When do you look at the price tag?

When you walk into a grocery store to buy a gallon of milk, do you look at the price of everything else?  You look at the strawberries, corn, and kumquats.  You look at the meat, eggs, and toilet paper.  You look at the price of 18 brands of peanut butter.  All on the way to the milk.  Does this sound like a ridiculous scenario?

No… you go to the milk section and look at the milk.  But do you look at all the milk prices?  Whole milk, skim milk, 2% milk, goat’s milk, soy milk, butter milk, almond milk, chocolate milk.  You check the price on an expired milk?

No… you look at the milk to find the right kind of milk (we drink skim) and THEN you compare prices.

So WHY in the world do you give a damn about salary requirements of every single applicant?

You need to look for who you want (the milk section), then you need to find the characteristics of the employee that you want (the characteristics of the milk), THEN you check the price.  If you are lucky, you have a few different candidates that are the right type of employee (2% milk) and you can do a price comparison.  But if there is only 1 kind of milk, you need to buy that milk AND if there is only 1 candidate who is a good fit, then you pay what they need.

If salary is your main focus, you don’t understand what your company needs and you will continue making  poor hiring decisions.

No Budget? No Problem.

IT leaderships talk about increasing pressures of lower budgets, reduced staff, more systems to support, the need to keep systems up to date, the need to introduce new technology, and the need to innovate and contribute value to the core business.  As a leader, I faced the same situation.  How do you introduce new technology with no budget?

Here’s two ways that I have successfully funded new technology projects.

Top Down

Top down funding is the traditional model of “getting stuff paid for” in IT.  But I’ve always approached it differently.  Typically, you know something you need, you get a quote, you ask for the money.  Here’s a new approach: ask people what they want.  I would try to meet with 1 or 2 department heads a week and talk about “how is my team doing?” but I would always end the meeting with a question:

What’s your teams biggest pain point right now?

Most of the time it wasn’t anything that I could influence but occasionally I’d have a conversation like this:

VP of Operations: Our kanban system is killing us.  We have runners that restock with assembly lines and sometimes lines will shut down because they are waiting for a runner to show up, see the empty kanban, fetch the part, and bring it back. I may have to hire another runner which is going to kill the labor budget.

Me: What if the runner knew about the empty kanban before he was at the line?  Like he was back at the inventory warehouse, fetching parts for line 1, and he just knew that line 2 just ran out of some part?  Would that help?

VP:  That would be incredible!

Me:  How much would that be worth?

VP:  Easily the salary of a runner plus another 1-2% efficiency on most lines.  Maybe $250,000 a year?

And that funded wireless VoIP…

Bottom Up

Bottom up is the funding methodology for highly scalable solutions like the cloud.  I wanted to implement Lync as a corporate messaging solution.  I knew that Lync would immediately improve collaboration across the engineering, design, and manufacturing teams but couldn’t find the metrics to support the actual improvement of efficiency and the CEO didn’t see the vision.

So I did “bottom up funding”.  I bought 4 Lync licenses with my discretionary funds for me and my senior system admins.  Then I invited the Director of Engineering to my office and arranged for one of my system admins to Lync me during the meeting.

Director of Engineering: What’s that?

Me: That?  Lync.  It’s really cool.  It’s a chat, video, audio instant messaging service my team uses for collaboration.  Let me show you.

Director: Sweet.  Can I get that for my team?

Me:  Yup.  It’s only $4.00/month per user.

Director:  I’ll take it.

A few weeks later, I get a call from the Design Manager.

Design Manager: Hey, I saw engineering using this new chat thing, Lync.  Can I get that?

Me: Yup.  It’s only $4.00/month per user.

A few weeks later, HR wants it… then accounting… pretty soon, we are using Lync.  The CEO tells me that he’s glad he supported the project.  So am I.

Are you too big for the cloud? Maybe… but probably not.

Yesterday I (along with a dozen other experts) spoke at Camp IT’s Cloud Computing Conference and on the 4 hour drive home thought a lot about the value proposition of cloud computing.  Let me share some of my thoughts and observations.

Cloud computing enables small companies to act like big companies…cheaply.

Imagine I open a company of one, DavidCo, manufacturer of the David5000, a revolutionary product that will sweep the world.  I need email, a website, an ordering system, and CRM to compete with BIGWIDGETS.  BIGWIDGETS has a dozen IT staff, each of whose individual salary is larger than my total revenue.

