Here it is, Saturday again, and two very different views of culture are on the menu.
Let’s look first at a topic that’s the subject of a media frenzy: Steve Jobs and Apple.
Looking at the media, old and new, a large number seem to be leaning towards some level of mass hysteria along the lines of there is no Apple without Steve Jobs.
Now, I grant that Jobs is unique, especially his gift of seeing of seeing around corners and over the horizon, but at the same time his people have been steeped deep in a culture that believes doing that is possible and that belief is at least half the battle.
For a thoughtful analysis take a look at this Knowledge @ Wharton analysis with some fascinating insights from Wharton management professor Michael Useem, among others, on the part that culture does/will play at Apple.
What does Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz have in common with incoming President Barack Obama?
While they are superb choices as managers and as leaders,
both are entering their respective stages at a time of crisis;
both have multiple and diverse constituencies;
both are the focus of extremely high, often conflicting, sometimes impossible expectations; and
both are subject to substantial outside influences, circumstances and pressure.
Hopefully both will succeed, but the real lesson to be learned here is in the list of commonality and what they do.
Not because of the obvious difficulties, the scope of challenges or even enormous pressures, but because these four points are what every person in charge faces—from multinational CEOs through small biz owners and managers at every level to parents. In many ways the scope isn’t even all that different, relatively speaking.
It’s like cooking. You can take a recipe for two, multiply by X and feed an army.
Which makes this the opportunity of a lifetime.
Look at your world, professional and personal, and analyze it based on the four points above and sort accordingly. Then watch the actions of these two role models.
For instance, Obama spent substantial time before the election and all his time since talking with a wide variety of people and gathering a diverse amount of information from all quarters—including just plain people—in order to be as fully briefed as possible to the situations he’ll inherit on January 20th.
Bartz plans to gather diverse intelligence from all stakeholders and doesn’t seem interested in just kowtowing to those with power.
“But for the moment, she doesn’t even seem to care [about a Microsoft deal]. She told journalists to stop already with the speculation and advice, and explained that she would take her time listening to employees and customers before making any big decisions.”
Ask yourself, how often do you take on a situation by doing instead of listening, analyzing and thinking first?
Plan on watching these two, learning from what they do and applying that knowledge to your own situations—kind of long-distance mentoring.
The world today is one of nitch marketing and personalized mass consumer products.
The marketing folks are using customization/value-add/service/quality to sell to the individual and to capitalize on tiny segments of the market. The result is a surge in the ‘my way’ mentality of consumers, i.e., people.
OK, so what does all this have to do with your ability to do your job as a manager?
A lot, fortunately or not, depending on you and your MAP.
The mentality described above is the same mentality that you need to appeal to when hiring and with so few openings it’s more critical than ever to hire the right person at the right time and for the right reasons.
In spite of the economy and the abundance of candidates, to get the person you want you’ll need to sell—the job, your company, yourself, your team, corporate culture, everything—to candidates, just as they’re selling themselves to you.
You can make your staffing life easier by doing two things.
First, be sure to write a really complete req, not, as I’m fond of saying, a wreck.
Next, determine your position’s niche and identify the characteristics of that market. Here’s an example of what I mean; match the following programming jobs
upgrades
advanced development
maintenance
with the correct mentality
bleeding edge
tinkerer
improvement
Once this is done you can make sure that both the req and ad target the correct candidates, saving yourself time, energy, money, and nerves—not to mention looking like a hero.
I love it. In November BNet posted 10 Reasons why middle managers are more valuable than CEOs—but you knew that.
So, what makes middle managers more valuable? Here’s a synopsis, click the link for the full version.
You know how stuff really gets done.
You know what motivates individuals.
You know the customer well enough to get to the truth.
You know the vendors as well as the competitive landscape.
You don’t have to defend the original strategy.
You have the skills to get people of diverse backgrounds and in cross functional groups to work together.
You know exactly what point your company is in the movie.
You know the believers.
You can motivate with humor.
You have the power to heal.
Obviously, there are a lot of middle managers who don’t fit this profile, and plenty of senior managers who do.
The smartest companies encourage everybody to be a middle manager, relatively speaking, while in startups and smaller companies it’s a necessity—from the CEO through the developers to the receptionist.
Having everybody acting like middle managers may be powerful, but it’s only half of what can be accomplished.
