The Incredible Power of Luck and Finding Suckers

I recently read two automotive industry books, first was Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and the second was Driving Honda, Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company. Those two companies could not be more unlike wile still being in the same industry. One company (Tesla, if you’re clueless)  is driven by a narcistic megalomaniac and the other is driven by a company philosophy. The cars produced by the two companies are equally different: Teslas are all about status and “belonging” to a cult and Hondas are primarily reliable, flexible transportation. One company exists to promote the fame and fortune of its owner, man-boy Elon Musk, and Honda exists “to provide products and services that expand people's dreams and potential.” The difference is apparent, even obvious, in the products, the employees, and the customers.

I committed a fair portion of my working career to manufacturing and, even, a substantial portion of my early audio engineering experience to producing products of my own design . In fact, from my perspective it was hard to beat the best moments I experienced in manufacturing products I cared about. Likewise, I would have rather died in a motorcycle crash at 30 than having gone through my worst half-dozen moments in manufacturing (which all occurred during my 10 years in medical devices). Manufacturing anything is a team effort and that includes designing the equipment necessary for manufacturing. Anyone who claims to have designed a product that was mass produced is a lying sack of crap. From the original concept to the finished product, there are dozens if not hundreds of hands and minds that shape and finish a product into something that is useful, safe, and cost-effective.

Weirdly, there has never been a shortage of people who are willing to do the hard work that is necessary to make and improve a product or service. Usually, those people go unnoticed not just by the public but by the people who have the most to gain from their hard work. Every rich asshole from Henry Ford to Elon Musk has lucked into a few hundred dedicated, talented, hard-working people who foolishly bought into the rich guys’ bullshit and made the lucky idiot rich in spite of himself. I’ve had a ringside seat for a half-dozen of those rags-to-riches lucky business histories. In only one of the lot was the “founder” a critical (or even useful) component in the companies’ success. In most, the founder/founders was/were an impediment that employees had to work around to keep the business alive. In none of the second group of mismanagers were the people who had the most to gain even mildly aware of their good fortune. In that one instance where the founder was a critical component, he was also very aware of his own shortcomings and consistently grateful for the contributions of the people who carried his ass from rags to riches (although he started out pretty rich).

Luck usually has more to do with success than does brilliance, talent, strategy, or even hard work. But yiou’d never get that story from the lucky few who are successful, or at least rarely is that kind of self-critical honesty present. Most “founders” do everything they can to purge their institutions of evidence of their mindless luck as quickly as possible. Some do it ruthlessly and fairly successfully, like Musk and Tesla or Jobs and Apple, and many more do it ham-handedly often killing the golden goose before it is fully hatched. But they all depend nearly totally on being lucky enough to con the right people into committing to what is presented as a “mission” early in the business’ history and doing all of the hard, boring, detail work that is necessary to actual success. Some, like Trump, not only misunderstand how little he contributed to the success of his one-and-only public corporate meltdown but blame the people who did the work for dying on him. Most are like Henry Ford who carefully scraped away all of the evidence of his own good fortune so ruthlessly that he “destroyed” his only son, Edsel, to keep his own competence myth alive. Without the fatal consequences, the same went for Musk and Jobs.

The next time you hear some half-wit babble about his self-made zillionaire status, try to imagine what it would be like to have built something spectacular,—believing your hard work and contributions would result in some kind of recognition and reward—having to listen to a non-contributor brag who ended up on top of the corporate turd-pile purely out of luck and conniving viciousness. It happens more often than not, but the public perception is one more example that “history is written (and advertised) by the winners.”

An Age of Dying Expertise

Recently, a friend described an incredibly expensive series of visits to his Volvo dealership in which he had to explain the problem (surging at low speeds), leave his vehicle at the dealership for a day or two, pay around $1,000 per visit, take the car home and discover the same problem still existed. And he had to do this a half-dozen times before he finally “resolved” the problem by disabling the car’s oxygen sensors. He’d had several such problems with his two early 2000’s Volvos and at least one of those malfunctions was solved by a Boomer parts manager who had been a mechanic before being promoted to management who knew something about the history of Volvo’s many fuel system problems. Without that insight, his car might be in a salvage yard today.

I’ve had a couple similar experiences. In 2011, on a motorcycle trip with my grandson through the Rockies, my Suzuki blew a fork seal about 50 miles north of Laramie, WY. First, I assumed that there wouldn’t be a Suzuki dealer in that backwater and I was wrong. Frontier Cycles not only serviced and sold Suzuki bikes, but I lucked into a 60-something parts guy who knew that Suzuki only use 3 sizes of seals, regardless of their hundreds of part numbers for fork seals. Thanks to his long-term knowledge of Suzuki motorcycles, I was back on the road a day later. Left up to the young mechanic who did the work in a perfectly competent manner, I’d have been stuck in a motel for a week waiting for a part from Denver. I’ve documented my Volkswagen experience here long and loud, but along with discovering that two Albuquerque VW dealers and one VW specialty independent service station were totally incapable of doing anything their highly flawed computer analysis equipment didn’t describe for them, I lucked into one very clever and curious 50-60-something technician at German Motorwerke who discovered the Eurovan’s Transmission Control Unit (TCU) couldn’t make up its mind as to the source of the problem. Where the VW dealer “mechanics” read “replace the transmission,” Motorwerke’s tech tracked the faults though the analysis down to the point that every time he ran the analysis, the computer pointed to a different component of the transmission. That convinced him that the TCU was the problem, not the transmission that obviously managed to get the camper from eastern New Mexico to Albuquerque without frying itself, although a good bit of that trip was done in “limp home mode.” Later, I found another mechanic, Victor Cano-Linson at Big Victor’s Automotive in Elephant Butte, NM who patiently hacked his way through the mostly-erroneous mess of “service information” VW supplies for $400/month to independent shops and got us back on the road. Victor has a couple of grown kids, regardless of the fact that he looks about 30 max, so he’s going to be heading into retirement soon, too.