Enter the cloud.  I can get a website hosted in the cloud (no skill needed), which connects to my ordering system which I ordered through Salesforce.com, which connects to my email which I pay $10.00 a month for through Microsoft Office 365 or Google.  For around $50/month, I can compete with BIGWIDGETS and probably do so better than BIGWIDGETS.

Cloud computing enables big companies to react like small companies.

Eventually DavidCo gets acquired by BIGWIDGETS and because of my brilliant leveraging of technology as a competitive advantage, I am asked to be CIO of BIGWIDGETS.  BIGWIDGETS is having a hard time keeping up with the pace of development and change.  Seasonal ordering cycles are playing havoc on their website and order processing time.

Enter the cloud.  In minutes, I can rapidly spin up 1 server, or 100 servers, or 1,000 servers.  When I don’t need them, I turn them off.  I only pay for what I use.  I can create an entire datacenter in the cloud faster than I can put an order in for physical servers with my VAR, let alone the 2-4 weeks to receive the servers, the 2-4 weeks to configure them, etc, etc, etc…

The cloud is just a timeshare.

The cloud (Amazon, Microsoft, VMWare, Cisco, whatever) is really just a timeshare.  A timeshare is a bunch of condos (individual resources like servers), pooled together into a big building (pooled together like the cloud), and leased out when you need a room or two or twelve.

So when are you too big for the cloud?

When you can either (1) fill the entire timeshare consistently or (2) you are large enough to have overcome the economy of scale advantage and have a predictable and controllable rate of growth that allows you to meet the scalability needs of your organization.

If you fill the entire timeshare 24x7x365 days a year, it’s not really a timeshare anymore.  The “share” in timeshare is gone.  The shared resource pool of cloud is gone.  There is no advantage to the shared resource pool.

The reason cloud providers are more affordable to small or medium sized folks is that small and medium sized businesses only used 1-10% of their resources and do not have a pricing advantage of a large organization like Google.  If you work in a very large organization and if you have a stable and predictable rate of growth, you can build your own “internal” or “private” cloud which has all of the advantages of a public cloud.  Many large organizations, Cisco is one, have done this.

Here’s the skinny.

Unless you are a very, very, ginormous organization you are going to get some advantages from the public cloud.  I’d encourage you to look at it.

If you need a speaker for your group or organization on cloud computing or leadership, reach out.

Can, will, want.

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about interviewing.  Interviewing is important.  Hiring is important.  It is one of the most important things leaders do.  If you make a bad hire, you have the cost of hiring, then the cost of training, the lost productivity, the cost of firing, the loss of reputation (you make bad decisions), and then the cost of trying to fill the position again…

Someone asked me what I look for when interviewing.  I look for three things:

Can, Will, Want

1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you do the job?
3. Do you want to do the job?

These are three radically different things.

“Can you do the job” is a matter of skills, education, and experience.  Do you have the functional knowledge and capacity to do the tasks that I need you to do to be successful at the job?  Many employers stop there.  I think this is 10% of the interview.  Sure I want to know if you can do the job but if you can but won’t it really doesn’t matter.

“Will you do the job” is a question of motivation.  If you are able (“can”), are you motivated (“will”)?  A really good company gets to motivation.  This is a good 30% of my interview.  Are you the kind of person that is driven to produce quality work?  Do you take pride in your work?  Are you proactive or am I going to have to constantly make sure you are staying busy?

Here’s the “want”.  Do you want to work here?  Let me tell you about the good, bad, and ugly of this job.  Let me tell you about me as a boss.  My expectations, my team, my communication style.  Do you want to work for me?  See I want someone who wants to work for me.  People don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses. (Hall, 2013)  I want someone who is in it for the long haul.  For me, this is the last 60%.

Here’s the big secret.

If you have the ‘Will’ and the ‘Want’, I can train the ‘Can’.  If you don’t have the ‘Will’ or the ‘Want’, all the ‘Can’ in the world isn’t worth a hill of beans.

A Better Interview

Are you interviewing and saying all the right things but not getting the call?  Are you an interviewer hiring folks who turn out “okay” or worse?  I have an answer.

This is my formula for success, it’s not science, and it’s the same for both parties (interviewer and interviewee).

Here’s the secret sauce.

