The Business Sensei

What do you really stand for?

Knowing where you are going as a company, and having a simple, clear, exciting vision that you can communicate well to your employees can improve performance dramatically. So why doesn’t it work more often?

The key to having a powerful vision is to be consistent across all aspects of your corporate behavior. If you want people to care, they have to feel that they are caring about something that matters up and down the company.

Take, for example, the recent debacle at Lowe’s. As several articles in the NY Times discussed,  Lowe’s decided to fund a reality show called “All-American Muslim.” This show committed the unforgivable sin of revealing that Muslim Americans are much like every other American as opposed to being terrorists. In response to complaints from one group, Lowe’s then pulled out of the show, triggering a great deal more complaints, this time from almost everyone else.

Now, Lowe’s might claim to support diversity and oppose racism, as quoted in another Times article:  “In a statement on its Facebook page, Lowe’s said it had ‘a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion’ but had pulled its spots from the show because it ‘became a lightning rod’ for’individuals and groups’ with ‘strong political and social views.’ ”

In other words, it appears that Lowe’s feels strongly about supporting anything that no one argues with. Unfortunately, this does not exactly send a message about strong commitment to your own values. One has to wonder how an employee at Lowe’s will feel about the corporate vision going forward from here.

By comparison, let’s look at the employees of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. As discussed in a recent news story, when gunman attacked the city three years ago, employees risked their own lives to protect guests at the hotel. This can be directly attributed to the Taj’s consistent vision of providing outstanding customer service no matter what, a vision that is carried out at all levels of the organization and reinforced at every opportunity.

As I discuss in my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” a vision needs to answer some key questions, including:

• “Where are we going?”
• “Why do we care?”
• “Why does anyone else care?”
• How will the world change, even a little, if we accomplish our vision?”

These are all important and necessary questions to address, but they are not sufficient to make your vision work. You also have to believe in the vision, and you have to demonstrate that you will stand up for what you believe in. Otherwise, you shouldn’t waste your time with a vision: you’re better off not standing for anything at all than demonstrating that you won’t stand up for what you claim to care about.

Wait! Where’s the death ray?

When I first started planning this post, I was expecting Apple to announce an iPhone 5. Naturally, the mythical i5’s been hyped to insane levels, and I had a great idea for a post about the dangers of overly high expectations: you see, I figured that when Apple announced it’s iPhone 5, it would be an amazing device and still people would be disappointed because it just didn’t have a death ray. Or maybe a built in razor. Or it didn’t cook your dinner for you.Rather than focus on what it did have, everyone would focus on what it didn’t.

The fact is, over building expectations can be a real problem: build the expectations for the new hire too high and nothing that person does will be good enough. Build the expectations for the seminar too high, and the actual seminar is bound to be a disappointment. Build the expectations for the pony too high and you’ll complain that it wasn’t a thoroughbred horse.

But Apple fooled me, and now I feel more like Marvin the Martian wondering what happened to his Earth-shattering kaboom. For sixteen months of hype, it’s rather anti-climactic. Perhaps Apple should take Marvin’s advice at the end of the cartoon.

It’s also rather rough for Tim Cook. Even a bigger question than the i5 was whether or not Tim Cook could fill Steve Jobs’ turtleneck. I, for one, still don’t know. He was, in a manner of speaking, given some pretty poor lines. The question now is whether or not the i4S release will define the image of Tim Cook.

Managing expectations is important. Letting them get too big may be fun sometimes, but can also have some very negative consequences. And when you don’t even come close, everyone remembers the missing earth-shattering kaboom.

Thoughts on multitasking

When we multitask, we force our brains to continuously move information around. Ever notice how your computer starts to slow down and the disk light flashes more when you have a lot of apps open? The computer has to constantly rotate information from the hard disk to RAM depending on which app you’re using. Our brains are very similar. Unlike computers, however, which never get tired, our brains very quickly get tired.

Another problem is that our brains are built to remember uncompleted tasks. As we start to stack up uncompleted tasks, more and more of our mental computer becomes engaged in tracking the uncompleted tasks, leaving less available to deal with the problem in front of us.

