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Privilege

Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendann/3769037680

Three years ago Jason Ford, an entrepreneur and investor in Austin, TX, wrote a post on Medium titled The real reason my startup was successful: privilege.

It is far more honest and accurate than the typical stuff from founders talking (bragging) about how they did it on their own.

This is especially true of younger founders.

Like Rick yesterday, they have no recognition of the privilege that eased their lives and underlies their success.

The post was thoughtful, intelligent, calmly stated, no insulting, or trolling.

But a lot of people scanned it, their focus caught on a couple of words, so the misinterpreted what Ford had written, in many cases angrily.

A couple of months later he followed up with White privilege is real to respond to comments from the first post.

Ford says it better, but privilege, whether White or based on gender, zip code, alumni, or any of a myriad of other things is very real.

Ford says it much better than I do; read his posts and spread the word.

No problem, large or small, was ever solved by ignoring it.

Image credit: Stephen Dann

Golden Oldies: Ducks in a Row: Are You Privileged?

Monday, December 9th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflythegreat/6132347883

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

It’s been nearly five years since I wrote about “Rick” and in spite of everything that’s happened in those years, including inheriting his grandmother’s large estate, Rick still doesn’t consider himself privileged. Not surprising, considering the American belief that anybody can bootstrap their way to success all on their own. That includes people like Kylie Jenner, who brags about being self-made, since she bootstrapped her company using her own money — all by herself. No question, bootstrapping is far easier when you are privileged.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

If you’re an outsider, or even an insider prone to objectivity, Silicon Valley’s culture is a mess.

When I said as much to “Rick” his response caught me off guard — although it shouldn’t have.

“I wish they would just give it a rest. I am sick and tired of all the crap about wealth inequality, lack of diversity and privacy rights. That stuff is not my responsibility. I’ve worked hard and deserve my success; nobody went out of their way to help me. I’m sure not privileged and I figure if I can do it so can they.”

I’ve heard this before, but it still leaves me speechless.

Rick is tall, white, nice looking, middle class family, raised around Palo Alto, and graduated from UC Berkeley; his dad worked for Intel.

Yet he doesn’t see himself as privileged.

Over the years I’ve known thousands of Ricks.

And therein lies the true problem.

Because it’s hard to change that which doesn’t exist.

Image credit: Dagny Mol

The Screwing of WeWork Employees

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

A long time ago I wrote about what I call ego-merge, which refers to buying into the idea that you and your company are one.

Ego-merge used to be the result of long-term employment with the same company; these days it’s more the result of buying too deeply into the founder’s vision.

“The initial thing of ‘making a life, not a living,’ ‘community,’ ‘better together’ — the terms WeWork pushed as marketing also seeped into this company’s culture in a very real way,” said Kevin Hsieh, a software engineer involved in the group. “There is a looming sense of betrayal and frustration that that wasn’t necessarily followed everywhere.”

Betrayal is no understatement.

Adam Neumann, WeWork’s CEO, walked away with a $1.7 billion golden parachute, while employees are getting worse than screwed.

Combining an intriguing vision, with intense passion and an invincible belief in self, is a recipe that can  hook investors, workers and users — and it did.

Caveat emptor, indeed.

It’s Up to You

Tuesday, November 26th, 2019

Scheduling is every boss’ responsibility.

Good scheduling means your people can count on having a life outside work.

If projects stack up, or have deadlines like these, you need to figure out what’s going on.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dan4th/2312622098/

Don’t look to your team for a solution.

In most cases, look in the mirror to solve the problem.

Image credit: Dan4th Nicholas

Golden Oldies: MAP Action 2 (management by walking around)

Monday, November 25th, 2019

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/office-space

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

80 years ago Dave Packard commented that good management was “marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that “everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” That belief developed into a management technique called MWBA and it’s just as powerful now as it was then — if not more so. 13 years ago I wrote a four-part series about it. The second post talks about why to do it, the third about uncovering problems and the fourth about using MWBA to crosscheck what you hear.

And yes, you do have time.

Author John le Carré, of Bond fame, said it best.

