Yoest.com » 2008

Over 20 percent, one-fifth of employees who choose to leave a position do so because of poor management.

These “voluntary employee exits” can be reduced and good employees retained with good management practices.

Kathy Albarado, President and CEO of HeliosHR quotes the Society of Human Resource Management retention study in Washington SmartCEO, May 2008.

Employees must know what is expected of them. This seems obvious, but clients and students constantly tell Your Business Blogger(R) of being surprised when an employee evaluation is conducted. The employee is surprised because s/he didn’t see the criticism coming. And the manager is surprised that the employee is surprised.

No one likes to be blindsided. Not the staff. Not the boss. Bad news does not get better with age — conduct an interim “evaluation” to correct employee performance. You’ll need to do this for a paper trail if the subordinate might be terminated.

Teamwork & Rowing: 2008 National Scholastic Championship, Oak Ridge, TN.

The strongest collection of individual contributors may not produce the best team.

28 May 2008

Managers: Networking or Not Working

“Successful managers spend 70 percent more time networking than their less successful counterparts,” reports the Academy of Management Journal.

Experienced managers know that their individual business silo is worth less without a circle of friends.

Your Business Blogger(R)’s biggest challenge in training of managers is to move the managers’ thinking from that of individual contributor - the one who does the doing - to manager: the one who accomplishes the goals of the organization through the efforts of others.

The best trained managers nurture the support of bosses, internal and external peers and reporting staff to gain discretionary management time.

27 May 2008

The Managing Management Time(tm) Seminar: Key Points

From The William Oncken Corporation. For more information contact authorized representative, Jack Yoest at 202.215.2434, Management Training of DC, LLC, Arlington, VA

Most of us were hired for our creativity, originality, imagination, innovation, and zeal. That is: our competence.

But Bill Oncken’s First Law states, “What you know will not get off the ground without the active support of who you know.” So, we must have two things to be effective:

1. Discretionary time: which is needed to make the judgments you were hired to make, and,

2. The active support of key power brokers and stake holders inside and outside of the organization.

The Managing Management Time(tm) program lays out the organizational problems we all face in this regard and how to implement the necessary solutions.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEMS

Though not necessarily the most frequent or
the most severe disrupter of your time, your boss can be the principle one, because he has final say as to your priorities.

Unless you get three-point landings — what you want, when and where you want it — from your peers, you have time-management problems.

Subordinates Are Also Part Of The Problem

When you are victimized by “upward-delegation” — when your subordinates’ monkeys wind up on your back — you have one more thing to do, they have one less, throwing you behind in their work as well as your own.
The amateur boss takes on so much of the subordinates’ work that he eventually runs out of time for everyone and everything.

It is your job to arrange for your boss, peers and subordinates to support you. If higher management has to do it for you, then why do they need you?

It is sometimes tempting to do things that other people are paid to do because you do them well, you like to do them, doing them is often easier than managing them, and doing them gives your subordinates the chance to watch genius-in-action.

IMPLEMENTING THE SOLUTIONS

A new formula for managers: “Get control of the timing and content of what you do!”

Managing Your Boss

Right or wrong, your boss’ anxieties are the source of his impositions on your time. The best strategy is to maximize your discretionary time by minimizing his anxieties concerning not just what you are doing but also how you are going about it.

Since you are an integral part of a complex intra-organizational administrative and economic system, you can recapture more of your discretionary time by getting the system to work for you before it succeeds in enslaving you.

Since your subordinates are charged with carrying out your decisions, you can recapture even more discretionary time by increasing your dependence on them and lessening their dependence on you.

Since most managers must deal directly or indirectly with outsiders, you can also recapture the last of your lost discretionary time through anticipation. For instance, a satisfied customer uses less of a sales manager’s time than a dissatisfied one and an informed shareholder needs less of the president’s time than an neglected one does.

It is better to act now at your own discretion than to react later to someone else’s agenda.

21 May 2008

Rowing and Teamwork

Launching Area
Click on image for live feed
web-cam Building Teams and Teamwork is the mantra of the modern manager. How does a manager take a group of talented individual contributors and motivate them to, well, pull together as one unit in the same boat?

Last year The Chronicle of Higher Education lurched into the truth in an article All for One. It was a story on rowing. And in it Your Business Blogger(R) read a business lesson.

Race Course
Click on image for live feed
web-cam The Oak Ridge Rowing Association and the Scholastic Rowing Association of America is sponsoring the 2008 National Scholastic Championships in Oak Ridge, TN. Several thousand visitors will go down to the river and pray for blue skies and flat water.

We are packing up the monster Huck-a-truck and the Penta-Posse (minus The Dreamer traveling with her team) and will gas-guzzle our way to the Volunteer State to watch our girls compete at the regatta. With a monster carbon footprint. Listening to the Oak Ridge Boys .

The Women’s coach was able to persuade decision makers to allow his team to use the Invictus. A new and faster boat used by upper class men at their high school.

Where tenths of a second determine winners, the perception of crewing a world-class shell can make the difference. If the women think they are faster, they will be.

Which brings us back to Notes From Academe, in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Writer Scott Smallwood visited the Cambridge University Boat Club in the UK to write about the yearly Oxford-Cambridge competition.

Alert Readers will recall that Charmaine and Your Business Blogger(R) read at Oxford and attended our first rowing event on the narrow creeks that pass for rivers at ox-ford.

