It’s Not My Problem/Business

A friend on Facebook recently asked about the relevance of Yelp (and other user-style volunteer) reviews. He said, “To me the content feels like collated, anonymous hearsay.” Of course, the alternative would be the paid professional/political-announcement style reviews we should all be taking with a block of salt in magazines, blogs, television, the internet, and newspapers. Having read and written product and performance reviews since I was 13, when I submitted a whiny little-kid letter to Downbeat Magazine that the editor mistook for a “review” and published it as such, I usually apply more weight to end-user reviews than to “professional” opinions, unless there is technical content involved.

Opinions are, as everyone knows, like assholes. On a weirdly-weighted site like Amazon, I look at the negative reviews first to get the “bad news” over with, then the middle-weighted reviews for the whole picture, and, rarely, scan the paid 5-star reviews to see what the company line might be. I still get misled occasionally, but not as often as I would if I just looked at the overall star-count or read the pointless 5-star reviews.

Lots of people and businesses don’t like the end-user review system, from academics to small business and services to giant monopolies like Amazon. That, of course, doesn’t mean that these reviews are wrong or even particularly effective in affecting business behavioral change. The thinner the skin and the more aggrieved the business response, most likely, the more accurate a negative review probably is.

For example, an acquaintance of my friend wrote, "As a restaurant/bar owner I believe there really isn't a reason for these type of sites. If you are a decent, strong human being, if there is a problem you will always speak in person, in private, to the manager or owner, because you care about the business and you care about its employees that need jobs and you want to see the business do well. If everything is great you can always give a good review on your own social media platforms. . .”

This reminds me of a similar experience I had in a vocational class a few years ago and I wrote about that in “How Quality Feedback Really Works” and I kept beating that horse with "Quality in the Disposable World." I summarized my take on customer feedback, “Small quantity (boutique) production and service businesses don’t have access to actual numbers and formal inspection procedures and if they rely on customer complaints for feedback they are committing business suicide. In fact, the only way a small business can get any kind of information about customer satisfaction is to hunt for it. When someone cares enough about the product or its performance to complain, a conscious customer service tech should take that complaint seriously and to heart. The 1% of your customer base who care enough about your product or their expectations to complain are rare and valuable. If you choose to ignore them, don’t complain when your customer base makes its buying decisions solely on price and delivery. You have informed them through your actions that you don’t give a shit about their expectations and the result is that they won’t care about you or your company’s survival.” But that requires the owner of the business to actually care about something other than convenience and income and that is rare as hens’ retirement plans.

After working for a half-dozen small companies during the first 20 years of my career, I decided to actively pursue Intel CEO Andy Grove’s advice, "Each individual must build the kind of career strength that makes him or her marketable. No matter where you work, you are not an employee. You are in a business with one employer - yourself, in competition with millions of similar businesses worldwide. . . Nobody owes you a career - you own it as a sole proprietor. And the key to survival is to learn to add more value everyday.“ An addition I tacked to that advice was a tactic I ended up needing to pay attention to way too often, “I have no reason to care more about this business that the people who have the most to gain from its survival.” I augmented that rule with “I am not going to make another nitwit into a millionaire.” (In those first 20 years, I rescued three circling-the-toilet companies from their owners’ worst instincts and two of them were sold for a substantial profit soon after I left and one went back to old habits and soon vanished from corporate history.

A slight, but very helpful (to me) variation on that 2nd rule is “I will not be a manager in a dysfunctional business.” My 30-day stint as manufacturing and engineering manager for a trainwreck of a company in Indiana put the nail into that rule that has stuck since. Not volunteering for a “promotion” into middle management freed my energy and time so that, eventually, I was able to put my whole self into three one-man service businesses that I ran between 2000 and 2015 (when I retired the last of those companies) and my paid hobby as a Minnesota State Motorcycle Safety Instructor (from which I retired in 2018).

So, not only do I believe there is some value in end-user goods and services reviews, I think they are a business’ best (and sometimes only) chance to know what your customers really think of you. Ignore them at your own risk. Many have and many have died as a result.

Banned by Amazon’s Robocops

April 10, 2023 This past Friday I received an email from Amazon titled “Unusual Reviewing Behavior.” The message inside was, “We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.  If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com.” If you’re bored enough to follow that “community guidelines” link you’ll discover it is almost as helpful as FEMA under a Republican administration. That description applies to all of the communications I’ve ever seen from Amazon, too. The company is so big that it no longer feels any need to communicate with its customers.

In the past twelve months, I’d received two notices from Amazon’s “bot algorithm” claiming that “You  have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines (available at http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines) or Conditions of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088).” There was no indication of where I had “repeatedly” violated anything and since I used to regularly review music, books, and occasional products I was in the dark. I responded to their “community-help” robot with “If you don’t have a system to help identify what you call a violation for users, how do you expect anyone to self-correct?” And that has been the end of our “communications.” Of course, in the lazy-robo-programmer tradition, there was no way for me to identify what review Amazon’s robot was objecting to, so examining what it was that the bot objected to was impossible. . However, as an obvious “libtard” I suspect the actual objection came when some wingnut “reported” one of my book or movie reviews and inappropriate or some other typical snowflake objection.

