A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Early this year I wrote Convenience is Killing Creativity and today is a sort of follow-up to that post.

A few days ago another story popped up condemning tech’s fixation on “easy to use.”

These days, the gold standard for tech is whether or not it’s “easy to use.” (…) So easy a five-year-old could do it. That is a nice ideal.

But simplicity comes at a cost, and five-year-olds are not very smart. A simple tool is, by definition, inflexible. Software that boils everything down to one button needs to make a lot of assumptions about what the user is trying to do. If you don’t agree with those assumptions, too bad.

Too bad is right.

While the author was focused on software programs, assumptions are found everywhere.

I hate those assumptions. Windows 10 doesn’t like how I personalize my computer, so it just goes ahead and changes everything back to what some damn 25 year old thinks it should be.

And it’s not just software.

Surveys and questionnaires are terrible, especially those in healthcare.

Even multiple choice offers absolute choices, with little flexibility; how often have you seen ‘sometimes’?

The problem is that, for most of us, true answers are more nuanced.

Sure, sometimes the nuances and subtleties don’t really matter, but too often they make the difference between an accurate picture and one that is distorted, or, at the least, blurred by the creator’s bias (as opposed to one’s own).

Bottom line: tech dumbs us down with “ease of use” and everyone limits us with lack of choice.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I have been exploring a few options lately when it comes to my career. While I am not unhappy with my current role I realize that the potential elsewhere is greater.

This has led to some interesting thoughts as I look into different companies and teams. It is almost like a career day at school, you sit there to hear about different paths and imagine yourself in the role.

I read an article one time that stated its hard for a company to convey culture during the interview process, instead, they lead with salary and benefits.

This makes sense to a degree, but as a candidate, you end up dealing with asymmetric information. Sure there are sites that give job reviews but we all know that when you really dislike a job you will write a review. Lukewarm about the whole thing? Probably not writing a review one way or the other. So how can we overcome this information gap?

As I have matured a bit in my career (mature is loosely defined, by the way) I have started resorting to reaching out to a trusted friend or business acquaintance. I like to hear about their personal experiences and their viewpoints.

One way I do this is by reaching out to those I respect via LinkedIn or on the phone. I prefer hearing someone describe something and listen to their tone while they say it.

Why do I do this? If I trust someone then I feel that they will have my best interests in mind.

If I reach out to a random site online that have company reviews, then I really do not know if they have my best interests in mind. They could be bitter or they could just have an employer encouraging positive reviews.

How do you evaluate?

Image credit: Hiking Artist

Even if your sights are set on a goal far beyond $85 million in revenue (not valuation), you would be wise to take a lesson from Michael Kiolbassa, whose product you’ve probably eaten more than once.

Grandson of the founder, Kiolbassa wasn’t prone to delegating. He did listen to advice from a wide range of pundits and was prone to “management by bestseller.”

Until, that is, the company was blindsided with a giant cost increase that should have been forecasted, but wasn’t.

For years, he saw his role as the solver of all problems. That’s what he’d learned from his dad, who would even fix the machinery. “I’m the production guy,” Michael explained to a consultant in 2010. “I’m the sales guy. I’m the culture guy. I’m the guy.”

“Is it working for you?” the consultant asked.

“No, it’s not.”

That’s when things changed and he started delegating.

Sales soared as did production, but not in concert, so the losses almost killed the company.

That’s when Kiolbassa was introduced to open-book management, which he embraced, with a quarterly bonus incentive for everybody, and everything changed.

“I got everybody together, shared the financials in detail and showed them just how much money had been lost,” says Michael. “They had no idea.” (…) Posted in Spanish as well as English, the financial displays let everyone track whether the company is likely to pay a quarterly profit-sharing bonus

And that’s the key that most CEOs don’t get.

There is a wealth of information at every level within every organization, not just from those with fancy titles, if you are willing to listen.

“Suddenly,” says Michael Johnson, a Kiolbassa vice president, “you had guys on the shipping dock looking at invoices and saying, I know we can get jalapenos cheaper.”

Proof, as is said, is in the pudding, or, in this case, the financials.

In fact, they turned the first quarter of 2018 into the company’s most profitable ever, with revenue growth of 30% and a profit margin of 6%.

Think what open-book management could do for your company — if you have the guts to implement it.

Image credit: Kiolbassa Smoked Meats

KG Charles-Harris sent me an article about WeWork-as-a-cult, which prompted yesterday’s Oldie.