The net result is that multitasking brings about a short-term pop in productivity, for maybe a couple hours (if that), but productivity swiftly declines after that. Unlike other skills, which improve as we use them, our performance while multitasking does not improve: instead, our ability to concentrate on a problem may actually decline because we develop the habit of switching too often and too soon.

An office with a lot of multitasking is almost always one in which work flow and office routines are not well developed or thought out. Most so-called emergencies aren’t.

So how is that some people (e.g. athletes) appear to do multiple things at once? If you practice something until it becomes second-nature, then you can appear to multitask. The key is that the practiced activity no longer takes any appreciable amount of concentration: think of it as a body macro. However, like macros they are hard to interrupt, change on the fly, or pick up in the middle if you do get interrupted.

The importance of a vacation

I was recently interviewed for an article in AOL Jobs on taking breaks. You can read the full article here, or a related article (which I had nothing to do with), here.

The first article didn’t use everything I wrote, so here’s the full text, including the questions I was asked.

• Why is it so important from a performance perspective to log off and then return to work completely refreshed?

Let’s start by understanding how our brains work. We are built to tune out repetitive stimuli and focus on the novel. This isn’t all that surprising: most animals are built that way. It’s not the unchanging thing that is most likely to be a threat, it’s the thing that’s changed. Taking breaks allows us to view our work with new eyes instead of becoming bored and burned out.

Another piece of the puzzle is the way we make intuitive leaps. Archimedes didn’t have his “Eureka!” moment while he was staring at the problem. He had it when he took a break and went to the baths. Taking breaks enables the mental static to fade out and the creative and unexpected connections to pop up. Some of the recent work in neuroscience suggests that, although they’ve become encrusted with mystic gibberish, Zen Koans are designed to force the brain to essentially “take a break” from a problem it is stuck on.

• Is it helpful to perhaps check e-mails periodically on vacay for urgent matters to diminish anxiety and the workload upon return or is it better to be completely shut off?

I’m not sure that there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to this. There are some things to recognize though: our brains are built to remember uncompleted tasks better than completed tasks. You might ask, “If that’s so, why do we forget so many tasks?” The answer is that we are usually trying to remember too many different tasks!

When we check our email during vacation, we run the risk of seeing a problem that we feel we have to address and can’t from where we are. At worst, that can blow the vacation out of the water. If nothing else, it can ruin the rest of the day, or several days, because we can’t get the problem out of our heads. If you are going to check email during a vacation, make sure you have an easy way of queuing anything important so that you’ll be reminded of it when you get back. That makes it much easier to forget about it during vacation without worrying that you won’t remember to deal with it.

I will observe that the people who have the most trouble unplugging during vacation are also the people who work for or lead teams that have significant other performance issues. If you feel that you must check email during vacation or your team won’t be able to get anything done, that’s not an email problem, that’s a team development problem. You need to fix it. Similarly, if you’re telling me that people on your team can’t take a vacation without so much work piling up that they either have to work from the beach or are overwhelmed the moment they return, that’s also not a vacation problem. That’s either a team development problem, a leadership problem, or a scheduling/time management problem, possibly all three. Address those issues and you’ll be amazed how many of the other problems go away.

• What are two or three ways people can do this? For instance, one source told me to simply not bring the BlackBerry to the beach so you’re not tempted and in turn, you avoid losing the BlackBerry to sand damage.

Turning off the computer, putting the iPhone on airplane mode (so you can still listen to music), etc, are common techniques. I usually leave the computer off at least one day of every weekend. The real answer, though, is not technological, it’s personal: develop the habit of turning off. By turning off the computer one day of the weekend, I am practicing turning off under “controlled conditions.” When I went camping with my family earlier in the summer, I did bring the computer in case I wanted to write (I didn’t — never turned it on), and I put my iPhone in airplane mode. I took it out of airplane mode once to delete emails. Didn’t read anything, just deleted anything that was obviously unimportant.

It feels difficult at first to turn off. That’s why practicing is important.

• What are some benefits to logging off?
  