BE HONEST.

For interviewee, stop trying to give “the right answer”, give “your answer”.  Imagine someone interviewing for the position of system administrator:

Interviewer:  Tell me about your ideal job.

Interviewee (“right” answer):  The job description that you posted.  To the tee.  Everything that you’ve posted at this company, that I’ve dreamt of working at since birth.

Interviewee (“your” answer):  I’ve always enjoyed working with technology but lately I’ve been thinking about the importance of good training.  The training I’ve received has been really important in my career success and maybe someday I’ll get to pay that forward as a trainer or teacher.  Right now I like to help mentor the service desk people.

Interviewee (“your” answer 2):  I’d like to do more with networking.  I’ve been doing systems administration for a while and although I don’t think I’m ready for a career change, I’d look for opportunities to cross-train with your network team.

Interviewee (“your” answer 3):  I’d like to write science fiction!  I’ve been wondering how to combine my technical expertise and writing.  It’s a hobby now but if I could do it professionally, it would be awesome!

The “right” answer tells me nothing.  You are forgettable.  By being honest, at least you are interesting and maybe I can imagine some skill that you have that would differentiate you from the 75,000 other candidates (training, networking, technical writing…).

“BE HONEST” applies to interviewers too.  Imagine the describing the company preamble (the same job) while being honest:

HR (version 1):  We are a pretty political organization.  It takes multiple levels of approval to implement new processes so you need to be pretty good at maneuvering the organizational politics.

HR (version 2):  We are a family owned company.  We have lots of company picnics and family friendly events throughout the year.  If you’re going to connect with people, you need to be comfortable attending these events.  Although they’re optional events; they’re really not.  The owners notice who attends and who doesn’t.

HR (version 3):  We are undergoing a lot of growth right now and things have been changing really fast.  We hear a lot of people say that they might only see their manager once a day.  You need to hit the ground running, be able to function without direct management, and will probably need to work 5-10 hours of overtime a week for the next year.

Three ENTIRELY different kinds of people are going to be successful in this job, because the organizations are ENTIRELY different.  Someone who knows they aren’t going to succeed in those environments will RUN from your opening.  Someone who will succeed will be ENERGIZED by your description.

But being honest requires that you stop trying to fill a position and start trying to find a match.

Don’t look for a body to put in a seat.  Look for the right person.

Start by being honest about your company and your self.  Really.  Try it.  You will be much happier with your hires and your job.

Credibility is foundational

I’ve been thinking a lot about credibility today.  Credibility means “the quality of being trusted and believed in.”

So much of my success has been being credible.  I am candid… to a fault.  People often say “no one has ever said that to me before.”  It’s not that I’m particularly different than you; I just don’t have time to do the verbal dance.  Let me give you and example.  I was interviewing a candidate for an open position in my department, here’s how the interview started:

Me:  I’ve been looking over your resume and I have three concerns.  One, you’ve been out of enterprise IT for three year; I think your skills are out of date.  Two, when you were in enterprise IT, you were in management for quite a while; I think that you are going to come in here, use this job as a stepping stone to get back into IT management.  Three, you are asking for a salary 2/3rds of your previous salary.  I think you are going to come in here and still be looking for a job at your previous salary.  How do you address my three concerns?

The interview was focused and fast.  The candidate read me as someone who was going to see through the standard interview BS and was candid with me.  The candidate said “no one has ever told me these concerns in an interview before.”  It was a good interview.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.

What do you do if you have no credibility?

I’ve never been in a situation where I had so sullied my reputation that I had no credibility.  I’m trying to help someone in this situation.  Worse, what if you have no credibility but don’t realize that you have no credibility…

So much of success is built on credibility…  It’s really a conundrum.

It’s not my job.

I get pulled into a lot of OPP (Other Peoples’ Problems).  These are problems that involve two or more groups than have nothing to do with me.  They have nothing to do with my group, nothing to do with anything my group does, has responsibility for, or can fix.  This is about how I solve these and stay sane.

Recently, I got pulled into an OPP that was holding up a client deliverable.  One of the people tried to throw the problem over the wall to me, thinking I would “do it” because they didn’t want to.  So I walked over to their cubicle (situations like this are face-to-face situations).

Other Person (OP):  It’s really OP2’s responsibility.  Someone needs to work with OP3 and OP4 to create the deliverable.