For a fact, I know that Amazon’s ‘bot wasn’t activated by an excessive number of positive reviews. I almost never give anything a 5-star review and I almost never think anything, product-person-or-organization rates an “excellent” rating. Likewise, I rarely give 1-star ratings. Again, not many things are outright awful. I do review a fair number of books that I’ve checked out of my local libraries through Kindle. So my “verified buyer” numbers do not correlate to my book reviews. But after the first Amazon threat of banning, I have contained my book and movie reviews to the Minneapolis Public Library system.

Amazon is obviously overwhelmed by the outcome of their AI review “analysis” and banishing pogrom. It seems that there should be a substantial backlash to the company’s actions and I suspect there has been. There has been a sudden rash of complaints about this robocop-crap and you’ll find an almost unlimited number of people wondering what is going on at Amazon on diverse sites from the  amazonforum.com to forums.macrumors.com to quora.com to reddit.com to businessinsider.com to Amazon’s own vendors who complain about informative reviews disappearing.

For me, this forced a self-admission that I have been lazy and this has been a wake-up call. A little on-line searching and I found all sorts of substitutes for Amazon’s dismal service including Rakuten.com, Walmart.com, AliExpress.com, and for a few extra pennies I started going direct to some of the vendors I’d bought from through Amazon in the past, especially my subscription services. This wake-up call comes at a pretty interesting time for me, too. Looking back at my last year of Amazon purchases I discovered that I’ve returned about 1/4 of the semi-major purchases I’ve made with the monolith due to defects, obviously previous use, and gross mislabeling either by Amazon or the vendor. Electronics from Amazon is almost consistently a bad bet.I have had far better results with electronics from NewEgg.com. NewEgg's customer service is terrific and the people who do customer reviews on NewEgg are technically competent.

This is an example of damaged or
used stuff Amazon's Chinese vendors
ship to US customers. I had to cancel
payment through my bank to get
Amazon to refund this purchase.

I’d suspect that a lot of Asian vendors are dumping their junk inventory on Amazon under the safe assumption that Americans who are lazy enough to buy online are also too lazy to complain when their purchases are defective or damaged or even “previously owned.” 25% defects is a terrible batting average and a friend who gave up on Amazon a few years ago swears that the stuff he gets from AliExpress is consistently better quality and far cheaper than any similar products coming from Amazon. It makes sense, since almost everything Amazon sells is made in China and the things that aren’t made in China are available directly from those companies. 

Again, why wouldn’t Chinese companies dump their junk through Amazon and sell their good stuff directly through their own outlets? That is how the long, sad history of vanishing American manufacturing has gone since the 70s and, now, we may be seeing the same thing happen to American retail. If I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I makes no sense to be building a brand for another country or business. Remember Superscope from the 1960s? I didn't think so. 

Living without Amazon is a lot easier than I suspected. I gave up on Prime a couple of years ago because their video selection was pitiful and I almost never got anything in less than 3-4 days, regardless of their 2-day shipping promise. There are all sorts of articles about ditching Prime: "How to Officially Break Up with Amazon" is a terrific primer on how to wean yourself from Amazon's clickbait. Buying from Amazon is bad for your local economy and the company treats its employees like crap, so everything about Amazon is bad karma. Like dumping Twitter and Facebook, the longer I stay away from Amazon the better I feel about that decision. I think this is going to be a beautiful non-relationship.

The Rat’s Rules: #6 If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying

““If You’re Not Growing You’re Dying” is probably one of the most misunderstood business rules in a long, long list of misunderstood business rules. Too many mismanagers mistake that phrase to mean the growth is the agent that keeps the business alive. That is not what the phrase means, or should mean.

It’s more important to stay alive than to grow, ask any number of short people or many exceptionally long people. Concentrating on growth allows lazy mismanagers to pretend to have their eye on the target while looking at easy stuff that could be handled by an intern: a stupid, unmotivated intern. Growth mismanagers worry about advertising/marketing, paying the sales force more to develop more sales, reducing costs (like R&D, manufacturing, or employee development), and juggling the books to provide the appearance of growth. None of those things are likely to create long term growth and most of them waste resources that will likely kill the business.

If that kind of mismanager were inclined to take advice from an honest consultant (both, a rare breed), that consultant would tell the growth mismanager  “Don’t worry about growing, dumbass. You are dying. Try to concentrate on staying alive.” Not growing is a symptom of dying, not the core problem. As any old person who has lived long enough to begin to lose height. It isn’t the lost inch or two that is the problem, the problem is being old and close to dying.

