Tag Archives: managing

June 28, 2016 · 11:00 am

Going Backward Is Dumb. Looking Backward Isn’t.

There was a story in this morning’s paper that had me shaking my head once again. Seems as if it’s a daily occurrence, I know. This one got me thinking about the things we can take away from the subject and apply to business, which is also a daily occurrence. The story was about our shared stupidity and our general refusal to learn. Let me explain.

Here is the headline: American Drivers Regain Appetite for Gas Guzzlers. I’ve linked to the story but as you can imagine it has to do with many people giving up their fuel-efficient cars to buy gas guzzlers as the price of gas has fallen. Of course, in addition to adding a lot of room to the passenger compartment, these vehicles also add a lot of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, and unless you’re one of the few who are ignoring virtually every scientist on the planet, that is creating a changed climate for us all.

I’m not ranting today about the politics of this. To me, it’s not very different from what a lot of managers do in their own businesses. The higher price of gas was a crisis. Many car owners adjusted by decreasing driving, buying more efficient vehicles or using mass transit if it was available. Most good managers do the same sort of thing in a crisis. They cut spending, focus on business development, eliminate inefficient product lines, and do all of the other things one can do to continue on until the crisis has passed. What the great managers do is to continue to operate with that mindset even after the crisis is long gone under the assumption that the same problem or another one is virtually certain to rear its head at some point. That doesn’t mean they fail to invest once conditions have improved. It does mean that they learn from the crisis and adjust and they don’t go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

I own a hybrid and my family owns two others. I can’t see going backward with respect to fuel efficiency and greenhouse emissions no matter how cheap gas becomes. I try not to go backward in business either. Going backward is dumb. Looking backward and learning isn’t. Your call.

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June 20, 2016 · 12:45 pm

Make Up Your Mind

At the risk of compelling you to sound like Ronald Reagan (“There you go again”), I’m going to weigh in on a lesson learned from yesterday’s US Open Golf Championship. I promise not to get into a discussion of the rules of golf!

There was a moment when Dustin Johnson, who was leading the tournament, had his golf ball move a tiny bit while he was preparing to putt. He notified the rules official about what had happened and the official told him that since ball moved without Johnson doing anything to cause it, there would be no penalty. At some point, other US Golf Association officials notified the on course officials that they were going to review video of the indecent and that Johnson might be facing a one stroke penalty. What ensued was chaos, and is instructive for any of us in business.

Put yourself in the position of the golfers. At the time, there were several competitors within several strokes of one another. The on-course scoreboards might no longer be accurate and every walking official had been notified that Johnson’s score might be one shot lower than the scoreboards were reporting. Do the golfers play more aggressively? More conservatively? The point is that there was uncertainty and that uncertainty might not be resolved until after the round was over when more officials could chat with Johnson.

That’s the business lesson. Putting aside the complexity of the rules, the USGA should have made a decision immediately. No golfer can compete without knowing how they stand and neither can the folks who work in your business. I’ve worked in organizations where there were rumors of layoffs and/or budget cuts. It was paralyzing. Employees were focused on their jobs and not on their work. Partners were worried about both with whom they’d be dealing and if the business could live up to commitments it had made. I’ve found people can deal with almost anything except not knowing.

There is a corollary lesson here. If the scoreboards aren’t accurate, the golfers don’t know how they stand nor how they should operate going forward. If your data is incomplete or possibly inaccurate, neither do you. We need to make decisions and we need to have accurate, complete information as we do so.  Lesson learned?

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June 15, 2016 · 11:33 am

You’re Missing 93%

One of the things I find to be both a blessing and a curse in our modern business world is email. As someone who can remember the days of typing (On a typewriter! With carbon paper for copies!) business correspondence and sticking it in an envelope prior to a days-long wait for a response, email’s immediacy is a blessing. Things happen! Stuff gets done! That’s great, but there are a few downsides and they’re worth thinking about.

First, because email is so fast, we tend to send missives off rather quickly. One thing the slow pace of written correspondence used to force was a thorough consideration of each thing we sent. Letters took time to craft and revisions took even longer because until the widespread use of the word processor one had to retype the entire document. Think about what a business partner would think if you were sending snail mail as you do email. Would you send a letter that simply said “OK” or “thanks” or any of the silly little emails we send? Would you send four notes a day, all within an hour of one another? Probably not.

The reality is that you’d probably not send a note at all. You’d pick up the telephone or, if it’s a work colleague, walk down the hall to see them. That’s the real downside of email, and I think it’s a huge problem. Why? I’ll let Psychology Today answer:

If there were ever numbers associated with body language and nonverbal communication, 55, 38, and 7 would be it. People often refer to these numbers as the standard for understanding nonverbal communication and expressing its importance- specifically over the words being spoken…The numbers represent the percentages of importance of varying communication channels have with the belief that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.

In other words, by using email as our primary form of interaction – with coworkers, with partners, with customers, or with vendors – we’re missing 93% of what they’re saying because they’re saying it either with body language or with their tone of voice.  The telephone helps capture the latter but we’re still missing more than half.

I realize that it’s not always practical to go see someone and you also want many communications to be in writing.  But in addition to the blessing (??) of email, we also have the gift of many video chatting platforms.  Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, and others make interacting with someone a near in-person experience.  More importantly, they can help assure that you’re “hearing” them because you can see all the non-verbal nuances that are NEVER available in email. Make sense?

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