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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Consider the piranha.

According to Smithsonian.com, “A typical piranha diet consists of insects, fish, crustaceans, worms, carrion, seeds and other plant material. A red-bellied piranha (Pygocentrus nattereri), for example, eats about 2.46 grams per day—about one-eighth of its average body mass.”

But in our KJR Bestiary we’re embracing post-factualism. We don’t care about what piranhas really eat, and how much of it. The Piranha of our bestiary is the one the locals conned Teddy Roosevelt into believing in. The one Hollywood makes movies about. The one that, hunting in large, vicious schools, can eat a human alive in a couple of minutes.

Piranhas

Do you work with Piranhas?

I was tempted to call these colleagues ducks, as in “pecked to death by ducks,” but somehow even the most intimidating mallards just don’t seem to inspire the proper level of fear and revulsion.

So Piranhas it is — those colleagues who individually lack even the force of character to backstab their unlucky victims, but who in large groups can shred a fellow employee’s reputation and self-esteem, one small bite at a time.

Office Piranhas receive no obvious benefit from their nastiness. Benefit, though, isn’t really the point.

Unlike Howler Monkeys and quite a few other species too, Piranhas don’t see their world as a pecking order into which they have to establish their level, where the higher up they are the more benefit flows their way.

Piranhas, along with no shortage of other beasts, have a simpler ranking system: their world consists of friends and enemies, with no one in between.

The difference between Piranhas and those other friends-and-enemies beasts is the difference between I and we.

If you’re my enemy it’s singular. Whether I simply see you as someone who’s standing in my way or I see you as a bad person who must be stopped for the greater good, you’re my enemy.

Not so for Piranhas. Piranha-ism is all about group identity. So far as I can tell, Piranhas see themselves as MOS’s … Members of School, just like their aqueous namesakes.

That is, they divide the world into us and them. And if you’re them you’re the enemy, deserving everything bad we can dish out.

Piranhas also understand just how small they are compared to their enemies, which is why they hide in dark water and only attack when their prey is at its most vulnerable.

All of this is also why Piranhas prize loyalty above all other virtues. “Be true to your school” is what matters most (I couldn’t help myself). It’s a zero-sum game, which means helping anyone who isn’t an MOS is, in the end, doing us harm.

As mentioned before, Piranhas’ targets are self-esteem and reputation. Dealing with the self-esteem part isn’t at all hard. This is mostly a matter of the Piranhas trying to establish themselves as the Cool Kids Club, and all you have to do to avoid taking damage is to want, as urgently, desperately, and visibly as possible, to never be a member or to be mistaken for one.

When interacting with Piranhas at this level, eye rolls and sour smiles are, unlike the scaly ones, your friend.

The reputation part is a harder nut to crack because there’s nothing for you to sink your teeth into, unlike the Piranhas, who can sink theirs into you. That is, since no single action on the Piranhas part even rises to the hard-to-counter level of backstabbing, there’s little you can do to address each of their little nibbles.

What you can do is recognize that metaphors won’t help you solve this. As with backstabbing, your best recourse when others are trying to harm your reputation is to have a strong personal network — a wide range of associates who recognize your integrity, competence, and value, and who, on top of that, consider you to be part of their we.

Piranhas who try to overcome a barrier this strong will find themselves left high and dry.

* * *

The invitation is still open: Send me your species and join the KJR Cool Kids Club. What I’d like from you are:

  • Species: A type of bad leader or manager, associated with an unpleasant creature, whether alive, extinct, or mythical. I’ll also consider unpleasant ecosystems if you come up with a nasty organization type instead.
  • Root Cause: What you think leads to the character flaws you’re describing.
  • Solution: What, in your personal experience, works to help an employee survive unscathed and without being mutated in the process.
  • Permission: This includes permission to give you credit for the idea, if you’d like that, or instructions not to. It also includes permission to use your ideas intact, or to modify both your thoughts and your writing as I see fit. Please don’t take offense if I do. Even if I like your writing that doesn’t mean it fits KJR. And if I disagree with your thinking … well, my name will be on the final result. I’ll do my best to give proper credit without burdening your good name with my opinions.
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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Somewhere in the business you support is a manager who needs to do things more effectively. The alternatives:

