Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Is this a picture of the Department of Widgets and Doodads in your organization?

The picture actually displays an homage to the great cartoonist Rube Goldberg, pictured here with a couple of young volunteers while giving a talk in front of the drawing board.

Goldberg’s famous namesake drawings were hiliarious because the contraptions in them were elaborate and impractical beyond all reason. But I talk to plenty of people whose daily frustrations make them feel like their organizations are built along the same lines. (You can see more of Goldberg’s famous contraption drawings at the official Rube Goldberg site.)

The other day I polled the crowd about what to do with high-maintenance people, so now let’s broaden the focus:

How do you deal with the high-maintenance processes
in your organization?

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(Contraption photo by freshwater2006; Goldberg photo courtesy of Alan Light.)

How do you deal with high-maintenance people?

That question arose on Twitter with the following exchange between Brett Nordquist and me:

• Brett: High maintenance employees can sure suck the fun out a job.
• Me: What do you do (or try to do) to get them to lower their level of maintenance?
• Brett: Good question, since that’s my job.

So now I turn it over to you, dear readers: share your wisdom on dealing with high-maintenance people (including yourself, if you’re brave enough to admit that it applies) in the comments. Feel free to share horror stories!

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(Image from Cyron.)

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three,
and not a hundred or a thousand . . . Simplify, simplify.

Thoreau won’t be displacing Peter Drucker at the top of the management-wisdom heap anytime soon, but on this one thing they certainly agreed: you need to get things simpler if you want to do them better.

Drucker held that top executives could handle one or maybe two major initiatives at a time. Anything more and something was sure to get lost in the shuffle. Thoreau believed that the trappings of America’s increasingly mechanized life — way back in the mid-19th century, mind you — were crowding out human interactions, with each other and with the realm of nature.

Every day I hear from dozens of people who lament the complexity of their lives — at work, at home, and especially in the mixture of the two. Special anger wells up at company policies, cultures, and individuals who gum up the works with needless complexity.

Mind you, some complexity is necessary: you don’t build an MRI machine or an airport terminal using 3rd-grade-level math. But how many of your tasks — your team’s projects — your company’s larger endeavors — would benefit from a hard dose of simplification?

So, tell me:

What should YOU make simpler for yourself?

What should your ORGANIZATION make simpler for everyone?

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The other day I posted a long summa about stress and the bad things it does to us. This morning I read a great short piece from John Murrell of Good Morning Silicon Valley on the subject of stress and how we react to it:

Stressors are inevitable; stress isn’t

I won’t summarize it for you, because I think you should take three minutes to read the whole thing, then as long as you need to ponder its ramifications for your own life.

What I will do is quote John’s conclusion for shorthand, and as a reminder to myself:

It comes down to acceptance — acceptance that you are largely powerless in this world, and that’s OK; acceptance that the outside world will continue to turn without your constant attention; acceptance that you can’t change the wind but you can adjust the sails.

While I’m at it, I’ll tell you that I’ve been reading Good Morning Silicon Valley longer than any other blog or newsletter. If I had to cut my RSS feeds down to ten, GMSV would make that list easily.

Do yourself a favor and read Murrell’s piece on stress. If you care about what goes on in the high-tech world, do yourself another favor by adding GMSV to your regular online rounds.

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(Photo of some serious de-stressing by -just-jen-.)

Among the other things it kills — people, for instance — stress kills your ability to do good work. If you want to improve your organization, get ahead in your own career, and enjoy your life in the process, it’s time to let go of your stress-embracing ways.

First, though, a key distinction. There is such a thing as eustress, or “good stress,” which is the sort of tension you feel inside when you’re exhilarated about something. (The concept was pioneered by Hans Selye, who did groundbreaking work on stress in the middle decades of the 20th century.) But that’s not what we’re talking about here — and not what most people mean when they talk about the stress of the workplace.

Stress Is Poison

This sort of bad stress contributes to a range of health problems — everything from hypertension to E.D. to high cholesterol to asthma. But it also saps your ability to be creative, since stress tends to provoke a fight-or-flight response in us that is toxic to higher rational function. So when you say you can’t think your way through a problem because you’re stressed-out, you are literally correct.

