Formal Meetings- Have Less, Learn More

After reading an article about a good place to work (as described by a CEO), it seems another viewpoint should be raised. This tech CEO was big on training, and had a rule that every manager had to meet with his or her people 1:1 on a regular basis. Apparently, one day, he found that a manager hadn’t had any of these in 6 months.

The CEO has a come to Jesus meeting and explains why he wants this, and says if it doesn’t happen he’ll have no recourse but to fire the people. Now that, of course, is his prerogative as the CEO…having things run your way always is when you are top management.

I haven’t been a CEO of a large company…but I ran a small one on pure positive cash flow for 10 years, and tripled sales and doubled gross profits. I rarely ever had a meeting. As a customer who had been at a large company, had a Ph.D and taught business courses in his ‘retirement’ noted, I practiced management by walking around.

This was true. Every hour of every day, I made the rounds. It’s simple, and works better than meetings. Go out on to the showroom floor and chat with the sales people. Head to the shop and talk with the technicians. Ask them how it’s going, and if there’s anything they need that will make things work more smoothly. You can’t always promise they’ll get those changes, but you ALWAYS know what’s going on, and they know that you are concerned and will try your best to get them what they need. Sometimes, jump in and help and get your hands dirty! Yes, I ruined more than a few dress shirts, ties, and slacks doing this, but the boost to morale was well worth it.

It’s not always true, but as a general rule, you learn a lot more and get a lot more done from management by walking around than from formal meetings. BTW, Mr. Tech CEO I didn’t name…a close friend of mine is a CEO of a company that sells goods that is 1000 times larger than your company and has been in business since the 20’s…guess what? He practices management by walking around too.

Playing With Fire…Works

It’s all too easy to look back at times past and not how much better things were in ‘the good old days.’ In some cases, it also happens to be true. Part of that is due to changing times, of course. Another is the changed perspective from a child to an adult.

The Fourth of July, our Independence Day, is a time for celebration and reflection. I hope you are celebrating in your manner of choice…be it a BBQ, pic nicking, partying, or watching the night works with friends and family. For kids, the food is one great thing, but the big attraction is the fireworks.

Many places these days have only ‘safe and sane’ fireworks, or may have banned them altogether. With all due acknowledgement of the danger or kids shooting off fireworks, that was one of the great high points of a youngster’s summer ‘back in the day.’ Whether it was a package of one and a half inchers, bottle rockets, pinwheels, or those snakes that left a permanent stain on the concrete (to the consternation of adults), THAT was the best part of the holiday for kids.

In our family, we often traveled to a lake in Missouri where my aunt and uncle had a home. Our families would BBQ, water ski, and then take the boat down to the dam to watch the fireworks from the water at dusk. For my cousin and myself, there was another guilty pleasure…a guy on the lake made a trip somewhere every June, and came back with a station wagon full of fireworks that weren’t even legal back then.

My cousin and I (around ages 12 and 13 I believe) would spend the princely sum of 20 dollars and buy a box of M-80’s to split. Nothing matched the excitement of tying those to a rock, lighting them, and tossing them into the lake from the dock…they’d send up a water column some 10 to 15 feet into the air. We were lucky of course–if you didn’t toss them in time, they could blow off most of your hand. That and the fire danger were and are certainly reason enough for them to be banned…but it sure was fun at the time!

Happy Independence Day!

The Supreme Court & the Individual Mandate

As has been widely reported, and is now being analyzed at length, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act (otherwise dubbed Obamacare) this morning. The administration had claimed that it was Constitutional with three separate arguments: the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Taxation Power (“lay and collect Taxes”.) Chief Justice Roberts, in delivering the opinion of the court, wrote that the law wasn’t supported by either of the first two, but was, in fact, Constitutional under the Taxation Power of Congress in the Constitution.

Although the Congress stated that it wasn’t a tax in writing the law, the Court sensibly saw past this language as a political decision to get the law passed. The expansion of Medicaid was struck down by the Court. Expect considerable discussion about overturning Obamacare from the right, and expanding it to Medicare from the left from here to the election this fall, and beyond. Let the games begin!

Managing Expectations

Today Apple rolled out a raft of hardware and software at their World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco (WWDC.) The company showed new Macbook Pros, a new Macbook Air, released a new Mac Pro, and demoed their next OS, Mountain Lion, as well as the next iteration of their mobile OS, iOS 6. Some computer commentators have said that the retina display Macbook Pro is a year to 2 years ahead of any PC laptop.

In the OS department, Apple showed their new Maps feature and updated Siri personal assistant software with increased capabilities. One figure was dropped on the crowd which is stunning when you compare it to the 901 million active Facebook users (as of April 2012)….Apple has 400 million CREDIT CARDS of users! Contemplate that for a moment!

Despite this large rollout of products, both soft and hard, Wall Street was ‘disappointed.’ Being a financial whiz is crucial to success on Wall Street, let there be no doubt of that. With that in mind, though, it might serve analysts in good stead to have some real world experience in companies that provide ACTUAL goods and services to our vaunted free market. Even better, if some of these folks had the experience of managing a company on pure, positive cash flow, they would REALLY understand American business. Main Street must be doing a collective face palm right now!

