and the logic that was used. They will ask detailed questions and probe the arcane aspects associated with the decision. There were always a great many “your decision” questions, and they were usually phrased as “I would like to know…” While the high maintenance manager may not make all of the decisions, through this type of process they do in effect control the decision making process.




It might sound as though I have found high maintenance managers to be untrusting of their teams. In all honesty, I really do not believe this to be the case. I think it stems more from the idea that these types of managers are driven by the perception that since they are nominally in charge that they must be in the middle of all that is going on. They must be aware of, understand and try to control all that is going on as it pertains to their realms.




I am not advocating or even saying that leaders are not or should not be aware of their team’s activities. I am saying that good leaders need to provide space for their team members to operate in. Team members should not be fully autonomous, but they do need to have some sense of self direction if they are to grow into the next generation of leaders. The leaders that I have been associated with were good at providing objectives and guidelines. The managers that I have worked for usually provided tasks and instructions.




I have spent a little time describing some of the traits and attributes of high maintenance managers. I am sure there are more. There are other items such as rigorous justifications associated with approval processes. Another favorite of mine is the repeated forwarding, with comments, of just about every email and piece of correspondence that they receive. It seems that since high maintenance managers crave information, they assume everyone else does too.



So how do you deal with a high maintenance manager if you happen to find yourself in one of their group’s? Their demand for awareness and involvement will not go away. Refusing or ignoring their involvement usually only increases their demands to be involved. And as my dad was so fond of telling me, he might not always be right but he (like the high maintenance manager) was always boss.




I have found that there was never any way to satiate the demands of a high maintenance manager, but that there were usually ways to contain them. One of my favorite ways was what I referred to as the preemptive information strike. Since they were information junkies, I found that if I would provide an information set to them prior to them asking for it, I could invariably provide them a less intensive information set and avoid the detailed review.




I also found that I could work to create an information format or structure that again would be less time consuming and information intensive. I would look to try and create a “bulletized” information / feedback format that would enable me to provide the desired information while at the same time creating a jointly agreeable structure that would reduce my reporting time.




I am sure there are other methods for dealing with high maintenance managers. I have only highlighted a couple of tactics that seemed to work for me. High maintenance managers by their nature are demanding of their team members’ time. This is a trait that is difficult to change. Refusing their information and report requests usually only succeeds in having the requests changed to demands. And the demands usually become for ever more intensive detailed information.




High maintenance managers are a fact of business. For whatever reason they have adopted an informational management approach that they believe works for them. Team members will need to understand this and be flexible enough to adapt to this management style. It is difficult if not impossible to get managers of this type to change, but it is possible to find ways of satisfying their demands while at the same time limiting their informational intrusion into the actual conduct of the business. While that may not be the optimal solution it is an effective way of dealing with high maintenance managers, and still accomplishing your goals.

Employees, Expectations, Management Style

Low Maintenance Employees

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I once heard a very senior executive asked what type of employee he appreciated most. I thought his response was most telling. He said: “A low maintenance one.” I didn’t quite understand at the time what he meant, but as I have gone though the various management ranks, I think I might have picked up on it some. I think what the executive meant was that it is not the management of the issues, problems and crises that are the greatest challenge to managers; it is the management of the people that takes the most time and effort.



Business is conducted between people. Whether it is providing services to the customer or responding to an executive request, it is individual people that do it. And when individual people interact there can and will be issues. It is my position that in general all employees want to do a good job. They want to succeed in their assignments. They want to advance in their careers. The want to be recognized for their contributions to the progress of the business. The issues start to arise when different employees start to utilize differing approaches to working on and attaining these objectives.




Any time you start discussing people, the behavior of people and the management of people you can be treading on very thin ice. I am sure there are claxons, sirens and all manner of warning lights flashing in all sorts of Human Resource departments across the web based on the fact someone outside of HR would have the nerve to address this type of topic. Fortunately I am speaking only for myself and from my own experiences so there really isn’t anyone for them to call. If there are truly any issues, I will look forward to the comments.




I have come to interpret the executive’s low maintenance employee response to mean that he prized an employee that did not require, or seek an inordinate amount of his time to manage. It is a key point to understand the two aspects of this issue.




