Category Archives: Reflections

10 Troubling Employer-Employee Lessons

Advice, Reflections, , ,

I was lucky. As Palo Alto Software grew up it found some good people along the way. Some of them stuck with us, and some were related to me, a second generation. We had a sense of community that seems, now that it’s grown, vital to that growth.

But I’ve never really understood about managing employees. When I was in business school, oh, so many years ago, what they taught was organizational theory, which we called “touchy feely,” and it didn’t relate well to what happened to us as we built a company.

You work shoulder to shoulder with people and you care about them. It’s hard to give good feedback on both sides (negative as well as positive) of the performance. It’s hard to stay at arm’s length, even though that’s what all the texts and literature and common sense suggest.

So here is some of what I take out of 25 years of building a company, points related to being an employer and having employees:

  1. Choosing people to fill jobs is really hard. People are unpredictable. Resumes don’t work very well, and job interviews don’t work very well either. And the legal advice all companies get from good attorneys, like all the questions you can’t or shouldn’t ask, make that even harder.
  2. “Fit” as in employee fit, is vital but also overrated, and too often used as a rationalization. You want people unlike you, not people like you. But you like people like you.
  3. People change. Long-term loyal and trusted employees grow in and out of the job, sometimes. Sometimes people find themselves and grow and get better and need more. Sometimes they get tired and stop caring as much.
  4. Sometimes you hire the right person for the wrong job. If so, you’re lucky. You find the right job and that problem is solved. Sometimes you hire somebody just for who they are, not how they fill the job description.
  5. When family business works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, I’m told, and we all know the stories, it’s hell. But it’s worked for me and Palo Alto Software. As the company grew up some family members grew up as well, finished college, worked in the industry, and came back to be a second generation of management. When that happens and you have a smart, loyal, trustworthy second generation, its great. How sad that some people assume there’s something wrong with that. Why?
  6. English doesn’t have formal and informal like Spanish and German and French. One of my mentors would never use the informal you. “Because I might have to fire you tomorrow,” he would say. There’s wisdom in that, I think, but then one day he jumped out of a high hotel window to his death.
  7. You can change the job, or move the person to a different job, but you can’t change the person. The people change on their own.
  8. Suspicion, hearsay, jumping to conclusions is dangerous. You don’t get to act on the smoke. Wait for the fire.
  9. Firing people is the hardest thing you do. And the hardest firing is the loyal and honest and hard-working employee who just doesn’t get the job done, or keeps making the wrong decision, and doesn’t fit another job. You were supposed to stay arms-length, remember? I still don’t know how people do that.
  10. It’s easier to fire five people in a single day than just one person ever, except when that person’s had a bad attitude.

Moonshot, Columbus, now Woodstock Also a Myth? Say It Ain’t So.

Reflections, , , ,

We baby boomers have lost too many cultural icons. Don’t take away Woodstock.

Some nut shot John Lennon. Good journalism — or was it reality? — took away our faith in institutions. We’ve pretty much lost Ford, Chevrolet, General Motors, Wall Street, faith in television news, trust in doctors, air, water … hell, they even took away Christopher Columbus, who went from great explorer to racist exploiter, all in one generation. And now there are people who say the 1969 moon walk was faked. But Woodstock too? What’s left?

I turned 21 in 1969. I was a West coast kid, nowhere near Woodstock, working a summer job between years at college. But, despite the technicality of geography, I was there in spirit just like the rest of that half of my generation that had woken up to new values, wanted to change the world, believed in a new kind of freedom, opposed the Vietnam war, and drank the cool-aid. With whatever symbolism we could find, usually nothing more than long hair and bell-bottom pants, we paraded our loyalty to what we thought was going to be a once-in-history sweeping change in humanity.

The Woodstock media sensation was cultural affirmation.  It was just about a year after the 1968 student uprisings world wide — riots, broken windows, overturned cars, breaking out simultaneously in places as far apart as Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, and cities across the United States. Unlike the year before, though, it was a new kind of uprising, a peaceful uprising. It was validation. Half a million people gathered for three days in a muddy field with no money, no violence, no hierarchy, no police, no authorities, and no problems. And it proved what we’d been saying to ourselves, to our parents, to our teachers, bosses, and anybody else who objected.

It felt like a turning point. After Woodstock, “Hippy” was no longer a bad thing to be.

All of which brings me to this disturbing segment of a fascinating Wall Street Journal video (below) on how Woodstock changed music. Oh the loss, oh the disillusion! Is nothing sacred?

Disillusion number one: marketing? The narration says “the Woodstock nation was born, ushering in a whole new area of marketing. True, I’m all grown up now, I get marketing, my company depends on it like the rest of small business, but jeez, marketing at Woodstock? That’s Woodstock’s legacy?