“Staying alive” activities are (in order): superior customer service, staying close to customers to determine their needs and desires, creating reliable and innovative products, employee development, and (dead last by several lengths) marketing and sales. When you ask an ex-customer of a company that was once considered excellent why they now dislike or distrust that company, 99% of the time I’d bet the answer will be “they treated me like crap.” Poor customer service will flip a loyal customer to a hater in a few seconds. That kind of hater will spread poisonous word-of-mouth stories that no marketing plan could ever keep up with. There is an old restaurant management rule that says something like “It takes $50 in advertising to get a new customer to try your business, 5 seconds of poor service to lose them, and $5,000 in advertising to get them to try you again.” The cost of poor service is under-rated, often ignored, and when it has gone on too long there is no road back for the company. No one can afford to spend $5,000 to attract a customer for a $20 meal.

22 years ago, I started my RatsEyeView.com (a domain I gave up a few years ago) business page and this blog to attract customers to the business consulting companies I worked for. I was a sub-contractor, most often, for D&H Consulting out of Rancho Santa Fe, CA working with an old friend from California on improving quality management and inventory control. I didn’t last long, 3 or 4 projects I think. It was soon apparent to me that in the early 2000s the corporate rewards were going to mismanagers who could downsize operations to little more than marketing and sales, passing off manufacturing and service to overseas manufacturers and contract companies. What these CEOs and other corner-office creeps wanted to hear was “How much do you like my poetry?” The only "improvement" they had in mind was in their own salary and perks. Almost universally, these mismanagers were all proud holders of the most worthless degree in academia, the MBA. Someone once said that you could sum up the entirety of a Harvard MBA with “Push blame down and pull credit up.” If any of the corporate “leaders” I consulted with had other skills, they did not display them around me. Every one of the companies we worked with has since been absorbed by another entity now, most at bargain basement prices. The CEOs, though, made out like the bandits they are.The businesses and employees were trashed like they were the disposable private property of the executives and, usually, the stockholders got the shaft too.

Why people like that keep getting hired is impossible to explain. Killing a business ought to be a scarlet letter on an executive’s resume, but it doesn’t work that way. Corporate American seems to protect and reward the really major failures. Which is why our companies keep dying while they focus on growth and keep over-paying executives who don’t produce revenue or customer satisfaction.

Go figure.

Locally Smocally

An acquaintance in our little town is trying to promote a “buy locally” program that is loosely based on variations of the food co-ops and small business crowd-funding. It’s a pretty hard sell pitch, which always puts me on guard. On top of that the argument that “the national system is rigged against the small investor, so you should really like investments that you can talk, personally, to the owners and employees” has a scary, familiar ring to me.

Talking to a small business owner is pretty useless, information-wise. I’ve worked for a half-dozen small businesses and what I learned from that experience is that con artists don’t limit themselves to Wall Street. That’s where the Big Cons live, but for every Big Con there are thousands of Little Cons and most of them work their scams in small businesses of a wide variety: from home improvement contractors to car dealerships to investment councilors to small town banks. The thing they all have in common is that they don’t report to anyone until they are on their way to jail or bankruptcy court.

Not many years ago, an acquaintance from high school demonstrated this too well for me when his “investment company” was discovered to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme and a large number of investors discovered they were broke. I’ve been a low-key investor since the late 1970‘s and I’ve had more than my share of ups-and-downs over those years, but I have never lost everything with any of the mediocre-to-not-awful big brokers I’ve worked through. Merrill Lynch was pretty terrible back in the 1980’s when their “advisors” were steering small investors into whatever heavily discounted piece of crap their executives were shilling for, but it has never been difficult for me to ignore financial advice from people who are not rich. The one decent tip I got from my Merrill Lynch broker was Marvel Entertainment, when that company went public in 1986. We didn’t get out of the Reagan years without a collection of recessions and stock crashes and my Marvel stock didn’t do any better than most of the rest of the economy. I dumped it to help finance a house in Colorado in ‘91 and I’m not sure which “investment” would have done better. I did fairly well with the house. Marvel stock really hit the trashcan in the mid-90’s.

I was in some kind of management capacity in every small company I worked for, except the last one; McNally Smith College (which suddenly, but predictably, went broke in late 2017). By then, I’d decided that I wouldn’t make another nitwit into a millionare and that I’d never again try to manage people in a dysfunctional organization. (The top levels of mismanagement at McNally Smith College was a colection of dysfunction that would have embarrassed Trump. I knew associating closely with that crowd would be self-defeating.) My experiences at the other small companies were relentlessly discouraging; from outright corruption and misrepresentation to the usual series of fairytales designed to keep employees from bolting to more secure or better-paying employment. From the inside of all but one of those companies, no one who worked there would invest a penny of their own money regardless of the promises made by ownership. I didn’t even trust most of those employers to honestly manage 401k funds and my IRAs are the reason I’m retired today. My employer funds consistently lost money, even the Fortune 100 employer IRAs were mediocre investment vehicles.