See above. Logging off helps increase motivation, productivity, and creativity. Let me add that the brain is a muscle. Like any exercise, it pays to change it up so we don’t get stuck in ineffective habits.

• In this digital age it makes it so tempting to remain connected but is it better or does it no matter if a vacation is a vacation is a vacation whether or not you take a long weekend that’s 100% work-free or a two week vacation whereby you periodically check in for messages?

It takes 7-10 days to really destress and start to relax. Staying connected can only slow that down. That said, if you can be disciplined about not getting sucked into your Blackberry and can control your time, checking for messages probably won’t do too much harm. Keep in mind, though, that once you show your co-workers that you’re available to help them during your vacation, you can count on them continuing to bug you. After all, by responding while on vacation, you’ve effectively given them permission.

• If there’s anything else you’d like to add as it relates to how to log off and why we need to, please feel free to add.

If you do check for messages, make sure you have a good calendaring service (e.g. iCal, GCal, followup.cc, etc) where you can quickly and easily schedule reminders for when you get back.

If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night worrying about work or can’t get work problems out of your head, block out some “worry time” on  your calendar. Give yourself 15 minutes, and move on. Once we’ve addressed an uncompleted task, even if merely by scheduling time to think about it, we can let it go.

The Corporate Culture Conundrum

I get asked a lot about corporate culture. In this case, I ended up responding to a very detailed query at such length that I decided to include it here since I doubt the person interviewing me will be able to use all of what I wrote (I’m also posting this after the article comes out, so I don’t upstage anyone).

Let’s start by defining culture. At root, culture is nothing more than the residue of perceived success. In other words, it is the accumulated knowledge of how to be successful at a particular company and how the company is successful in the marketplace.

Why success and not failure? Simple. We tend to repeat the behaviors that appear to bring us success, and discontinue those that do not. Moreover, cultures based on failure simply do not survive. At some point, there have to be successes in order for the culture to remain viable.

I focus on perceived success because what really matters is not whether a behavior is really successful so much as our belief that it is successful. For example, in the 1990s, Nokia firmly believed that its success was due to its innovative management style. The reality was that they had a hot product, cell phones, in an exploding market. When the market saturated, their revenues dropped off along with every other cell phone provider in 2000. Today, Nokia is increasingly irrelevant. If everyone at the company had come to work wearing Groucho Glasses every day, their product would still have sold and they might very well have ascribed their success to their innovative dress code. The results would have been pretty much the same, although people might have been inspired to tell better jokes.

Because culture contains within it the memory of success, it is very hard to change. No one likes to change what’s working! What’s worse is that a behavior rarely succeeds all the time: when something doesn’t work, we ascribe the failure to “not trying hard enough” and resolve to do better. The resulting semi-randomness to the success produces a response similar to playing a slot machine: random success is highly addicting.

This phenomenon becomes particularly important when we realize that the business environment changes more rapidly than the culture. A once successful behavior gradually stops working. However, because it fades out slowly, intermittent successes along the way serve to make the behavior stronger and stronger even as its usefulness is decreasing. When it comes to not changing a behavior, it takes only the occasional success to make up for an awful lot of getting kicked upside the head.

This also means that there are two key aspects to culture: what we do and why we do it. Most organizations focus purely on the “what” and ignore the “why.” Even when an organization attempts to change culture, they almost always focus on what they are doing. Unfortunately, when you only change the what, you are changing the superficial. The underlying why will rapidly pull the new behavior back into alignment with the original behavior; although cosmetic changes may persist, the new “what” will be fundamentally identical to the old.

The “whys” of culture also interlock: there is rarely one reason for a particular behavior. As a result, attempting to change one “why” can also be quite difficult because a) it’s hard to identify it precisely, and b) the rest of the interlocking structure of beliefs pulls it back. It is quite possible for a CEO or senior management team to simply chop off a piece of a corporate culture, but it can be quite unpredictable what else they’ll lose: for example, when IBM dropped its traditional full-employment policy, they also lost a great deal of employee loyalty and their historic “IBM takes care of me and my family, I take care of IBM” employee mindset.