No, I hope not; but then John Scher, CEO of Metropolitan Talent, explains:

“You had a new brand. It was called Woodstock. And you had music that was associated with a mass movement: A social, cultural, and political movement. Music could be marketed, differently, than it was before. And then you had people who had no soul, just trying to sell product, trying to figure out how they could latch on.”

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/main.swf

(If you can’t see the video, click here to go to the source at wsj.com)

But wait: it gets worse. The narrator implies that the legacy was more the movie than the event, and in the movie …

“Not all the performers fared so well.  The order of performers was changed, some were left out, in some cases songs performed elsewhere replaced songs performed at the event.  It all helped to create a memory that wasn’t necessarily true to life.”

And still worse. The five-minute piece finishes with WSJ Music Critic Jim Fusilli:

“There’s a lot of really terrific performances that received no exposure. For the past 39 years, they’ve gotten very little bounce. A lot of Columbia artists didn’t get into the film. A lot of Capitol artists didn’t get into the film, or onto the album. You had a giant label in Warner Brothers, who had possession of the music at Woodstock.

“I don’t remember what actually happened anymore either. I’ve been struggling against the myth of Woodstock. I’ve probably read 10 books, I’ve listened to (I bet your) two thirds of the music that was at Woodstock. I’ve talked to probably 20 people who were at Woodstock or involved in Woodstock. And I don’t really know what happened anymore. The only thing I have that I can trust is the music.

“This is a debate that I have with myself all the time, as to whether things like Woodstock, and the Beatles, and the Stones, will continue into the future. Whether people will have the same affection for them once the social context has changed. And I think it’s hard to say. The truth is that as long as a single hippy remains alive, the myth of Woodstock will be perpetuated.”

Screw historical accuracy. Power to the people. Leave Woodstock alone.

On the other hand, sacred? Who are we kidding? So, in the immortal words of the late great Gilda Radner (another baby boomer, by the way), never mind.

Reflections on Programming, and the Good Old Days

Reflections, Technology, True Stories, , ,

Somebody asked me recently how my background relates to programming computers, and software. That’s hard to explain, given that I majored in Literature as an undergrad, then got an MA in Journalism, then an MBA. None of that says programming.

In my case it was like falling in love. I first used word processing when I was still with United Press International (UPI) in Mexico City, back in the 1970s (it was an early Atex system). Then, when I got accepted to business school they gave me a teach-yourself-BASIC programming book, and told me to learn it before the school year started.

Flickr cc by Jana_aka_BADGRL
Flickr cc by Jana_aka_BADGRL

Programming, making the computer do things, was fascinating to me. It was like making real things, but with a touch of magic. Do the code, press run, and when it did what I wanted, filling the screen with my results, I loved it. I ended up with a part-time job helping fellow students with the computer in the business school basement, and building my own computer from parts (for you really old-time computer geeks, that was a CP/M computer and an S-100 bus).

What reminded me of these good old days was yesterday my daughter Megan sent me this: Someone At Apple Has A Sense Of Humor. The MobileCrunch report cites this piece of code deep in the iPhone, where you’d only find it by trying to hack around the main stuff:

00009 @interface UIViewController (UIViewControllerClassDumpWarning)

00010 – (void)attentionClassDumpUser:(id)fp8 yesItsUsAgain:(id)fp12 althoughSwizzlingAndOverridingPrivateMethodsIsFun:(id)fp16 itWasntMuchFunWhenYourAppStoppedWorking:(id)fp20 pleaseRefrainFromDoingSoInTheFutureOkayThanksBye:(id)fp24; 00011 @end

What that says there is “Although swizzling and overriding private methods is fun, it wasn’t much fun when your app stopped working. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Okay thanks bye.”

My actual programming was mainly in the 1980s, when “hacking” was a good thing, and those of us who worked with personal computers could feel like we were some kind of an in crowd at times. I did do some real code for Business Plan Pro’s first version, and, before that, I wrote code for the early Business Plan Toolkit using spreadsheet macros. Error messages could be kind of fun.

I’d like to brag about some of the more amusing error messages I left, but, sorry, I’d play with them during testing but I always chickened out and cleaned them up to look more professional (and, sadly, dull).

And that also reminds me, as well, of how programming was so often a one-person job back in the 1980s. I’d do it for myself, first, use it, and then productize later. That’s a lot different from the teams of programmers everybody uses today. But things, including the computer programs, were a lot simpler. Not as good, either — not by a long shot — but simpler.

But I searched Google for funny error messages, and a lot come up. You can click the link to see for yourself, or maybe just use this one, which seems like one of the best.

Problems with “Fit”

Advice, Reflections,

I’m troubled by the concept of “fit” and how it works with growing a company and hiring employees.

