30 October 2007 
The Mission and Purpose of the Manager
My college text book reminds us that management is
Planning, Organizing, Leading, Motivating and Controlling.
But before the manager can proceed with the text book solutions, he needs something even more basic.
And this is not taught in our institutions of higher learning.
(Except if you do Business with me…)
UPDATE: following are details for Wednesday’s class and propaganda. Attached is suggested reading.
Managers work to control events, instead of events controlling them. They anticipate the future . . . adapt to the present. . . and learn from the past. Like the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, Managers are Prepared.
* * * The Managing Management Time™ class trains managers
how to apply this philosophy to their own leadership challenges * * *
Are you running out of time…while your staff runs out of work? If your management skills need to be sharpened, join us at the Northern Virginia Community College, Arlington.
Who: Managers who need to get in control of events or to better influence results
What: An introduction to Managing Management Time™
1. Vocational vs Management Time
2. Molecule of Management
3. Followership and Leadership
4. Management and Sales
5. Development of Direct Reports
When: Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 4:00 to 5:30pm
Where: NVCC, Room 304, 4600 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203
Behind Holiday Inn Map here near Ballston Metro; Orange Line.
Why: Improve managerial effectiveness
Cost: No Charge. Registration is required. Parking is limited.
Since 1960, over one million people have been trained in our practice of management. The MMT class teaches you, the manager, to leverage your management time, and the time of your team, to get more done.
Harvard Business Review published Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? in 1974, by Bill Oncken, Jr.. The article, an edited excerpt of the MMT seminar, has gone on to become one of the two most requested reprints in the history of the Review. The training summarized in the article is sometimes called the “Monkey Management” seminar.
Jack Yoest, Adjunct Professor of Management and President of Management Training of DC, is a former Armored Cavalry Officer in Combat Arms. His military leadership training and experience guides his management philosophy at the core of Managing Management Time™. He has managed software, health care and international human resource management companies.
Jack also served in the Governor’s Office of the Commonwealth Virginia as Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Resources where he acted as the Chief Technology Officer for the secretariat. He was responsible for the successful Year 2000 (Y2K) conversion for the 16,000-employee unit. He was also a manager with a medical device start-up and helped move sales from zero to over $12 million, resulting in a buy-out by Johnson & Johnson. Jack has consulted in China and India.
Questions? www.Yoest.com, Jack@Yoest.org, or call Jack at 202.215.2434 to save your spot.
Jack Yoest
202.215.2434
Management Training of DC, LLC
Part One Management Time vs Vocational Time
Penalty for being in this class for an hour means that you will be three hours behind in your work.
Monkey Story
Overview:
Mission Statement: Which is –
To control events.
Next Move
Every monkey requires 2 – 1 to work, 1 to supervise.
1. Management Defined:
Getting things done through others – one darn thing after another.
Plan, Organized, Lead, Motivate, Control.
Getting things done with the active support of others.
You were hired as a manager for your wisdom and judgment – -not your manual dexterity. Gain wisdom and judgment in the little leagues by making mistakes.
2. Managing Vocational/Management Time
a. Two kinds of time. Individual contributor – Bricklayer, brain surgeon, Accountant or Actor, consultant or work in a classroom, engineer. Truck Driver.
IC: Competence = Results
Manager: Competence + Support = Results
Individual Contributor = efficiency. Get more done in less time turn out products or services faster/better/cheaper.
Zero defects. 6th Sigma. No tolerance for errors parts per million — perfection
Efficiency is easy to measure.
b. Manager with a number of direct reports with power to hire and fire with a budget is measured by their effectiveness. This is a type of knowledge worker with efficiency nearly impossible to measure.
c. Time management is not management time. Discretionary management time
4. Managers Formula for success
Competence + Support = Results
50 + 50 = 100%
50 + 0 = 50%
Twice as hard
100 + 0 = 100%
80 hours with out support = 100%
If this were a vocational or technical seminar, the formula would be competence equals performance.
