The Intern Diaries: Week Four

Around the fourth day after Mr. Sperm meets Miss Egg, differentiation begins.  (If you slept through high school biology, differentiation is when cells start to get specialized.)

Ok, biology lesson is over.  I was just mulling over how week four of the Interns could be subtitled, The Week of Differentiation.  It isn’t that they weren’t fully formed individuals when they arrived.  It’s how we see them and assign work to them that’s undergone some subtle changes.

Lindsay is continuing to work on social marketing optimization because she’s a star Communicator.  Not surprising.  This line from her Role-Based Assessment pretty well covers why I wanted her for this project:

She will quickly make contacts throughout the organization and get to know almost everyone. She is especially cooperative and will also try to do almost anything she is asked to do. Her focus is on interpersonal interaction and trying to get everyone to work together harmoniously. She won’t do this by direct means but by attempting to broker the arrangements that bring people together in a positive manner. As a result, she is likely to be respected by those she has contact with.

But we needed to get the database cleaned up so despite the fact that she also had this in her report: “She will not want to do organizational tasks…”, there she was in the conference room with some others, working on exactly that task, with music emanating from someone’s laptop, a pile of snacks, and the sunniest of good natures.

Meanwhile, Kartik, the Action Former, whose report included the following, managed to reorganize, clean up, and optimize my consultant certification files.  Here’s Kartik in a nutshell:

This candidate is the type of employee who can be found in the front of the group with marker in hand, developing a list of things that need to be done or important points or assignments. He is the consummate organizer. The key is that he does not organize for the present but as a way of getting things ready for the future. His style is one of handling many things simultaneously. He believes that multi-tasking in a rapidly evolving environment is essential to keep on top of everything.

The others too have their unique qualities and it’s amazing how much more productive they are when we recognize them, give them work they enjoy, and celebrate the results.

It just makes good business sense.

Happy ending: Lindsay has a project beginning Monday that is totally about communicating with people, while Kartik will get a great new organization project!

Are You Taking Any Prisoners?

As a coda to the conference on women entrepreneurs, last night there was a gathering at the Innovation Center in Philadelphia to hear the results of a survey on the same subject.  I was still on a roll from the previous day, which was a flashback to my first consciousness-raising group in the early 70’s.

As I went on about finding alternative ways to do business when you get blocked, Gloria Rabinowitz, the managing director of Golden Seeds in Philadelphia, an angel venture group that supports women entrepreneurs, said to me  “I like your ‘take no prisoners’ attitude.”

So I have to ask myself, why do I not take prisoners?  Are women expected to?  I haven’t ever been accused of ‘emotional blackmail’ but I guess that would be the equivalent of prisoner-taking.

So here it is, the whole truth, albeit according to me:

If you take prisoners, you take on burdens and distractions.

You will become the imprisoned one.

And my simple advice, whether you are an entrepreneur or not:

Take No Prisoners.

Will That Be One Hump or Two?

Jason Zweig (aka WSJ’s Intelligent Investor) had a great article in the weekend Wall Street Journal.  After giving examples of bad group decision making (as they say on Law & Order, ‘ripped from the headlines’) he concludes that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is an illusion, that it depends on the competency of the group.

I’d like to add here that what he’s talking about is entirely measurable.

Ineffective groups (aka committees) start out designing a horse and give you a camel.  Let’s just refer to that as being two humps off.  (This measure, of course, assumes they have designed a bactrian rather than a dromedary.)  You can quantify that in pounds of weight the horse would find burdensome, or the extra expense of feeding the resultant lumpy-backed horse or the lessened productivity caused by the extra weight.

It’s all entrely preventable if you select members of the group for their teaming characteristics and leave off those who are either rigid or diffuse.  It also helps to have Role diversity to avoid the tendency to jump in with agreement too early.

Moral of the story: If you always see things my way, you probably aren’t needed on my team.

What Will Happen to HR?

I gave the keynote at Philadelphia SHRM’s meeting this week and since I’ve been getting a lot of calls and LinkedIn requests from senior HR people lately, I figured I’d offer my help to anyone who’s looking.  I never expected there would be that many.  More to the point, I never expected to be that many senior level, highly experienced, knowledgeable people with no prospects in sight.

One person lamented that companies just don’t care about people any more.  I’m not convinced that they ever did, at least in the sense that HR professional thought they should.

Seems to me that when we think that way, we pit HR, the protector of the worker, against the company’s stakeholders – often a whole lot of people who have a little bit of that company’s stock in their (dwindling) 401k.

What if we had a way of thinking about all the people involved in an organization – those who fund it, those who it serves, those who manage it – as if their interests were compatible?  If we did, I wouldn’t have to ask myself, what will happen to HR?

Brother, Can You Spare $1.84?

Unemployment figure is out this morning – 8.1% – triggering memories of conversations with people who lived through the Great Depression.  One of my favorites was from a couple who had just been married when the bottom fell out in 1929.  Every morning she sent him off to look for work with his daily rations  – two cigarettes (this was before the Surgeon General’s report, of course) and a dime for coffee.  They said people really did ask, can you spare a dime.  And although a dime meant something, there was plenty of sharing going around.