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Remember Management By Walking Around (MWBA)? It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

Great managers work to spend at least 25% (or more) of their time wandering around chatting and building trust with their people.

Don’t have time? Maybe that’s because you never really thought abut the benefits. Getting to know your people this way helps you to

    • spot high-potential workers;
    • raise your trust quotient with employees;
    • improve retention;
    • attract talent;
    • discover molehills before they’re mountains, and, most importantly, it’s the best, if not only, way to
    • know what’s really going on.

To work it must be the norm—that means it needs to be done constantly, not just when there’s a problem.

Consistent, casual visits make people feel comfortable and encourages them to chat—saying what they are thinking without editing it. To pass on information, rumors, and the like without wondering or worrying that it will boomerang and hurt them.

While wandering, you’ll hear enough to validate or repudiate what you heard from somewhere else. It lets you protect your sources—which means they’ll continue to pass on information—and it helps you avoid acting on erroneous information.

The higher you rise in the organization the more important this intelligence becomes. One of the greatest dangers for any manager is getting isolated and hearing only a sanitized or slanted version of what’s going on within the group, department or company. This is especially true for the CEO and senior staff.

Bottom-line—get off your duff, out of your office, wander around, say hi, listen, be a sponge and soak it all up.

Invest the time—that’s what managers do—and it will pay off handsomely!

Does it still work? Absolutely. Read about how it went from strictly a management tool to also offering personal growth and stress reduction.

A note for managers in love with tech. MBWA can’t be done digitally; it’s an in-person, face-to-face technique that works.

It takes far less time than recruiting new people.

And it’s free.

Image credit: LYCS Architecture on Unsplash

Entrepreneurs: Know and Control Your Burn Rate

Monday, November 18th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gowestphoto/3921760653/

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Burn rate is why companies (and people) should budget. Unfortunately, budgeting is often driven by burn rate when it should be vice versa — as most learn the hard way. Hard, but not impossible, just ask the guy who went from a burn rate of over half a million a month to $15,000. Although this post is from 2016 when money was tight and focused on entrepreneurs, it applies to companies of any size, as well as people, no matter their income.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Last summer David Bladow, co-founder and CEO of flower delivery startup BloomThat, had the worse kind of ah-ha moment after deciphering the company’s accounting — a self-described “convoluted mess.”

What he found was a monthly burn rate of $550K that meant the company would be out of cash in just 4 months.

That knowledge drove a laser focus to change.

Now instead of shutting its doors in November, its self-diagnosed death date, the startup launched nationally on February 3. The company that was burning through half a million a month is now down to $15,000 a month.

BloomThat did early what every founder should be doing now.

Yesterday Mark Suster wrote about how to figure the right burn rate for your company and last week we talked about doing more with less.

Actually, I think the tightening of funding is a very good thing, although it will create a certain amount of carnage, it will force founders and their teams to grow up.

If that sounds harsh, so be it.

Funding based on unproven future sales is driven by hopes that are heavily shaped by outside circumstances — circumstances beyond any founder’s control.

Sam Altman warns that funding is not a guarantee of success and in the next few years David Bladow, Andrew Wilkinson and dozens like them will prove that horses have the staying power that unicorns lack.

Flickr image credit: Tsutomu Takasu

Reviews and Male Bosses

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

Men have been bosses since the dawn of work.

Therefore, by whatever name, reviews have been a male province.

For decades reviews have been hell.

performance-review-1

And in many companies they still are.

Image credit: Hiking Artist

Reviews and Female Bosses

Tuesday, November 12th, 2019

Women at work are damned when they get promoted and damned to a lower profile and paycheck when they don’t.

They are especially damned when they are a boss doing reviews.

That became clear in a recent study by Martin Abel, an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College, that was published in the Institute of Labor Economics.

All managers need to be able to give tough feedback at times. But Abel’s research finds that both men and women discriminate against female bosses who dish out criticism, even when the feedback is worded identically to the feedback given by male managers.