There are employees that due to any number of issues require extra management intervention in order for them to be able to do their jobs. They may be new and untrained and hence need the incremental leadership. They may be “personality challenged” when it comes to working with others and may require incremental intervention and direction. The point is that there are inevitably employees that require more time and attention from leaders than others in order for them to achieve their goals.




On the other side of the management attention coin, there are those employees that actively seek incremental management attention during the normal course of conducting their job functions. They are the employees that always ask questions during any open forum information session. They will continually come in and seek intermediate approval for each incremental step in the solution process to each of their assignments. In short, they like to spend a lot of time in their manager’s office. It may be due to a true sense of insecurity regarding what they have been asked to do, or it may be from a desire to be perceived as more visible in the execution of their duties. Either way it takes up management time.



There may be some business managers that like and or seek this kind of business activity. Managing the people or managing the process can sometimes be confused with managing the business just as in many instances it can be made to appear that activity can be confused with actually making progress. Most business leaders do not like or seek this type of management situation.




Business leaders are looking for employees whom they can trust to perform their assignments to the same high level that they themselves would perform it. They are looking for employees that are self motivated and understand that there is a distinct value in their being able to perform their roles without incremental management attention, either required or desired on their part, and without other interpersonal difficulties.




That doesn’t mean that good employees must be prepared to work in isolation of their management. I was once in an assignment where I literally had not had any significant time or interface with my reporting executive in several weeks. We had been extremely busy and successful in the market and had several different projects in various stages of development and completion. Still I had not had any time with him. I scheduled a half hour with him through his administrative assistant for the following week.




The meeting came around and I went into his office. He thanked me for setting up an appointment, as he said most people seemed to just barge in on him when they wanted to talk with him, and he then asked me what my issue was.




I told him that I really didn’t have any issue that I needed to escalate to him, but that it had been several weeks since we had had any communications and that I was just closing the loop. I asked him if there was anything else I needed to be doing on his behalf or for the business. He just looked at me for a few moments.



He then said that he had not realized that it had indeed been so long since we had communicated, but he had in fact been focusing on the people and issues that required his attention and since I nor the business I was responsible for needed his attention he had not been in contact with me. He went on to say that this was a good thing in that it freed up valuable time for him to focus on other issues that did require his attention.




I then understood. I thanked him for his time and told him I would not take up any more of it. I learned that I didn’t need to have, nor should I seek a lot of feedback or attention and that even if employees don’t need a great deal of supervision or attention it is still a good idea to periodically touch base with them and provide feedback. I think I only used about fifteen minutes of the half hour allotment.




Leaders recognize those employees that go quietly about doing their jobs, and who do the job to the same high standards that the leaders would do them. They appreciate those who do the work and don’t allow any people management issues to reach a point where they require management intervention or time.  Leaders know what their team members are doing. They don’t need to be reminded by each team member what that specific team member is doing. They also don’t want to have to solve specific issues for specific team members either.




In business a leader wants an employee that they can trust to execute their responsibilities so that they are where they should be in their job and on their assignments at each appropriate time. They don’t need to be doing things to garner individual incremental attention. They should not be doing things that require individual incremental intervention. If they can perform their roles and duties in a manner that requires only a modicum of management supervision or attention and achieve the assigned goals, they will be sought after, recognized and reward by business leaders.

Management Style, Project Management, Recognition, Self Analysis, Time Management

Procrastination and C. Northcote Parkinson

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I was sitting here thinking about what my next topic would be, but I kept putting off getting started. Maybe it was because I just didn’t feel the urgency of writing a new article yet. Some of the topics and articles seem to flow so easily that I begin to think that I might actually be getting the hang of this writing thing. Then others, like this one seem to require significant effort in order to perform their extraction and conversion into cogent thought. When that happens, I do the only logical thing. I procrastinate.



The fact that I was just sitting here trying to avoid writing something got me to thinking of the story of John Lennon when he was in the throes of writing the classic Beatles tune “Nowhere Man”: He said that he was “…lying there trying to write a song and was getting nowhere, man” and it hit him. The rest is musical genius and history. If I should ever be so fortunate as to possess one tenth the talent for writing that he had in his little finger, in my entire body I would count myself lucky. None the less it did give rise to my self examination of why I was having any sort of writers block.




Those of you that know me have often stated that usually I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut. You should be smiling at my difficulty at finding something, in this case the right thing to say.