With that said, let me jump over to your questions:

1. How do you know when there's something wrong with your corporate culture (what are 2-3 signs), or how do you know if things need improving just a bit?

Something is “wrong” with a corporate culture when the culture can no longer obtain resources, that is to say clients and revenue, from its environment. The early symptoms can manifest in several ways before the revenue drop really hits. The most common is a persistent feeling of being stuck: more and more effort is expended for less and less success. Previously successful revenue generating behaviors are losing their effectiveness, but doing so in fits and starts.

Another common symptom is increasing defensiveness on the part of management: executives don’t want to hear why something isn’t working, and attempts to address problems are met with denial. At exactly the point where the executive team should be bringing in outside help, they become increasingly unwilling to do so. An outsider is far too likely to grind the sacred cows into hamburger. IBM’s decision to bring in Lou Gerstner in 1992 is an example of a company overcoming that fear of outsiders and actually addressing their problems.

A third symptom of culture problems is a persistent inability to make and keep decisions. When teams within the company, or the company as whole, continually revisits discussions and can’t seem to follow-through on goals, that’s a major warning sign that you need to take action.

2. Where do generational differences among staff and colleagues come into play?

Let’s start with the elephant in the living room: the Gen Y myth. This whole concept that Gen Y’ers are somehow less dedicated, less motivated, or less <insert here> than Gen X or Boomers is, quite simply, a myth. Indeed, the whole idea that the younger generation is less respectful, dedicated, hard-working, and so forth, than their elders is itself a cultural belief that goes back at least to Socrates.

What is different, however, is that Gen Y’s do not share the cultural belief that you graduate from college, work at one job for 40 years, and retire to enjoy your “golden years.” While this was, or at least appeared to be, a valid cultural belief at one time, it is no longer valid in the current environment and shows no signs of regaining validity. However, for those who grew up with it, it is very difficult to put it aside.

Within an organization, what matters first is not the generational differences but the degree of immersion in the culture of the organization. Younger employees are less deeply immersed in the culture; they’ve had less time to absorb it and to assume its values. Thus, they are more likely to propose ideas and approaches that older employees view as violating cultural values and hence are more likely to reject. Note, by the way, that I’m referring less to chronological age than to amount of time with the company. Since the older employees typically have more authority, younger employees are more likely to be frustrated. How they cope with that will, however, be strongly influenced by their generational cultural values: a Boomer or X’er might decide that if they stick around and pay their dues, they’ll get a voice in due time; a Gen Y’er is probably more likely to go somewhere else. One solution is not inherently better than another.

3. How do you cultivate a creative and collaborative team (what 2-3 three things can really build that team culture)?

Culture is whatever is seen as successful. If you want people to collaborate, reward collaboration. Sounds simple, but it just doesn’t happen. Companies focus on individual performance and individual reward. As a result, they get a bunch of individuals often competing for a limited pie. While it is important to acknowledge and reward individual contributions, that cannot be all that you reward and it should never be set up in a way that creates competition between team members.

4. It's all about innovation, how best to encourage creative brainstorming for service/product innovation (what works and what doesn't and why)?

There are four culture traps to avoid and four cultural beliefs to build. The four traps are:

Perfection — We must make the perfect mousetrap… which works until someone comes along with a cat.

Protection — We must not hurt our existing products. Pity our competitors don’t feel that way…

Identity — We’re an X not a Y. IBM was a serious business company in the 1980s. They didn’t “do games.” Now they’re heavily involved in serious gaming.

Creeping Box — We’re so far outside the box no one can catch us. Just ask Yahoo… Once you move outside the box, the box grows and suddenly you’re just one of the pack.

The cultural values to foster

Continuous education — Keep people learning. Don’t limit people to taking classes in their areas of expertise; rather encourage employees to study whatever interests them. Innovation comes from putting together apparently disparate pieces of information.

Making mistakes — How do you respond to mistakes? Innovation is a messy business. If mistakes are punished, no one will risk making them and innovation will falter. Thomas Edison famously said that he’d learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb. Easy to say, hard to live.