Duncan Holland, the Cambridge coach with some twenty years experience, helped Dutch rowers to an Olympic medal. He well understands that even though he’s got winning seasons, only one race matters as a condition of (enjoyable) employment: Beat Oxford.

Mr. de Rond is a professor at Cambridge’s Judge Business School and is studying the Cambridge athletes and the team and the coach,

But here the Cambridge rowers become a self-directed team. Something business managers talk about but seldom see,

Like the coaches, this is where managers work their magic. To assemble a team that maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses, as Peter Drucker said.

So the women’s coach got a better boat for his team. Coaches and managers get paid to figure out the immeasurables; the intangibles that go into building a winning team.

All for One by Scott Smallwood was published on May 4, 2007 in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Link by subscription.

20 May 2008

INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR Chief Executive Officers By HERBERT MEYER

INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOs
By HERBERT MEYER

This is a paper presented several weeks ago by Herb Meyer at a Davos,
Switzerland meeting which was attended by most of the CEOs from all
the major international corporations — a very good summary of
today’s key trends and a perspective one seldom sees. Herbert E.
Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to
the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s
National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed
production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-
secret projections for the President and his national security advisers.

Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S.Government
official to forecast the Soviet Union’s collapse, for which he later
was awarded the U.S.National Intelligence Distinguished Service
Medal, the intelligence community’s highest honor.

[ Meyer is] Formerly an associate editor of FORTUNE, he is also the author of
several books.

Currently, there are [4] major transformations that are shaping
political, economic and world events. These transformations have
profound implications for American business leaders and owners, our
culture and on our way of life.

There are three major monotheistic religions in the world:
Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the sixteenth century, Judaism and
Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests
and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward.
Religion remained at the center of life, church and state became
separate. Rule of law, idea of economic liberty, individual rights,
human Rights-all these are defining point of modern Western
civilization. These concepts started with the Greeks but didn’t take
off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity
found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened,
it unleashed the scientific revolution and the greatest outpouring of
art, literature and music the world has ever known. Islam, which
developed in the seventh century, counts millions of Moslems around the world who are normal people. However, there is a radical streak
within Islam. When the radicals are in charge, Islam attacks Western
civilization. Islam first attacked Western civilization in the seventh
century, and later in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, the
Moslems (Turks from the Ottoman Empire) were literally at the gates
of Vienna. It was in Vienna that the climatic battle between Islam
and Western civilization took place. The West won and went forward.
Islam lost and went backward. Interestingly, the date of that battle
was September 11. Since them, Islam has not found a way to reconcile
with the modern world.

Today, terrorism is the third attack on Western civilization by
radical Islam. To deal with terrorism, the U.S. is doing two things.
First, units of our armed forces are in thirty countries around the world
hunting down terrorist groups and dealing with them. This gets very
little publicity. Second we are taking military action in Afghanistan
and Iraq.

These actions are covered relentlessly by the media. People can argue
about whether the war in Iraq is right or wrong. However, the
underlying strategy behind the war is to use our military to remove
the radicals from power and give the moderates a chance. Our hope is
that, over time, the moderates will find a way to bring Islam forward
into the 21st century. That’s what our involvement in Iraq and
Afghanistan is all about.

The lesson of 9/11 is that we live in a world where a small number of
people can kill a large number of people very quickly. They can use
airplanes, bombs, anthrax, chemical weapons or dirty bombs. Even with
a first-rate intelligence service (which the U.S. does not have), you
can’t stop every attack. That means our tolerance for political
horseplay has dropped to zero. No longer will we play games with
terrorists or weapons of mass destructions.

That’s why we have thought that if we could knock out the radicals
and give the moderates a chance to hold power, they might find a way
to reconcile Islam with the modern world. So when looking at
Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s important to look for any signs that they
are modernizing.

For example, women being brought into the work force and colleges in
Afghanistan is good. The Iraqis stumbling toward a constitution is good.

People can argue about what the U.S. is doing and how we’re doing it,
but anything that suggests Islam is finding its way forward is good.

In the last 20 years, China has moved 250 million people from the
farms and villages into the cities. Their plan is to move another 300
million in the next 20 years. When you put that many people into the
cities, you have to find work for them. That’s why China is addicted
to manufacturing; they have to put all the relocated people to work.
When we decide to manufacture something in the U.S., it’s based on
market needs and the opportunity to make a profit. In China, they
make the decision because they want the jobs, which is a very
different calculation.

While China is addicted to manufacturing, Americans are addicted to
low prices. As a result, a unique kind of economic codependency has
developed between the two countries. If we ever stop buying from
China, they will explode politically. If China stops selling to us,
our economy will take a huge hit because prices will jump. We are
subsidizing their economic development; they are subsidizing our
economic growth.

Because of their huge growth in manufacturing, China is hungry for
raw materials, which drives prices up worldwide. China is also
thirsty for oil, which is one reason oil is now at one hundred dollars a barrel.

By 2020, China will produce more cars than the U.S. China is also buying
its way into the oil infrastructure around the world. They are doing
it in the open market and paying fair market prices, but millions of
barrels of oil that would have gone to the U.S. are now going to
China. China’s quest to assure it has the oil it needs to fuel its
economy is a major factor in world politics and economics.

