Workplace Engineering

Another sad demographic and economic trend reported in the WSJ.

Today, more and more children are being raised by their grandparents. These grandparents provide a crucial safety net, allowing children whose parents can’t provide for them to remain in families, instead of winding up as wards of the state. But as the recession hits “grandfamilies,” that safety net is under stress.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I bought the audio book and think I need to by it in print too. The whole idea of turning your business/organization/industry into a platform is incredibly compelling. Kind of wish I’d read it before starting my business.


View all my reviews.

I’ve been missing my Fracking Friday routine now that Battlestar Galactica is finished. Clearly Robert Strohmeyer is missing it too:

10 Business Lessons From ‘Battlestar Galactica’ - Business Center - PC World

Of Strohmeyer’s 10 lessons from BG, this one resonated the most with me:

“3. Some things can’t be outsourced.
Pretty much every terrible event that befalls humanity in Galactica is the direct result of an overzealous push toward outsourcing human labor to robots. The business lesson here is clear: While outsourcing may save short-term costs, outsourcing the wrong jobs can ultimately destroy your business, the economy, or your species.”

One of the tenets I’ve followed during a career of working in heavily outsourced environments is that you can’t outsource your problems either. The twelve colonies were pretty fractured and instead of tackling the issues befalling their society they outsourced the labor instead.

This is one of the great risks of outsourcing generally. Once you’ve outsourced it you’ve to a large extent hidden it too. If your processes don’t work and your teams are dysfunctional it won’t be any better after you’ve ceded control and it will be a whole lot more difficult to get inside and solve them before like the Cylons, those broken systems come back with vengeance.

Of course you can do something about it. If you are going to outsource, make sure you understand what you are outsourcing and the full context. If you can, solve your problems before you outsource. If you can’t, at least tell the outsource partner and make them a part of the solution.

(Via: Guy Kawasaki)

The biggest “aha!” that I’ve had since starting my own business is how difficult it is to get your message out and to encourage potential customers to buy from you. I used to flatter myself that I was a good communicator and could persuade business leaders to follow my recommendations. Since last summer, I’ve found out that moving from selling to internal corporate customers to selling to real customers is like doing well in the little leagues and then walking out into the Superbowl. It’s enough to make you want to change your pants/trousers!

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1 - Great sales professionals deserve HUGE RESPECT! It takes a special kind of person to walk into a room, create rapport, build trust, maintain enthusiasm and have the stamina to eventually close the sale.

2 - A lot of sales professionals are not great. We’ve taken mentoring from a number of sales people along the way. As we’ve learned more, we’ve figured out that most just are not that good. Fortunately, we have one in our back pocket now who is causing the scales to fall from our eyes (you know who you are).

3 - The sales cycle isn’t like running a marathon, it’s like sailing around the world! In a marathon you have some control - train and eat well and put on a decent pair of running shoes and you should get to the finish line at some point. If you are sailing, you need the right training, right clothes, right boat, right equipment, right charts, right crew….and then you put to see, hoping that you’ll make all your checkpoints and get to your destination before you sink.

4 - Selling enterprise software is really hard! First you need to find out if a customer for your software actually exists. If you have an application that runs across organizational boundaries, it is especially difficult to find someone who can make a decision. If you can find someone who can be a champion for you, you are now in a race to get through all of the gates to an order before they move on to bigger and better things.

5 - Software is not a complete product (or at least ours isn’t). After spending six months as a pure software play, realized that we actually need to put food on the table. So, we’ve started to consult. Guess what! Now people are starting to get interested in our product…..provided we consult too.

6 - It’s the benefits, Stupid! I have spent six months extolling the features of our portal only to find out that our possible customers don’t really care. They want to know what our product can actually do for them. Our customers may not be able to calculate ROI is or even give a business school definition, but they have a very healthy understanding of what return on investment actually means.

7 - Focus. Focus. Focus. It is easier to sell a product that does one highly targeted thing well than a complicated the cure for world hunger. We’ve moved from selling a general light-weight online dashboard/scorecard that does everything to a services-vendor KPI reporting tool.

8 - It’s all about the customer. I did a Dale Carnegie course last year. It has taken me around a year of soak time to finally get the idea that it really is about them and not about me.

Big Up Respect to great sales people. I think I’ve at least found where the path to sales success starts now. 2009 is going to be about learning more and actually doing it!

Incredible question in the Harvard Discussion Leader article In 2009, Match the Urge to Purge with a Zest to Invest - Bill Taylor:

“For years now, as I have addressed executive audiences around the word, I have urged leaders to ask themselves one simple question: If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising genius Roy Spence, who says he got it from strategy guru Jim Collins. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as you evaluate how to navigate through this economic crisis.

Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate. Precious few companies meet any of these criteria — which may be why so many companies feel like they’re on the verge of going out of business, even in good times.”

For those of us who decided to launch businesses just before the reversal in economic fortunes, the question that we’ve got to answer is: “If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone know you existed in the first place?”

(Via Harvard Business Publishing.)

I’m one of those armchair adventurers who loves to read about the exploits of great explorers and then makes every excuse under the sun why I can’t won’t follow in their footsteps. Not enough money, my kids are too young, overweight, not enough education/ability, bad knees etc. etc.

This is someone who doesn’t make excuses: Adventurer Todd Carmichael Completes 700 Mile Trek from Antarctica to the South Pole Unassisted : TreeHugger:

“Todd Carmichael of Philadelphia, Pa., is the first American to complete the 700 mile trek from Antarctica to the South Pole unassisted. Carmichael arrived at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at 4:10 p.m. on December 21, exactly 97 years and one week after the first polar explorer Roald Amundsen first achieved the frosty feat.”

My heroes didn’t accept excuses. Shackleton accepted no excuses when it came to getting all his men out of Antarctica. Gandhi accepted no excuses when it came to freeing his homeland peacefully and Nelson accepted no excuses at Trafalgar.

My friend, Ed Harris, asked me today what my New Year’s resolution is for 2009. I’ve decided now:

I resolve that 2009 will be the “Year of No Excuses”

Zen Habits post A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly: is really helpful to anyone like me who’s been trying to figure out how to engage with Twitter….

“Twitter is like a river … you can step into it at any point and feel the water, bathe in it, frolic if you like … and then get out. And go back in at any time, at any point. But, you don’t have to try to consume the entire river — it’s impossible and frankly a waste of time in my eyes.

So that’s how I approach Twitter these days: I’ll just jump into the stream of incoming tweets and see what people are saying. I can ignore them or follow their links or reply if I want. Then I get out of the stream. I don’t try to read everything I missed, and if I miss a lot of stuff, I’m OK with that.”

I think this advice could apply equally to all the corporate information my clients have to keep up with. There are some core performance KPIs that they need to be on top of all of the time, but much of what passes an executive these days is just the flow of the corporate river.

(See the rest of the post in Zen Habits.)

Successfully outsourcing can result in considerable cost savings and performance and capacity improvements for an outsourcing organization and can provide opportunities for economies of scale that would be otherwise impossible.  If an organization could achieve all of its goals by itself there would be no need to  enter into business partnerships and the outsourcing industry in particular would be much smaller than it is today. Ten of the pitfalls an organization faces are:

1. Poor Planning
2. Marry in haste, repent at leisure
3. Faulty Financials
4. Underinvestment in the Transisition
5. Brain Drain
6. Passive Agressive Teamwork
7. The Tower of Babel
8. It doesn’t last
9. Losing the wood for the trees
10. Unrealistic expectations

These pitfalls can be avoided through planning, insight, and a commitment to communication and sustaining the change that comes along with a successful partnership.

The failure to meet unrealistic expectations can have a huge detrimental impact on a business partnership. Business partnerships and outsourcing relationships in particular are complex, lengthy, involve considerable change and require both personal and organizational investment to be successful. Lack of understanding, over ambitious promises and lack of preparation and rigor can all lead to expectations that are not matched by reality.

Knowledge, preparation and communication are the answers to unrealistic expectations. Developing a deep and structured knowledge of your processes, needs, performance requirements and your partner capabilities drives realistic criteria. Deep preparation leaving little to chance ensures that scenarios are thought about and surprises are reduced. On-going, honest and clear communications ensures that everyone is on the same page and there is little room for unrealistic expectations.

There is a temptation to over measure and get lost in detailed performance metrics and lose sight of the overall objectives of the partnership. After taking the time to develop detailed processes, understand key quality items, benchmark and then developing a complex algorithm linking pay to performance that a mad scientist would be proud of, performance stubbornly refuses to budge and great expectations are dashed.

This temptation to measure and set targets for everything the greater the possibility that they will influence each other (in possibly not fully understood ways) and  prevent major gains in any one area. In statistics, this is known as “regression to the mean,” for the poor individuals managing or performing in this scenario it is a classic no-win situation.

It can also be tempting to set arbitrary standards because they seem to make sense at the time. The percentage is the biggest villain here. 98% performance may sound great or 99.99% may sound like perfection. When that becomes a target for missing mail for an organization delivering 100,000 letters a day to a business, it means that that means 99 can go missing each and every day. Reality checks are critical when setting targets.

Both of these problems can be avoided by taking a step back to clarify objectives and what actually needs to be measured and then give that balanced scorecard a healthy dose of reality.