But the minute you get in a management or leadership position, your performance is the sum of two items: support and competence. Your personal competence and the organizational support you are getting.
If one of those two elements has to go to zero, not that I recommending this, but if one of those two items has to go to zero, either competence or support, which had best never go to zero?
Support.
You can be an idiot and still move to the right on the formula and get equal to get to performance. But if you are a Ph.D. and every one hates your guts then you are dead in the water. You won’t be contributing to anything.
5. Why do managers do vocational work?
If you want it done right, do it your self
Habit – Management as a discipline is deviant behavior Abnormal activity
They don’t know what else to do
Keeping up with the state of the art
Instant feedback
Pride of craft
Identification
Part Two Molecule of Management
Baseball analogy 300 batting average.
The manager is not perfect. Not always in direct control
Mario Andretti If you are under control – you’re not driving fast enough.
You may be in the driver’s seat but you are not alone.
Desert Island Story
Now, if you or I were on a desert island growing tomatoes and we had no boss we were accountable to no one; no peers we had to coordinate with and no staff we had to lead, we could do what we want, when we want, where we want, correct?
But the minute you and I are a nucleus in an organization, our time is not our own. Any one of those electrons can with an inconveniently timed memo or email phone or phone call – screw up our plan for a day, the week, the month, correct?
Boss – The Golden Rule
Peers YOU Peers — Monopoly
Them – The Ball
Relationships
2. Golden Rule of money; Monopoly of scarce resources; The Ball where the doing gets done.
4. The 3 fundamentals of management in order of importance are:
1. Followership
2. Teamwork
3. Leadership
3. Moving the Fulcrum.
1. In your management work, does the value of your output have a straight line relationship to the duration of your input?
You apply the principle of leverage when you increase your work output without increasing the duration of your input.
4. Managers: your major is management; your minor is vocational.
Part Three Follower-ship and Leadership
Everyone has a boss. CEO board. Sole proprietor is the customer
Apple polishing—booking licking and backside kissing
Followership between Boss and YOU
Leadership between YOU and Them
1. Followership.
a. Relieve the boss’s anxiety. A nervous boss is terrible, especially if you are the one making him nervous. Boss will put his efforts where his anxieties are – not logical – not where his brains but where his worries are.
b. Yes man versus compliance. This is discipline prompt obedience to orders – appropriate action.
c. When subordinates turn their judgment off and do exactly what their boss told them to do – even though they know that it is not to his advantage – they are practicing Vicious Compliance.
Bright line – debate or decision – talking deciding
d. A pro, when the boss makes a bad decision, will turn it into a success through execution. Our Job is to protect the boss – even from himself.
Fear that employee will not do exactly what he’s told to do.
Biggest fear is that the employee will do Exactly what he’s told to do.
e. Army: A poor plan properly executed is better than a good plan poorly executed.
QB represents the coaches call on the field. Do exactly as he says?
2. Leadership
a. Gaining the active support of your subordinates is
A Your Right
B Is automatic
C Takes Tireless work
3. If you are not able to get and hold the active support of your molecule, you should make a career decision and seek alternate employment.
5. Your boss is the most important aspect because he sets your priorities and allocates resources.
6. Company politics are essential to the survival of an organization.
7. When the plans of a subordinate and those of his boss are on a collision course, the boss always has the right of way.
8. But if it is to the boss’s advantage to yield his right of way to the subordinate’s plans, it is the subordinate’s obligation to speak up.
9. Who is the best judge of your work? The Boss.
10. Who is the best judge of your subordinates work? The manager.
11. Who gets the credit for your work? The Boss.
12. If a subordinate leaves out several important points in preparing a report, who will be discredited?
The manager is responsible for all his unit does or fails to do.
Part Four Management and Sales
Many managers feel that if I just do the best job I know how my future will be assured.
Nonsense. Nothing moves unless its pushed.
Your role as a manager. Anticipate future events and their impact on our organization. We need personal and organizational flexibly:
We need to sell –
a. Make the necessary judgments, and
b. Exert the necessary influence.