What I Learned On the Way to Look Up Something Else

When I was younger, the editor of our hometown newspaper wrote a couple of regular columns himself. He was a brilliant, interesting man, to be sure. His main column was S.A.’s, a play on both the word ‘essays’ and his initials. It was generally a topical column that any brilliant news editor might produce.

The other column he wrote, which appeared somewhat less regularly, was “Things I Learned On the Way to Look Up Something Else.” If you were around, looking up information in pre-internet days, did that ever happen to you? It certainly happened to me, and my personal database is considerably richer as a result. A confession: I do love the internet, and almost everything associated with it. Even though I do love the web, all the search engines like Google, Bing, and whatever else (if anything) people use really limit, if they don’t completely eliminate, learning other facts ‘on the way to look up something else.’

You don’t have to be an absolute generalist to appreciate the loss of richness in our learning that has occurred as a result of the lightning fast and digitally accurate searches for those crucial facts we are seeking when we do a modern day search. While I don’t advocate…or even personally want…to turn the clock back to the so-called ‘good old days’ before we had the wonders of computerized search, I do recommend cracking a non-fiction book from time to time. You may be surprised what interesting and useful information you’ll pick up leafing through them!

Self Driving Cars? How About You?

You may have seen the news that Nevada has ok’ed licensing for Google to test one of their self-driving cars. This is both exciting and disconcerting, and raises as many new issues as it resolves. If perfected, the self-driving car will be a boon to those who aren’t able to drive. I have a couple of relatives who have lost sufficient sight as to be unable to drive now, and are always scrounging for rides to purchase groceries, necessities, and to make it to medical appointments. Self-driving cabs could be an interesting addition to major cities…although in addition to costing jobs, we would lose some colorful entertainment in the person of those often interesting cabbies.

The issue has already come up regarding insurance. If the car crashes, is the human passenger responsible? The company that provides it? The software designer? This will make for some interesting litigation as all of these details get sorted out over the course of years…just as every other area covered by insurance has been.

Here’s a thought though…who or what drives YOU? Do others drive you, are you self-driven like the Google car, or does a burning idea drive you to bring it to fruition? If it’s the former, it might be good to give some thought to making some changes in your life to roll with #2 or #3. You might not become another Google, but you will still go a lot further and faster down the road when it’s YOU at the wheel!

Sometimes the 2 Percent Outlier Happens

Sometimes, life throws a really interesting one at you. When you and others have carefully assessed a situation, and calculated the three possible outcomes and the likelihood of each…occasionally a 4th one turns out to be that one that no one even remotely considered…that 2% outlier that ‘never happens.’ The moral of this little post…like the Boy Scouts, ‘Be Prepared,’ even if it’s for that 2% outcome no one saw coming.

For those who live in earthquake country–so, do you have your emergency kit?

Will There Be a Dick Clark of the Internet?

With the passing this morning of Dick Clark, who gave us American Bandstand, game shows, and brought in the new year from Times Square for so many years, the question arises: will there be a Dick Clark for the internet?

Dick Clark gave numerous acts their big break during the golden age of Rock and Roll. There are so many rock acts that owe him, and certainly a legion of radio personalities and tv personalities who stand on his mighty shoulders. Will there be someone that can launch so many careers producing content on the web? Is it even reasonable to compare the content produced for radio and then television with that produced to entertain on the internet?

I don’t have the answer to that last question, but I sure hope so. It’s great to look to the iTunes Store or the Android Market for apps, and apps are content as surely as music was and is for radio, but will we see a larger than life personality who genuinely loves the content (whether music, video, apps, or whatever), and wants to share it as widely as possible explode on a web based platform to spread enjoyment through that content?

In Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Understanding Media,’ which came out decades ago, he stated that radio was the only ‘hot media,’ one that really touched people. My contention is that the internet is the second ‘hot media,’ in the way it touches people through social media, multiplayer games, chat, etc.

I’ll be waiting on that great internet Dick Clark to show up and spread the love of great content across the web universe. Sure hope he gets here before too long!

Not Quite Off the Grid

As I sit here, watching the blinking light on the cable modem, reminding me of its cohorts that are dark, it brought home again how dependent (some say addicted) we have become to this always-on, connected state.

Of course, there is a backup…the cellular system, but when the big one hits (maybe not an earthquake, but a tornado, hurricane, or whatever it is elsewhere), even that will be out.

After trying in whatever way to check on family and friends, my thought is, how will we Tweet, blog, and Facebook about it all? Will this be a new corollary to PTSD when folks aren’t able to do those things? Will there be “no Internet rage,” kind of like road rage, making it necessary to avoid irate people?

I don’t have the answers, but for now…I’m blogging about this!

The iPad Heat Fakeroversy

Here we go again. The new iPad reportedly runs as warm as 116 degrees when playing graphic intensive games. This is apparently 12-13 degrees hotter than the preceding model, the iPad 2. Even the testers admit that this is warm, but not really hot.

A few users have even gotten a heat warning on-screen…although in several cases, they were using the device in direct sunlight…never a brilliant idea with any battery powered electronic device.

This reporter can testify anecdotally that he has written this on one, and survived without any burns to the lap. What will the next silly non-issue be, and when will it be breathlessly reported? Stay tuned for a minute…that’s probably as long as you will have to wait!