Fast calculation using 2007 averages: $1.38 for the coffee and .23 per smoke.

Brother, can you spare $1.84?  Just doesn’t have the same feel.  I wonder how much sharing will happen this round.

The Bailout – Enron End Run Revisited

I was going to write something on the bailout but when I started thinking about it, I realized I’d already written what I wanted to say.  This was originally published in 2002.  The situation is just more of the same (snafu, for the literary) so I’m going to recycle it here.  My submission was entitled Enron End Run.

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The media update us hourly on the Enron situation about courts and lawyers, documents and shredders. They ask a lot of quality journalist questions, but I have one. How did Enron make such bad decisions? After all, they could afford the best executives money (stock options, deferred income, perks, golden parachutes, etc.) could buy.

Rarely are decisions made alone. Even when the guy (and in the US, it’s usually a guy) in charge wants something, there’s usually a team that needs to agree to it.That’s called getting “buy-in,” a rather unfortunate term considering the price that Enron execs will likely pay at some time in the future. Within a series of decisions, you’ll find a series of interactions of the people who make them, of opportunities for correcting a runner who’s straying out of bounds.

Any executive team decision is just one stop on their problem-solving mission. But when you analyze the series of their decisions, you see patterns that repeat, patterns woven of the interactions of the key players on the team. And at Enron, as at so many corporations, that team was missing a few key players.

A good executive team is diverse. Not in the sense of political correctness, necessarily, but in the sense of recognizing the value of differences in people’s styles, what team theory refers to as their Roles, as opposed to the things they do on a day-to-day basis, their tasks. One simple way in which diversity serves a team is that of the ten team roles, there are three that serve to contain action, to stop and think of the consequences, to converge on the true path of the team’s mission. In other words, getting things done in a business environment requires power and control. Enron had plenty of power. What they lacked was effective control.

I’m not much of a football fan, but I have a good friend who explains what I want to know in language I can relate to. Today I asked him about end runs. Are they common, I asked, wanting to know if they are as performed as often on the field as apparently they are off the field. Enron is not the first, nor will it be the last, playing the game this way. He explained that there are maybe six or so end runs in a season and that many teams don’t even do one because once you’ve done one, you’ve bent the rules enough to cause others to wonder if you can ever straighten them out again. I was intrigued when he told me that sometimes it is only two or three people on the team who know that they will be attempting an end run. I wonder how they make this decision. Is it in the passion of needing to win at all costs or is it thought out? Are the pros and cons given voice? And does anyone know how many team members were involved in the decision and how many just went along with it because it was a winning play?

Regulation, de-regulation, re-regulation: none of it helps when the problem lies in management. FASB, GAAP, IRS: all just letters, as in “the letter of the law,” worthless without the spirit and intent of the law. The new rules to come will further regulate “balance sheet partnerships” but will do nothing to insure against the poor decisions made by an “end run” team.

According to team theory, certain roles serve to move the ball, to further the overall goals of the team. Others focus the effort to move the ball in such a way as to end up winning the game. Without focus, the ball moves out of bounds and while the referee might miss this occasionally, sooner or later it’s going to be caught. In a professional football game, this pattern is caught in practice before the game. A player who constantly and needlessly runs out of bounds is not going to do well. The idea is to move the ball within the boundaries required. The better someone is at that, the better the player. The better the players, the better the team.

Did Enron have someone there who could provide the control over the power that the key players had? CBS News reported that they did. Robin Hosea, a senior accountant, worked in the benefits department. She apparently reported that some Enron departments were spending employee benefits money without approval from her department. She said she reported this to her superiors and was told to keep quiet. She was soon laid off. If money was spent this way, it constitutes a criminal offense. Her job in the company was to work on the team as a control agent. She was, in part, there to focus the efforts of the management on moving the efforts of the organization forward while keeping within the boundaries required. When they ignored her, they lost that essential focus. They lost the containment they so sorely needed.

Capitalism is arguably the most effective economic system ever developed but unbridled capitalism is based on greed. Now there is nothing wrong with a little healthy greed. That’s what motivates for-profit companies. But greed is powerful. If it is allowed to range unchecked, it will eventually destroy everything around it.

Governments are supposed to place various constraints on what actions a company may take in order to protect the welfare of the rest of society. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Far more effective are the constraints that an ethical, diverse management team, with its interplay of forces of power and control, places on itself. Without control to balance it, a team with an excess of power almost inevitably sets up the kind of conflict that led to the Enron collapse.

Enron executives were simply trying to make money. Most of them probably believed they were abiding by the letter of the law. In the end though, the company collapsed. Just consider what would have happened with that same kind of power and drive under tight and disciplined control, constrained and focused not by broad laws that regulate all companies but by cooperation with team members who were also interested in the long term interests of the company. Instead of free-ranging action with an eye on the short-term, they would have been focused and directed, power under control, to accomplish what they wanted without paying such a high price. It might have taken longer but it would have cost them – and their victims – a lot less in the end.