People of all ages, even those well into their seventies are working longer and proud of it. Having spare time has become a symbol of low value, while being always busy equates to high status.
So it’s no surprise that companies and individual bosses are taking advantage and always pushing people to increase productivity.
As countless studies have shown, this simply isn’t true. Productivity dramatically decreases with longer work hours, and completely drops off once people reach 55 hours of work a week, to the point that, on average, someone working 70 hours in a week achieves no more than a colleague working 15 fewer hours.
But that doesn’t stop various media from writing job shaming articles making fun of successful, well-known people working retail jobs.
Fans wondered why it was deemed newsworthy that a mother of two had taken a job in a different sector when her best-known role as an actor had wound down. (Soap stars, even on massive hits like EastEnders, do not earn early-retirement-level salaries.)
The fiasco echoed a similar attempt at job-shaming by another British tabloid last year, when the Daily Mail published photos of American actor Geoffrey Owens bagging groceries as a cashier at a Trader Joe’s, a retail chain known for its excellent job benefits. Fox News picked up the story in the US and both media outlets were ridiculed for it.
And, for a change, the trolls crawled quietly back under their rocks. Will wonders never cease.
McKinsey findings show that 48% of employed U.S. college grads are in jobs that require less than a four-year degree.
Geoffrey Owens summed it up best.
“There is no job that’s better than another job. It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper. But actually, it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable,”
Investors are still enamored by founders with their fast talk and passionate visions to “change the world.”
However, enamored or not, when funding, investors focus closely on CYA.
Which is easy, since investors have all the leverage, because they dictate the terms.
This is what is happening to get that exact $1B valuation. Even if the fundamentals don’t justify the $1B valuation, the investors can lay on enough structure and terms to get the founders to a $1B headline valuation (while investors have the protections they need). With the $1B valuation, founders get:
Of course, it’s the programmers, marketers, sales and support who actually build the products that will pay the price for the inflated valuation.
In these exit situations, common shareholders, aka employees, get fleeced.
Harking back to 2015, money has tightened again and being profitable is at the forefront of founder thinking — mainly because it’s the focus of investors.
Stockpiling cash is at odds with the model of most venture capital-backed start-ups, which typically raise piles of money to spend on growing faster. Many investors are now pushing their companies to turn a profit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you hate it when roads you travel often are torn up for weeks/months in order to repave them?
I do. I also hate the pollution manufacturing asphalt causes, not to mention the choice between driving on potholes or seeing my taxes paying to do the same road over and over.
“New synthetic binders are going to transform the global road construction or road rehabilitation marketplace, and they’re going to allow for roads to be 100% recycled,” says Sean Weaver, president of TechniSoil Industrial, the company that designed the new process. “That’s always been the holy grail of the road construction market—could you recycle 100% of the top surface of the road, grind it up, crush it, and put it right back down, and have that be as durable as the original hot mixed asphalt road.”
Even better, the process uses recycled PET plastic (think water bottles) to replace bitumen and the result is far stronger than the original.
Considering the fact that so much US infrastructure, especially roads/streets/highways are badly deteriorated TechniSoil’s innovation couldn’t come at a better time.
After it’s tested in LA the main problem will be getting (forcing) bureaucracies and politicians to use it.
And that means overcoming entrenched players, with powerful lobbying and money to buy the pols.
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.
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,