Strategic breaks — Allow the breakthrough to happen. The “eureka” moment doesn’t happen when we’re exhausted from banging our head against the wall. It comes when we take a break and do something different. Learn how to take breaks strategically.

Patience — Don’t wait for a crisis to force your hand. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but waiting for the last minute to start innovating is the number one cause of premature death amongst new ideas.

5. How do intangibles like volunteerism, office greening, impact corporate culture?

Intangibles matter to the extent that they reflect the corporation’s values, beliefs, and aspirations. Volunteerism can be very important in a company that views itself as a good citizen of the community. However, to be effective, intangibles have to be worth the time and energy expended on them. If employees who volunteer their time end up being paid less or promoted less frequently than those who don’t volunteer their time, volunteerism will fade out. The behavior that is rewarded will become part of the culture, and the culture will attract those who believe in the values manifested through the behavior.

6. What are other intangibles that are important but corporations may not be keen about their importance?

How meetings are conducted, whether employees are permitted to work from home, how much freedom and autonomy versus direction employees are given, how mistakes are handled, how disagreements are managed, how permissible it is to question authority, are just a few of the intangibles that shape cultures.

7. How important is culture today and why?

Organizational culture is probably the most important most powerful force in any corporation. Because culture is the lessons of the past, it provides the template for how to behave in the future. Once a corporation loses sight of its culture, it’s only a matter of time before it slams into a brick wall.

8. Is your sense that most firms are focused on their culture, why or why not?

While many firms focus on their culture, they focus on the wrong aspects of it. Most companies focus purely on the “what,” those superficial artifacts that are easy to see but which have the least significance. It’s hard to focus on the “why.” Indeed, really delving into the “why” of your culture is rather like performing open heart surgery on yourself. In other words, you need the assistance of a trained outsider who is not immersed in your culture to see the elements you take for granted.

9. Any interesting, stats, surveys or other data about corporate culture?

Let me point you my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development.” Chapter one is about culture and the entire book discusses how organizational development shapes and is shaped by culture.

10. If a company can make only one change in it's culture, how to determine what should be that priority?

The biggest priority is changing the belief that you can change only one thing… Seriously, culture change is not a precise, surgical operation. Sure, if you’re only after changing the “what,” you can pick one thing, but for anything non-trivial you have to go after the “why.” That requires taking the time to really understand what values and assumptions that are taken for granted are no longer valid, and then building up a new set of values and assumptions. Most culture change fails because it tries to focus too narrowly on one thing. Corporations go through a lot of pain and spend a lot of money only to experience a fleeting success before the culture reverts back to the way it was: when you seek to change only one thing, everything connected to that one thing acts to pull it back to its original form.

Psychology of branding

I was interviewed recently on the psychology of branding and creating personal brands. Since this question comes up a lot, I’m posting my thoughts here.

Let’s start by looking at what a brand is. At the most basic level, your brand is what people think of when you’re not there. IBM, for example, built a brand of service and dependability in the 1940s-1970s. Then their brand became overpriced and stodgy before they took control back in the 1990s and rebranded themselves.

Broadly speaking, a company’s brand is the shorthand for what they do and what’s exciting about them. A given brand won’t interest everyone; the goal is to create a brand that appeals to the people to whom you want to appeal: your target market if you’re selling products/services, your potential employees if you’re hiring, and so on.

Creating brand loyalty as early as possible and reinforcing whenever possible thus does two things: it builds your potential customer base and it builds a pool of people who start to connect themselves to the brand, who start to think of themselves as representing the brand. This is one of the easiest ways to attract potential  employees because they self-select: they’re already interested and at least passively loyal to the ideal of the company. Hiring people who are already bought into the ideal of the company saves a lot of effort convincing them to buy in later, and those employees are also the easiest to motivate.

