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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Random thoughts while on vacation in southern Spain:

Want to know how to motivate people? Forget the books and formulas — even mine; even Daniel Pink’s!

Just pay attention to your life. For example, there I was, “canyoning” at the top of a 90-foot cliff (estimated from the top; from the bottom estimates ranged from 3 to 4 meters). Below me was a pool of water of uncertain depth.

In the pool were my stepsister and stepbrother who had just cheerfully jumped in. Next to me was our guide and a young woman, perhaps 27 years old, who had joined our little expedition.

While perched on the rock, while our guide was explaining that all I had to do was take one step, I idly wondered if the proper diagnosis was acrophobia (fear of heights) or bathophobia (fear of falling).

But with two already down an all four watching me …

This is why, when you manage projects, you want a weekly status meeting, where everyone on the project interacts with everyone else on the project team as they discuss whether they made their deadlines for the week or not. Neither my list of motivators (need for approval, exclusivity, fear, greed, and guilt) nor Pink’s (autonomy, mastery, purpose) mentions peer pressure.

But peer pressure is what launched me off the rock and into freefall. And when you’re managing a project, peer pressure is the your most effective tool for keeping everyone on schedule.

* * *

We drove to Gibraltar. On the way we  read  a wee bit of its history: England got custody as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, and Spain has been angry about it ever since.

Having driven there, gazed upon it, and admired it, and also having spent time and energy facilitating discussions and brokering agreements, I have this advice for Spain:

Get over it. It’s a rock. Sure, if you owned it maybe you could get Prudential to pay you for usage rights, but probably not. Other than that … your economy is in depression, your overextended banks took you there, bailing them out nearly bankrupted your government, and you have no control over your own currency.

My advice: Ignore the rock. My related advice to the managers and staff who read this missive on a regular basis: Someone you worked with slighted you recently, or insulted you, or otherwise took possession of your Rock of Gibraltar. Your best strategy just might be to ignore it, too.

(Along these lines, Ambrose Bierce once wrote of a lion’s encounter with a skunk. Feeling threatened, the skunk did what skunks do best, but the lion took no apparent notice. So the skunk said something like, “Sir, I beg you to notice that I have set upon the earth an implacable aroma.” To which the lion replied, “You needn’t have bothered. I already knew you were a skunk.”)

* * *

My Dad updated his iPad to iOS 7. It froze mid-update. As I’m the closest thing to a resident tech here, it was my responsibility to do something. It being an iPad, I pushed various buttons in varying combinations until it unfroze, at which point the screen informed us that nothing else was going to happen until we plugged it into iTunes.

With my usual technical panache I figured out this meant the iTunes software and not the iTunes store. So we found an appropriate Windows laptop, downloaded and installed iTunes, plugged in the iPad, and pushed various buttons in varying combinations once again, until voila! The iPad booted up. Remarkably, it was then able to restore from iCloud and my Dad was back in business.

Apple. It just works. Except when it doesn’t.

So then, for reasons that mattered at the time but not to you, I had to install some videoconferencing software on my personal Windows 8 tablet. Pathetically enough, the software didn’t detect that it was being installed on a version of Windows with which it was incompatible, but it was, and it didn’t, resulting in a hung system, followed by an uninstall, after which  much of the installed software no longer worked.

Fortunately, Windows 8 comes with a feature called “Refresh,” which is supposed to fix up munged systems without doing any collateral damage. Unfortunately, Refresh caused quite a bit of collateral damage: It uninstalled every bit of Windows Desktop software, including Microsoft Office.

Which is why I’m writing this week’s column using whatever Google calls its office suite these days.

Proving that no matter where you are and whatever you face, there’s probably a way to fix it, but there’s a good chance the way you find will be pretty annoying.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I couldn’t stand it anymore.

Objectively, it wasn’t that time-consuming. Subjectively?

I’m talking about how I’ve been publishing KJR for years. It’s been … less than elegant.

It is connected to running IT. I think. Bear with me.

I use WordPress to manage the KJR archives. I embed them in my main site on the archives page, courtesy of an <iframe> tag.

But I put the current column and ManagementSpeak on the carefully formatted issurvivor.com home page. That’s been a cut-and-paste operation — three separate cut-and-paste operations — one from MS Word into WordPress, the second from WordPress onto the home page, and the third from the home page into the email transmission. Worse, the headline, sub-head, ManagementSpeak and column text all required separate handling.

It’s been annoying because: It’s cumbersome; it takes about a half hour a week; and it’s stupid.

So I finally bit the bullet. Time to make the current ManagementSpeak and column material automagically appear on the issurvivor.com home page from WordPress.

I’ll spare you [some of] the details, which involved much more about PHP, WordPress, and cascading style sheets than I’d ever wanted to know.

But along the way I was reminded of some principles that also apply to much larger operations than mine. Starting with:

Wrapper your data: WordPress runs on MySQL. Going after the database with SQL code would have been way too much work, starting with figuring out the WordPress table structure.

Fortunately, WordPress spared me that particular agony. It provides functions that navigate the database for me.

Do the same. Give everyone canned data views to work with. It makes everyone faster and makes debugging much easier.

Strategize first. Re-strategize second. And sometimes third. Then code. My first thought was to retrieve the week’s posts via their unique WordPress identifier, then call up the page invoking a custom template. But that meant … oh, never mind. I promised to spare you the details. Short version: After a couple of blind alleys I figured out I could get the job done quite efficiently using categories.

The point: Choose the right programming strategy carefully and everything that follows is a lot easier.

Assume the tools are there: Same example, different lesson. Far too many companies that implement large COTS solutions mess with core code or build satellite applications, assuming the COTS solution doesn’t come with tools that will get the job done for you within the solution architecture.

Maybe not, but don’t assume it. Instead, invest in creating system gurus who know the system inside and out. Solutions that use the systems architecture are almost always less expensive, more robust, and easier to maintain than the alternatives.

And they’re usually there. In my case, WordPress had everything I needed to get the job done, other than positioning things on the home page which I was able to accomplish with a <table> and a couple of <iframe> tags.

There’s always one more complication: I needed different header fonts for the home page than for the archives. I had to figure out how to add them to the .css file, and how to invoke them from a template.

I also needed a header that didn’t include the top-bar … the bar that includes tabs and a search box. That mean figuring out how to add and invoke an alternative header file.

Read the syntax carefully: Turns out, alternative WordPress header files must have names structured as “header-xxxxx” but are invoked by “xxxxx“. That took me a half-hour to figure out.

Also (I’m embarrassed about this one) … if you don’t put a </iframe> tag after your <iframe> tag, nothing else will render on your page. That only took fifteen minutes to debug.

Know when good enough is good enough: The new home page looks marginally less attractive. To compare, go to https://issurvivor.com. You’ll find an “Old Home” link at the bottom.

Also: In the archives, click on the current column or ManagementSpeak. You’ll find they look pretty raw. I figured, who’s going to do that when they’re already formatted quite nicely on the home page?

The way I figure it, saving twenty minutes and the feeling of doing things stupidly every week makes these minor cosmetic deficiencies worthwhile trade-offs.

There’s something peculiarly satisfying about writing code that works: If you’ve ever written code for a living, you know this. If you haven’t, you probably don’t, but if you lead developers you need to.

Because knowing what makes the people you lead tick makes you a better leader.

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