So, “investing” at the local level rarely gets past the level of “crowd funding” or panhandling. There is no SEC, as weak as that organization occasionally becomes, to make even a haphazard effort to monitor company finances. There is no good reason to imagine that a small business owner would disclose bad news to potential investors. The “investment” is not liquid in any fashion, as I can attest to since I still own some weird and obscure portion of one of my past employer’s business that I’ve been unable to cash out of in 40-plus years. In the end, it’s just crowdfunding/electronic-panhandling and I can always think of better places to put my contribution money than small businesses. It’s not like our government is doing such a good job of protecting democracy, providing a safety net, ensuring “liberty and justice for all,” or even managing national security that there are no more important causes so I might as well try small business crowdfunding.

Sweet Dreams

I recently connected to an old friend who I haven’t seen or talked to in at least 30 years. He spent his entire life, outside of vacation travel, in Nebraska and most of that in small town Nebraska. I could have easily led that life at one time, but economics, chance, opportunity, and restlessness ended up sending me to a lot of places I would have never expected to see and experience. In one of many conversations with my friend and his wife, we touched on the dreams we’ve had that carried emotion, meaning, and resonance to our lives. My friend and his wife are religious and the dreams they described had to do with that subject. My dream was very different and their perspective and ideals reminded me of that near-spiritual dream that I still occasionally have.

After my decade in medical devices, I was a mental train wreck. Being asked to help the richest people I’ve ever known cover-up device failures that had killed patients, tortured even more patients, and bankrupted many others caused me to lose the ability to read for almost half of a year. In retrospect, I realize that some part of my brain decided that if my consciousness wasn’t going to do the right thing the next best thing was to incapacitate my ability to do the wrong thing. Many people imagine that becoming a whistle-blower is either some form of treason or is as easy as going with the flow and doing what the higher-ups demand. It isn’t and if you have never had the skills or talent to be in a position to be pressed to consider having moral backbone to blow the whistle on corruption and evil in high places you have no basis with which to compare your situation to that miserable place. This essay isn’t about that dilemma, but if it were it would be longer, sadder, and more revealing that I am likely to ever be in this blog. This essay is about the dream that signaled my release from that situation.

About three months after I quit Guidant, a St. Paul medical devices company and my last corporate employer, I had the dream that turned out to be an important part of my release from the hell that had become my employment “contract.” I was mostly unemployed, living on savings and some meager self-employment and contract tech work, the economy was in free fall because of the 9/11 attacks, and my future as a 52-year-old mid-tech technical writer and engineer was totally in doubt. I still could not, yet, read and comprehend the captions below pictures in newspapers. My sole dependable income was teaching motorcycle safety classes on weekends and, occasionally, weekdays. That particular early morning, I would be teaching my first classroom in this new career. To that day, studying the materials I had to absorb to become an MSF instructor had required that I read a list of 132 questions and memorize the course-accepted answers. Because of my reading disability I had spent hundreds of hours staring at the study guides and instructors’ manuals to get to the point that I had the gist of those documents memorized. The chance that I might have a clear moment and would be able to read the test questions to my students was too much to risk, so I memorized the test. That evening I had spent six hours just going over the test questions and I could spout “What is important to know about a convex mirror?” and when #19’s time came or when I heard “#39” my kneejerk response was “List the three-step process to shift to a higher gear.”

The last thing that I remember from the fleeting moments of sleep the morning of the day I regained my ability to read again was an incredible feeling of well-being as I rode my motorcycle from my garage into the street and in every direction I saw “suits” hanging from every telephone pole down my Little Canada street, along Little Canada Road to the I35E freeway entrance and all along the freeway to the Century Avenue exit on I694. Then I woke up. I don’t remember what led to that image, if there was a story that precluded the sight of so many corporate executives getting their just deserts. The dream was more a release from the self-torture I’d subjected myself to as a consequence of working for one of the many entirely self-serving, psychopathic, and outright evil corporations this greed-loving country has spawned. There wasn’t much of a story behind that grand sight, as I remember it. It was just a beatific scene from a world gone wrong that had self-corrected.

I had that wonderful dream repeatedly for about a month and intermittently for the next year or so. Then it stopped. The part of the dream I remember always woke me up about the time I needed to be getting out of bed. The feeling it left me with was always a great sense of peace because “truth, justice, and the American way” had been restored in my world. Sometimes, I suspect that there is a lot of French in my English and German heritage because the revolution I most empathize with is the French Revolution. Being a savage US citizen, I see the 1% being hanged from telephone poles rather than guillotined, but the end result is the same.

Of course, none of that will ever happen here. We’re a nation of serfs who love to serve and obey our masters while they misdirect our anger and violence toward other members of the 99%. The chances that Americans will rise up and throw off the shackles of failed and corrupt capitalism and its bedfellow, fascism, are about as good as are the odds that we’ll figure out space travel before the next ecological catastrophe wipes us from the earth: zero-to-none. But . . . damn! That was one sweet dream and I go to bed every night hoping I’ll get to experience it again.