It’s not a new concept, and I should have figured it out, by now, since I’ve watched Palo Alto Software grow from nowhere to 45 employees.

But I haven’t. And I don’t think it’s just me. I think there are two very different sides to the same idea, one perfectly logical, the other sinister, and threatening.

The good side of fit is what you look for when you invite a new employee to join a small company. You want a good fit with team spirit, cooperation, and working together. Values are extremely important. One of the best ways to build a company is to build it around values — like a mantra, a meaning, how your company makes the world better — and to bring together people who share those values.

Flickr; photo by BenSpark
Flickr; photo by BenSpark

The dark side of fit is a rationalization, a code word for favoring one kind of person. It’s code for discrimination. It gets used as a catch-all phrase to exclude people who are different.

The answer to the puzzle of fit is that a good fit on a team is not sameness or similarity. A strong business grows through diversity, finding people who bring new skills, new ideas, and new points of view. As you move from a one-person company to finding that second person, you want somebody different, not somebody like you. That’s the foundation of the business value of diversity.

It’s scary to me how often diversity ends up as a political football, and “fit” as an excuse. Diversity is not just good policy, it’s also good business.

Invention vs. Necessity, Upside Down

Productivity Software, Reflections, , , ,

You know the phrase:

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Right? You hear it a lot.

But what if, in fact, invention is the mother of necessity. Once the technology exists,  we then complicate things, demand more, and use up the productivity gain in raising the quality bar.

Take budgets, for example. I realize it’s hard for most people to imagine a world without ready access to spreadsheets (you’d almost have to be a baby boomer, since spreadsheets and personal computing burst onto the scene in the early 1980s). But spreadsheets changed what we expect of budgets and budgeting. The invention changed what we define as necessity. We can do the numbers now, so we demand more numbers.

Or word processing, and then, a few years later, desktop publishing. The combination completely changed what we expect of business correspondence. You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but there was a time when we wrote letters and memos and mailed them. Yes, I mean using the post office, and postage stamps. Back then, we didn’t get hundreds of letters to answer every day. The invention changed the necessity. We can email now (or tweet, or blog), so the world demands more communication.

And cell phones.  Ah yes, lots of us remember the world before cell phones. We didn’t bug each other nearly as much, back before cell phones, as we do now; we didn’t expect phone calls checking in, updating each other, nearly as much. Less communication was acceptable.

Are we more productive? Who knows? Do we have a choice on the matter? No. Technology goes one way. Whether we like it or not.

Questioning 10 Things Women Need to Know About Men

Reflections, , ,

I spent a spare moment on twitter last Saturday afternoon. It had been a busy day, a long drive home in the morning, quiet time to myself in the car, then an explosion of small children, a beautiful summer day, a nice dinner in the garden.

And I discovered this:

Top 10 Things All Women Need To Know About Men. It caught my eye in twitter, I clicked, I read. I liked the intro. I’m not a church goer myself, at least not anymore, but the introduction, church or not, God or not, was pleasant enough and engaging. Thoughtful.

I even like the list. There’s something in the tone that makes me like the author. I browsed his blog, called Big is the New Small, and liked a lot of what I saw there. His name is Scott Williams.

But parts of it bother me. Maybe at 61, almost 40 years married, I’m getting tired of the stereotypes. For example, when Scott writes …

We are not mind readers, say what’s really on your mind.

… I can’t help thinking how different his view is from my world. My wife has never had any trouble speaking her mind, some of my daughters do automatically, others don’t. And I don’t always. I don’t think this is a gender thing, certainly no more female than male.

And on this one:

We need our time alone: guys night out, man cave…

My response to this is: “wow, no offense to guy friends, but no thanks.” What with business to do, kids, family, trying to have a life … I never understood the guys’ night out syndrome. I never wanted it. Is that really just me? Or is that a matter of life, family, and work, leading to precious little down time, and not wanting to spend it with guy friends.

It reminds me of the recurring thread, not from Scott in this case, of people taking vacations from family. As my wife and I had kids, we never wanted vacations separate from them. Vacations were about them.

Then again, maybe it is me, maybe I am different. I’ve liked a lot of so-called “chick flix” in my day (which contradicts another point on Scott’s list) and I usually remember dates (which contradicts yet another). But I do match a lot of his points.

So why take issue? Because stereotyping genders worries me. Not that I don’t like gender differences; I do, that’s the spice of life. I’m all in favor of gender differences as long as we’re not talking about jobs, or opportunities, or compensation or freedom. And identifying men traits and women traits can even be useful (the Mars/Venus thing opened my eyes to some things I hadn’t seen before). But it makes me uncomfortable too. When Scott says, in his list of things women should know about men,

We want to be the leader and the protector… let us lead.