Currently, significantly more than 50% of America’s skilled-trade workers are retiring in the next 10 years, almost a third in the next five. That skilled labor shortage includes automotive and heavy equipment mechanics, plumbers, electricians, electronic technicians  construction workers, water system treatment technicians, building maintenance technicians, HVAC technicians, welders, masons, and heavy equipment operators. The same is true for high-skill, jobs like electrical and electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, doctors, and other hyper-skilled, education dependent jobs. There was a brief window when the important details of many of those skills would have been passed on, but that opportunity was missed during the multiple recessions, down-sizing, huge and incompetent conglomerate monopolies sucking up businesses and trashing them, and the massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% the country suffered between 1970 and 2020. While the owners of those skills are leaving the workforce, their replacements are having to fend for themselves in an unstable labor market with a shaky national  economic future. We often hear the shrill cry of “why don’t people want to work anymore,” but those asking don’t want to hear the complicated answer.

In a country that has fallen hook-line-and-sinker for the repeatedly-failed economic fallacy that dribble-down will save the economy and culture if we just cut taxes on the rich, working hard to earn a middle class living has lost its appeal. White people especially have been convinced if they just bow and scrape low enough they will be rewarded with the luxurious life they are entitled to be living. Mostly that proves that you can fool enough of the people all of the time.

From my own experience, a big reason the traditional generational skill-transfer didn’t and isn’t happening is that since the 70’s few of us had even considered staying with an employer long enough to be part of that. Most of us didn’t have the opportunity due to downsizing layoffs, recessionary layoffs, and local economic factors that put many of us in the technical migrant category. During the 70s through most of my career, the average engineer stayed at one company for an average of 3 years. Supposedly, that is up to 5.1 years today, but only one or two people (or at least a dozen) I know who are working in engineering would reflect that stat. Still, after 5.1 years an engineer has barely mastered the basics of a typical job in manufacturing, design, or customer support. Through most of the past 40 years, companies have devalued technical experience by laying off higher paid, experienced employees first often followed by employing those ex-employees at a much higher rate as contractors. There is literally no reason why a contractor would make the slightest effort to pass on valuable information to a company employee.

My last medical devices employer only hired degreed (mostly MS and PhD) engineers from well-regarded schools like MIT and CalTech. They were usually wonderful manipulators of computer-assisted software (CAD/CAM) and could wring solutions from auto-routing PCB layout software that totally baffled me. Their understanding of semiconductor electronics and reliability engineering was embarrassing at best and too often tragic for the end users. And every year there were fewer experienced engineers at that company to act as guardrails against the kind of mistakes young engineers make without knowing any history of the product, customers, or applications. Many of those experienced engineers were paid early-out bonuses to leave, because the company mismanagement had no idea how complicated the products had become.

Years ago, a young man who was trying to get started in the field I had introduced him to through the school where I worked and he had attended complained that “It’s not what you know but who you know in this business.” He was mostly complaining about the fact that service information on the products he most often was asked to repair was only available from other technicians. The companies who made the equipment were mostly dead-and-gone, but their equipment lived on and stayed in demand for at least another decade. The “who” he was complaining about were experienced technicians who had collected service manuals, schematics, and troubleshooting techniques over the previous 20-30 years. I offered to level the playing field for him by ignoring his calls when he needed help and he declined; understanding that it might take a while to become well-regarded enough to collect more useful resources.

Company and industry history are poorly-regarded today. “Experienced workers” are considered to be expensive workers and the first to go when mismanagement wants to give itself a giant pay increase or a huge golden parachute. Because they have no financial motivation to do anything to improve the life of the companies they mismanage, they see no downside in killing off company history resources. Like their heroes—Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the rest of that ilk—they imagine that their media-manipulations are the important stuff in a company’s activities and the wreckage they leave behind will be for future generations to clean up . . . or not.

STP–The Canaries in the Coal Mine

Back in 2014, when we first moved to Red Wing, we joined the local YMCA. It’s a fairly nice facility for a small town and it seemed to be welcoming. That was typical of my experience with Minnesota Twin Cities (YMCA of the North) organizations. I had been a downtown St. Paul YMCA member, transferred to the Roseville facility, since we moved to Minnesota in 1996 and, as of 2013, my Medicare health insurance Silver Sneakers benefit began to pay for my membership. So, it seemed logical to transfer my membership to my new residence. The paperwork went smoothly and in late November we began to enjoy our new facility . . . for about a month. In late December, the Red Wing YMCA quietly announced (louder for those of us who were effected) that it would no longer accept Silver Sneakers payments and even acknowledged that it was the only YMCA in the state to make that move.

At least in our situation, the only real benefit to the Red Wing YMCA was the swimming pool. We have a small gym in our basement, complete with an excellent treadmill, stationary bicycle, weights, and resistance bands. We have no reason to leave our home for those things, which I discovered by transferring my Silver Sneakers membership to the local Anytime Fitness where I used it a couple of times and let it lapse.