Sears: Tearing Failure from the Arms of Success

When I was a kid in small town western Kansas, back in the 1950’s, Sears and Roebuck was king of retail; mail-order retail, that is. Every home had a big Sears catalog somewhere prominent and Sears was the place to go for furniture, appliances, hand and power tools, and clothing. By the 1960’s, my hometown had an actual Sears store which stocked the most popular items and made ordering from the catalog even easier. Over the years, Sears morphed into full fledged department stores and, now, these things they call “Hometown Stores”: which are micro-stores that offer free “delivery” (to the store) of items not stocked in the store. Sears is sort of like Amazon with an inconvenient delivery system.

Still, that could work if the Sears mismanagement team had some idea what the 21st Century looks like. They don’t. Sears has been losing money, consistently every quarter, for years. Sears Holdings, the TBTF holding company that now clings to Sears and Kmart, appears to be completely clueless about modern retail, website presence, and management of a business in general. It’s almost impossible to imagine that some senior executive from Sears Holdings would not end up in Trump’s cabinet: they are that stupid. Almost as if he was created by a Hollywood screenplay writer for the part, the Sears’ CEO’s name is “Edward Lampert.” I shit you not. Right out of 1880, his advice to Sears employees who are staring unemployment in the face was, “I’m asking each of you to work faster and smarter and to sharpen your efforts throughout the year.” Of course, Eddie Lampert will be sitting in his corner office, twiddling his thumbs or dialing an Aspen real estate broker as he looks for a place to spend his unearned and undeserved $4,300,585 salary. No chance any responsibility for Sears’ failure belongs to the top guy, right?

It’s almost worth buying something from a local store to get a feel for how backwards Sears Holdings is. I guess I performed that experiment for you when I bought a super-cheap Kenmore/Maytag dishwasher from my local Hometown Store. The store was, of course, a well-run, neat and organized local business, but the on-sale item I wanted to buy had to be ordered. Supposedly, the appliance would be delivered in a week or so and “we’ll call you” when it arrives. You’d think Sears would have an automatic notification system for when products can be picked up, like almost every other big box retailer on the planet has, but you’d be wrong. I discovered my dishwasher was waiting to be picked up by calling the store and getting a clerk to check the delivery area to see if it was there. Turns out it was and had been for more than a week. This isn’t a local store problem, the store is barely manned by what looks like a high school kid and a part-time mostly-retired woman and they do a good job of greeting customers, ringing up sales, and maintaining the store. This is a front office back in Chicago mismanagement problem. The useless and lazy bums staffing those corner offices, raking down huge paychecks, and issuing stupid “work harder and faster” memos are not doing any part of the job of management.

A terrific and entertaining way to see how badly mismanagement is performing is to buy something at Sears and experience the customer feedback on-line form at www.hometownfeedback.com/. Every part of this survey is right out of the bad old days of the computer “inmates are running the asylum.” The form doesn’t fit on the screen, the questions are formatted so badly they are unreadable, the questions are clearly written by non-English-speaking authors, and the questions motivations are obviously designed to put blame on the lowest level employees and deflect any responsibility from the deadbeats at the top.

Open Letter to Econofoods (and all of Walmart’s competition)

I think you are missing bet in the competition for grocery business in southeastern Minnesota. My local store doesn't appear to either know there are local farm suppliers for apples, eggs, meat, and other staples, but seems to be dumping the few local food sources they recognized; like Sturdiwheat. I live on the west end of town and my closest grocery is the Tyler Road Econo Foods, but right up the hill is Walmart with most of the same groceries slightly to substantially cheaper. 

Since an actual local grocery, Buchanan Grocery, stocks local products, including Wisconsin and Minnesota cheese, Sturdiwheat products, Pepin Heights apples and cider, and other locally grown products, I am starting my grocery runs there. The way back first takes me past Walmart then our Econo Foods store.

There is no convenience advantage to spending more money at Econofoods and without a local food motivation you've made it difficult for me to follow my natural opposition to shopping at Walmarts. I think someone in marketing needs to get fired and whoever is making the distribution decisions should be next.

In the battle for grocery customers, it’s pretty amazing to see that a small, sort-of-locally-owned chain would be so clueless about locally produced food. The Econo Foods' website makes the claim, "We offer a full service grocery store and take pride in carefully selecting the best meats and hand picked produce from local farmers." The reality is that most of the products that could be sourced locally come from Michigan and the Kroger Company distributors: including apples and other seasonally available fruits and vegetables, apple cider, cheese, milk, eggs, meat, grains and flour, and, as I mentioned in my letter, Sturdiwheat products. I am willing to pay a reasonable premium for locally grown foods and a smaller price to avoid shopping at Walmart, but if the so-called local store is no more willing to buy locally produced foods than Walmart, why would I care which one gets my money? I’m just sayin’.