Individuals, however, do not have the reach of a corporation. Corporations are also abstract entities, whereas individuals are, well, individual. Thus, individual brands need to focus more around personal attributes and what the brand means to others. For an employee, this usually means branding yourself as someone who produces results for the company. Specific details will vary according to the industry: a software engineer might build a brand as someone who writes bug-free code or who always delivers ahead of deadlines, etc. A salesman might build a brand around closing the most difficult clients, around rapid closure, around rescuing faltering deals, etc.

One of the reasons why candidates may stand out in an interview but fail to make a mark on the job is that they saw the interview and landing the job as the goal, instead of as a stepping stone. Another problem is that after a candidate lands the job, they often aren’t quite sure what to do next to stand out. If a candidate wants to establish their brand during the interview and then hit the ground running, I advise asking the interviewer(s) the following question: “If you hired me and in six months thought I’d done an excellent job, what would I have done to make you feel that way?”

Take notes when the interviewer answers! Not only does this question help the interviewer convince himself to hire you, you are also identifying your initial most critical goals. Hitting those goals establishes you as someone who produces results. Once you’ve established that brand, not only do better assignments come your way, you are also more likely to be forgiven if something does go wrong (and the fact is, sooner or later something always goes wrong).

The Game’s Afoot!

Remember Sherlock Holmes’s famous line: “Come Watson! The game’s afoot.”

While some have argued that Holmes was referring to a soccer match, in fact this line almost always preceded Holmes going forth and solving the mystery.

This time, though, Watson was the brilliant one.

The news of Watson, the IBM supercomputer, winning Jeopardy has been all over the web lately. I was lucky enough to attend an event at IBM in Littleton where they explained a bit about Watson and how it was developed, followed by the final Jeopardy show.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone arguing that Watson was, quite possibly, just a publicity stunt. After all, doesn’t a computer have an innate advantage in buzzing in? And what”s the big deal about a computer answering questions? After all, can’t Google do that?

Here’s my response (although since I’m quoting myself, I get to add all the things I wished I’d thought of when I originally responded 🙂 )
An interesting post on Watson, but your questions are easily answered… just use Google 🙂

Seriously, as impressive as Watson’s question answering was, that wasn’t what made it so successful. Let me address your other points first, though.

The trigger finger point: all human players develop heuristics for training themselves to buzz in as quickly as possible without getting locked out. Watson has its own algorithms, based on how much confidence it has in its answer. There were times when the human players beat Watson to the punch. However, just as a human player will try to keep the questions in an area where he has greater knowledge, which translates to an improved ability to respond quickly, Watson does the same. Just as humans respond more rapidly when we have higher confidence in our answers, so does Watson.

Watson vs. Google: try typing a typical Jeopardy question into Google: “A city whose first airport is named for a WWII hero and whose second for a famous battle from the same war.” What you’ll get is a discussion of how Watson answered that question (Toronto???). Google forces us to ask questions in a way the computer understands; Watson answers questions the way we naturally speak. Although probably oversimplified, Google does keyword matching ranked by popularity. Watson is attempting to do semantic matching — in other words, answer based on meaning. That’s more like what we do, although Watson doesn’t necessarily mimic how we do it.

The real secret to Watson’s success, though, was less about its ability to answer questions as its ability to gauge the confidence of its answers. Watson bets small amounts when it has low confidence and large amounts when it has high confidence, just like a person (or at least how a person might wish to act). However, Watson is considerably more able than most people to accurately assess the likelihood of its being right or wrong.

Watson is also able to calculate with a high degree of accuracy where Daily Doubles are likely to occur. Apparently, it’s a statistical calculation based on past games, and Watson can run that calculation very, very fast. Faster than any human. Given the previous discussion on confidence, we can see that this strategy gives Watson a chance to really clean up.

In short, as impressive as is Watson’s ability to understand English and understand puns (yes, it can do that!), the real secret to Watson’s success is that it knows how to win big when it’s right and cut its losses when it’s wrong.

Now that’s a lesson we might all benefit from!

The Peter Principle of the thing

Okay, the Peter Principle, that each person in an organization is promoted to their level of incompetence, is legendary. Since it was first advanced by Lawrence J. Peter in the 1960s, it’s been one of those things that is spoken about amusingly but with a certain element of “yeah, right.” (which is, I believe, the only example of a double-positive making a negative, but I digress.)