The action that really juices the results comes when everybody is listened to as if they are the CEO.
There’s been a lot said (and ranted) over the last couple of decades about the dumbing down of America. Not just kids, but adults, too.
I’m not referring to the expertise each of us has that allows us to do our jobs and generally function, but of the general knowledge of the world in which we live—literature, geography, art, etc.—call it liberal arts, if you will.
Few Americans are multi-lingual, as opposed to Europeans, East Europeans, Russians, Asians, etc., and our knowledge of geography is laughable.
I remember a survey during the Bosnia war and more than half of the respondents didn’t know where Bosnia was or that it, along with the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Herzegovina, were part of the old Yugoslavia, with Serbia and Montenegro forming the rest—nor did they seem to care.
For centuries, fighting of one kind or another has gone on almost constantly in the Middle East and, to put it mildly, is still going on and having a major impact on us today.
But most people have only a vague idea where these countries are.
How much do you know? Click the MAP below and see how well you do on arranging the listed countries.
On a general level I had them on the right continent, but don’t think much of my knowledge beyond that.
Does it matter? Does knowledge in liberal arts areas foster more than interesting, late night discussions over a bottle of wine?
What does it mean to be educated in the Twenty-first Century?
My regular readers know that normally Wordless Wednesday is truly wordless, but all good rules have exceptions and flexibility is a virtue.
The video is a great example of how an innovative combination of socially unacceptable food and a culture of exceptional customer care turned a restaurant into a destination and a major hit with people who aren’t intimidated by the food police. Heart Attack Grill here we come! (Good grief, a reason to go to Chandler, Ariz.)
If you are doing email marketing campaigns, you need to understand the inbox of your email recipients. If you can think like your recipient, and sit in his chair as he works his way through a huge stack of email, then you will succeed. In this post we will follow Jim Easterbrook, the Director of Internet Security at Midwest Regional Bank.
Some background: Midwest Regional Bank avoided the debt meltdown, did not take any loans from the Federal government, and had minimal exposure to consumer real estate loans. So now Midwest Regional Bank is growing rapidly, gaining new depositors who like its independence from Congress and gaining new business clients, too. Because businesses are fleeing banks that took Federal loans, Midwest Regional can choose the most creditworthy businesses as its new customers.
Jim has a big problem. He’s swamped with work and his inbox is swamped with emails. He cleaned it out Friday afternoon, only to see another 500 emails waiting for him on Monday morning.
Here’s what happens to them
Jim’s spam filter automatically sorts about 350 emails into his spam folder. He plans to sort through the spam for any interesting emails, but somehow never has the time. Therefore, if the filter calls it spam, then Jim will never see it. (You can keep your email out of his spam folder, and we will talk more about this in a future post.)
There are about 50 emails from coworkers, suppliers, or customers. Jim responds to these high-priority emails immediately, and then starts dealing with the remaining 100 emails, all lower priority from external sources. Your email probably falls into this bucket.
Jim set up several rules in his Outlook (the company-selected email application) to help him manage the email. These automatic rules sort about 60 into various folders, such as community, professional and industry. These emails are typically newsletters, meeting notices, and professional correspondence that Jim handles in the evenings when he has time.
Your email is one of the one of the remaining forty sitting unsorted and mostly unwanted in his inbox. Jim’s goal is to clean out these forty emails in five minutes, so your first email to him will get only about 5-10 seconds of his time.
First Email – Six Spam Tests
Jim uses a simple set of six external cues to evaluate an email before opening it.
Email title – Make it direct, specific, relevant, and plain. Jim intuitively recognizes certain words and phrases as spam. If he sees “free,” “limited time, “dear friend,” or other key phrases, he hits the spam button immediately. Your email should contain some information of value to Jim, and the title should reflect that content.
Recipient Email Address – Send business information to Jim’s business email. Jim has both personal and business email addresses. If your email went to jimeasterbrook0057@aol.com or any other ISP provider (comcast.net, msn.com, yahoo.com, etc.) he will delete it immediately. Take the time to find his business email address and send business emails there.
Sender Name – Make it personal. Your email should not come from the marketing department or the service team. Your email should come from a real, live person, preferably the CEO or an appropriate vice president in your organization.