Empowerment is the new buzz word and it is wrong. It is often seen as delegation, but with most employees, empowerment is abdication.
In any human transaction, someone is buying and someone is selling. Managers – in today’s egalitarian climate of nonsense – always get this wrong.
And everyone who has ever gotten a job has acted as a salesman. Commonly known as the job interview. You were selling yourself.
This was a hard sell for some of you.
But you did.
Why then does our new employee say he does not like office politics – because politics is simply the selling of an intangible?
It is the great cowboy myth of the manager as the lone ranger. The boss is not the font of all ideas
The customer is always right. Wrong, the customer must always be happy. The customer is always the judge.
The boss is the customer. The subordinate is the salesman.
I’ve carried a bag as a sales guy with lots of titles – sales representative, Business Development – but my favorite is ACCOUNT MANAGER
The best sales reps are masters at inter and intra company politics.
It can get easy to get LOST in the politics as Sales — it is more complicated than the Darhma Initiative.
What is making the boss anxious? Nervous? What is causing him Pain?
The purpose of sales is to go to the bank.
You can feed your ego – or you can feed your family – let’s learn how we might be able to do both.
Selling is the transference of emotion.
Selling tangibles and intangibles. Selling air. Nothing harder that to sell the intangible of action – Boss, I want you to do something – or let me do something
This is politics. This is persuasion.
People don’t like (office) politics – the ones who don’t like it are usually not very good at it.
Money, Authority, Pain.
Money or budget boss can get.
Authority boss can get.
Look for Pain
Part Five Development of Direct Reports
Another strategic goal of the manager is to plan for his replacement. To achieve this, the manager must develop deputies.
1. A deputy is a trusted subordinate who would act as the boss would act – if he had enough time.
Sign for the commander.
How do managers groom deputies?
What do you do? What ever I want. You want Freedom.
2. You cannot gain the freedom to act unless you gain control of the Timing and the Content of what you do.
How do you get this Freedom?
a. Salesman
b. Freedom Scale
3. Freedom Scale
Five Steps:
1. Act on own – deputy
2. Act But Advise at once
3. Recommend, Then Take Resulting Action
————————————————–
4. Ask What To Do.
5. Wait Until Told What To Do.
4. Number 5 and 4 – Children — Avoid “wait until told” with Anticipative Followership.
5. Move up from Ask to Act. What do I do? Boss may not know either.
6. Check first with peers-subordinates – move up to Act
Completed Staff Work Research possible course of action, four options, Make one recommendation
In order to help your subordinates become better followers by taking more initiative, you should not allow them to Ask Me What To Do. Instead you should require that they Make Recommendations.
7. Advise – UNODir
8. You can help your subordinates become better followers by giving them a good example of my follower-ship of my boss.
25 October 2007
Capitalism: Self Interest
Your Business Blogger is honored and delighted to teach business management at the local college. As part of my continuous learning, I am on the look-out for refined ‘methods of instruction.’
MOI as it was known when I was in the Army back in the days of the horse cavalry…
Anyway, John Stossel from ABC has an outstanding video clip outlining capitalism. On why greed is good (from The Wealth of Nations).
Thank you to SCSUSCHOLARS for posting.
20 October 2007
Management of New Media: 4 Lessons From The Washington Briefing
Your Business Blogger is observing The Washington Briefing in Washington, DC, hosted by the Family Research Council.
All nine presidential candidates are speaking. Some 2,600 people from 48 states are cheering on their favorites.
As I sit here live blogging I count some 37 people with media credentials typing away on Bloggers Row.
Over 400 media credentials have been issued. The event is progressing, well, uneventfully. No visible glitches. Little is going wrong in the mechanics.
It is a success.
I ask Charmaine, the VP of Communications on the number of media hits. She doesn’t know. I press for a guess. No one on her staff knows either.
But she smiles and concedes that there has been a “complete international domination” of news. (I accompanied her to her live interview on the local BBC News bureau last night.)