For a bit, I attempted to carry on a dialog with the Y’s management (Tom Burke, Martha Harris, and Mike Melstad) and a member of the board (Barb Haley) who all claimed to have a solid, demonstrable financial reason for the Silver Sneakers decision, but were all completely unable or unwilling to produce any of it. I suspect when they learned I have a background in manufacturing accounting, ROI justification, and quality management they decided to keep their “secret calculations” secret. I was supposed to believe they’d done a thorough financial analysis which had provided justification for their decision. I am rarely inclined to trust any kind of management decision logic, based on my long history with incompetent, lazy, uninformed, overpaid, and mostly-useless management types.

This past December, the Red Wing YMCA management decided to re-evaluate and reverse their Silver Sneakers decision. They were pretty quiet about it, but I lucked into the inspiration to ask on January 1, 2023 and discovered they’d be allowing Silver Sneakers compensation starting the next day. While I was either getting registered, watching my wife get re-enrolled, or watching a half-dozen other old farts get signed up under the new policy, I heard the same pool-schedule spiel fed to each of us: the best time to swim and to avoid crowds was between 2PM and 4PM. So, I’ve been taking advantage of my new membership fairly regularly for the last 3 weeks. Yesterday, I showed for for my routine and discovered, thanks to a tiny sign printed on the door to the pool (after changing and showering) that the pool hours would be limited 4:15 to 8:30PM. I wasn’t the only surprised bait-and-switch victim, as there were two other new members in the dressing room who were at least as pissed as me.

I thought about bitching about yet another snow-job experience from the Red Wing YMCA, but I decided it is no longer worth it to me. Mrs. Day and I have been discussing the pros and cons of staying in Red Wing and Minnesota for the last couple of winters and I’m just going to put the local YMCA in the “cons” category and let someone else worry about it. “Fixing” systems, organizations, and processes was my career for 50+ years. I’m retired and don’t care enough to fix much of anything now.

This all reminded me of a conversation I had with the Washburn quality manager in 1991, during my 30-day moment of unhappy employment with that company. I wrote about this in a 2015 essay titled “Quality in A Disposable World” after a similar conversation with a Red Wing Southeast Technical College instructor. In that essay, I wrote, “Like a lot of small business people, my instructor was under the delusion that customers will naturally complain if they are disappointed with service or product quality. Many larger companies are equally happy to pretend that they are getting 100% ‘compliance’ from dissatisfied customers. The fact is that most customers simply log their dissatisfaction and tell themselves they will remember to never buy that particular company’s product or service again. Most company executives are perfectly happy with that outcome.”

The Washburn service manager explained to me that the company’s complaints system dealt with customers fairly ruthlessly (efficiently?). He said, “the company shipped product with a known 50% defect rate, based off of the internal random inspection data from a few years back (Since they quit inspections after a few months, product quality had probably gotten worse.). From a suspected 50% defect rate, about 1% of the company’s customers complained, expecting some sort of warranty response. If they stonewalled that first complaint, about 1% of the first 1% would come back for more abuse. No special inspection was done for warranty replacement instruments, so at least 50% of the replacements were also defective out-of-the-box. According to the manager, that 1%-of-1% routine applied to warranty replacement complaints.” So, with a known 50% defect rate, Washburn only provided some kind of warranty service (the first time) on 0.5% of shipped product.

In a similar vein, someone who was once involved in Red Wing’s city management explained how the city’s civil service bureaucracy blew off citizen comments and complaints with an acronym, "STP = same three people.”  The arrogant, simple-minded idea was that the few members of the public who contested or complained about the top-down city management decisions could be dismissed with this delusion. Red Wing is a very small town, 16,000 people and steadily shrinking (especially in average incomes), with a huge budget and a voracious appetite for insane growth through mindless annexation (41.41 square miles, so far). Minneapolis, with 425,000 residents, is contained in 57.51 square miles. Red Wing city management also has an outsized view of the “value” of city employees, based solely on what the city employees can get away with (often by ignoring the STP). Xcel’s Prairie Island Power Plants are the city’s main property tax contributor and those plants are likely to be phased out in the next decade. Eventually, that unrestrained spending will result in exorbitant local taxes and a rapid Atlantic City-style evacuation of the area by everyone who can afford to take a loss to find a more secure place to live. (Remember the rule, the first rats to leave the ship are the ones who can swim.)

Like the Washburn quality manager and the Red Wing YMCA management, the Red Wing city bureaucrats labor under the delusion that the 3 or 4 citizens who regularly comment and/or complain about the city’s services, expenses, or decisions only represent themselves. In fact, that small group is very likely representative of at least half of the local residents. They are consistently the “canaries in the coal mine.” The poor treatment they receive from the bureaucrats likely keeps the rest of the locals from voicing their opinions, until they vote with their feet and give up on the city. Red Wing’s growth has been anemic, at best, for the entire 163 year life of the city, falling far behind the national population growth and that of the state’s major cities. That failure isn’t for lack of natural resources,opportunity, or even representation in state and federal government.

Who Gets Replaced by A Robot

In manufacturing [Remember when we used to do that?] there is an old rule that says, “We automate the jobs that are mostly occupied by the biggest pain-in-the-ass employees.” In several of the companies where I worked in the 70s through the late 90s, the first people to be replaced by a computer or robot were technicians. For a time, moderately trained technicians were the “special children” on the manufacturing floor. They weren’t skilled enough to be engineers or even middle-management, but they were too skilled to easily be replaced by other company employees or easily recruited from the recently tech school-educated employment pool.

