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The award for best two-layer play on words in a book title goes to How to Feed Friends and Influence People: The Carnegie Deli (Milton Parker and Allyn Freeman, 2005).

It’s the tale of the best deli in New York — a place that makes its own corned beef and pastrami and turns them into sandwiches the size of your head.

It’s a nice little book, and valuable besides, since interspersed with the deli’s history are recipes — including the formulas for knishes, stuffed cabbage, and of course matzoh balls.

And, it describes the ten business principles that have made the Carnegie Deli a huge success. Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running know the difference between running IT as a business (bad idea) and running IT in a businesslike way (great idea). That being the case I have an excuse for: Listing the ten principles, offering my own comments, and counting the cost of the book as a business expense.

1. Keep it simple. The Carnegie Deli sells delicatessen food. That’s it.

That isn’t it, of course. There’s a lot of complexity supporting that simplicity. As CIO your organization has a lot of moving parts, too (138 — we’ve counted them). See if you can develop a formulation as simple as the Carnegie’s for what you do.

2. Do one thing better than anyone else. The Carnegie Deli sells customers phenomenal food in generous portions at a great price. It’s why, with lots of New York delis to choose from, they eat at the Carnegie.

You run IT, not an independent business. You still need to give your boss and your peers a reason to work with you and your department instead of ignoring you, or wishing you were someone different. What is it?

3. Create a family atmosphere among the staff. This isn’t fake. As I watched Sol Levine, the Carnegie Deli’s manager, schmoozing with his customers our server told me, unasked, “We love that guy!”

When employees trust each other … and you … it’s easy to make great things happen. When they don’t you have no chance.

4. Promote from within. Sometimes you’ll need new blood, especially when your old ideas have run out of steam. More often, managers hire from the outside because they failed to prepare anyone on the inside.

5. Have an open ear to staff and customer comments. The twenty-buck term is “organizational listening.” Managers who don’t listen to everyone they can don’t know What’s Going On Out There. That makes them ignorant — poor preparation for making good decisions.

6. Make it yourself. This is far easier when your products are corned beef, pastrami and pickled tongue than when your products are software and data repositories. Few IT shops can build everything internally. What you can do, though, is make it all your own. Once you select (for example) SAP and implement it in your company, it’s your unique implementation. You’d better have gurus who know it inside and out.

7. Own the premises. The Carnegie Deli owns its own building. As CIO, this principle should make you think hard about the consequences of, for example, rented data center space in a co-location facility. The benefits are well-known. The hazards are all related to loss of control, and you shouldn’t take them lightly.

8. Management is always responsible. The book says it best: “There’s no finger-pointing. If something goes wrong or is mishandled, management is at fault.”

More to the point: If something goes wrong or is mishandled, the manager in charge should be asking, “How could I have prevented this, and how am I going to prevent it from happening again.”

Blame is for schmucks.

9. Do not be greedy. Greed is a strategy that works in the short term but almost always crashes and burns in the long term. Greed makes managers adopt unsustainable business practices. This is true of the company you serve. It’s also true for departments with grandiose plans. Make it one step at a time, and do each step well.

10. Have fun working. Some CIOs have problems with absenteeism, and with employees who hide in their cubicles, uninterested in doing their jobs.

They should ask themselves what it is about the department they lead that makes employees want to be somewhere else.

The last time I ate at the Carnegie Deli Sol Levine told me, “We’ve been doing this for 75 years and we still don’t know what we’re doing.”

If I didn’t know what I was doing as well as Sol and his colleagues don’t know what they’re doing, I’d be a much better consultant than I am today.

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At last! Many have asked, most have been patient. You can finally subscribe to KJR as an RSS feed. The URL is https://issurvivor.com/?feed=rss2. Thanks for waiting.

“My boss micromanages me. What can I do about it?”

It’s a common complaint. If you’re algebraically inclined:

“My boss does x(i) and I don’t like it. What can I do?” where x is the set of all managerial behaviors, and x(i) is a specific member of the set.

It really doesn’t matter very much what x(i) stands for. The same short answer usually works, just as it does for the negative form, “My boss doesn’t do x(i) and I don’t like it. What can I do?”

The answer, for x(i=1 to infinity) is, find a different boss, and if you can’t, learn to live with the one you have.

There are, of course, a few exceptions. If your boss is creating a threatening or harassing environment, or your co-workers are creating one and your boss refuses to do anything about it, document everything and contact HR. If that doesn’t work, contact a lawyer. And, at the same time, find a better boss. But don’t just learn to live with the one you have. There are some things up with which you must not put.

But a boss who micromanages? Or is demeaning? Or overly critical? Or never gives you a compliment or thank-you?

Find a boss whose style is more compatible. Or, learn to live with it. Or, I guess, hope your boss gets promoted, demoted, fired, transferred, or hired away… and, learn to live with the situation until that happens.

In the case of micromanagement, I do have one additional suggestion to try first: Determine whether your boss is a micromanager, or is micromanaging you. There’s a big difference.

If a boss is a micromanager, that’s a personal style. It’s about the manager. A manager who is micromanaging an employee — just that one employee, that is, or maybe just two or three — doesn’t trust that employee to get the job done otherwise. That’s about the employee, and what it’s going to take to be a better one.

If that’s what’s going on in your work world, ask. Don’t use the word “micromanage” when you do, either. Ask, “I’ve noticed you’re supervising me more closely them most of the other employees. I’m guessing I need to do something differently. What is it?”

That’s if it’s just you, or just you and one or two others. Otherwise, find a different boss, or learn to live with the one you have.

Why is this? Why wouldn’t your boss want to know how to be more motivating, get more out of employees, be better liked, or what-have you?

Why? Because whatever it is about your boss you find disagreeable is part of your boss’s formula for success, that’s why. It’s part of what he or she has done throughout his or her career to become your boss.

It’s worked. If what you want to suggest would have worked, you’d be the boss instead, or at least that’s how the world looks when viewed through your boss’s corneas.

Think you’re going to change that through the magic of an epiphany-inducing conversation?

Think again.

Actually, when the complaint is micromanagement, what you’d be asking of your boss is even tougher. To understand why, go back to the two golden rules of delegation:

  • If you know how to do a job better than your employees, only delegate it if you’re willing to accept the risk of failure.
  • If your employees know how to do it better than you do, always delegate it unless you’re willing to accept the risk of failure.

Micromanagers feel, rightly or wrongly, they have the superior skills, so when they have to delegate … and every responsibility listed in a job description constitutes delegation just as much as a special assignment … it’s going to be grudging and closely watched by any manager who’s uncomfortable with the idea of deliberately risking failure.

It’s like the advice columnists say in the context of interpersonal relationships.

If your goal is to get the other person to change, the best thing for you to do is to find a different goal.

Assuming, that is, you want something useful to happen. If your goal is to have something to complain about, on the other hand, by all means go ahead and have a heartfelt conversation with your boss.

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Eighteen years ago, in KJR’s predecessor, InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” I published my first piece on bad metrics, but far from the last.

And if I hadn’t published the column about corporate xenophobia and what to do about it fifteen years ago, I could publish it next week and it would be just as current. Check it out.

ManagementSpeak: I’m not going to hold you to these estimates.

Translation: Yes I am.

We’re holding this week’s anonymous contributor in high esteem for her excellent translation.