Me:  Ah.  Is that on your calendar?

OP:  No.  I’m too busy.

Me: (thinking “too busy to do your job?” and “I’m pretty damn busy myself.”)  Ah.  So you gave it to me?

OP:  Well, I don’t have time to do it!

Me:  Let me try to help you.

A little later… Other Person 2 (OP2) and I meet.

OP2:  I don’t have access to do it.  OP has to do it.

Me:  OP said you are supposed to work with OP3 and OP4.

OP2:  Well, I’m too busy to do it.

Me:  Okay.  So you are too busy to do it, OP is too busy to do it, and the customer is waiting.  Let me try to help.

Let me cut to the chase.  I ended up working with OP3 and OP4 to solve the immediate issue, then wrote a procedure about how to handle this type of client request in the future, and a RACI (Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed) framework to outline specific tasks in the future.  My team was nowhere in the RACI.

I’m sure this happens to you.  You get OPP as well.  How do you deal with OPP and stay sane?

You could join the throngs of people whining “It’s not my job”.  Or you could do something helpful.

I like having a reputation as “the guy who gets shit done.”

The way I stay sane is that I remember the reason I get roped into Other Peoples’ Problems, it’s because I have a reputation as “the guy who gets shit done.”  People want me on their team because I know how to move a project forward, I know how to keep teams focused, and I know how to deliver results.

If you find yourself in the middle of OPP, you probably have that reputation too.  You should be happy about that.

The Real Moral of The Tortoise & The Hare

Remember the Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise & The Hare”?  I always hated that story.  “Slow and steady wins the race” – what a load of crap.  The rabbit should have kicked the turtle’s ass.  I hate that story… no wait… I hate the moral of the story… or at least the moral that people usually associate with that story.  Let me tell you the real moral of “The Tortoise & The Hare”.

First, “The Tortoise & The Hare”:  If you’ve never read it, you can read one translation here.  In a nutshell, a turtle & a rabbit race.  The turtle wins because the rabbit dashes off in the beginning but stops and takes a nap or plays in the sun or something else before finishing.  The moral that most people associate with it is “slow and steady wins the race.”  Ugh.

 

Let me step back another step.  Someone asked me why I blog, which is really a question about for whom I blog.  Firstly, I blog for my kids.  I hope that someday they will want to know more about what sort of leader their dad was, what he was thinking when he was at work, and I hope that they learn something about leadership.  Secondly, I blog for anyone who knows me personally or professionally.  Sometimes, I think people have to wonder what the hell I’m thinking when I make some decision, so I brain dump here.  This gives my staff a chance to read unfiltered thoughts in their boss’s brain.  I know at least one of my staff reads this.  Thirdly, I blog for anyone else who cares.  Sometimes I have to include personal details that I wouldn’t normally tell the world, that people might think is bragging, but if you remember that I’m talking to my kids and you are eavesdropping, you might understand.

Given that I’m writing about the Tortoise & The Hare because…

I want my kids to hear “slow and steady wins the race” and cry out “BS!” 

When I was a young, my daughters age as I write this, my junior high school counselor gave me an IQ test and proceeded to tell my teachers, in front of me, that I was pretty darn smart.  Stay with me.  I’ll bring this back to the rabbit/turtle.  The counselor actually said to one teacher “David is smarter than you.  He’s smarter than me.  He’s smarter than every one in this school or likely to ever go to this school.”

That pretty much screwed me up for the rest of my teenage years.

I thought because I was clever that I was entitled to success.  I should win because I was smart.

The rabbit thought because he was fast that he was entitled to success.  He should win because he was fast.

See what I did there?

Natural ability doesn’t mean crap.  You have to work hard.  Had I figured that out about 15 years earlier than I did, my life would have been radically different.  Remember that, kids.  I said the same thing this morning over breakfast.

My kids are smart.  Very smart.  I suspect they are geniuses (I know everyone thinks their kids are smart; however, I’m using the clinical definition of genius 140+ IQ).  But I don’t want them to think that being a genius means that life owes them more.  It means that they owe life more.

With great power comes great responsibility. – Stan Lee

Okay.  Everyone else… I promised you the real moral of “The Tortoise & The Hare”.

The real moral of the story is:  natural ability doesn’t matter without hard work.