We have our Navy fleets protecting the sea lines, specifically the
ability to get the tankers through. It won’t be long before the
Chinese have an aircraft carrier sitting in the Persian Gulf as well.
The question is, will their aircraft carrier be pointing in the same
direction as ours or against us?

Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a
civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable. Maintaining a
steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1 In Western Europe, the
birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement.
In 30 years there will be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans than there
are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy and Spain
are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population
declines by 30 percent in 20 years, which has a huge impact on the
economy. When you don’t have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them.

The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the
Moslems comprise ten percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates.

However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don’t support the Iraq war is they fear their
Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020, more than half of
all births in the Netherlands will be non-European.

The huge design flaw in the postmodern secular state is that you need
a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. The
Europeans simply don’t wish to have children, so they are dying. In
Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60
million people over the next 30 years. Because Japan has a very
different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers.
Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2,000
schools, and is closing them down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan
is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five Japanese
will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run
an economy with those demographics.

Europe and Japan, which comprise two of the world’s major economic
engines, aren’t merely in recession, they’re shutting down. This will
have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is already beginning
to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct
correlation between abandonment of traditional religious society and
a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is becoming irrelevant.

The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below
replacement, the population ages. With fewer working people to
support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the
smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay
marriage and having a family. Once this trend starts, the downward
spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the
traditions they formerly held in regard to having families and
raising children.

The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an
increase in population because of immigration. When broken down by
ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 — same as France — while the
Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S., the baby boomers are
starting to retire in massive numbers. This will push the elder
dependency ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is
not as bad as Europe, but still represents the same kind of trend.

Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive
society understands-you need kids to have a healthy society. Children
are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become taxpayers. That’s how a society works, but the postmodern secular state seems to have
forgotten that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had
been the same as post-World War II, there would be no Social Security
or Medicare problems.

The world’s most effective birth control device is money. As society
creates a middle class and women move into the workforce, birth rates
drop. Having large families is incompatible with middle class living.

The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic
development. After World War II, the U.S. instituted a $600 tax
credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four
children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of
22 million kids, which was a huge consumer market. That turned into a
huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in today’s dollars
would cost $12,000 per child.

China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both
countries, there is a preference for boys over girls, and we now have
the technology to know which is which before they are born. In China
and India, families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of
these countries there are 70 million boys growing up who will never
find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for every 100
girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100
girls.

The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will
be smaller than that of Yemen. Russia has one-sixth of the earth’s
land surface and much of its oil. You can’t control that much area
with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have
China with 70 million unmarried men who are a real potential
nightmare scenario for Russia.

The fourth major transformation involves a fundamental restructuring
of American business. Today’s business environment is very complex
and competitive. To succeed, you have to be the best, which means
having the highest quality and lowest cost. Whatever your price
point, you must have the best quality and lowest price. To be the
best, you have to concentrate on one thing. You can’t be all things
to all people and be the best.

A generation ago, IBM used to make every part of their computer. Now
Intel makes the chips, Microsoft makes the software, and someone else
makes the modems, hard drives, monitors, etc. IBM even out sources
their call center. Because IBM has all these companies supplying
goods and services cheaper and better than they could do it
themselves, they can make a better computer at a lower cost. This is
called a fracturing of business. When one company can make a better
product by relying on others to perform functions the business used
to do itself, it creates a complex pyramid of companies that serve
and support each other.

The companies who supply IBM are now doing the same thing -
outsourcing many of their core services and production process. As a
result, they can make cheaper, better products. Over time, this
pyramid continues to get bigger and bigger. Just when you think it
can’t fracture again, it does.

Even very small businesses can have a large pyramid of corporate
entities that perform many of its important functions. One aspect of
this trend is that companies end up with fewer employees and more
independent contractors. This trend has also created two new words in
business, integrator and complementer. At the top of the pyramid, IBM
is the integrator. As you go down the pyramid, Microsoft, Intel and
the other companies that support IBM are the complementers. However,
each of the complementers is itself an integrator for the
complementers underneath it.

This has several implications, the first of which is that we are now
getting false readings on the economy. People who used to be
employees are now independent contractors launching their own
businesses. There are many people working whose work is not listed as
a job. As a result, the economy is perking along better than the
numbers are telling us.

Outsourcing also confused the numbers. Suppose a company like General Motors decides to outsource all its employee cafeteria functions to Marriott (which it did). It lays-off hundreds of cafeteria workers,
who then get hired right back by Marriott. The only thing that has
changed is that these people work for Marriott rather than GM.

Yet, the media headlines will scream that America has lost more
manufacturing jobs. All that really happened is that these workers
are now reclassified as service workers. So the old way of counting
jobs contributes to false economic readings. As yet, we haven’t
figured out how to make the numbers catch up with the changing
realities of the business world.

Another implication of this massive restructuring is that because
companies are getting rid of units and people that used to work for
them, the entity is smaller. As the companies get smaller and more
efficient, revenues are going down but profits are going up. As a
result, the old notion that revenues are up and we’re doing great
isn’t always the case anymore. Companies are getting smaller but are
becoming more efficient and profitable in the process.

In some ways, the war is going very well. Afghanistan and Iraq have
the beginnings of a modern government, which is a huge step forward.
The Saudis are starting to talk about some good things, while Egypt
and Lebanon are beginning to move in a good direction. A series of
revolutions have taken place in countries like Ukraine and Georgia.