  • Shovel a request into the IT request queue.
  • Ask Clyde, who’s “good with PCs” to do something magical with Excel.
  • Bring in a local IT services company to build a system that helps do things more effectively.
  • Find some inexpensive off-the-shelf software that will help do things more effectively, then badger IT into allowing its installation.
  • Contract with a SaaS vendor whose software will help do things more effectively and don’t tell IT anything about it.
  • Sigh a great sigh and give up on making things happen more effectively.

The first bullet is The Right Way To Do Things.

The remaining bullets are all some form of end-user computing (EUC) or the dreaded shadow IT.

Except for the last bullet, that is. The Great Sigh is a key reason entrepreneurships are able to beat, or at least hold their own against their giant competitors.

Let’s add a dimension to this mess exciting array of alternatives: The backbone and hub of your enterprise technical architecture is one of the major commercial ERP suites. What the manager needs would, most logically, be implemented as a customization to one of the ERP suite’s modules.

Nope. Can’t have that. So option #1 — the right way to do things — is off the table, leaving only end-user computing (EUC), Shadow IT, or sighing deep sighs on the table for our sadly un-mythical manager to choose from.

Compared to the rest of the population, KJR’s readers are, disproportionately, metrics nerds, so let’s add a nerdy metrical dimension as well.

The metrics your average business manager cares about in this situation are, in descending order of importance:
1. Cycle time: Start the stopwatch the moment the manager first develops a reasonably clear idea of what’s needed. Stop it when the software is in production and the manager’s employees are doing things the new way. More than anything else, managers want this cycle time to be short.
2. Quality: No, not being bug free, although that’s nice too. Quality isn’t just the absence of defects. It’s also adherence to specifications – whether the software does what the manager needs it to do. By this definition, the plain-vanilla version of the ERP suite’s module is a low-quality solution. It doesn’t do what the manager needs it to do, because if it did, the manager wouldn’t be submitting the request. Q.E.D.
3. Fixed cost: This is the initial spend – how much the manager will have to pay for the solution. This matters because above a certain amount the software becomes a capital acquisition, which means the manager would have to go through the company’s CapEx approval process … a governance process that makes the IT request queue seem downright friendly and inviting in comparison.
IT’s priorities, presumably reflected in your company’s IT request governance, are quite different, usually along the lines of:

1. Financial Value: Amortize the fixed project costs over some reasonable number of useful years of software service. Add the expected cost of ongoing maintenance. Subtract from the business benefits that will come from doing things the new way. Divide by total cost to turn the result into a percentage. (Yes, yes, multiply by 100. Don’t be pedantic. Oh, I forgot — you’re a metrics nerd too. Okay.)

If the result is a positive number, rank it against all the other requests that have to compete for IT’s time and attention.

2. Political Value: Don’t be shocked. Also, don’t be outraged. The Financial Value undervalues a lot of what are, in polite company, called “intangible benefits.” (In less polite company they’re called “warm fuzzies”; also, “Don’t be ridiculous!”)

As minor matters like customer satisfaction usually fall into the intangibles bucket, there’s often value in political value — for someone standing up for what matters most, even if it’s hard to put a number to it.

3. Strategic Value: Some projects are part of the strategic plan — they advance the strategy. Others aren’t part of the plan but they are consistent with strategic intent. There are no others — any manager worth his or her salt knows how to write the obligatory two-paragraph account of how their pet project fits into the company strategy.

Compare the two sets of priorities and it should be clear why, for most managers, and especially for smaller efforts, EUC and shadow IT are the preferred ways to go.

Doing things the so-called right way might make a manager a good corporate citizen.

But EUC and shadow IT are what get the annual bonus.

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