#128 What's an Executive Worth? (2005)

During a recent NPR business-babble program, Weekend Edition, Bill Catlin asked numbskull "expert, Jim Sillery, an executive compensation consultant, if executives were "worth" the idiotic salaries they receive for mismanaging over-stuffed American Misfortune 500 disaster zones.  This brilliant question was inspired by the recent Fannie Mae accounting mismanagement fiasco, which was preceded by ENRON and a few hundred similar incidents of gross and corrupt mismanagement in the last few years.  Of course, Sillery assured Catlin that boards of directors only pay what they "need" to pay to get the "talent" their companies require.  Talent?  Need?  What would a couple of stuffed suits who never worked an honest day in their lives know about talent or need? 

NPR's "business" program morphed into an equally silly discussion between Scott Simon and Fortune magazine editor Joe Nocera.  They continued the fanzine babble over the wonders of executive inspiration.  Spoken like the true outsider he is, Nocera pronounced Steve Jobs to be the 2004 Business Man of the Year.  Somehow, Nocera fantasized that Jobs was the Apple "founder" who's technical wizardry turned Apple into the poster-biz for rags-to-riches.  Catlin listened to this BS as uncritically as GeeWizz Bush receiving a lecture on world affairs from his puppet master, da Veepmeister. 

I would wager a good piece of spare change that neither Catlin, Sillery, Simon, or Nocera have worked on a production line, been a part of a product design team, or spent time in customer service.  At best, these four spoiled children might have had a summer job flipping burgers or pretending to be country club lifeguards.  There is no way that people with such limited useful business experience could know what a CEO "contributes" to a company, its products, the company's morale, inspiration, or daily function. 

Jobs is about as far from a tech-wiz as GeeWizz Bush.  Steve Wozniak provided the technical skills that created and still inspire Apple.  Jobs chased Wozniak out of his own company with power plays, back-stabbing, and by turning a cool, creative company into a tech sweatshop.  Jobs' claim to fame, in every Apple product, is the quickly dated "look" of Apple products.  With the same trendy vision that new cars look like old cars in two years, Jobs cranks out plastic boxes that look 50 years old by the time the next generation of products appears.  Jobs might be a marketing wiz, but he's no Woz.  He is not a technical innovator, an inspiring manager, or a creative force.  He's a political animal and there is no shortage of those in these United States.  The best analogy I've seen of Wozniak and Jobs compared them to the Beatles: Jobs was McCartney, a self-promoting pop icon with limited skills but lots of unfounded sex appeal, Wozniak is Lennon, multi-talented, ahead of his time, and completely dedicated to music and making the world a better place to live. 

Leadership is a grossly misunderstood quality.  For some reason, humans want to imagine that leaders are something you can breed and grow like pedigreed sheep.  For centuries, human cultures have gravitated toward promoting the most useless, least visionary, least talented men to the highest positions in the country.  We all know this isn't reality.  Hollywood and historians have made a living out of retelling the story that we all know to be true; that our leaders are distracted and incompetent and, without the constant assistance and supervision of critical middle management, they will drive us to ruin.  Crooked and doped up politicians, dimwitted kings and CEOs, loudmouthed but foolish bosses, sexist and clueless managers, and the long list of people in power who don't have the capacity or motivation to do the leading their job implies they should provide.  That's the universal stereotype for "leadership."  Writers and comedians have been working with that material for centuries. 

Cultural and corporate heroes are always the rare born leader who spends his time leading and doing the work that needs doing, instead of politicking, stuffing knives into backs, and avoiding useful work.  The fools who rise to the top of the corporate and political ladder are excess baggage with ambition.  They don't care who they hurt, how much damage they do to their culture and associates (they rarely have friends), or what happens to the business or country they mismanage after they receive their golden parachutes or are assassinated (politically or actually). Claiming that these men are critical to a company's success is as clueless as imagining that Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union or that Bill Clinton created the Information Society.  Just because they were sitting at the top of the pile when those things happened is no evidence that they were any part of the cause or the effect.

The myth survives because, rarely, a real leader actually ends up on top of the heap.  When that happens, the lucky heap is massively stronger than other heaps.  Microsoft is that kind of company and we all know how popular that company's leader is.  Human herds do not like people who actually are smarter than the average dull upper-crust wit.  But when a company or a culture does well, that isn't an indication of that kind of luck.  It's most often a different sort of happenstance.  The kind that is driven from somewhere less visible but more typical.  Most companies can get along fine without any of their deadbeat executives, but no company can survive without middle management, customer service, and the rest of the folks who actually do work.

January 2005

#85 The Purpose of A Business (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

In my foolishly mismanaged career, I've worked for really small and really monstrous companies.  The difference between small companies and large companies is, mostly, money.  The little companies don’t have much, big companies have a lot.  Otherwise, the little companies do the same, stupid things that drive sane people insane in the bloated, brain-dead humongous companies.  Money allows the big guys to get by with more stupidity, but stupidity is its own reward and you never want to sell short the capacity of really small companies to shoot themselves in the foot. 