So, as soon as possible manufacturing engineers started searching for ways to put some kind of computer test equipment into the assembly processes to reduce the number of technicians needed. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a management decision. Few improvements in any process are driven by upper management; they are too busy stuffing their pockets with the company profits to bother with doing actual work. Actual decisions always get made by the people stuck being responsible for the work and that is almost always engineers and manufacturing technicians.

Thinking about that kind of problems in society, it is easy who and what engineers would automate in the rest of the country: police, prison guards, politicians and many bureaucrats, firefighters, tax collection, the justice system, bus and truck drivers, and restaurant workers. And, pretty much, in that order.

Police, obviously, are a societal pain-in-the-ass, a huge civic liability, more often than not more corrupt than the “criminals” they supposedly protect us from, and massively expensive. Police department costs range from as much as 64% of a city’s budget (Billings, MT, $247 per resident) to as “little” as 8% (New York, City, $624 per resident). Ridding taxpayers of out-of-control police department spending and erratic and violent policing would go a long ways toward making cities more livable, safer, less racist, less expensive, and sustainable. From a manufacturing engineering standpoint, a huge portion of what police do on a daily basis would clearly be easy and cheap to automate. At least 90% of what a traffic cop does could be done better with strategically placed sensors (cameras and microphones). Most traffic violations could be recorded, vehicles identified, and citations sent through computerized systems: no cop necessary unless an arrest for non-compliance is required. One of the most common vehicle violations that goes un-cited today is noise violations and practically every state’s current vehicle noise violations could be monitored and cited automatically with “fix-it tickets” and the revenue from those violations, alone, might pay for the system. For more aggressive traffic violations, the combination of those cameras and microphones and driver alerts could utilize the remaining human police and computerized dispatch systems to be used more effectively. The relatively few complicated police activities, typically assigned to “detectives,” would likely remain human-powered for a long time, but as the number of crimes solved by those humans continues to decline there will be plenty of incentive's for automated solutions to those underperforming employees.

Likewise, it’s pretty obvious that automation and robots could do at least as good a job as prison guards and their mismanagement for a tiny fraction of the cost. For example, California’s prison guard union is so grossly over-powerful that the annual cost of keeping a typical prisoner “guarded” is well over $100,000 per year. Even as the state’s prison population declines, the costs are rising rapidly as are the salaries and benefits of their underworked, unskilled union members. Since the guard’s union has a stranglehold on the state politicians (Democrat and Republican) the solution is clearly one place where California’s referendum system should be able to sold a problem that the politicians won’t dare touch.

The rest of my list (see above) will be more and less complicated to automate with some of the easiest going earlier simply because there will be fewer political obstacles to overcome (like truck and bus drivers who most everyone will be happy to see gone from the highways). So, now my “predictions” are in print and probably a while after I’m dead someone might find them and have a great time ridiculing how wrong I was. Have fun, whoever you are.

Know Thyself?

According to Wikipedia and the Greek writer Pausanias, "The Ancient Greek aphorism 'know thyself,' is one of the Delphic maxims and was the first of three maxims inscribed in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi." It is probably first because most of us will never get to #2 if we spend any serious effort at figuring out how to know ourselves. It’s a disgusting job, but someone has to do it.

Take me, for example. Back in the 80s, I took a required career development course that included the infamous Myers-Briggs “personality inventory” test. The end result was a printout of my personality characteristics that, honestly, stunned me. Back then, a very primitive mini-computer determined that I was an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving). I had NEVER thought of myself as introverted and that hyper-important aspect to my personality was worse than neglected, ignored, and abused for 60-some years.In fact, until I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking last December, a book that was practically forced on my by two very perceptive friends, I had no idea what being introverted means. However, that 1980’s computer printout almost made me breakdown and cry in the middle of a very large class because it was, I felt, the first time in my life anyone actually knew me. And that was scary because I worked very hard for a lot of years not to be “known” by anyone.

More recently, I’ve tested (on the 16Personalities.com website) as an INTJ-T ( Introverted - 95%, Intuitive - 63%, Thinking - 91%, Judging - 75%) with a new quality (Turbulent - 76%). Supposedly, this INTJ personality can be summed up as "the Architect." This last character swap is interesting. A summary of the differences claimed, “The key difference between the INTJ and INTP in this respect is INTJs do accept leadership roles on occasion whereas INTPs do not." Honestly, that tracks. For most of my life, I took on management/leadership roles because I thought “that’s what a man does.” Sort of a version of “if I want this job done right, I have to be the one to do it.” Eventually, that attitude crushed the life almost completely out of me. When I left my electrical and manufacturing engineering career in 1991, I also made the unconscious decision to avoid any management assignments in dysfunctional organizations. For the last 15 years of my career, I began to take that decision more seriously at every turn of my working life: to the point that at one particularly difficult moment in my teaching career I stated that principle out loud in refusing a “promotion.” From then on, it was a conscious decision and a guideline I would not cross.