There will be more of these revolutions for an interesting reason. In
every revolution, there comes a point where the dictator turns to the
general and says, Fire into the crowd. If the general fires into the
crowd, it stops the revolution. If the general says No, the
revolution continues. Increasingly, the generals are saying No
because their kids are in the crowd.

Thanks to TV and the Internet, the average 18-year old outside the
U.S. is very savvy about what is going on in the world, especially in
terms of popular culture. There is a huge global consciousness, and
young people around the world want to be a part of it. It is
increasingly apparent to them that the miserable government where
they live is the only thing standing in their way. More and more, it
is the well-educated kids, the children of the generals and the
elite, who are leading the revolutions.

At the same time, not all is well with the war. The level of violence
in Iraq is much worse and doesn’t appear to be improving. It’s
possible that we’re asking too much of Islam all at one time. We’re
trying to jolt them from the 7th century to the 21st century all at
once, which may be further than they can go. They might make it and
they might not.

Nobody knows for sure. The point is, we don’t know how the war will
turn out. Anyone who says they know is just guessing. The real place
to watch is Iran. If they actually obtain nuclear weapons it will be
a terrible situation. There are two ways to deal with it. The first
is a military strike, which will be very difficult. The Iranians have
dispersed their nuclear development facilities and put them
underground. The U.S. has nuclear weapons that can go under the earth and take out those facilities, but we don’t want to do that.

The other way is to separate the radical mullahs from the government,
which is the most likely course of action. Seventy percent of the
Iranian population is under 30. They are Moslem but not Arab. They
are mostly pro-Western. Many experts think the U.S. should have dealt
with Iran before going to war with Iraq. The problem isn’t so much
the weapons, it’s the people who control them. If Iran has a moderate
government, the weapons become less of a concern.

We don’t know if we will win the war in Iraq. We could lose or win.
What we’re looking for is any indicator that Islam is moving into the
21st century and stabilizing.

It may be that pushing 500 million people from farms and villages
into cities is too much too soon. Although it gets almost no
publicity, China is experiencing hundreds of demonstrations around
the country, which is unprecedented. These are not students in
Tienanmen Square. These are average citizens who are angry with the
government for building chemical plants and polluting the water they
drink and the air they breathe.

The Chinese are a smart and industrious people. They may be able to
pull it off and become a very successful economic and military
superpower. If so, we will have to learn to live with it. If they
want to share the responsibility of keeping the world’s oil lanes
open, that’s a good thing. They currently have eight new nuclear
electric power generators under way and 45 on the books to build.
Soon, they will leave the U.S. way behind in their ability to
generate nuclear power.

What can go wrong with China? For one, you can’t move 550 million
people into the cities without major problems. Two, China really
wants Taiwan, not so much for economic reasons, they just want it.
The Chinese know that their system of communism can’t survive much
longer in the 21st century. The last thing they want to do before
they morph into some sort of more capitalistic government is to take
over Taiwan.

We may wake up one morning and find they have launched an attack on
Taiwan. If so, it will be a mess, both economically and militarily.
The U.S. has committed to the military defense of Taiwan. If China
attacks Taiwan, will we really go to war against them? If the Chinese
generals believe the answer is no, they may attack. If we don’t
defend Taiwan, every treaty the U.S. has will be worthless.
Hopefully, China won’t do anything stupid.

Europe and Japan are dying because their populations are aging and
shrinking. These trends can be reversed if the young people start
breeding. However, the birth rates in these areas are so low it will
take two generations to turn things around. No economic model exists
that permits 50 years to turn things around. Some countries are
beginning to offer incentives for people to have bigger families. For
example, Italy is offering tax breaks for having children. However,
it’s a lifestyle issue versus a tiny amount of money. Europeans
aren’t willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to
have more children.

Europeans have a real talent for living. They don’t want to work very
hard. The average European worker gets 400 more hours of vacation
time per year than Americans. They don’t want to work and they don’t
want to make any of the changes needed to revive their economies.

The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In
August, the country basically shuts down when everyone goes on vacation.

That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living
in nursing homes and hospitals died. Their children didn’t even leave
the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies. Institutions
had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies
until people came to claim them. This loss of life was five times
bigger than 9/11 in America, yet it didn’t trigger any change in
French society.

When birth rates are so low, it creates a tremendous tax burden on
the young. Under those circumstances, keeping mom and dad alive is
not an attractive option. That’s why euthanasia is becoming so
popular in most European countries. The only country that doesn’t
permit (and even encourage) euthanasia is Germany, because of all the
baggage from World War II.

The European economy is beginning to fracture. Countries like Italy
are starting to talk about pulling out of the European Union because
it is killing them. When things get bad economically in Europe, they
tend to get very nasty politically. The canary in the mine is anti-
Semitism.

When it goes up, it means trouble is coming. Current levels of anti-
Semitism are higher than ever.

Germany won’t launch another war, but Europe will likely get
shabbier, more dangerous and less pleasant to live in. Japan has a
birth rate of 1.3 and has no intention of bringing in immigrants. By
2020, one out of every five Japanese will be 70 years old. Property
values in Japan have dropped every year for the past 14 years. The
country is simply shutting down. In the U.S. we also have an aging
population. Boomers are starting to retire at a massive rate. These
retirements will have several major impacts:

Possible massive sell off of large four-bedroom houses and a movement
to condos.