Take bureaucracy, for example.  You’d think that little companies would, by nature, avoid designing useless accounting practices, stuffing offices with purposeless middle managers, and putting layers of interference between the people who do work and the people who are expecting to have work done.  You’d be wrong.  Far too many small companies are influenced by the management practices of the biggest, least efficient role models.  Small company managers suffer the delusion that their purpose in the company is to live a life of leisure and uselessness.  Once they can afford a couple of employees, they shuffle off responsibility and critical functions to those minimally paid employees, under the hallucination that employees are motivated to do a better job than the idiots who own the business.  That might work until the employees realize that they are being taken for granted, used and abused, and they adopt the “I don’t give a shit” attitude of their employer.  One thing about crappy jobs, there is always another one.

That’s the odd thing about management’s attitude.  When a store owner, company executive, or business owner manages to kill the golden goose, there isn’t another similar job around the corner for them.  You’d think they’d be more concerned about keeping their good thing alive, but they’re not, apparently, that bright.  It’s true that dumb asses flock together and it’s also true that the “good ‘ole boy” network hangs pretty tightly, but the preponderance of jobs available in the good ‘ole US of A are minimum wage.  There‘s no shortage of ex-execs holding on to the remains of their severance packages, shipping fancy resumes to uninterested personnel departments, and hoping another ship will come in before they have to look for real work.  Another ship that they can help sink, once they’re safely accommodated in a padded chair behind a loading dock-sized desk.  

I’ve written about this before, but it is true that some companies seem to go out of their way to hire execs who have failed before.  The fantastic “logic” often spouted is that a failed exec will have learned something valuable about the experience of failure that will somehow translate into success for the moronic fools who give the failed exec another chance.  I suppose these idiots bet on losing horses with the same logic. 

No, most execs don’t learn anything from their failures, except how to do less work, make fewer decisions, and to attract as little attention as possible.  Of course, those were the skills that took them up the corporate ladder, initially, so they must be mission-critical skills in any business. 

Or the real deal may be that leadership is overrated, under-realized, and grossly over-paid.  Several companies, in the early stages of the latest economic crash, relieved themselves of CEOs, CFOs, directors, and other bloated titles without function and found that there was no need to re-fill those positions.  They simply saved the cash, spent it on their corporate functions, or distributed the money among people who actually did work and performed tasks that needed performing.  I’ll admit that this is a rare company, but, since I’m a firm believer that “99% of everything is crap,” any bit of rational thought is encouraging.

June 2004

#30 Doing A Job vs. Doing The Job (1999)

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Thomas W. Day

Believe it or not, the Rat is being heard. Last week, I received a note from an executive who objects to my belief that, if everyone of the executive floor of a typical company were to die from catered lobster bisque poisoning, it would be weeks, months, or years before the rest of the company noticed. My lone protesting exec claims that execs are hard-working, over-stressed, and reasonably paid for the value they provide to their companies. I beg to differ.

There's a difference between working hard and being productive. For most adults, spending a dozen hours a day with the nose buried in the next-guy-up-the-ladder's butt is difficult, stressful, and only gets done with an expectation of something of value (like lots of money). However difficult that kind of activity may be, it isn't something that provides value to the business.

This is along the lines of my arguments about MBA degrees. Several readers have protested that the path to earning an MBA is as difficult as the route to something more useful. Academia can make anything hard. That doesn't prove that the actual course material is complex or hard to master, it just proves that academia would complicate selling (or giving away) ice cubes in Death Valley.

The history of the management class of humans, ever since the earliest days of clan chiefs, has been self-serving. In the dirt-floor days, a guy got to be king because he was an effective military leader (or he was the only guy left alive after the battle and the ones who stayed home mistook survival as a battle skill). It seemed to take one generation of inherited power for early royalty to forget their purpose and function. It might be true that war skills could be handed down a generation or two, but it probably wasn't. Humans tend to drift toward easy answers and the concept of inherited intelligence, skill, and courage is, mostly, a myth.

Not all that long ago, business leaders were, mostly, business founders. When a company survives the first decade or two, there is usually some skill behind the start-up. However, that skill doesn't necessarily reside in the founder, let alone his genes. Sometimes, a lucky early hire provides the talent and drive that pushes a company past the early failure zone.

Henry Ford was a great example of a founding father who couldn't have kept an ice cream truck business alive, on his own. A certifiable fruitcake with the magnetic personality of the guy holding the pitchfork in the Grant Wood painting, "American Gothic," Ford lucked into a couple of key employees who created his "legacy" and fortune. The assembly line, the mechanical genius that separated the early Ford cars from the rest of the automotive pack, and the organization systems that were necessary to Ford's survival (and which Ford did his personal best to destroy) were all created and supervised by mid-level managers. Now that we're a dozen generations away from that sketchy origin, the Fords who are left in control probably can't even drive a car, let alone make one.

These days, what passes for business leaders are too often a dramatically different group from "founder" types. The typical management types are in the Roger Smith (of GM infamy) class. Their claim to leadership is more based on their ability to avoid critical decisions, suck up to whoever's currently on top (while positioning themselves for an opportunity to slip a knife between the ribs), and an unerring obsession toward their own personal power and profit. This sort of character is the origin of the old rule that anyone who wants to lead is someone who ought not to be allowed near the job. Again, while all those devious activities are complicated and energy draining, they're not productive.