So, I guess it’s possible that my basic personality was altered by that realization? Something swapped me from Perceiving to Judging and did it in a not subtle way. Back in the 80s, that first Meyers-Briggs test found that I was hard-line on everyone of my four personality values. Many people are borderline on everyone of their personality traits, but not me. If you look at the trait percentages at the beginning of the paragraph above, you might notice that the Intuitive (N) trait, at 63%, is the closest I come to a borderline quality. In the 80s, I was in the 80-90% territory for 3 of my 4 INTP traits. Perception (P) was the exception, being somewhere closer to the line. So, something shifted in me at some point in my life. Honestly, I think it was for the good even if it cost me money, some authority, and promotional opportunities. None of those things mean much to me.

At 72, I am still exploring and learning about the first of my 4 or 5 "personality traits.” The first chapter of Quiet details the outright distain, distrust, dislike, and disgust that introverts produced from the Powers that Were in the 20th Century and I grew up in that atmosphere. It was not good enough to be a competent athlete, student, or worker. You needed to be excited, vocal, and authoritative in your convictions. To be successful, you needed to be a “leader” and to be noisy about it. I wasn’t excited about much of anything but mathematics and music when I was in high school and either I chose that moment or the moment chose me to escape into music. As a long-haired, hippy, musician outcast, the expectations of me were instantly lowered and I could be me to myself and the rest of the world made assumptions based on outward appearances and mostly left me alone. Later, I learned that to survive in the world of work and to provide for my family I would have to disguise myself as someone else and I did that for 40 years. Now, I’m having to study and spend a lot of time alone to remember who I am.

When Does Marketing Trump Products?

As usual, I stepped into a discussion about the “importance” of marketing when I should have just ignored it all and let people believe the whackadoodle crap they want to believe, uninterrupted by reality. As usual, the marketing dweebs out-jabbered me and I’m happy to let them wander off into the woods as they usually do. At this point in my life, it no longer matters to me what happens to anyone’s business and I’m less inclined to be interested in anyone’s mission than at any other time in my life.

However, I get to have the last word (if I want to) on my own blog and here it comes.

The question from marketing is always, “How do people hear about the product you are selling if not marketing?" The answer is simple and complicated. The simple part is that word-of-mouth spreads far faster and more effectively than any advertising campaign. The complicated part is that word-of-mouth spreads bad news far faster and more effectively than any advertising campaign can ever hope to repair. From my years in quality management training, I remember a restaurant rule that went something like “It will take $50 in advertising to convince a customer to try your business, 5 seconds of lousy service to drive that customer out the door, and $5,000 in more advertising to get them to try you again.” Something like that.

My favorite example of how effectively word-of-mouth works is In-N-Out Burger vs. McDonalds and Burger King.  When my family lived in California in the 80’s, there were probably a dozen fairly substantial fast food chains. Fast food was nothing more than a commodity to 90% of those businesses. None of them did anything particularly well, so the best marketing program probably “won.” Creative accounting probably helped those chains help convince suckers to both invest in their franchise and to buy their engineered addictive “fat, salt, and sugar” concoctions. You couldn’t drive a block on any busy street without seeing an ad for McDonalds, Burger King, Burger Chef, Wendy’s, Hardies, Carl’s Jr., and/or any of those commodity food producers.

The burger joint of choice for Californians remained In-N-Out Burger and before the internet the best way to find one was to ask for directions from someone wearing one of their t-shirts. There were two In-N-Out Burger stands in Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa and neither of them bothered to do much more than keep their signs lit, marketing-wise, and their lines flowing through their drive-thrus were always long. Like Aldi’s, those lines moved fast, so it was always worth the wait to get a hamburger made from actual beef, fresh tomatoes, onions, and lettuce and fries made from actual potatoes. When an In-N-Out Burger appeared near my daughter’s home in Plano, Texas, her junk-food addicted husband immediately changed his food allegiance to actual food. No advertising required.

Likewise, the pro audio company I worked for in California couldn’t afford an actual marketing department for the first 6 years I worked for the company. When the company started out, in 1973, the founder spent all of his inheritance and some of his siblings and parents’ money promoting a company that had yet to figure out product development and manufacturing. After a brief flash-in-the-pan period of media presence, the company downsized to a half-dozen employees in a cheap business district in Costa Mesa. For the next ten years, the founder worked at learning his engineering craft, the original employees learned how to manage money, purchase parts, and develop a sales rep network. By the time I started work there, “marketing” consisted of very information-strong ads in industry magazines and a couple of sales meetings each year.

That same year, the company released its first professional quality power amplifiers and by the end of 1983 our problems became “how can we make more of these products, service our customers, and maintain our product quality?” For the next six years, we doubled our gross sales every year, maintained a 24-26% profit margin, and led our industry in customer service and product quality.

The company’s CEO idolized Hartley Peavey and Steve Jobs and had a minor hard-on for Donald Trump. He saw himself as a similar marketing “genius” and desperately wanted to reform the company as an “ideas business” instead of a manufacturing and engineering company. In the next few years, manufacturing moved to China, product development became diffused and only somewhat focused on customer needs, marketing became a more powerful force and a larger empire in the company, and it took another decade for the gross sales to double between 1992 and 2002. It’s a privately-held company, so it’s hard to guess what the profit margins are now, but based on the gross sales, the size of the administrative staff (especially in marketing and sales), and the luxury of the new facilities and number of executive officers, I’d guess 5-8% max.

