Sales-pitch alert! This is a plug. There is a tie-in to IT management, but it’s thin. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. – Bob
I’ve always thought someone should stage the climax of a thriller at Disney World, in the “It’s a Small, Small World” ride. Imagine Jason Stratham and some equally lethal opponent, splashing around the boats and cutsey exhibits, exhausting their supply of bullets until, finally, they resort to hand-to-hand combat, all with the exhibit’s impossible-to-get-out-of-your-head theme song playing in the background.
Irresistible!
It is a small world, as my wife Sharon and I discovered while having dinner with my friend and client, Dave Kaiser and his wife Jean. That’s when a chance comment revealed that Dave and Sharon both grew up in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin.
Then Dave asked a consequential question: Had Sharon heard of the elephant murder? Turns out, some years back a Wisconsin Rapids woman had been killed by an elephant under suspicious circumstances (as if there might have been any other kind).
Dave’s father found the body, close to the backyard of his good friend, Kissy Knuteson — the man with the irresistible name, and also, as it turns out, someone with whom one of Sharon’s uncles used to build houses.
Very small world. Also, an irresistible premise for an “inspired by a true story” novel, or so Dave and I concluded.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Actually, it isn’t history at all. It’s pure fiction, with deep meaning only if you measure depth in millimeters and not many of them.
Yes, this is a thinly disguised plug for our new book, The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris (by Bob Lewis and Dave Kaiser). Through the end of the year you can buy it for a mere $3.99, exclusively for the Kindle platform.
Should you buy this bit of mayhem, for yourself or for friends as (ahem) a seasonal gift (assuming you have any friends, that is, and assuming you don’t care that they might then become former friends after reading it, perhaps because, hypothetically, they have actual taste) … anyway, Dave and I would appreciate a review, too.
Not a good review, necessarily. We aren’t trying to pack the house. If you think it’s awful, say “this book is awful!” If you like it, that’s even better.
But even bad reviews beat being ignored. Thanks.
So … how do a CIO and IT management consultant go about co-authoring a piece of fiction? Answer: We started by defining our process, of course.
We started by taking stock of the fiction we both enjoy, and concluded (none of this is profound):
The stories we like the best have engaging characters. They have plots moved along by action and not just internal dialog. They don’t waste a lot of space with endless detailed descriptions of the scenery, either.
They have a strategy, too — an order to telling the story.
Very important (and this week’s alleged point): The characters have to be plausible — we figured people do things for reasons that make sense to themselves, which meant we needed to know our characters’ biographies and personalities.
I promised there’d be something this week that has some actual value to you as an IT leader. Here’s what it is: It isn’t just fictional characters who have to be plausible. The real men and women you work with have to be plausible too.
See, no matter how much each of us tries to deal with people as they are, the best we can actually do is to deal with our mental model of who they are … our inferences regarding how they were raised, what they’ve experienced, their biases, the hidden assumptions they make … how they think about the world and how they’re likely to respond to it.
Many managers just aren’t very good at this; some don’t even understand why it’s important.
It’s important because if you want to lead them, which means if you want them to follow you, understanding them as individuals is superior to understanding them as generic members of a class. Whether the class is “millennials,” “boomers,” “geeks,” “bureaucrats,” “bean counters,” “empty suits,” or “horrible human beings,” for every employee some stereotype helps you understand there will be at least two where it misleads you.
In baseball, batting .333 is quite good. In leadership, if that’s the best you can do when assessing the people you work with you have three choices: get better at it, get out of management, or buy yourself a copy of Moral Hazard.
No, Moral Hazard won’t make you a better leader. But it might take your mind off your inadequacies.
Not a bad ROI for four bucks.
* * *
Nearly forgot. If you like it, tell your friends. We’ve always wanted to go viral.
The link to the book is your author link, not the public link to the Amazon page.
Bob – The link goes to a page on Amazon that tells me the following:
> Important Message
>
> The e-mail address and password you are using are not connected to an Author Central
> account. If this is your first time visiting Author Central, you can join here.
I’m assuming one doesn’t have to join Author Central just to peruse or purchase the book … ?
Sorry. I had no obvious way to tell the difference.
Here’s the link
I liked your article, but disagree with you when you said, “It’s important because if you want to lead them, which means if you want them to follow you, understanding them as individuals is superior to understanding them as generic members of a class.”
Actually, I think you have to understand them both as individuals and as members of a subculture. As a black man, there are some things that I do that can only be understood accurately unless you know that I am black and/or that I am a man.
If you think of them as only as individuals devoid of their subcultures, one can fall into the trap of thinking you know why they did something, when you really don’t know. For example, every review that I read of the movie, “The Butler”, said it did a poor or unrealistic job of portraying the U.S. Presidents the main character encountered. But, if any of the white reviewers had some black folks what was going, at least 90% of the time, the black folks would have that the movie is about black people and how we struggled during 40 year period covered in the movie. And, how white folks looked to US, not how white folks looked at themselves.
My point is not that both blacks and whites have not found enough ways to neutralize our internalized racism. My point is that you need to also understand the subculture of the individual, and it’s useful and legitimate to do so, so long as you let the members of that subculture do the defining of their own subculture. If you let them have that authority, then I think you can have a far more accurate model for understanding the individual, as well have having an enhanced list options in your management toolkit.
Whew! this was much longer than I hoped, but it was the best I do, for now…
Thanks again, for your article
Ray … you make a very good point. And in fact, in a discussion (okay, an argument) with Paul Glen, author of “Leading Geeks,” I raised a similar point, namely, that while “geek” as a personality type is pretty much useless when it comes to leading a whole department, geek as a cultural descriptor is a whole different matter. Among the differences: personality types are intrinsic and pretty much immutable, while culture is normative, and changeable.
I’d say this, though: You inform me that you belong to the black male subculture. Now that I know this, I know you’re bound, at least in part, by those cultural norms and that they have a profound impact on how you look at the world.
But until you informed me, were I to assume that because you’re a male and you’re black, that you’re a part of the black male subculture, I’d be stereotyping, which would do you a disservice.
Part of getting to know you as an individual is learning which groups you consider yourself to be a member of.
Make sense?
It makes a ton of sense to me and is consistent with, and integral to my life experiences.
For me, there are times when I’m just black, other times, when I am just a male, times when I am a black male (there is a difference), and times when I am “just” a human of transcendent humanity. And, those subcultural identities can change in a instant, sometimes even in the same sentence…
Ah, the joys of being a human being!
But, as a manager, a teacher, or even just a work colleague, developing an effective skill set to create and maintain a diverse, yet highly functional work place, is a challenging, but usually rewarding thing to achieve.
I think you make a huge point when you talk about finding out which groups a person self-identifies with. It so easy for me to make assumptions in that area, even with an enhanced(?) awareness of my own, having usually been the only black in the educational or work environment with whites.
I think it’s a very important point of personal boundaries and I salute you for having that level of awareness related to that issue.
Being fair, being perceived as fair, but staying focused on what gets achieved, and the total cost of those achievements (No jerks allowed!) would be the mission of a manager, I would think. Though I would be curious as to your thoughts on the matter, if time or interest allows.
In any event, thanks for your response.