Sender Email Address – Be transparent. The email address should always match the sender name; Jim unconsciously checks for this. If the sender is Fred Broomfield, then Jim expects to see fbroomfield@ or fredb@ in the email prefix. Jim is looking for any reason to hit the delete button, so the email address must be obvious and transparent.
Email size and attachments – Small is beautiful, but attachments are ugly. As a sender, you are requesting time from the recipient. Jim always checks the email size, so keep it short, polite and respectful. He does not have time to read long emails and any attachment gets it deleted immediately.
Congratulations, your email passed all of Jim’s mental spam filter tests, so he did not delete it immediately. In fact, Jim moved the email into his “To Read Later” folder. But don’t get too excited. That folder gets pretty full and Jim seldom has time to read the emails in it. Typically, he just empties the folder every week or so, without reading many of them.
Build a Relationship
The important thing is that with this first email you have started building a long-term relationship with Jim. Keep it up. Next week we will see how Jim handles the next few emails he receives from you.
The best cultures satisfy the intangibles that people crave.
A Hollister poll of 1000 people, employed and unemployed, in Massachusetts last summer asked them what factors contributed the most to their job satisfaction; the majority of responses in order were
Company Culture;
Opportunities for Growth;
Employee Appreciation;
Work/Life Balance;
A good Benefits Package; and
Competitive salary/pay.
Notice that pay is dead last.
As I’ve always said, “The person who joins for money will leave for more money.”
The interesting thing about this is that numbers two through four are all parts of number one, good culture. Even benefits are a function of the culture, since they reflect the company’s attitude towards its people.
Still more interesting is that the top three are totally free—they cost the company no money—rather, they are a reflection of the corporate and/or manager’s MAP. Even number four is more about management attitude than dollars and any dollars that are spent typically offer substantial ROI.
There are tons of words that you’ll hear are important in creating a good culture, but I believe that it’s a function of two basics, one a belief and the other an action resulting from it.
Belief: People are intelligent, motivated, and they genuinely want to support their company in achieving its objectives. When people know more about their job, company, industry, and how they interact, they perform their own duties better and more productively because they understand the objectives and care about the results.
Action: People are most productive when they have all the information needed to do their job efficiently. This means that all managers, from CEO down, have both the ability and willingness to produce appropriately clear communications as to where the company is going, how it’s going to get there, what’s expected of them and how it all fits together and then disburse it accurately and completely so people can do their work in a timely manner.
If you believe that
a key ingredient for success is a culture that recognizes employees as its most valuable (and least replaceable) asset and
that people are required to act with initiative and their performance is directly impacted by the quality and quantity of the information they receive
then you’ll understand that people seriously resent communication failures that cause them to perform unnecessary, incorrect or wasted work.
Technically, communications is an IBB (infrastructure building block) and we’ll be talking more about them later.
The scandal at Satyam in India brings forth an interesting thought. In an article by him, Jitendra Singh, a Wharton management professor who is currently dean of the Nanyang Business School in Singapore says, “…companies with “the bluest of blue-chip reputations [such as] Infosys and TCS” could actually gain in the current environment, because of a potential “flight to quality” among client companies.” The third-tier and weaker companies will probably undergo a lot more scrutiny.”
Why does it make sense to do in-depth due diligence on third-or-lower tier companies, while taking top tier companies on faith and accepting their reputations with only cursory review.
Until their dirty linen came to light. Bernard Madoff’s hedge fund, Jeff Skilling’s Enron, WorldCom and Tyco were all considered top-tier.
This attitude of blindly accepting what is said by the top and increasing due diligence on lower levels is found everywhere, but it really permeates the hiring process.
I’ve lost count of the executives and managers I’ve known who went with cursory or no reference checks because the candidate
was a C-level executive;
graduated from a top-tier school;
earned over $100K;
had a PhD;
was referred by an executive or board member;
etc.
but ran exhaustive reference checks on every candidate below VP or director, including credit and criminal checks.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Here it is, Saturday again, and two very different views of culture are on the menu.
What does Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz have in common with incoming President Barack Obama?
If you are doing email marketing campaigns, you need to understand the inbox of your email recipients. If you can think like your recipient, and sit in his chair as he works his way through a huge stack of email, then you will succeed. In this post we will follow Jim Easterbrook, the Director of Internet Security at Midwest Regional Bank.
The best cultures satisfy the intangibles that people crave.