It worries me a bit because it hints at heirarchy, a leader and a follower, based on gender, in marriage. I guess I naturally have the instinct of protector maybe, in a physical way, male; when we used to take the kids up to the high country above Yosemite Valley, I was the one awake at night worrying about bears, because the rest of them assumed Daddy would keep them safe. But then my wife has been the mother bear protector of children sometimes more than me. She can be really scary. And, getting to the point, I don’t think marriage is about a leader and a follower. Let’s hope you have some of both, on both sides.

Another of Scott’s ten points is …

When we say nothing is wrong, “Nothing is wrong” nothing means nothing!

Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes. But, really, only one gender has trouble with this? I think not.

We want to be respected and appreciated.

Weird. What’s that doing here? Who doesn’t? What does this have to do with men and women? Is there anybody anywhere, man or woman, who doesn’t want to be respected an appreciated?

This is endearing, but it also gets old. Reminders of how we’re different can be a useful, even if we run down the list and they’re not exactly right for any one of uys. But the idea that some of this — like respect and appreciation, or leadership — are gender specific — is not that good for anybody. In my opinion.

Quicksand Problems

Advice, Reflections

There are problems you can make worse, but not better. I call them quicksand problems, because when you’re caught in quicksand, struggling makes it worse.

Examples are hard. Sometimes even talking about them, much less writing about them, is like struggling in quicksand; you just sink faster.

Flickr image by publicenergy

But say you overhear somebody bad-mouthing you. Do you let on? Were you eavesdropping? Does complaining about it make it worse?

Or somebody else hears the conversation and tells you about it. Do you get into one of those “he-said-she-said” mudslinging fights? How do you know who’s telling the truth? Or do you just ignore it?

And then there’s what happens when somebody treats you badly, in business, and you’d like to just forget about it and go on with your relationship. But now they don’t want to see you; you’re a reminder that they acted badly.

We Googled a software package yesterday and found an “I-hate-them” site ranked third in the Google listings. Ouch, that’s got to be painful. The hate site was a private person, using what looks like a real name, and a lot of expletives. What do you do about that? The good news, from the company’s side, was the overuse of expletives, which never does much for credibility; and the hate-site owner was generous enough to allow the company’s comments to stay on the site.

These are tough issues. And I worry, even while posting this, that you’re going to wonder who’s mad at me, or what happened. That comes with the territory; right?

Future Shock Top 10 Backwards Look

Baby Boomer, Reflections, Technology, Web/Tech, , ,

Ah yes, the good old days. How quickly time passes. My youngest graduated from college last weekend. She can barely remember life before cellphones, and can’t remember life before personal computers or VCRs, because both of those were born before she was.

A graduation is a milestone event, and milestone events generate this kind of thinking. How much the world has changed, and how quickly. When I graduated from college in 1970:

  1. The university had a computer in a basement that took up the space of an SUV and had way less power than an iPhone does now. Computer science students programmed it with perforated cards.
  2. The dorms had one phone per floor. Long distance calling costs were significant. I was in the Midwest, so I’d call my parents in California once every couple of months.
  3. We wrote letters. We read letters.
  4. We used typewriters for every college essay, paper, and assignment. We’d often retype an entire page to correct an error. Sometimes we’d reword things to make the pages end or begin with the correct word so we could insert an additional page.
  5. Four-function calculators existed, but nobody we knew had one. You could have bought a new low-end car for the price of two four-function calculators.
  6. I did my sophomore year abroad, and the university sent us from New York to Europe on an ocean liner. That was cheaper than flying.
  7. We wrote checks when we had to, used cash most of the time, and we got the cash from the bank teller window, not an ATM.
  8. Credit cards were rare. Our parents had them.
  9. Television was broadcast over the air. We watched in real time or not at all. We had 5 or 10 channels to choose from.
  10. When we were driving we listened to the radio, or cassette tapes.

And that’s just technology, or a smattering of technology.  When I think of social evolution, and environmental deterioration, the end of the cold war, the rise of terrorism, polar ice caps … like we used to say: “far out, man.”

Us vs. Apes, and Why we Care

Reflections, , , ,

How are we different from apes? Apes also pass culture on to groups, apes can be violent, apes can be empathetic, but no other species has the power for the abstract.

And why does this matter? How does it affect our lives?

Robert Zapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and a favorite professor at Stanford, gave this talk last Saturday as part of Stanford graduation. He starts at 4:51.

If you can’t see the video here, you can click here for the source on YouTube.

Money is Binary: Enough or Not Enough

Advice, Reflections,

I caught this post on Huffington Post: Who’s Happy And Why?

One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:

For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.

What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough.

“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. In my case, for years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”

A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.

The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 Rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.

Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.

I liked this, from the same post:

Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”

So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.

Ken Dychtwald Ph.D.: Who’s Happy And Why?