Women are supposed to be nice, complimentary and supportive (especially to men). Those who are assertive and speak up, instead of melting into the background and shutting up are considered bitches.

As are women who do what bosses are supposed to do, i.e., provide feedback, both good and not, that helps their people grow and develop their capabilities to the fullest.

…workers surveyed were “about three times more likely to associate giving praise and appropriate use of tone with female managers. By contrast, they are about twice more likely to associate giving criticism and strict expectations with male managers.”

The attitudes aren’t new. The same type of studies (presenting the same whatever, but using male and female names) have documented the same reactions in college professors, managers and workers.

Like I said, damned either way.

Image credit: Karen Cox

Golden Oldies: Twofer On Reviews

Monday, November 11th, 2019

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

5 years ago s+b created a video based on brain science to show how and why people often reacted negatively to performance reviews.

Ducks in a Row: Brains and Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are a frequent subject of management gurus, the media and pundits of every variety, myself included.

More recently the focus has been on what’s wrong with reviews and how they often act as a demotivator.

A new article in strategy + business uses brain science to look at exactly why and how reviews demotivate.

YouTube credit: strategy + business

A year later GE scrapped its notorious rank and yank review system as implemented by then-CEO Jack Welch. A year after that Amazon followed suit. There are still plenty of companies that use the system — whether they admit it or just change the name. Individual managers are also guilty of it no matter their company’s attitude. Be it company wide or individually the effect is the same — higher turnover, lower productivity, decreased engagement, and increasing recruiting costs.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A Sea Change for Annual Reviews

Years ago I wrote about how to make annual reviews painless and effective — more a review of the  year’s accomplishments and setting goals for the coming year than a critique of work past.

It worked because mini-reviews, coaching and conversations during the year were frequent.

Typical annual reviews were fraught with fear and loathing.

For decades, General Electric practiced (and proselytized) a rigid system, championed by then-CEO Jack Welch, of ranking employees. Formally known as the “vitality curve” but frequently called “rank and yank,” the system hinged on the annual performance review, and boiled the employees’ performance down to a number on which they were judged and ranked against peers. A bottom percentage (10% in GE’s case) of underperformers were then fired.

Jack Welch championed a lot of very bad stuff (e.g., work/life balance, HR), but the negativity of rank and yank is near the top, if not number one.

(As for GE’s stellar results keep under Welch keep in mind that businesses like GE Financial practically printed money until it all blew up.)

But times are changing.

According to Raghu Krishnamoorthy, the longtime GE exec in charge of Crotonville (GE’s in-house management school) “Command and control is what Jack was famous for. Now it’s about connection and inspiration.

And to that end, GE has developed a new in-house app that basically does what I and others evangelized a decade and more ago.

The new app is called “PD@GE” for “performance development at GE”  There’s an emphasis on coaching throughout, and the tone is unrelentingly positive. The app forces users to categorize feedback in one of two forms: To continue doing something, or to consider changing something.

If you don’t have the luxury of an app you can simplify it even further.

    • Care about your people.
    • Interact with your people.
    • Talk with your people.
    • Challenge your people.
    • Help them grow and advance — even when that means they leave for a better opportunity that you can’t provide.

Read what GE is doing and adapt it to your own group — whether your company does of not.

Image credit: Mark

Innovation and the National Park Service

Monday, November 4th, 2019

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I read a couple of articles last week highlighting two mind-blowing new products. Tomorrow you’ll learn about one that addresses wildfire prevention in a totally new way. The other (Wednesday) is a way to recycle roads, instead of repaving them, using plastic bottles.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Bureaucracies are not noted for their vision or rapid adoption of new technology and the National Park Service is a prime example of that.

So it was a major surprise to see that the NPS is integrating cutting edge technology in iconic Yellowstone Park’s infrastructure.

Not only that, but NPS is doing it with a public/private partnership, to boot.

The new concrete, called Flexi-Pave, is made with stones and recycled tires, and Michelin has been helping them install it all over the park.

Wow. If NPS can do something this radical maybe there’s hope for progress on other fronts and from other bureaucracies.

Video credit: Tech Insider

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