Leadership – Page 377 – IS Survivor Publishing

Measuring turkeys (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Leadership|Last Updated: November 24, 1997

Worthington, Minn., claims to be turkey capital of the United States. Worthington has competition, though. Example: In his autobiography, Dennis Green, head coach of the Minnesota Vikings, described his plan to sue the team’s owners if they refused to sell him a 30 percent share of the company.

Since a) privately held companies have no legal obligation to sell themselves to head coaches; b) writing an autobiography when you’re as unaccomplished as he is reveals an ego as big as Green’s waistline; and c) when you play hardball politics you’re best off doing it covertly; Minneapolis gets to include Green in its turkey production total. And at 285 pounds, he compensates for a large fraction of Worthington’s turkey production all by himself.

While you’re in the mood for turkey, here’s another turkey story for you from a reader I’ll call Stan, who worked for “a major US corporation.” The words are mostly his — I’m lightly paraphrasing from his description.

Once upon a time, Stan was a front-line manager responsible for keeping a large number of PCs up and running in five locations. Stan instituted a preventive maintenance program, and logged the results to help him spot trends — information that came in mighty handy on several occasions.

Then his management instituted a new trouble calls process. Instead of end-users’ calling Stan’s department directly, they were directed to call the front desk, which in turn called the help desk at corporate headquarters, which then opened a trouble report and paged Stan’s department, alerting them to a problem occurring probably no more than a several dozen paces away from their office.

Stan’s analysts would then log onto the corporate mainframe, find the trouble report, assign it to themselves, change its status to open, and then fix the problem. Afterward they retrieved the trouble report, closed it, and reported their time (including the “administrivia,” which was usually more time than it took to fix the problem), and what they did to fix it.

One thing you get from an advanced help desk system is statistics. Lots of ’em. And so Stan got some feedback on the success of his preventive maintenance program: Of all the offices, his had the smallest volume of trouble calls.

You know where this is going. Stan’s managers were devotees of the if-you-can’t-measure-you-can’t-manage school of process supervision, but not graduates of the be-careful-what-you-measure-because-that’s-what-you’ll-get college of advanced techniques. They measured productivity by number of trouble calls responded to, and therefore Stan’s office was the least “productive.” Management could not justify paying three salaries for such an “unproductive” office and gave Stan 30 days’ notice. Stan predicts that when the trouble call volume increases for this office (as it inevitably will), management will be able to point to its statistics to show how cutting one salary raised productivity.

OK, let’s be serious for a minute. Stan’s management made two basic conceptual errors. First, it designed its new process around management reporting, not staff effectiveness. Management reporting became the goal of the system, not a desirable byproduct. Problem management systems must always improve convenience for end-users and be unobtrusive and helpful for technicians, or they’ll fail.

Far worse, though, Stan’s management confused internal process management measures with external, business results measures. “Trouble calls responded to” merely measures a departmental sub-process, not a business result. The business result is measured by end-user up-time, however it’s accomplished.

Stan’s management, obsessed by numbers, had no interest in the business result. (No, I won’t name the company. If I did, companies that might do some soul-searching wouldn’t bother.)

Oh well. At least we won’t suffer from a turkey shortage this Thanksgiving.

Propaganda realities (first appeared in InfoWorld)

By: Bob Lewis|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated: November 17, 1997

When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, the Cubs shaped (warped?) my character every summer.

The team, needless to say, was awful, but we had our great players: Sweet swingin’ Billy Williams, pizza-sellin’ Ron Santo, and, more than anyone else, Ernie Banks, who was the perfect athlete hero for young kids. He was a great player (“Just think how good he’d be if he got to bat against Cub pitchers!” we’d exclaim to each other), he loved playing the game, and he was perennially optimistic and cheerful.

Whenever Jack Brickhouse interviewed Ernie Banks before a game, Ernie would say, “It’s another great day for baseball at beautiful Wrigley Field!” And at the end of every season, Ernie would say, “Next year will be a great season for the Cubs!”

Ernie was a wonderful ball player. I don’t think he’d have made a great executive, though. If I’ve seen one character trait that, more than any other, differentiates truly great executives from the rest of the population, it’s their refusal to let emotions blind them to reality.

Here’s a reality many of us are unwilling to face, but that every successful communicator knows: Your message must be aimed primarily at your audience’s emotions, and only slightly to the intellect. Otherwise, your audience will lose interest and won’t absorb your message.

Sales professionals live and die on this insight. Pretending the world is otherwise, or being unwilling to play the game to win, simply means you don’t belong in sales. (If you’re wondering, I’m not capable of it, and I got my coccyx out of the sales profession just a few months after entering it for that exact reason.) If you deny the validity of this insight into your own decision-making, you’re vulnerable to every sales shyster who learns how to yank your chain.

OK, brace yourself. Here’s an earlier version of the same advice, along with its authoritative source:

“Propaganda’s effect must be aimed primarily at nonintellectual elements of the mind and only, to a limited extent, at the rational intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public.” – Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

No, this doesn’t mean the sales representatives you deal with are Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, or Nazi dupes. It means they’re willing to embrace the realities of their profession, including tactics their competitors will use against them – even if Hitler explained those tactics in Mein Kampf.

How do you deal with uncomfortable realities? Hitler’s actions were horrifying. His effectiveness, though, was unquestionable, and that means you can’t just write off his insights into human behavior as psychotic ravings.

My friend Curtis Sahakian has written a white paper on this subject, titled “Business Application of Propaganda” (The Corporate Partnering Institute, Skokie, IL). It’s practically an inventory of human frailty. By reading it you’ll learn (among other facts) that people:

Change their beliefs more easily than their behavior;
Filter out messages that conflict with their beliefs;
Are strongly influenced by name-calling and innuendo;
Have a strong predisposition to perceive patterns in random events; and
Will do more out of fear, or to avoid pain, than for any other source of motivation.

Am I advocating unethical behavior by telling you these facts? Are you being unethical by learning them? If you learn the rules of propaganda and use them to your advantage, is that unethical, or are the ethics determined by the consequences of your actions?

I can answer only the first two questions with certainty: No, I’m not advocating unethical behavior by presenting these facts, and no, you aren’t displaying poor ethics by learning them.