This post isn’t about WeWork, but about two things that struck me.

First, the pure adoration shown to Adam Neumann and the absolute blind following of all he preaches reeks of Jim Jones only with a far larger world vision.

The second were the words uttered by Neumann’s wife Rebekah at the recent Tunbridge Wells Summer Camp.

“A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.”

Shades of Phyllis Schlafly.

And here I thought the fight, from gender equity to #metoo was so women could pursue their own, independent manifest destiny.

Silly me.

All this is even more disturbing, since the great majority of both WeWork employees and devotees are Millennials.

Image credit: Yankech gary

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.

I wrote this back in 2014. Obviously, I didn’t mention harassment because the post focused on what was in the news, and it wasn’t talked about all that openly, unlike now.

Sadly, nothing has changed. It’s still news and people are surprised.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I get it. I get what’s going on in terms of women in the workplace is news.

I get it that it is important to remind people that for all the progress that’s been made some things haven’t changed.

It’s still assumed that it’s OK to ask professional women, such as lawyers and marketing execs, to do stuff that would never be asked of the men in the organization.

“…plan parties, order food, take notes in meetings and join thankless committees…bring cupcakes for a colleague’s birthday, order sandwiches for office lunches and answer phones”

By the same token, it’s news that board diversity is moving at glacial speed, primarily because boards only want people with experience and to have experience they need to serve on a board.

“Recruiting women and minorities to boards is being slowed because of boards’ unwillingness to look at candidates who have not yet served on boards,” said Ron Lumbra, co-leader of the CEO and board services practice for Russell Reynolds. “There’s a premium on experience.’’

So while I have no problem with these subjects being presented over and over in the news, there is one thing I don’t understand.

Why are so many people surprised by the information?

Is the general population so naïve that they actually believe women are no longer asked to do tasks that are closer to house work than business work?

Do they really believe that the lack of board diversity is a function of the lack of experience as opposed a desire to spend time with people like themselves who are well within their comfort zones?

The sad part is that while it’s still news, it’s certainly not a surprise.

Flickr image credit: Arya Ziai

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

I love sandwiches.

My wife says I grew up in a “sandwich culture.” She grew up in the American South where people sat down to eat full meals a lot. We did that too in New York City, where I grew up, but sandwiches were a key part of life.

I’d stop by the deli on my way to my job after the school day was done and pick up the sandwich that would be my “dinner” that night. I rotated through roast beef and corned beef and pastrami. Cheese. Rye bread. I’d use some of my earnings to buy sandwich fixings for the weekend when I didn’t work. The best sandwiches were the ones you ate leaning over the sink.

Sometime in the last twenty years, sandwiches changed. The bread got flimsy and there was a lot less meat. People wanted to eat healthy so they cut back on the bread and the meat, but kept the cheese. Then came “low calorie” cheese.

Ugh. Low calorie cheese tastes like drywall. I kept my rye bread and I wanted a slab of cheddar or swiss on my roast beef, but I was the exception.

The sandwich in the age of the obesity epidemic

The challenge was pretty straightforward. As cheese became a more and more important part of the sandwich, people wanted it to taste good. Cheese makers responded by making low calorie cheese in various formulations. It tasted like drywall. They tried other formulas. It still tasted like drywall. Then the people at Sargento rethought the challenge.

Sargento: a history of innovation

Sargento is a big player in the packaged cheese business. They’re also a family owned company that’s been around since the 1950s with a history of innovation. In 1969, they introduced the pegbar system that’s now standard in supermarkets. They were the first to use re-sealable packages for cheese and the first to package shredded cheese.

Changing the challenge

The company figured that whatever they came up with would have to meet two criteria. It would have to use real cheese, not low-calorie, horrid tasting “cheese.” In other words, it would have to taste the way customers wanted cheese to taste. And, each slice would have to have no more than 45 calories.

Somebody at Sargento must have thought: “We can’t make low calorie cheese that tastes good. And we can’t offer smaller slices. What if we could reduce the calories in a slice of cheese by slicing real cheese thinner?”

The new challenge

That’s a great idea, but existing equipment couldn’t do it. Sargento could slice the cheese thinner, but then the slices would stick together. Whatever they came up with would have to work with existing packaging. Meeting that challenge took a $20 million investment in new technology. Sargento made it work.