There was an upside for me. Having spent 8 years in an executive position near someone who saw himself as a marketing genius, I developed pretty thick charisma armor. When Donald Trump went public for his one-and-only time with the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (DJT) IPO, I remembered the giant space between reality and our CEO’s self-image and, for the first and only time in my investment career, I shorted about 1,000 shares of DJT. I know, not an impressive bet in the scale of things, but it was a big deal for me at the time. My incredibly clever and sophisticated investment philosophy was “anything that the CEO I knew so well believes is a ‘good idea’ is going to be a guaranteed disaster.” I missed the IPO peak by a few weeks, but I still got in when the stock was valued at about $29. I sold off half of my shorted option in 1998 and the rest in 2001 when DJT was pretty much a penny stock.

I have never had that much confidence in a stock’s value collapsing since. I was close with Apple in 1997, but Bill Gates stepped in to save Apple with a $150M investment and a dumbed-down version of Office for dumbed-down Mac users. Peavey is still a privately held company, so there has never been an “investment opportunity” for me to bet against that company. I would if I could, though.

My takeaway from all of this is that marketing is what you do when you can’t do anything useful, original, necessary, and/or well. When what you have to sell is fluff or a me-too commodity or crap, you probably need marketing to convince customers to part with their money and waste their time. There is a price to be paid for shifting resources from manufacturing, design, research, and customer service, too. Regardless of the delusions and propaganda saying otherwise, everything is a zero-sum game: you can’t spend money in one area without taking those resources from other areas. Moving resources to an unexamined, usually poorly-managed area like marketing (especially if the marketing is an external “organization”) too often means that manufacturing (the hardest job in any product-based company) gets shipped off-shore and important, mission-critical skills are lost forever. (And the off-shore vendor gets to refine those skills on someone else’s money, eventually becoming a competitor.)

From the inside, I have since witnessed the farce of marketing-driven mismanagement several times and every one of those attempts at an illusionary business model resulted in spectacular crashes; just like DJT. I don’t really know if marketing actually ever works, but I do know that if you think your business desperately needs marketing assistance you have a lot to worry about.

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.

Placing My Bet Now

Regardless  of what you conservative fluffballs think, President Obama has done a fine job of keeping the country safe and restoring as much of our deficit economy as possible without a lick of work from our deadbeat Republican congress. If he’d have been given actual patriots to work with, we’d be in a whole different world today.


But you fuckwits decided to blow up the country and see if a random 1% mobbed-up Russian pimp asshole could fix what people with functioning brains could not make a dent in. That’s the beauty of being a moron; you not only don’t have to think before you act but when you fuck up the world you won’t be intelligent, decent, or courageous enough to admit the mess is all your fault.

Here’s my bet for 2017: Trump and his idiot vandals will be so busy looting the national treasury that, like Bush and Cheney and pals, they’ll take their eye off of the national security job and we’ll experience another national disaster like 9/11/2001. The beauty of being a pseudo-conservative is, as always, never having to admit responsibility or error. You morons stumble through life with both feet stuck in trashcans and your heads up your asses and you think your shit smells like roses.

So, let me say it before hand, “Thanks Donny and friends.”

This time, you’re going to discover that tactic is going to fail; big time or "bigly" (if you’re the usual Trump illiterate). You are going to crash the world economy, the plant’s eco system, and there won’t be any coming back from it. You may not admit that it was your fault, but it won’t matter because everyone is going to suffer. Climate change, massive national debt, near-universal unemployment, and a national reputation for stupidity that turns our allies into either a laugh track or enemies.

#175 Back to Quality

When I first started the Rat's Eye View, I mostly wrote about business and the decline in management capability I, personally, experienced in business. While the last couple of years have been more about politics and the rapidly down-breeding human race, I still think about business concepts and management. It just doesn't seem as important as the destruction of  democracy in the United States, the establishment of an ignorant theocracy in place of constitutional government, or my government's attempt to colonize North Africa for international oil corporations.

There appears to be no fix for the Rise and Fall of Great Nations, so for the moment I'm going to return to business and the concept of customer service and quality. Everything good in business comes from these two concepts. Some writers have considered the two as separate and, maybe, equal, but I think they are inseparable. Without a culture of service to the customers of the core business, there is no motivation for pursuing quality. Without the concepts of quality management, the tools for serving customers are insufficient.

Quality and service are hard concepts for the current breed of manager to grasp. Like professional athletes, the kind of people who gravitate into management, especially those who have inherited the position, tend to believe they possess some inherent capabilities that allows them to rise above the mundane problems of their business and customers to see the "bigger picture." There is no bigger picture. The problem with the real picture is that it is complicated, technically challenging, and constantly changing. The more simple view found by overlooking the problems of service and quality has nothing to do with the survival of the business or providing value to the business; it's just daydreaming disguised as management.

Recently, a couple of local, pointedly obvious experiences reminded me of how management can snatch defeat from the claws of success. When I first moved to Minnesota, I stumbled on a new multiplex theater in Oakdale, Minnesota. I only discovered this out-of-the-way theater because it was near a store I like a lot, Fleet Farm. The theater is about 5 miles from my home and there were several closer, equally well-equipped theaters near my home at the time. However, the Marcus Oakdale Theater became my default place to watch movies because on my first visit I found the seats to be comfortable, the screen to be acceptably large, the sound system to be well-tuned, and the popcorn to be edible. Not an overwhelming endorsement, but good enough to stop my unmotivated search for a better facility. Over the last decade, I've probably watched a hundred or so movies at the Marcus Oakdale. I'm usually with one or two other people, so we're talking about a couple thousand dollars in ten years. Not a spectacular expense, but not insignificant.