The biggest flaws in the ointment of many of the largest companies' organizations starts at the top and slithers its way down the ladder. Management is paid so outrageously that long-term corporate goals are sabotaged in the interest of making the next quarter's financial objective. The stock options from a single strong quarter can make a CEO a rich man, eliminating any interest in building a solid foundation for a company's long term success and health. Still, none of this stuff adds any value to the business.

As a culture, we seem to be able to recognize why this is unmotivating and corrupting when it happens to professional athletes, but don't seem to notice it when it's going on in our own companies. I suppose this is yet another thing we should thank the media for ignoring. Otherwise, we'd all be a lot wealthier and more secure and . . . where was I going what that?

The incestuous relationship between corporate execs and stock analysts complicates these defects even more. Analysts are no more interested in a company's long term health than that company's competitors might be. When a CEO and a pack of analysts climb into bed to create a bump in the stock value and a run of short-term profit taking, employees and non-conspiring investors have no protection. The SEC pays a little attention to this kind of stuff, but only if it's so blatant that there's no way to ignore it. The government's job is, primarily, to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. The rest of us are on our own. Still no value added.

While there's a lot of "work" going on, in climbing to and hanging on to those luxurious corner offices, hardly any of it benefits the organization. Most of the effort expended by the executive class is self-serving and always has been.

So, Mr. Exec, I'm sticking with my popguns. Until I see some evidence that you guys actually do something useful, I'm not going to make the leap of faith that you seem to think is due. But thanks for playing and try again when you have an argument that makes sense.

November 1999

#15 Athletes as Executives (1998)

All Rights Reserved © 1998 Thomas W. Day
The baseball strike of 1994 and beyond, the expressed shock at Reggie Lewis’ supposed drug use, and the regular athletes-are-bad-guys editorializing in our local newspapers has made me reconsider what athletes are to our culture.  Doing that made me realize that athletes have been raised above the standard we require for government officials, corporate executives, professionals such as lawyers and doctors, and even coaches.  I guess this is one more sign that our country’s priorities are so screwed up that even sports no longer make sense.
I guess this resorting of occupational importance occurred because salaries for athletes are so widely known and so incredibly large.  The big money part applies to  a whole category of people who’s performance is a lot more important to the country, but we don’t hear about the money they make through the daily papers and television. 
Face it, if a basketball player gets paid a few million as one member of a dozen person team, it’s pretty obvious—even to a half-bright sportswriter—that the team owner is raking in a whole lot more money for that investment.  That is, simply, how business works.  But you never see sportswriters criticize owners for being overpaid, under motivated, and under talented.  Anyone who has looked closely at the problems in American business knows that the source of our market failures is consistently a management failure.  Why would a sports team’s failures be any different? 
At the top end of American business, we’ve had a collection of executive goofballs expose their ignorance and incompetence on a constant basis, but how often does a local newspaper or television station run an expose on those bozos?  Next to never, unless they rake off a few billion in a local savings and loan and the Feds are hauling them to jail.  The press doesn’t usually catch that until the company PR spokesperson issues a “we are not idiots and/or crooks” press release.  What kind of outrage do you think the press would express if a Fortune 500 executive spent a few months drying out with Betty Ford?  It happens all the time and the press says nothing, even though these people are responsible for thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.  The standard simply isn’t the same and you have to wonder “why?”
Athletes don’t get any kind of consideration for privacy or, even, humanity.  For one, they aren’t from the ruling class.  They are working class, for the most part, who make ruling class salaries.  Apparently, that salary covers a lot more than payment for athletic performance.  Judging by the standards sportswriters seem to hold for athletes, their salaries include an obligation to assure sportswriters with employment.  Athletes may also be our middle class frustration scapegoat.  The ruling class has always done its best to find us someone to point fingers at, other than themselves, so that they can avoid making a cultural contribution equal to the wealth they extract from the culture and the middle class. 
Athletes deserve some of this attention.  They are instantly rich, nearly the moment after leaving college.  Many of these instant millionaires never prove to be worth a small portion of their guaranteed income.  Even those who make valuable contributions to their teams and sport are more profitable than most small to medium sized businesses.  The typical first round draft choice will make more money in his first year of full time employment than most of us will earn in our lifetimes.  That has to create some resentment among the working class. 
But that is no different than the children of the ruling class.  They often inherit the equivalent of the lifetime earnings of a pro athlete superstar, without ever lifting a finger.  They can control incredible assets without ever knowing the slightest thing about the businesses they manipulate.  Thousands of lives can hinge on their spoiled brat whims.  Stock markets can rise and fall from the maneuverings of their portfolio managers.  And their personal habits are completely out of the realm of public inspection.  Their business transactions are never disclosed by the media.  Somehow, they completely escape the attention given to a first round draft choice, who at the very least is among the 1,000 most talented people in the country in his sport.  Why is that?  I really want to know.
April 1998