If the rabbit had worked hard he would have kicked the turtles ass.  Period.  “Slow and steady” – my ass.

Stop Reading Leadership Articles!

Can we all agree to stop reading leadership articles?  Let me explain.

I just read another great leadership article about great things that great companies should be doing to have a great culture and/or have great people and/or great productivity.  I send these great articles to my peers, email them to my staff, tweet them, share them on LinkedIn in an effort to encourage and edify my fellow leaders to read them.  I was going to this in an effort to promote it to my connected network when I had a flashback to a conversation I had a bit ago…

I was working for a company that had the kludgiest process for tracking vacation time/sick time of any company I have ever seen.  Employees verbally requested time off from their immediate supervisor; there was no paper trail.  Employees self-reported via email time off to their department head (not their immediate supervisor); this created for all sorts of reporting errors.  The department heads reported time off to HR via email.  HR tracked time off in a spreadsheet that was emailed to the department heads.  The department heads parsed the spreadsheet to the immediate supervisor.  The immediate supervisor communicated the balances to the staff.

Aside from the insane level of manual work, opportunity for error, and redundant effort, here’s the most ridiculous part:  we were already using ADP for payroll and they would track all this, automatically, for pennies per employee.

So David (who is never afraid to ask a dumb question) talked to his boss and said:

Can I ask a dumb question?  Why don’t we have ADP track this mess?  You are spending a ridiculous amount of time tracking this crap; I spend a ridiculous amount of time doing this.  It’s full of errors.  It’s got to cost us a stupid amount of money.

David’s boss said:

I think it’s a great idea.  Every company I’ve worked for has done that.  I don’t know.  Talk to HR.

So David (who is never afraid to ask a dumb question) wandered down to HR and said:

Can I ask a dumb question?  I was talking to my boss about vacation and sick time tracking.  Why don’t we have ADP track this mess?  We are spending a ridiculous amount of time tracking this crap; I imagine that you spend a ridiculous amount of time doing this.  It’s full of errors.  It’s got to cost us a stupid amount of money.

HR said:

I think it’s a great idea.  Every company I’ve worked for has done that.  I don’t know.  Talk to Accounting.

So David (who is never afraid to ask a dumb question) wandered down to Accounting and said:

Can I ask a dumb question?  I was talking to my boss and HR about vacation and sick time tracking.  Why don’t we have ADP track this mess?  We are spending a ridiculous amount of time tracking this crap; I imagine that you spend a ridiculous amount of time doing this.  It’s full of errors.  It’s got to cost us a stupid amount of money.

Accounting said:

I think it’s a great idea.  Every company I’ve worked for has done that.  I don’t know.  Talk to management.

And David’s head exploded (ala Michael Ironside in the 1981 SciFi classic Scanners).

I said “Stop.  I’ve talked to management.  I’ve talked to IT.  I’ve talked to HR.  I’ve talked to Accounting.   Every individual person I talk to thinks this is  a great idea.”

“When can we stop talking about this being a great idea and start doing it?”

So how about that?

How about we all stop reading great business leadership articles and start doing them?

How about we agree to stop reading about developing people and actually develop our people?

How about we agree to stop reading about treating our employees like people and start treating them like people?

How about we agree to stop reading about firing bad leaders and fire bad leaders?

How about we agree to stop reading about encouraging innovation and actually encourage innovation?

I Can Do Better.

I work for a pretty awesome man.  I just figured out why he’s so awesome:  he makes me a better leader.  He pushes me to be better with one simple phrase.

“I think you can do better.”

Most of the time my first pass is pretty damn good.  I can usually put together a presentation, PowerPoint, RFP, proposal, analysis, whatever and my superiors are delighted with my output.  I’ve always focused on creating quality goods the first time.

This guy looks at my first pass and gives me real feedback.  Things that aren’t exactly what he wanted.  Things that could be better.  And sometimes he says “I think you can do better.”

At first, I had a tough time going from everyone loving everything I did to someone giving me feedback.  But I listened and applied his feedback.

And he was right.

I could do better.  I look at the first pass product and think “that was good, but this is great.”  I’d love to take credit for the great results but I can’t.  It’s a collaborative work.  Our ideas together are better.

I’ve told him that he makes me a better leader.  I think that’s the best compliment a leader can give another leader.

I hope I earn that compliment someday.

Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. – Judeo-Christian Proverb