An enormous drain on the treasury. Boomers vote, and they want their
benefits, even if it means putting a crushing tax burden on their
kids to get them. Social Security will be a huge problem. As this
generation ages, it will start to drain the system. We are the only
country in the world where there are no age limits on medical
procedures. An enormous drain on the health care system. This will
also increase the tax burden on the young, which will cause them to
delay marriage and having families, which will drive down the birth
rate even further.

Although scary, these demographics also present enormous
opportunities for products and services tailored to aging
populations. There will be tremendous demand for caring for older
people, especially those who don’t need nursing homes but need some
level of care. Some people will have a business where they take care
of three or four people in their homes. The demand for that type of
service and for products to physically care for aging people will be
huge.

Make sure the demographics of your business are attuned to where the
action is. For example, you don’t want to be a baby food company in
Europe or Japan. Demographics are much underrated as an indicator of
where the opportunities are. Businesses need customers. Go where the
customers are.

The restructuring of American business means we are coming to the end
of the age of the employer and employee. With all this fracturing of
businesses into different and smaller units, employers can’t
guarantee jobs anymore because they don’t know what their companies
will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an
independent contractor.

The new workforce contract will be: Show up at the my office five
days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own
insurance, benefits, health care and everything else. Husbands and
wives are becoming economic units. They take different jobs and work
different shifts depending on where they are in their careers and
families. They make trade-offs to put together a compensation package
to take care of the family.

This used to happen only with highly educated professionals with high
incomes. Now it is happening at the level of the factory floor worker.

Couples at all levels are designing their compensation packages based
on their individual needs. The only way this can work is if
everything is portable and flexible, which requires a huge shift in
the American economy.

The U.S is in the process of building the world’s first 21st century
model economy. The only other countries doing this are U.K. and
Australia. The model is fast, flexible, highly productive and
unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. This will
increase the economic gap between the U.S. and everybody else,
especially Europe and Japan.

At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China,
we are the only country that is continuing to put money into their
military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground
military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech
weapons are working and which ones aren’t. There is almost no one who
can take us on economically or militarily.

There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one
hand, this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people.
It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts
of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place
in the world to be in business and raise children. The U.S. is by far
the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the
marketplace.

We take it for granted, but it isn’t as available in other countries
of the world. Ultimately, it’s an issue of culture. The only people
who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up
our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans.

The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn’t
another America to pull us out.

10 May 2008

Service-System Design Matrix

Sometime in the mid-90’s Your Business Blogger(R) came across a nifty chart comparing the sales opportunity with the production efficiency measured against the amount of human interaction.

The Degree of Customer Service-Server Contact — The Service-System Design Matrix is not my intellectual property. Please leave me a comment if any Alert Reader would know where credit belongs.

9 May 2008

Bad Management

Good management looks easy when good numbers come in. But when the numbers are down — whether in sales or votes — managing begins to look like real work.

As recently as this past November, the New York Times was trumpeting Hillary Clinton’s “No-nonsense Style” as a manager. The story hailed her as a well-organized leader who had “honed” her skills, adjusted her style after the health care reform debacle, and had generated enduring loyalty from a cadre of skilled aides operating smoothly in HillaryLand.

By March, the Times was running an article headlining her campaign’s internal “sniping,” describing Senator Clinton’s management style as “insular.”

Now, in what appear to be the twilight days of her campaign, Politico observes “Clinton leadership is a study in missteps,” and McClatchy’s David Lightman begs the obvious question, “If Clinton can’t run a campaign, can she run the White House?”

Ironically, Hillary’s campaign has been rooted in claims of managerial competence. The Clinton camp’s promotion of Hillary-as-manager is a premier case of the lady protesting too much. To the extent that her campaign has had a consistent theme, it is that she is a proven leader/manager who knows how to move the levers of power effectively. The meta-narrative is even more grandiose: The senator strides the stage as feminist icon, poised to break the ultimate glass ceiling.

[For today’s senior female leaders the challenge is less the ‘glass ceiling’ than the ability to get support from organizations across department silos — what one scholar calls “glass walls.”]

For now, Hillary Clinton is still in this race, coming off a big win in Pennsylvania, due to many factors. Good management is not one of them. And while her political recalibrations are important to her electoral future, her ultimate fate depends on whether or not she can address this fundamental failure.

Hillary has spent the better portion of her life involved with political campaigns. Why has her own been so badly run?

Hierarchy Prevents Anarchy. Management is a fundamentally conservative enterprise. Liberals are constitutionally uncomfortable with hierarchy, and the results are plainly on display in the Clinton campaign.

Hillary’s preferred approach is to surround herself with contradictory opinions, throw it all in the wash, and wait for a Darwinian conclusion. No surprise then, reports coming out of HillaryLand recount rampant empire building, bureaucratic back stabbing, and political poseurs pushing in different directions.

Mark Penn lobbying for Hillary in Control; Terry McAuliffe and others lobbying for Hillary in Tears — what she ended up with was political schizophrenia and strategic incoherence. Penn wants to show Hillary’s competent side and go negative. Most other influencers want to show a kinder gentler human Hillary. The strategies are diabolically diametric: Hillary attempts both and achieves neither.

