Tag Archives: management

September 27, 2019 · 3:15 pm

What A Waste

In addition to it being Foodie Friday, it’s also trash day. Every Thursday night I wheel the trash and recycling bins out to the curb to await their pick-up Friday morning. That also means that each Thursday I go through the fridge and toss any food that has reached its expiration date or any leftovers that didn’t manage to get consumed after they were cooked sometime in the previous 5 days. In all candor, it’s one of the more frustrating things for me since I absolutely HATE to waste food.

Yes, I was of the generation who had parents that reminded us that children were starving in Europe (which they actually were as the continent rebuilt after WWII) and elsewhere but I don’t think that’s really what bothers me. It’s also not the feeling like I’m tossing cash money into the trash bin although that in effect is exactly what I’m doing. I just don’t like to waste anything. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve always admired Jacques Pepin who would always demonstrate how to make use of every scrap of food on his cooking shows.

This from a Food52 piece:

The average American ends up throwing away a full 103 pounds of spoiled food each year, according to a recent survey of 2,000 people conducted by OnePoll for Bosch home appliances. That works out to an average of 4 items a week, or the weekly equivalent of $53.81. All told, per the survey results, the average American adult will waste 6,180 pounds of food in their lifetime.

Food isn’t the only area where we waste perfectly good things either. Plastic bags are a plague, for example. I’m surprised stores still offer them or don’t hand out reusable bags. My supermarket sells big reusable bags at cost and will replace them for free if they rip. Trader Joe’s does something similar. It’s good for the customer, good for the environment, and good for the business since they don’t have to purchase as many single-use bags.

There is a lot of waste in business, of course, and I don’t just mean single-use bags. We produce reports that no one reads just because the report has always been produced. We don’t look at the analytics of what we’re doing on the web and in social media to understand if the bang is commiserated with the buck – the time and effort – we spend making those platforms hum.  We waste time in endless group email chains to solve a problem when one brief meeting would serve to fix the whole thing.

Be waste averse. Not just in your fridge but in your office as well. Your wallet and your CFO will thank you!

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September 6, 2019 · 3:12 pm

Cooking With Kids

What could be more fun on a Foodie Friday than cooking with kids? Mine are grown, of course, but I always loved the weekend because that was when we’d often find the time to get in the kitchen and cook together. As it turns out, there is something to be learned about business from this.

I think one benefit of getting children in the kitchen at a young age is that they begin to learn another language. While English was the language in our home, the language of food and cooking was another that the kids learned early on. Understanding what terms like simmer and boil meant and how they were different taught them precision. Learning the difference between dice, chop and even chiffonade helped them with knife skills, spatial relationships, and relative size.

Improving small motor skills is another benefit that kids get as they learn to use a knife or to crack an egg without shattering it or even to measure a cup of flour properly. Then there are the obvious benefits of learning what things taste like and being able to describe what they were tasting as well as what they liked and disliked. Finally, they were learning some science without thinking they were in class. Understanding, for example, that pancakes rise because of baking powder bubbles. Did I tell them it was because of an acid-base reaction that released carbon dioxide? Come on – they were kids! But they knew it made bubbles and the bubbles popped leaving the little holes they’d see in their pancakes.

This sort of process is exactly the one good managers need in business. New employees have to learn the language not just of business generally but of your specific company. Working alongside them, demonstrating and explaining as you go, is the only way they will get properly informed. Letting them do simple tasks, just as you might have kids stir and pour rather than dice and saute, lets them get a solid footing and the confidence to take on more complicated endeavors. It was always a mystery to me why some managers just sat new employees at a desk and then wondered why they weren’t being especially productive several months later. Unless you “cook” with them, they will probably never become all that they could be.

I think the main thing I got from cooking with my kids was a bond. Not only had we done something together but we’d made something together that we and others could enjoy. It’s the same in the office. Think back about the last time you were the new kid. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have someone take the time to build that bond with you as well as to help you produce your first great work?

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August 28, 2019 · 10:45 am

Back To School Again

It’s the time of year when the kids head back to school. I wish I could join them. Knowing what I know now, and more importantly, what I don’t know now, I’d make better use of my time there. Of course, like the quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain, I tried not to let my schooling interfere with my education.

I’ve written before what I think the only two things one needs to learn while in school, but to sum them up it’s the ability to:

  • Acquire pieces of information, figure out which pieces are accurate and synthesize your own ideas or opinions based on them;
  • Express those ideas or opinions clearly both verbally and in writing.

Does that make you smart? Not exactly although you certainly will sound a heck of a lot smarter. It does make you well-educated in the sense that you’ve obtained the most important skills education can provide. Smart, however, is an entirely different deal and I want us to think for a few minutes today about the different kinds of smart one can be regardless of education.

I’ve never made it a secret that I have a deep affection for smart people, especially those smarter than I am. I always tried to find job candidates who were, above all, really smart in every sense of the word. What do I mean?

First, there is the kind of smart where one is able to synthesize information and develop great insights. Yes, that kind of matched the first part of being well-educated. I’d couple that with intellectual curiosity, however, to make one smart.

Second is what many people would call educated. This is being full of information, what some might call book-learned. However, just because you can puke back a lot of facts, which might make you great at Trivial Pursuit or the trivia contest at your local tavern, you can’t really fool me that you’re smart unless you couple it with the other two parts.

The third part is being emotionally intelligent. As Wikipedia defines it, this is

the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s).

In many ways, this is the most important of the three “smarts” in business since it’s the one that helps you behave optimally in areas like customer service, employee management, and partner relations. I know there are other kinds of “smart” – street smart that is probably the personification of Twain’s statement, IQ-smart, which is just raw brainpower to name just two, but I think my three are the ones most critical to business – and life – success since they can be learned and developed while most others one either has or doesn’t.

So as the kids head back to school, maybe this is a good time for each of us to think about how we can get smarter too. What do you think?

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