Well, if you’ve ever wondered if the Peter Principle works, it turns out that it does. This year’s management Ignoble Prize went to The Peter Principle: A Computational Study. The researchers found that not only does it work, it’s potentially unavoidable if ones duties following a promotion are essentially unrelated to ones duties before the promotion. In other words, the skills of an engineering manager are not identical to those of an engineer. Being a good salesmanager is not the same as being a good salesman, and so on. The study went on to state that organizations could improve their efficiency by promoting randomly the most and least competent performers!

Looking at this study, I’m struck by the basic assumption underlying it: the principle works if the duties as you move up are substantially different from what they were at the “lower” level. Unfortunately, this is a pretty valid assumption. There is a cultural belief in most businesses that management is “higher” on the corporate ladder than being an individual contributor. As a result, if you really want to increase your salary and status in the company, you need to keep climbing. Unfortunately, this means that there’s a very good chance that eventually you’ll reach the point that you can’t do the job well anymore, and hence you’ll be stuck in a job that doesn’t fit your skills and talents.

It’s a very perverse incentive!

It occurs to me that instead of insisting on the ladder or believing that doing well at job X means that you’ll do well at job(not x), perhaps a better approach might be to give people the opportunity to try out a new job. Providing some sort of training for the new job is also a good idea. It’s rather disturbing how often people are “promoted” into management and then given no training on what to do. In a perfect example of the Peter Principle, they are taken out of the job that they excel in and for which they probably trained for many years, and put into a job for which they have no training and possibly no talent. The former, at least, can be fixed.

Of course, even when there is management training, it has to be done right. The occasional one-off, soon forgotten until the next year, is hardly sufficient. Consider how much training it probably took for the person to be successful in their previous job! Management training needs to be focused, given the reality of time constraints that exist in most businesses, and it also needs followup. Waiting a year until the next training won’t do it!

It takes a lot of effort to avoid the Peter Principle. I suspect that many businesses are figuring they can’t afford to do anything about it. My question is, can they afford not to?

The more things change…

I have a fondness for old time radio podcasts. Indeed, one of the big advantages of the iPod is that it created a whole slew of opportunities for those of us who want to listen to such things.

One of my discoveries was a podcast of the Avengers radio show. Yes, there was one, although it didn’t really come from the Golden Age of radio, rather being adapted from the TV show. Nonetheless, listening to episodes of the Avengers pointed up four very important points:

1. Russian accents are only the second most villainous sounding accents. British accents are the most villainous, probably because they always sound like they have anti-social personality disorder.
2. British accents also sound heroic.
3. Old time commercials in a British accent sound like something out of Monty Python.
4. When word “helpless” is said immediately before “Emma Peel” you know someone is in for a very nasty surprise.

I’m not entirely sure what this means, although the first might reflect my image of Boris Badenov as the quintessential Russian villain. Since this year is the 50^th anniversary of Rocky and Bullwinkle, perhaps Russian accented villains will make a comeback. I’ll leave that to James Bond (or Moose and Squirrel).

What has, apparently, made a comeback is a modern “duck and cover.” Remember that? When I was a kid, we had atomic bomb drills and went to the special basement hallway with the yellow atomic stickers. I didn’t really understand why that particular hallway was better than any other, but it was on the way to the school library.

Attending my son’s kindy orientation today, I’d just finished listening to a cold war episode of the Avengers, and thus nearly choked when they said that they do lock-downs and that when that happens they “hide under the tables.”

What I find interesting is how this “duck and cover” mindset, and the belief that somehow it’s safer to hide under a table, is still around. I guess we all did it and we won the cold war, so it must be useful :). Cultural memes stick around and they come back in the oddest and most unexpected places. Somewhere, at some time, the idea of hiding under large pieces of furniture became associated with safety, and now it emerges as a stress reaction when danger threatens… even when it doesn’t actually help.

I wonder what John Steed and Emma Peel would do… (or maybe Rocky & Bullwinkle would be a better bet).