The big payoff

Ultra-Thin Slices were released in 2012 and did $60 million in sales the first year. The second year sales more than doubled to $157 million. Even better, Ultra-Thin Slices attracted a lot of people who weren’t eating packaged cheese before. In other words, much of the sales growth was from new customers. That’s a breakthrough innovation by any standard.

What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: rethinking the challenge

The breakthrough innovation didn’t happen until someone reconceived the challenge. Before, everyone, including Sargento, had conceived the challenge as coming up with a lower calorie cheese. When Sargento changed that to “slice cheese thinner so it’s only 45 calories” solutions became obvious.

What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: the courage of conviction

It looks obvious now, but it took real courage to commit $20 million to develop new technology to support the reconception of the challenge. It may not have been a “bet the company” moment, but it was close.

Bottom Lines

Great innovation will not happen until you think of the challenge differently.

Making a great innovation a reality will not happen without courage.

Originally published at Three Star Leadership in 2016.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Today I was driving and my car burst into flames.

I wish that a hook to get you interested, but it’s the reality of what happened.

It made me think about some things as I watched the fire department spray my car down. (The image above is not my car.) One was, am I driving a safe car? The second thought was, how can I better myself so I don’t have do face this again.

Life will always give ups and downs, but can we prevent tragedy?

I find that the current state of affairs in tech are really trying to prevent tragedy and perfect our world. Facebook wants to prevent election tampering. Tesla wants to automate cars. Uber wants to increase safety of riders. Amazon wants you to order an item and receive it same day.

They all are seeking to alleviate pain and make our lives easier.

Is that what we want? I do.

However what is the cost? I’m not sure yet but I’ll let you know.

Good news. I’m safe, my car is towed and I can write another day.

Image credit: Jason Bolonski

In spite of my dislike of social media I know there is interesting stuff lurking amidst the inane, the garbage and the hate.

Fortunately, much of what I’m missing is referenced in stuff I do read, such as CB Insights, which is where the following showed up.

And here’s a link to my approach to make passwords easy.

Image credit: CB Insights

Bezos may be a genius and Amazon may be beloved by it’s customers, but for years it has been reviled for it’s (mis)treatment of fulfillment center (AKA, warehouse) workers.

The newest weapon in it’s fight to correct the facts is a Twitter campaign.

“FC ambassadors are employees who have experience working in our fulfillment centers… The most important thing is that they’ve been here long enough to honestly share the facts based on personal experience.”

The effort was first outed by Flamboyant Shoes Guy, who also said in a comment,

What amazes me is that a entire board of people on 7 or 8-figure salaries had several meetings regarding this, discussed it thoroughly and then concluded that there was no way anyone could possibly notice.

But if you think warehouse conditions are bad now, when the economy is hot and bodies in short supply, just wait until it turns, as it will. (What goes up always comes down. It’s the nature of the beast.)

Be it Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., you need to remember that companies, just like people, aren’t all good or all bad.

It’s just that their bad has a much larger effect.

Image credit: Twitter

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.

Back when this blog was published seven days a week, Sunday featured a collection of quotes along with (hopefully) pithy or erudite comments from yours truly.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

C’mon, guys. What else would today be about?

Scott Johnson said, “A bad day at work is better than a good day in hell.” If you don’t agree, ask any of the thousands of people who are there because they don’t have and can’t find a job.

And on a day dedicated to the working stiffs, management should take to heart the words of Henry George, “Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over,” before finding yet more ways to reduce their compensation.

Thomas Geoghegan explains succinctly why unions aren’t organizing the way they used to, “When people ask me, ‘Why can’t labor organize the way it did in the thirties?’ the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal,” as are many other actions from that era.

Everybody works hard these days, whether they sweat or not. Victor Hugo understood that when he said, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”

Samuel Gompers offers two insightful comments.

The first recognizes that labor knows boundaries.

“All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day . . . is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

The second seems to me to apply to any thinking human, not just those designated ‘labor’.

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

Finally, Elbert Hubbard offers some profound advice to all those who run flat out 24/7, “The man who doesn’t relax and hoot a few hoots voluntarily, now and then, is in great danger of hooting hoots and standing on his head for the edification of the pathologist and trained nurse, a little later on.”

I hope you take his words to heart, unplug and hoot a bit this weekend.

BTW, do you know the true story behind labor Day?

Image credit: Valerie Everett