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All For One, And One For All August 26, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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10 comments

I’ve been having a semi-regular delivery issue with a certain national daily publication.  Every now and then, it does not arrive in my driveway.  I dutifully go to their web site and note this oversight.  The next day, I get two copies: the current issue and the previous day.  Needless to say, getting a daily publication a day late is of limited value.

When this happened last week, I tweeted about it, and included the publication’s Twitter account in the tweet, along with two columnists who also happen to be on Twitter.  It was a bit of an experiment, I’ll admit, but it was also a request for help.  Would the power of Twitter help solve my problem?

Well, no.  What I did get was a direct message from a columnist with the number of the customer service department, along with an explanation that the columnists have nothing to do with delivery.

I know that.  I knew that when I included the columnists on the tweet.  But they work for the publication, just like the delivery people.  And in the end, they should be just as concerned that I get my paper as they are about writing their columns.  When the delivery person makes a mistake, the columnist looks bad.  When the columnists wrote a lousy column, the delivery people lose a bit of stature.  They are all in this together.

This is just as true in our own companies.  How often have you seen a group breathe a sigh of relief when they discover that “some other department” made a customer-visible error?  I hate to burst their bubble, but they get painted by the broad brush of customer dissatisfaction right along with the group that made the mistake.  The outside world does not know, or care, that some mistake occurred in a specific department.  They only know that the whole group has caused them a problem.

When you make a mistake, you hurt the reputation of every single person who works with you, whether they are involved or not.  That’s why mistakes are so expensive: not only did you inconvenience a customer, you damaged the standing of all of your co-workers.  Did they deserve that?  Did you think about that before doing your best to do a good job?

Fortunately, this works the other way as well.  When you make someone happy, everyone in your team benefits whether they were involved or not.  By making a customer feel good about your company (or department, or whatever), you improve the reputation of every person in that group.  What a great way to help every person you work with, every day!  Help a customer and make everyone look good!

The columnist dissociated themselves from the group that made a mistake, thinking that I would do the same.  But like most customers, I view the Journal as a single entity.  When my paper is late, they all decline a bit in my mind.  But if the columnist had gone out of their way to help fix my problem, they all would have gone up in my book, from the deliver person to the editorial board.

We’re all in this together, all for one and one for all.  Remember that when someone makes a mistake, and leverage it when you decide to do something good.

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Longevity August 19, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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8 comments

In my organization, we have quarterly all-hands meetings.  Depending on the calendar, the meetings have different agendas that match the flow of our business year.  But no matter what the time of year, we always celebrate service awards.

There are always a bunch of one- and five-year awards, which are great to celebrate.  Just last week, however, we celebrated a ten-year and a twenty-year service anniversary!  In these days of rapid turnover and short-term jobs, seeing someone spend twenty years at a company is a rare delight.

Beyond the award, however, was the manner of celebrating.  In both cases, the presenting manager had prepared a slide show of photos spanning the career of the individuals.  As the pictures went by, people would laugh and remember a moment, calling out a particular memory or exclaiming over long-lost hair and out-of-date clothes.  And the pictures weren’t just taken at work.  They showed coworkers bowling, at hockey games, and socializing with their kids.  In short, the slide shows captured years of friendship intertwined with work.

Beyond the slides, others got up and shared funny stories and past memories.  It was a great testimony not just to the honorees, but to the organization whose culture created those memories and shared stories.  I’ve only been there just under five years, but I was proud to be a part of such a tight-knit team.

These days, much is made of the new workforce, able to move from job to job, bartering skills via the internet and working remotely from home.  It is said that people may have ten or more jobs in their career.  Over a 45 year career, that means you won’t even last five years in any one place.  While this may be the best way to broker your skills and make a living, it doesn’t seem to be the best way to create these bonded teams with a long, mutual history.

I think that’s sad.  I’m all for the modern technology that enables all this job hopping and remote access, but I sure hope we aren’t sacrificing the crucial personal bonds that make work so rich and rewarding.  When we reach the end of our careers, the projects we worked on long ago will be forgotten, but the people we knew along the way will form the memories that we keep.

Perhaps the social network tools with which we currently tinker will provide the connections that will last beyond individual jobs.  Maybe the foundation of these long-term relationships will shift from our place of work to the hub of our social networks.  Will we someday celebrate twenty years of tweeting?  Perhaps, but I don’t know that all of our followers will gather to see our photos and exclaim as we put on our new watch.

Truly rewarding work is often coupled with long, strong bonds between people.  As traditional ways of creating those bonds fade away, what should we be doing to create them in new ways?  Who will celebrate you in twenty years?

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My Dear Aunt Sally August 7, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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5 comments

The recent Cash For Clunkers program neatly demonstrates a grave problem facing this country.  No, not the auto industry, global warming, or appropriate levels of government intervention in free markets.  I’m talking about something much more important: simple arithmetic.

Cash For Clunkers set aside a billion dollars to buy back certain vehicles in trade for newer, more efficient ones.  Each trade-in would qualify for either $3,500 or $4,500 in credit, depending on the model.  The program began in late July and was expected to run through November.  It lasted all of a week before running out of funds.  How could that happen?

Easy.  No one can do math in their heads anymore.

Let’s run the numbers. To make things simple, say each trade-in gets $4,000 from the fund.  With a billion dollars available, that allows for 250,000 trade-ins.  There are 23,000 car dealers in the US, each anxious to sell as many cars as possible.  That’s an average of 11 cars for each dealer.  Now ask yourself, how long would it take for each car dealer in the US to sell 11 cars that offer an additional $4,000 discount?