As a management trainer, I am most curious how I can advise clients on using cutting edge technology and advances on management development.
Getting a member of the media to ask about and publish information on an organization’s product or service is a marketer’s dream scenario.
So what did Charmaine do to encourage both the Fourth Estate and new media outlets to come and visit?
I was expecting brilliance to match Charmaine’s beauty.
The beauty was obvious but the brilliance was not quite as I expected in her management style. She simply got the basics right. Which is, indeed, brilliant.
We do not need to be taught, only to be reminded.
Charmaine has been a blogger for almost three years — a lifetime in the on-line business. She founded Reasoned Audacity in February of 2005 and manages the FRC Blog. Her blog was a WebLog Awards Finalist in 2005.
She knows new media.
Here are the four basics that Charmaine got right with new media:
1) Bloggers were treated like humans. The Blogger’s Row (with power outlets!) is in the main room to watch the event live — getting the feel for the crowd on the molecular level.
In contrast with another major event by another organization, the Blogger’s Row was shunted off into the exhibit area. The event was piped in through very nice Trinitrons. But we bloggers missed the seeing and feeling the crowd, the audience response.
2) Wireless for media, not cables. Yes, this sounds basic, but at still another event Your Business Blogger attended, bloggers had to dig around for the hard wire hook-up that didn’t always work. Wireless works wonders.
Peter Shinn reports the wireless here is 8 Mb, upstream and down stream vs T-1 at 1.5 Mb. See his analysis and photos and streaming video here.
3) Get funded. Americans United for Life generously provided a $10,000 donation for the set up of the “Bloggers’ Row.” As Morton Blackwell says, “You can’t change the world if you can’t pay the rent.”
4) The Bloggers were granted real media/press credentials. The blogger pass worn by NZ Bear is the same as worn by Byron York from National Review or Jeff Greenfield from ABC.
As the bloggers typed away it was like watching a live, unedited transcription of the event. The main stream media could still edit, but the former monopoly now has real competitors. Who work a bit cheaper. Most were doing it for the pure joy. The main stream media cannot compete with writers who are willing to work for free, as Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit said.
Bloggers sat next to other press outlets in the prestigous roped-offed press gallery. They are, today, indistinguishable. This may be the real news.
###
Thank-you (foot)notes:
Full Disclosure: Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D. is the wife of Your Business Blogger.
(When Charmaine and I were talking to Max Blumenthal, and he realizes that we are married, he says to me, “Way to go,” with thumbs up. Charmaine asks what that was all about. “It’s a guy thing,” I said. “It was a compliment one male gives to another on getting the hot chick…”)
Charmaine and presidential candidate Huckabee had an extended conversation backstage on mapping out a winning strategy; a top-secret plan on how to cross the finish line. They talked about running…marathons.
Jared Bridges, from FRC writes on the FRCBlog:
Briefing Coverage from the Washington Briefing’s New Media Row
We’ve got a full slate of bloggers here at New Media Row, which is sponsored by our friends at Americans United for Life
- PoliPundit.com
- Randy Thomas is posting at randythomas.org
- Erick Erickson of Redstate
- Ana Marie Cox from Time’s Swampland Blog
- Jim Geraghty of NRO’s Campaign Spot
- Anastasia Uglova and J.P. Freire from NBC Universal’s Politalk Blog
- Matthew Anderson of Mere Orthodoxy
- Dan Nejfelt from Faith in Public Life
- Justin Hart of Race 4 2008 and mymanmitt.com
- Melinda Penner and Amy Hall from Stand To Reason
- Democratis
- Nathan Bradfield from Church and State Blog
- N.Z. Bear from The Truth Laid Bear
- Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic
- Byron York from NRO’s The Corner
- Philip Klein of The American Spectator’s AmSpecBlog
- Jill Stanek of JillStanek.com
- Sharon Soon from Conservatives With Attitude
- Mary Katharine Ham, Amanda Carpenter, Matt Lewis, and Kevin McCullough of Townhall.com