What I did come up with is that C. Northcote Parkinson, the author of “Parkinson”s Law” was correct when he postulated:




         “Work expands to fill available time.”




The logical corollary, which I will modestly dub: “Gobeli’s Corollary” is:




“Procrastination reduces the perceived amount of work done by reducing available time for it to expand into.”



Think about it. I believe it explains a lot about who we are and why so many of the businesses, and for that matter so many of the political institutions that we have, operate the way they do. It is also probably at least partly responsible for the deadline mentality we seem to have evolved to. If you know that work will expand to fill all available time that it is given, the obvious solution to getting more work done is to provide a deadline that gives less time for each assignment to get done in.



I think we are also all familiar with the relationship between procrastination and “cramming”. We learned it early, probably in high school or college. Instead of spending a little time each day studying, we save it all for the last day or two before the exam. Why study every day when we can study really hard at the end and probably get the same result. We seem to have evolved this concept into our working structures now as well. We have even codified it as an accepted method of reducing the time required to compleat our projects. It’s called “Crashing”. We no longer work on our assignments ahead of time, or a little bit each day. Instead we wait till the deadline looms and then try to kick it directly into high gear.




We also see this type of work process with our current federal legislature. They are so good at procrastinating, and have recognized their own predilection for it, that they have had to create their own either artificial or real deadlines in order to get anything done. As a result we seem to be lurching from one crisis (read: deadline) to the next. This process does seem to keep the talking heads on the various news channels happy as they now have a continuous flow of issues to talk about, but is probably not the most efficient way to get things done.



I once worked a company where they had evolved a similar culture. They knew that they were excellent at managing in a crisis. The only problem was that they evolved to a point where everything had to be a crisis in order to get anything done. Being in a continual crisis mode does have a tendency to wear out the team. To think of it in sports terms, imagine a football team running their “Two Minute” offense for every play of every game for the entire season. It might work for a while, but the wear and tear on the team will eventually cause them to break down.



Gobeli’s Corollary would have us believe that by procrastinating, we would actually end up having to do less work. We seem to believe that doing two days of non-stop hard work is less work than doing an hour or so of less intense work across the term of a two week assignment. That logic just escapes me. For a culture that loves to multi-task while on conference calls, we seem to eschew the opportunity to multi-task on our longer term work assignments. Go figure.




I know I probably sound like a broken record (an interesting allusion since for all intents and purposes records are largely extinct and have been replaced by CDs and MP3s) but I am convinced that a lot of this crisis process is the result of our recognition and reward structures in business. Since we are largely working in “crisis” mode due to looming deadlines, we seek out those who can work well under this kind of pressure. I have referred to them in the past as fire fighters.




These are the “go to” staffs that are relied on to meet the deadline. They receive the recognition and rewards for being able to deliver in the clutch. It seems that those who practice “fire prevention” by taking steps ahead of time to complete their assignments in a non-crisis mode, do not garner as much management attention and perceived respect. The net result is that it doesn’t seem to pay to do the job efficiently and ahead of time. If you want to get noticed, you need a crisis.




And how do you get a crisis? You procrastinate.
 



So while Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill available time and Gobeli’s Corollary says that Procrastination reduces the perceived amount of work needed by reducing available time, there might also be a logical extension here regarding the relative rewards associated with “crisis work” as opposed to doing the same work in an orderly, non-crisis oriented manner. Perhaps the corollary should also incorporate an extended axiom:




“Work becomes more visible to and seems to be more valued by managers as proximity to the deadline grows”



That would play well with the observation that managers seem to recognize the contributions of fire fighters more so than the same contributions associated with those who perform the same work in non-crisis situations, and also explains why so many people seem to procrastinate in doing their assignments until they approach crisis proportions. It has been my experience that business leaders neither value the work of fire fighters more nor procrastinate to crisis levels. They get the work done on time because they know that they do not need to create crises of their own. There will be enough business issues for them to deal with.



Wow. And I got all this because I didn’t yet feel the urgency in having to come up with an article topic and getting written down. I suppose I should also say that I actually had two or three other articles already written, and though I was procrastinating there was probably a good reason why I wasn’t feeling the urgency to get this one done. I guess this early preparation thing can be a two edged sword.