Unfortunately, the way many workplaces operate, you’d think stress was a cardinal virtue. Read more

You need to get your head on straight instead.

A pencil is high technology if you use it for deeper thinking.

This comes to mind as I re-read this Dan Markovitz post:

The Lean Approach to Email Management: It’s Not About Technology

. . . Toyota is legendary for its production efficiency. The company is also legendary for being slow to introduce new technology. Management has always felt that it’s pointless to spend money on shiny new hardware, software, and equipment when the underlying process is broken: first get the process right, and then figure out whether it makes sense to invest in new technology.

. . . The real solution to the explosion of email isn’t a new Outlook add-in that makes sorting, filing, or finding email easier, any more than the solution to your weight problem is buying a bigger pair of pants.

I know many, many people who struggle with their e-mail overload. Or with meetings. Or with keeping track of the confustion of all their competing projects. Or whatever. Many of them are looking for a technology solution, whether that means a new e-mail filtering system, an enlarged memory partition on the e-mail server, or a better mobile device that lets them keep up with e-mails and IMs and tweets etc. while they’re in meetings. We could proliferate examples.

But what these folks really need is to get a grip on themselves. To ask themselves hard, basic questions about what their real work is and what they need to do to accomplish it. They need to examine — and then discard — their excuses. They need to really think about what value they bring.

By “they” I mean “we,” since I like the new shiny piece of technology as much as anybody. If I have a better grasp on this problem than some people, it’s because I’ve realized that in the overwhelming majority of cases, we don’t need better technology. We need to use our own brains better.

Okay, sure, some problems will only be answered by better technology. Samples:

• Cheap space travel.
• Ordinary cars that can run wholly off of solar power.
• Dirt-cheap desalination of seawater.
• Groundbreaking research in genomics, pharmaceuticals, and particle physics.
• 100% reduction in some industrial effluents.

But seriously, if you put your e-mail load into this category, you’re fooling yourself.

Stop fooling yourself. Think better.

I’ll try to help.

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More on this:

• The False God Opens a New Front - Kevin Meyer’s post includes this great line: “Automating the management of a problem is not managing the problem.”)
• “Workiness” is to work as “truthiness” is to truth. - Shiny new technology is often no more than a pit of “workiness.” You must avoid this like a plague.

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(Photo by Arwen Abendstern.)

A while back I talked about “deliberate practice” in the context of Will Smith’s career. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has been a pioneer in codifying deliberate practice and what it means.

In a nutshell, deliberate practice is the sort of self-sharpening work done by the very best practitioners in a field. It’s the sort of always-getting-better discipline shared by the best athletic performers (think Tiger Woods), the best musicians (think Yo-Yo Ma), or the best . . . well, the best anything, potentially.

While I was first introduced to the concept by a Geoff Colvin article in Fortune magazine, I think we’ve barely, barely tapped the potential of this idea for changing the way we think of our individual performances in the working world. It’s an idea I plan to return to in future posts.

This post, meanwhile, is one of those publish-it-now, keep-adding-later numbers: I’m going to use it for collecting links to interesting items on deliberate practice. Here’s my list as it stands now:

• [PDF link!] Anders Ericsson et al.: “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” — This is the article that started it all. (A summary of the article is available here.)
• Geoff Colvin in Fortune magazine: What it takes to be great
• Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: A Star Is Made: The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly
• WiseBread: How to become an expert
• The Practice of Leadership: Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership
• Daniel Goleman: Peak Performance: Why Records Fall
• Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice: An updated excerpt from Ericsson (2000)
• The Age (of Australia): E=mc2 (and a lot of hard work)
• The Sydney Morning Herald: Why only the right kind of practice gets anywhere near perfect
• On his blog, Jason Kottke has a category dedicated to deliberate practice.
• Time Magazine: The Science of Experience (I have to say that I thought the application of deliberate practice to Clinton, McCain, and Obama was strained. But some other parts were good.)
• The Simple Dollar blog: Deliberate Practice and Personal Finance (Good, straightforward application that reaches beyond finance.)
• . . .