A political campaign is the uber-start-up organization: usually thinly capitalized, lots of passion, a patched together team and an overworked principal. The best organizations have a clear chain of command where authority and responsibility travel along the same line on the organization chart. Ideally, decisions and assignments should move down an organization through a single, solid line visible to all.

Instead, HillaryLand has staffers reporting formally and informally to multiple decision makers with multiple agendas and strategies. Maggie Williams, Clinton’s new campaign manager, contends with Bill Clinton freelancing in South Carolina and the dearly-nearly-departed Mark Penn doing fly-bys from an alien hovercraft. And those are just the most obvious divided loyalties and mixed messages swirling around Clinton’s Ballston headquarters.

In addition to these multiple allegiances, Hillary is using two non-hierarchical types of organizational structures in the worst possible way. Instead of the brilliant synthesis of bright ideas that she believes will come from a loose process of collaboration, she gets hash.

There may be an official org[anization] chart, outlining a traditional pyramid gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. But here’s what the reality looks like:

The Wagon Wheel. Much as Bill Clinton did as president, Hillary’s senior management team resembles a hub and spoke organization where multiple decision makers have access down the spokes to Hillary at the hub. Each spoke makes different, uncoordinated decisions. Hillary’s (inadvertent) organizational structure can sometimes work in small enterprises, but not here.

The Matrix. In organizations with very talented or disciplined employees it is possible to have an individual staffer report to two different supervisors in temporary assignments in a matrix. “Matrix” refers to an organizational structure, not the movie — although to some conflicted staffers it feels like being trapped in a chart and living in a bad dream.

What’s a poor campaign staffer to do? No one seems to be in charge; no one knows what the boss is thinking.

While the staff is fighting Bill Clinton over the donuts, they wonder, “Do I listen to him, or to Williams, or to Penn?”

The best indication of future performance is past performance. If Hillary is not ready to manage now, she will not be Ready on Day One.

[Read the article at NRO.]

— Jack Yoest[MBA] is president of Management Training of DC, LLC, and is an adjunct professor of management at the Northern Virginia Community College; Charmaine Yoest[Ph.D.] is a vice president at a Washington, DC-based non-profit and served as senior adviser to the Huckabee presidential campaign. They blog at Reasoned Audacity.

1 May 2008

The Managerial Woman: SETTLING IN, BRANCHING OUT, MOVING UP

Dr. Mom has written extensively on women in management. I appreciate her writing: it keeps her and Charmaine out of Nordstroms…

Here is a speech she gave over 20 years ago — it seems that mom was on the cutting edge.

Note her use of ‘alliances’ used by female managers to get things done. Your Business Blogger(R) was using the term “networks.” Bill Oncken uses “support” both as a verb and as an adjective describing ’system’ in his “molecule of management.”

By JANICE SHAW CROUSE, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs,
Taylor University