This year, I convinced a friend to watch a western with me, 3:10 to Yuma. It's an Elmore Leonard story and I"m a dedicated Elmore Leonard fan. My friend wasn't either a fan of westerns or particularly interested in Elmore Leonard. I was hoping to make a convert. He wanted to pass an afternoon escaping from life's problems.

From the moment the projector fired up, an irritating black line appeared on the left side of the screen. My friend noticed it immediately. The line was sometimes joined by lesser lines, but the big black line remained on the screen for the entire showing; from popcorn commercials through the previous all the way to the end of the movie. My friend never stopped noticing the line, I could sometimes forget it was there because I'm a nutso western fan, but it was too often obvious to me, too.

The next day, I wrote to the theater's management, describing our experience and disappointment. A few weeks later, I received a letter from the theater's management apologizing for the bad experience and explaining that the theater had received a defective print from the distributor and it took several days for the distributor to provide a replacement. "It's not our fault," or something equally lame was the explanation. A couple of guest passes accompanied the apology.

Since then, I've seen three or four movies. I haven't used the guest passes yet. There is a new complex of theaters in my neighborhood and, when I wanted to take my grandson to a movie I decided to check out one of the new theaters. The seats were comfortable, the screen was pretty large, the sound system didn't blatantly distort, and the popcorn was edible. I have a new favorite theater and, when I visit Fleet Farm, I drive by my old favorite theater, remember that I have some free passes and wish I'd remembered to put them in the car in case I was in the area with some time on my hands.

The distain the manager demonstrated toward his customers, me, in continuing to show a damaged film with no warning, reduction in price, or acknowledgement that we might be intelligent enough to notice a defective product was enough of a de-motivator that I'm just not inclined to spend my own money to try that theater again. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.

In the college where I work, we have a coffee shop. From first hand observation, I'd suspect that the original concept for the school's coffee shop first started as an afterthought. It appeared to be something to do with a large room on the top floor of the building. The room didn't seem to fit into the school's classroom plan, but it would be wasted space if nothing went in that space. The initial facilities were almost laughable. The original manager, Ben, was a recent school graduate and was driven by unseen, unpredictable forces to make the coffee shop a hangout for students and instructors. He seemed to be particularly focused on making instructors happy, maybe because we were the only predictable customers he'd have; students being temporary customers at best. Ben offered better-than-cafe coffee, went through a variety of pastry suppliers until he found a decent bakery, and worked hard to encourage kids and instructors to patronize the coffee shop. It became a success, in spite of management's ignoring the facility and Ben's requests for more equipment and more comfortable furniture. Ben had no nearby competition, but he tried to make an impression anyway.

Eventually, the school's mismanagement decided that Ben wasn't a "professional" manager and he was replaced by a lady who claimed she had managed cafe's "in the real world." She lasted a couple of months and disappeared. Since then, we've gone through a collection of managers, each equally disinterested in the regular customers, providing more than the minimal service, and each imprinting absolutely no character on the facility.

For a few years, that worked. Then, a cafe opened across the street. It's a hassle, comparatively, to go outside, cross a busy street, wait in line with many more customers, to get a cup of coffee, but the service and coffee is significantly better. I've not only found myself surrounded by fellow instructors across the street, but the school's management is regularly over there, too. We are so used to indifferent service from our own facility that we automatically switch allegiances to a better service provider, even when we are the competition. How screwed up is that?

My turnaround came when I bought a cup of coffee and had the cup dissolve on me, spilling hot coffee on my hand, causing me to drop the cup, and waste a few minutes cleaning up after myself in class. When I bitched about it, my students all said they'd had the same experience. I took my complaint to the cafe manager and was told that he'd received a shipment of defective cups and it would be a couple of days before the supplier could replace them. He wasn't even slightly embarrassed that he'd been caught providing crappy product, that he knew would dissolve before his customers could naturally empty the cup. He just smirked at me for being foolish enough to think he cared. I started bringing coffee from home the next day, until I discovered that other instructors were going across the street for better service. On the rare occasion that I don't manage to brew my own coffee and don't want to walk an extra block for coffee, I bring my own cup to our coffee shop.

Ben has moved on to become a "professional" facility manager for a successful local club. I was reminded of Ben when a student came by my office to tell me that he was working for Ben and that he had asked the student to invite me to his club. Ben is still driven to extend exceptional service and I'm sure the quality naturally follows.

This all reminds me of an old (badly paraphrased) saying, "It takes $50 in advertising to convince a customer to try your product. 5 seconds of poor service will lose that customer and it will take at least $5,000 to bring that customer back again." Quality service takes constant attention and unwavering focus from management. Anything less is a lot less than the current breed of management imagines. 

December 2007

#143 Personal Words (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

For the last four years, I was blessed to work for a man I respected and trusted.  A couple of those years were the best experience in my working life.  I'm not saying the company, the school, for which I've worked has been respectable or trustworthy; just the man.  However, it has been a rare enough experience just having the opportunity to work for someone with positive qualities that it has spoiled me for the usual management riffraff.  This man, Michael, quit today.  The school's management didn't think Michael's leaving was important enough to let the rest of us know, but the word spread through the staff like a fire of despair. 

