All Posts by Bob Lewis

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Before we get started, you’re invited to enjoy (or froth at the mouth at, or snooze in response to) my recent conversation with PurposeWorks’s Thomas Bertels. You can watch it here: Work Matters S2E8: Bob Lewis – Digital Transformation – YouTube .

It was a travel week, so I’m re-running one I enjoyed re-reading from ten years ago. In addition to the ten-years-ago tag, I also chose this because I’ve been thinking a lot about corporate culture recently. One way or another, what follows has a culture tie-in. Hope you enjoy the re-read.

– Bob

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Let me tell you about Morocco.

Truth be told, I don’t know how to tell you about Morocco. Heck, I’ve lived in the United States for nearly 60 years, and were a Moroccan to have asked me to tell them about it, I wouldn’t have known where to begin. Something more specific? Sure. We talked about lots of specifics. But something that would help them get a handle on the place? That’s harder. A lot harder.

This trip … two weeks in an incredibly diverse country with a colorful, often bizarre history, forever overlaid in American perceptions by Casablanca, got me to thinking: In the 21st century, why do any of us choose to be tourists? What is it we want to get out of a visit to another place?

In Madrid, on a one-day stop before heading home, we spent hours at the Prado. Even had our day consisted of nothing beyond the time we spent standing in front of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, it would have been an excellent day.

Great art in person … the actual reality … far exceeds the best virtual reality has to offer. The first, obvious reason is dimension. The Garden is a big tryptych … maybe six feet wide and five high (we weren’t carrying a tape measure) and the impact is just something a computer screen can’t come close to.

Even more than size, though, is pigment. The best white a printout can achieve is whatever the paper it’s printed on is like; on-screen the darkest black is just a dull gray, and the hues and shades between are merely approximate.

But museums, no matter how marvelous, aren’t tourism. In principle, what’s in one museum can be loaned to another museum. It’s portable, which means it isn’t intrinsic to the destination.

If Tom Friedman is to be believed, nothing is intrinsic to the destination anymore. We live in a homogenized world, where all the same everything is available everywhere and everything is done pretty much the same way. Visit Casablanca, for example, and except for mosques being far more prevalent than churches, you’d be forgiven for wondering if you hadn’t accidentally landed in Chicago. Flat indeed.

(Stray thought about project management: Casablanca’s Hassan II Mosque, started in 1986 and completed in 1993, is more remarkable in every respect than Madrid’s  Catedral de la Almudena, completed the same year following more than a century of construction. Somewhere in there are lessons to be drawn. I promise you, I won’t be the one to draw them.)

Is the world so flat that tourism serves no interesting purpose anymore? No. The world of business perhaps. Business trips gravitate to large cities like Casablanca, and Madrid, and Sydney, and Chicago. But even there the flatness is transactional. Large urban environments are good at disguising cultural differences.

But the cultural differences are there, augmented and supported by different dominant religions, historical resentments, and civic expectations.

Leave Casablanca behind for Marrakech or Fes—cities with very different flavors, a long history of rivalry with each other, and Medinas (their old, walled hearts) that are mazes guaranteed to bring your average lab rat to loud tears and a complete nervous breakdown—and the world starts to look pretty bumpy, even if wifi and satellite dishes are nearly ubiquitous. Berbers and Arabs in traditional garb (with Minnesota-traditional down vests added on cold mornings) rub shoulders with more Berbers and Arabs in western clothing, and with Christians and a few remaining Jews (most of Morocco’s Jews have left the old Jewish quarters of Fes and Marrakech for the more modern economies of Rabat and Casablanca; Moroccans speak of the old Jewish communities with pride; and many Berbers claim ancient Jewish ancestry, presumably from the diaspora).

And, remarkably, nobody worries about it very much. We were lucky enough to have a Moroccan driver—a wonderful guy named Abdul who spoke excellent English, and who arranged a number of private tours for us … for example, with a degreed historian at the ancient Roman ruins at Volubilis, a Berber who was separated at birth from Joe Pesci and knew it (quite unsettling). We had wide-ranging conversations with all of them, and never once heard a Moroccan refer to any identifiable group in the country with anything except respect and appreciation. Except, that is, for their Parliament, but then, that isn’t flatness. It’s merely universal.

Even the French colonial period is thought of with some fondness so far as we could tell. I base this in part on our visit to Morocco’s “Swiss village” just outside Fes in the mid-Atlas range. Built by the French, it looks for all the world like any other alpine village, complete with red tile roofs, cranes nesting on the chimneys, and cafes with superior chocolate pastries.

In the end, this, I think, is what tourism is for. No, not the chocolate pastries. To understand and appreciate the bumpiness on a personal level—to connect with people who, in a still-bumpy world, live in different bumps than we do so we can get some sense of what we have in common, and what we don’t.