It is with a tremendous amount of gratitude and to be honest just a few pinches of regret that I stand here today and officially close the first year of the Marion-Grant County Career Women’s Council. I hope that you all share in the sense of satisfaction at what has been accomplished this year. There is a summary of the year’s activities at your place setting. Here you see the joint product of the hard work of this year’s officers and committee chairs as they worked to launch this organization and to plan challenging and interesting programs. I am proud of the growth and development that has occurred in our founding year and I know that you join me in expressing appreciation to each person who made this year such a success. Further, I look forward to the coming year since I know that the new officers whom we installed today are well-qualified and the plans which they have already begun laying out for next year are exciting. I look forward to seeing the continuing progress and growth which is sure to come under their leadership.
One of my favorite cartoons has Pogo staring out into space declaring “The world is full of insurmountable opportunities.” We, as women managers, can certainly identify with Pogo’s comment. For women who have undertaken the challenges of the marketplace, Pogo’s description fits beautifully. Our career world has been and continues to be full of insurmountable opportunities.
Let’s take a few moments to look back at the nature of the insurmountable opportunities faced by female managers in the early days. One of the most intriguing projects I have ever done was a study of 25 books written to provide guidance and advice for women managers. The writing of these books covered a little over a decade beginning in the early 70s. The earliest of these “how-to-do-it” books focused on “looking like” and “acting like” managers. There was very little concern with performance or quality. At that time, the major challenge was to get a foot in the door.
In the next few years the emphasis changed and the focus shifted to survival techniques. Certainly, those books were appropriate because in those days – as now – very few women survived the pitfalls and made significant advances in the management hierarchy. Of those who did survive and advance, most did so at the price of enormous sacrifices in their personal lives.
Hennig and Jardim in their classic book, The Managerial Woman, examines women’s track record of surviving in the corporate structure. They traced 25 successful women managers through childhood to a top-level position in their companies. Their study revealed that in order to survive, all 25 executives had to essentially give up life outside their careers. Each of the 25 devoted total energy to her job. In addition, each had a male mentor who protected her and ran interference for her in the workplace.
For the most part management is still dominated by the male majority many of whom instinctively tune women out. While our numbers are increasing, we still tend to hold lower level management positions and it is very difficult to break through to the top. Many men are only comfortable interacting with women in subordinate positions or women in roles not related to the business world. They continue to transfer domestic patterns of attitudes, relationships and reactions to women at work.
It doesn’t help the situation when we carry into our business environment patterns of speech and mannerisms inappropriate for leadership roles. And it certainly doesn’t help when women – like many men – behave as though the primary objective is to make certain that they are “looking like” and “being treated like” managers.
Fortunately, managerial women and those who write about and for us are now tackling the real issues of how women can actually “BE” managers; how we can effectively handle our responsibilities. I was glad to see the shift of interest and focus from image to performance and from perks of the position to its opportunity for significant participation. That is one of the reasons I am a part of the Career Women’s Council. We exist as an organization because we are professional women who want to deal with performance and the shaping of organizations. We want to handle our responsibilities capably; we want to be involved in decision-making, handling conflict and solving problems.
As the newness has worn off and the initial excitement dimmed, executive women are entering a new phase. The new woman manager is interested in more than assertiveness training, how to dress for success and stress management workshops. She wants to be able to reach her potential. That means learning how to match her abilities and interests with the demands of her job in ways that make her a vital pat of the total organization or corporation. She is learning that strength and confidence can lead to a light touch rather than heavy-handed aggressiveness. She is learning that humor and femininity do not have to diminish authority and power.
You and I know we still have to follow the Biblical injunction to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” We all know that Betty Harrigan is right – there are a lot of games that mother never taught us. The military and football motifs common to the male networks are still outside the experience of most of us and most of us are still novices at the competitive strategies men grow up absorbing. Maybe that’s not too bad. I find it very satisfying to note that the corporate world is now, however slowly, beginning to adapt to and absorb female styles of management.
We have come a long way. We are settling in, branching out and moving up.
How are we settling in? In the past 20 years, the percentage of managerial positions held by women has increased by 150 percent. By 1984, women were holding an estimated 33 percent of all managerial and administrative positions in business. The only shadow in the rosy picture is that among the top 50 companies of the U.S. only 2 percent of the executives are women. We are still, for the most part, out of the board rooms. Some women are solving that problem by starting their own businesses. Female-owned businesses rose from 5 percent in 1972 to 15-20 percent in 1986.
For those of us who are not planning to start our own business, the picture should not be discouraging – in spite of the statistics. We are proving ourselves. We are settling in. As Judie Forbes says in Newsweek, March 1986, “women haven’t earned the right to be mediocre.” Most of our female role models are people we can point to with pride. Women are proving that we can get the job done and that we have what it takes. Many people are finding that they like the way women manage. Not only can we get the job done; we do it in a way that builds rapport and this has the potential to significantly change the workplace.
Ned Herrman, chairman of a research and consulting company that specializes in studying how the brain works, has commented that “women are able to blend intuition and logic in their thinking” and they are able to assimilate “relationship issues with great clarity without large data or data-based materials to work from.” Further, leadership studies at West Point conducted after female cadets were admitted, showed that male and female cadets did equally well in getting the job done, but women rated higher in looking out for subordinates’ welfare and showing interest in subordinates’ lives.
By using our abilities and strengths and performing with excellence, attitudes are changing. Men’s favorable attitudes toward women executives rose from 35 percent in 1965 to 73 percent in 1985. In addition, some of the old stereotypes are finally dying out. In 1965, 51 percent of men managers agreed with the statement that women were temperamentally unfit for management. In 1985, 82 percent of men managers disagreed with the statement.
All the evidence points to the fact that female managers are not a flash in the pan, we are settling in, we are here to stay, and most people like what they see and what they get with female executives.
When we reach top levels we will continue to do a good job. Far too many of the men who are presently at the top have not been able to cut it there and their businesses and institutions have muddled along without distinction. We are earning our stripes; we will be ready when the doors open – as they certainly will. We have settled in. The rest is inevitable.
In addition to settling in, women managers are branching out. We are taking initiatives. As America shifts to a service instead of an industrial economy, feminine skills are becoming more important. Even so, having abilities doesn’t automatically mean that a person knows how to use those abilities says New York Management Consultant Karin Allport. There are things that we need to learn about capitalizing on our strengths and abilities because quality comes when we use our aptitudes to best advantage.
There is an old cliché that says “it takes so little to be above average.” As women managers we must learn that as we branch out we must continue to produce a quality performance. Bear Bryant, the legendary Alabama football coach was once asked to explain his successful record. His response was, “It is the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny things that beat you.”