If you guessed “four months,” you have a potential career in Congress.  If you guessed “four days,” you are demonstrating a good grasp of basic market analysis.  In fact, some dealerships sold more than 11 cars in just one day; the only thing that slowed their pace was that the government web site for registering all these sales collapsed under the load, clearly designed with a “four month” mind set.

I’m not presenting this to start a political discussion. I’m here to lament that the average person can no longer solve this problem in their head. (Some people cannot solve it with pencil and paper, either.)

If you seek to run a successful business, or an organization within a business, you’ll need to make many rapid decisions based on numerical analysis.  If you cannot run those numbers in your head, you will not make good decisions.  Pricing, licensing, system loads, capacity planning, leasing terms, scheduling, manpower loading, you name it: quick, accurate math skills are the cornerstone of effective management.

I have sat in many presentations where outlandish claims were made without a murmur of dissent by those attending.  Running the numbers in my head allowed me to question the claim and get a better answer.  We see advertisements every day that cannot stand the scrutiny of simple math, yet many people take them as verbatim truth.  Why won’t people do the math?

In many cases, doing the math leads you to a result that strains your credulity.  In the Cash For Clunkers analysis, you’re left wondering if it would take four months to sell eleven cars.  More typically, you may instead be looking at outrageous monthly lease payments, or unrealistic average network latency, or some other metric that makes no sense.  But if you didn’t do the math, you’d never get to the simple number that makes you say “Wait a minute!”

A big part of leadership is knowing when to say “Wait a minute!” Quick arithmetic skills can play a big part in honing that skill.  Almost all of us can do simple arithmetic, but how many of us use those skills every day to increase our odds of success?

Not Now. Or Ever. July 31, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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7 comments

I have been known to rant a bit on what I perceive to be annoying sales practices.  Just when you think you’ve seen it all, someone comes up with yet another way to completely irritate a potential customer.  The latest trick is the “presumptive appointment.”

With the universal adoption of calendaring systems, most everyone has grown accustomed to receiving appointment invitations via email.  While such appointments are very common within an organization, they’ve generally not expanded beyond organizations.  Recently, however, people have been sending more invitations to people outside of their email domain, which is generally useful and makes scheduling a meeting a little easier.

That’s where the annoying salespeople come in.  Lately I’ve gotten meeting requests from salespeople for meetings I did not agree to attend.  In the body of the message, they do not ask for my time; rather, they ask me to supply a different time if their proposed time is not convenient.  The real question, whether I want to meet with them, is ignored.

This is like someone showing up at your house, unannounced, looking for dinner.  When you awkwardly try to refuse their request, they innocently ask, “Oh, is this not a good time to have dinner?  When would be better for you?” Well, how about “never?”

A responsible salesperson goes about this in a different way. After a productive introductory conversation, he or she might ask if a follow-up meeting is in order.  If I agree, we then compare calendars and find a mutually convenient time.  To close out that negotiation, I’ll ask them to send a meeting request to confirm the appointment.  The calendar entry represents the result of our negotiation, not the starting point.

I am constantly amazed at how rude a small subset of salespeople can be.  All the hardworking, polite salespeople that go about things in the right way should beat these ignorant few with a stick. Are there large groups of people that accept these invitations without prior discussion?  If so, stop!  Like the insane people that respond to spam email, you are only encouraging more bad behavior.  We’re all suffering as a result.

Go Away! July 15, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Random Musings.
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5 comments

As the summer reaches it peak, let’s all take moment to consider the importance of vacations.

This seems patently obvious; I doubt that many people would come out against vacations in any sort of popularity contest.  For many of us, though, vacations can generate a lot of talk but very little action.  As our jobs become busier and busier, it can get harder and harder to actually set aside time and get away for a while.

However, leaders need to set examples for their people, and vacations are no exception.  If you think vacations are important, lead by example and take one!  Here’s why:

  • You really need the time to get away.
  • Your people really need you to go away.

For you: go somewhere and clear your head. Break free of overwhelming detail to get a fresh perspective on everything: life, work, family, and everything else that is important to you.  I find that my best thinking is done during extended absences from work, when time and distance gives a perspective that is simply not available in the daily trenches of your job.

Whenever I get away, I typically return with a laundry list of ideas.  Solutions to nagging problems suddenly gel and new paths to explore present themselves.  It is refreshing and invigorating to be able to step away and refocus on everything.

For your people: I don’t mean to chip away at your fragile ego, but your company will survive in your absence.  So will your organization, if you are doing things right.  There is no clearer sign of a bad leader than when his team collapses in his absence.  If you are micromanaging the world to the point that nothing happens when you are away, you are not serving your people, your company, or yourself.

Your team needs a chance to run things while you are away.  Ideally, they are completely capable of running things anyway.  Your absence simply lets them prove that to themselves. Dealing with things in your absence lets them explore solutions on their own, deal with details without pulling you in (or you horning in!), and resolve things from start to finish.  Not only do they get crucial experience, they get a huge boost of confidence.

Recently, many companies have stopped allowing people to roll vacation days over from one year to the next.  While there are clear financial benefits to this policy, I think the personnel benefits are far more important.  We all know of those folks who simply never take vacations, accruing weeks and weeks of time off in the process.  While a tiny minority of people really are saving for that eight-week excursion around the world, most people are simply never going to take that time. By forcing people to take their time each year, you force people to help themselves with a much-needed diversion.

Resolve to take time off.  Encourage your people to do the same, and set a good example by going on vacation. The time you spend away may be the best thing you do to improve the time you spend at work!