What is Morocco like? We were lucky enough to make it to Merzouga, where the Saharan sand dunes start. We did the tourist thing and rode camels into the dunes to watch the sunset.

About the saddles Moroccans use on their camels: They start with heavy gauge wire to make a frame. Then they wrap some cloth around it. Between it and the camel goes a thick blanket or some other form of padding. Between it and the rider goes … nothing, so far as I could tell.

This isn’t new, either. Douglas Porch’s wonderful The Conquest of Morocco includes this, from the late 1800s, about Moroccan saddles: “On the ridge are some curious lumps, which come exactly where lumps are least welcome to any person of Christian build.”

In any event, the gentleman who led our camels, and ourselves up into the dunes is from a family of Arab nomads. His parents lived that life.

Once he had us safely off our camels and gazing into the trackless Saharan sand, he pulled out his cell phone to text some friends.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Are you resigned to the Great Resignation?

Don’t be. Whether you’re buying or selling labor, the so-called Great Resignation exemplifies the innumeracy of much of the journalistic profession, along with the statistical credulity of their audience.

The problem isn’t with the alarming-looking numbers themselves. Lots of people really have left their jobs – more than 47 million in 2021. The problem is with how we interpret this number.

The incorrect interpretation is that people are giving up on the idea of working for a living. That’s not what’s happening.

What the Great Resignation numbers are telling us is that employees have decided they can choose to leave jobs they hate. They aren’t leaving the workforce to mooch off their parents. They’re leaving the jobs they have for hoped-for greener pastures.

The proper metric for understanding workforce shrinkage is something else. It’s called the labor force participation rate (LFPR). It measures the percentage of the potential workforce that either is employed or isn’t but would like to be.

For an in-depth analysis of a complex subject, read Brooking’s “Labor market exits and entrances are elevated: Who is coming back?”, Lauren Bauer and Wendy Edelberg, December 14, 2021.

Very briefly, LFPR increased steadily from its post-great-recession low of just over 80% to a pre-pandemic high of 83% (for those aged 25 to 54 years old; different age thresholds yield different but parallel outcomes). It “crashed,“ to use an unnecessarily dramatic verb, to a pandemic-driven low of just under 80% in 2020. It’s been recovering since then, to a current level of about 82%.

The usually cited evidence doesn’t, that is, support the proposition that we Americans have given up on the idea of working for a living.

What’s real in all this is an imbalance between the number of jobs employers have open and the number of qualified applicants who want those open jobs. To a significant extent this is a consequence of how strong the economy is, not how few workers are available. To give you an idea, 64 million jobs were created in 2021, while first-time unemployment claims fell to about 200,000 from about 800,000 a year earlier.

Another view: In 2021 the economy added about 64 million jobs while “only” about 47 million employees resigned from the jobs they had to express interest in them.

One way or another, employers want to hire more people than they can find who want to be hired. What’s an employer to do? A few thoughts come to mind:

  • Don’t gripe about the law of supply and demand. You might as well resent gravity for making the direction you go when you trip and fall down. Right now, demand exceeds supply, which means prices – compensation, that is – ought to increase. In other years, when the supply of suitable workers exceeded demand, employers were happy to pay them less.
  • Keep the phrase “that’s why they call it work” to yourself. No manager can make every responsibility in every position fun. That isn’t an excuse to make a job unpleasant. If you’re in doubt on this point, buy yourself a copy of Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World and read chapter 6, which talks about how to motivate employees, also chapter 7, which covers team dynamics.
  • Stop discriminating. I’m not talking about race, gender, ethnicity, or age, although if you do discriminate on any of these bases, shame on you, and stop it. Add to your do-not-discriminate-against list bad resume writers. You aren’t after all, hiring a resume.
  • Make onboarding more effective. The hidden cost of bringing new employees up to speed has always been large. The less time employees spend with you before leaving for greener pastures, the less time you have to amortize the cost of onboarding and acculturation. As employment time shrinks, the impact of onboarding and acculturation increases.

Bob’s last word: Once upon a time, much of the workforce was unionized, which gave them, and also independent employees some level of protection from bad managers. Think of the Great Resignation as a sort of crowdsourced virtual unionization.

Couple it with the increased willingness of employees to insist on better working conditions, the impact of the so-called “gig economy,” and the rise of the remote worker, and it’s clear that building desirability into the work environment can’t be an afterthought anymore.

Bob’s sales pitch: A favor, please. If you’ve read any of my books, it would be helpful if you’d post a review on Amazon. That’s especially true if you liked what you read (authors have egos, after all). But even if you’re less than enthusiastic, the number of reviews adds a patina of legitimacy to book shoppers deciding which book to buy on a given subject.

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