For women managers, that lesson must become second nature to us. Quality and professional advancement are dependent upon successfully handling the itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny things. Each of us has to study our present situation to discover the available opportunities for honing our skills and propelling us forward professionally.
My husband and I just returned from a 25th anniversary vacation trip. In spite of the fact that every place we stayed knew that our visit was a special occasion for us, only one place paid attention to that detail and did anything extra to make our time at their restaurant or resort a memorable event. There was no evidence at most of the places of pride in a job well-done. The one quality performance stood out unmistakably and the extra effort cost almost nothing; the “extras” took very little time or expense. The result, however, was to set that establishment in a category quite apart from the others. The attention to detail and the quality performance was an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny thing – but it made a difference.
Unfortunately, quality performances by women frequently go unnoticed, are taken for granted, are not acknowledged or do not lead to advancement. What happens is increased responsibility, but not increased status or position. You as a woman manager must learn to develop objective measures for determining to your own satisfaction if you are doing a good job. You have to keep your own score card so that even if no one else gives you credit for your accomplishments, your self-esteem can be nurtured and you can recognize the progress you make.
Beyond the internal rewards, however, we must learn how to be what Adele Scheele calls “achievers.” In her book, Skills for Success, Scheele describes two types of workers. The Sustainers spend 70 percent of their time doing a good job and 30 percent of their time waiting to be recognized for doing that good job. The Achievers have learned to interact with others to discuss what they are doing. They are not braggarts, but they let others know what they have done by building contacts and alliances. Many women are woefully inexperienced at such “networking” and are still uncomfortable and awkward in talking about or broadcasting what they have done and what they can do. While we learn to keep our own scorecard, we must also learn to let it be seen by others. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough grandfatherly mentors to go around. Most of the males at our level or above aren’t interested in mentoring anyone else. Further, while they accept us on the team they aren’t about to acknowledge that we are competition in the race. If they can get away with it, they will let us burn out in our present middle management levels.
That brings us to the business of moving up. Those who are determined to run the race are discovering that we are in a new phase. The “top” is no longer just an illusive dream; though still somewhat rare, it is nevertheless an objective reality and when we look at that reality we need to ask some significant questions. With the goal in sight and with the prize within grasp, women are reevaluating their goals and objectives. Thus, as some are moving up; some are opting out.
John Nesbitt in Megatrends said that our society is currently in a period of parenthesis – that we exist between two eras. He describes the parenthesis as a time of contrasts – incredible potential for opportunities with equally incredible potential for devastation. That description is certainly true for women managers. The world we look out on is still like Pogo’s. Our world is still filled with insurmountable opportunities. Women have won the major war – the right and privilege of leadership can be ours.
But, suddenly women are counting the costs and some are determining that the price is too high to pay. A recent ABC television special reported, “Even professional women – the ones whose leather briefcases match their leather shoes – have it tough. For one thing, they still have to fight their way to the top. And once they’re there they often find that the price they paid was too high.”
Studies show that most men who make it to top executive levels have a strong, supportive family. For most, “the little woman” [see Charmaine, linked above] has stood beside and behind him and has single-handedly taken care of most of the responsibilities extraneous to the workplace. In addition, most men who make it in management have external support from their club, their gold partners – the list could go on, but you get the picture. In comparison, women in management for the most part are still responsible for the routine maintenance of their homes and personal lives. Even if she is fortunate enough to have a mentor, she seldom has the luxury of having a man Friday. Inevitably, the managerial woman must spend some time being “Superwoman.”
Fenn in the book, Making it in Management, says that “To succeed women must be able to risk and be willing to accept the consequences of their actions.” Moving up or moving on carries a heavy price tag. Life can fall apart when you move too quickly. One factor that looms large in such a decision is the adequacy of one’s personal support system. Supportive friends, family, colleagues, church, club, neighbors are important steadying forces that can be vitally important during transitions. Investing the time to maintain these relationships can seem an impossible expenditure of energy to someone who has given her work “all she’s got,” but several of our CSC members during the past year have seen the importance of this group during their major career decisions, transitions and crises.
Another vital factor in successfully moving up is timing. A career move appropriate at one point in time could be disastrous at another. As we count the costs and estimate the odds of a successful move at a particular juncture in life, we must evaluate the timing of the move both in terms of its advantages and disadvantages for career development and its effect on personal lives and relationships. It is extremely important not to be stampeded by the “only chance” syndrome, the fear that you’ll never have another chance like this one. It is comforting to know that other trains will be coming down the track and we have some control over the choice and direction of the train we take. Persistence, determination, personal growth and development, and pride in high quality work are the soil out of which opportunities grow.
We are the ones who have to determine whether to permanently stay at our present level, to wait for advancement where we are – even with the constraints and frustrations that are a part of the circumstances, or to go for it somewhere else with all the attendant stress that comes with a move into new circumstances.
Thompson and Wood in Management Strategies for Women state that the old advice and lessons are not enough. They argue that situations now require that a woman know her own abilities and interests in order to determine whether they fit the job she seeks. Further, they stress the importance of the woman knowing the organization and whether she can function within it.
Most of us in this room have decided not to opt out and have accepted the challenge of settling in; we are branching out and we want to move up. As we close out the first year of this career Women’s Council and as I close my remarks to you, I would like you to think back to the 1984 Olympics and the gold-medal performance of Mary Lou Retton.
Mary Lou had trained, disciplined and prepared herself for the competition. She was mentally and physically tough. She had paid attention to the little details that spelled excellence and quality. She had confidence in her abilities and she chose to go for the gold and reach the top.
The thing that set Mary Lou apart was the way she proved that she belonged at the head of the pack. The way she “stuck” her first landing and smiled that triumphant grin is indelibly imprinted in our memories. She won her gold medal, but she didn’t stop there. Mary Lou pranced right back to the end of the mat for her second vault to show them what she was made of. She sailed through a second vault that was also a perfect 10 and she proved that her gold-medal performance was a product of her skill as a gymnast and not just a lucky try.
There is a lesson there for all of us in the Marion-Grant County Career Women’s Council. Like Mary Lou on the eve of the 1984 Olympics, we stand today on the threshold of insurmountable opportunities. Through determined preparation, when Mary Lou reached her opportunity she was ready to shine. She performed to her full potential and proved that she was made of solid gold. Her success was a joy and an inspiration. There was no question that she earned her position; she belonged there and she handled the role with incredible aplomb.
Let it be true of all of us!

This is a cross post from Reasoned Audacity.

29 May 2008

Why Do Employees Quit?