That dot-dot-dot is for YOU. If you know of other articles that might make a good addition to this list, please note them in the comments.

You’re fooling yourself.

You think there’s such a thing as “work/life balance.”

You think that there are two paths, one labeled “work” and the other labeled “life,” and that somehow you can travel down the two of them separately in a given day.

You feel stymied by work duties and life duties because you can’t get them to jibe.

Well, you’re not alone. I’m in that same cave with you, friend, trying to stay warm and dry. But let’s see if we can philosophize a little on this problem and find a better way of going forward.

Why is it like this?

I believe we routinely mismanage our time at work, and routinely fall into bad working habits, because we don’t acknowledge that work is as much a part of life as anything else. Let me make a comparison to illustrate:

You go into a restaurant. The staff is nice enough, but they’re slow to seat you and slow to serve you. The food isn’t all it was cracked up to be on the menu, and some of it was served cold. Your server never brought you a couple of the things you ordered, even though you asked more than once. When you raised the issue, it somehow got turned around so that it was your own fault. Despite all these disappointments, the bill was pretty steep.

Do you go back to that restaurant? That’s just the sort of place that most of us will take pains to avoid.

What we put up with.

Yet take what I’ve just described and translate it into the terms of the workplace. The people you work with are nice enough, but projects and communication are slow. Despite a lot of what looks like hard work, you end up making — and trying to sell — products that fit in the great mass of the unremarkable. Reasonable requests, whether for flextime or a new printer or an extra salary in your department, go unheeded. And when you raise the issue . . . somehow it’s your fault for not playing along. Read more

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King died.

He wasn’t a perfect man. By the end of his life, the weight of leadership bore heavily upon him. Throughout many years before his murder, he had lived as a target of hate.

But he changed the world.

Most of us will never have a hundredth of the notoreity or the influence of MLK. We’ll go through our daily routines, we’ll mind our own business, and we’ll try to stay more or less happy as we go along. But sometimes, we’ll catch a glimmer of what we might be, what we might do — if only we were bold enough.

Whether you do it by big or small means, I exhort you: change the world. Find out what you’re capable of, whether it’s in business (in which case you’ll likely make a fortune) or in the rest of life (in which case you’ll certainly leave a lasting impression).

How are you going to change the world? How is your organization going to change the world?

Start today.

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(Photo from this amazing set at TIME.)

Who are your firefighters?

Wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk has declared today Good People Day, and the tweets and blog posts have been coming thick and fast. People are praising the good people they know, which seems to fit Gary’s vision of a day in which we celebrate what’s good, instead of spending so much of our time on the negatives of life.

This puts me in mind of a great old post by Kathy Sierra:

Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain

. . . Can any of us honestly say we haven’t experienced emotional contagion? Even if we ourselves haven’t felt our energy drain from being around a perpetually negative person, we’ve watched it happen to someone we care about. We’ve noticed a change in ourselves or our loved ones based on who we/they spend time with. We’ve all known at least one person who really did seem able to “light up the room with their smile,” or another who could “kill the mood” without saying a word. We’ve all found ourselves drawn to some people and not others, based on how we felt around them, in ways we weren’t able to articulate. . . .

Celebrating good people is more than just a feel-good exercise — it’s a step toward keeping ourselves in good mental health. Being around good people can make our brains more receptive to good and positive things, which can lead us to adopt better habits for ourselves.

Working at Hoover’s all these years, I’ve gotten spoiled by the company’s culture. I’ll sum it up by saying that, more or less, only nice people stick around here. Just yesterday I was talking with a new colleague who’s been here only a couple of months; she remarked on how easy it is to work here because everybody is just so nice. We’re human, too, but we do treat each other well. And in the long run, I’m sure it makes us more competitive in the marketplace.

There are other ways to manage. Some have succeeded with various forms of corporate tyranny. But the best way, for my money, is the nice way.

Go celebrate some of the Good People you know!

(Photo by icopythat.)