The last year and a half has been tolerable, but in decline.  The people who own and mismanage the school are the usual lot; boy-men who couldn't make a sane decision if their inheritances depended upon it.  But that hasn't mattered for the past twelve years of the school's existence, because Michael could always be counted on to make the important decisions for the organization.  While the owners rattled around in their palatial offices, posing for portraits and polishing their egos, Michael hired staff, distributed resources, settled disputes, and moved the school from a dilapidated warehouse in Minneapolis to a shining new facility in St. Paul.  When every major step was completed, the owners would make a hand-waving appearance and express wonder at their miraculous accomplishments. 

Other than being a bit irritating, most of us didn't mind their ignorance, because Michael knew who did the real work and he made us into the kind of team that rarely exists outside of myth and dreams.  Today, members of that team met in hallways, the parking garage, and at least one bar to mourn the end of a workplace era.  I heard expressions of anger, disappointment, sorrow, and pain from people working in sales, maintenance, administration, and (above all in an educational institution) the teachers.  The loss of no other person in the school could have inspired so much emotion, and we've had some sad losses in the last couple of years.  If both of the school's founders had died in the floods of New Orleans, a bare fraction of that passion would have been generated.  The feeling in the school was similar to what I experienced in 1963, as a school boy, when President Kennedy was assassinated.  Hearts were broken, spirits were crushed, bonds of friendship and common goals were damaged. 

Of course, the mismanagers were oblivious to all of this because they were distracted, as usual, by illusions found in their office mirrors. 

As I sat in a bar with friends, fellow instructors, listening to plans for revolt, alternative business ideas, descriptions of escape routes, and general melancholy, I tried to come to peace with my own future.  Not long ago, I planned to spend the rest of my working life with this group.  For the first time in my adult life, I had been part of what felt like an indestructible force; like an NFL offensive line, and I was watching it dissipate like a beautiful sunset fading to darkness.  For me, the school isn't a serious place without Michael there.  What we do, suddenly, seems pointless without his encouragement, honest faith, and vision for our institution and our students.  Michael believed in what we did, he supported it.  Michael had taught every class we taught.  He understood our industry and our technology.  He recognized and attempted to fix problems before we saw them coming.  Even if the industry we represented is mostly in the past, he believed that we could guide our students into the future, making music and changing lives.  He created the school's mission and he believed in it.

What's left is about money, power, and the usual suspects are in control.  Something extraordinary has been turned ordinary.  It's incredible how easy that is to do.  Destruction is always easier than creation, but it's not as inspiring.

September 2005

#135 Trade Show Logic (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

You hate to kill the golden goose when the goose is spewing eggs in your direction, but it's a lot easier when the goose is in someone else's yard.  One of my all time favorite geese, when I was in industry, was the trade show.  It's practically impossible to imagine an easier gig for any salesperson, or any other working person, than staffing a trade show booth.  Execs, of course, see trade shows as "hard work," but that simply re-establishes the obvious fact that execs are unfamiliar with the whole "work" concept. 

Trade shows have become consumer product shows in the last couple of decades.  It only makes sense that vendors and show management would want to increase their profits by drawing consumers to their demonstrations.  It makes a little less sense that consumers would want to see the newest stuff as soon as the manufacturers have it ready to be seen.  What doesn't make sense is the idea that consumers would be willing to pay top dollar to experience the same sales pitch they'd receive in a store. 

This past weekend my wife worked her first trade show; a home products show.  The turnout for the show was abysmal, a disappointment even for the trade show management but a complete bust for the vendors.  Over a holiday weekend, barely 500 customers bothered to make the trip to half-alive downtown St. Paul, suffered the outrage of $15 "special event" parking, and coughed up $7.50 for the privilege of having a few hundred salespeople try to sell them stuff they didn't need.  In the end, even the large vendors wondered why they bothered with the show.  There were more vendors on the floor at any time during the show than there were customers. 

While I think that it's interesting perspective, it's even more interesting that so many trade show organizers think the American public is so stupid that we'll pay to be exposed to salespeople and their pitches.  From cars to computers, there are "shows" that are little more than small-time state fair vendor booths hawking their wares to a self-captured audience foolish enough to pay for the privilege. 

Why anyone would pay to be pitched is beyond my comprehension.  As we've all seen over the years of my publishing the Rat Rants, many things are beyond my comprehension.  Cable television, for example.  Originally, cable TV was sold as a way to escape ads by paying for the service directly, instead of indirectly through the irritation of 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes of television programming.  Today, however, dumbasses pay to be pitched and television executives are laughing all the way to the bank.  The bank where they store their golden parachutes.  On the occasion that I find myself in a cable-ready motel room, I'm always amazed at the dearth of interesting programming and the wealth of advertising to be suffered on cable TV.  More evidence that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public; American or otherwise. 

May 2005

#130 Looking for King George (2005)

All Rights Reserved © 2005 Thomas W. Day

I've heard at least a zillion explanations for why executives are worth the humongous salaries they're paid for doing the mediocre work they usually avoid.  Not a one of those justifications makes a lick of sense. 

The dumbest is the comparison between professional athletes and executive salaries.  The story goes that if an uneducated street kid who happens to be able to run fast, throw a ball hard, jump high, and/or coordinate his hand and eye at a superhuman level is worth X-million-dollars a year, it should be obvious that the CEO of a Misfortune 500 Company deserves even more money for whatever the hell he does.  Sort of an if X=Y, then Z=$6,000,000 kind of logic. 

First, we have some standard of comparison for the athlete, even if it's totally irrational because some dumbass CEO is the fool who decides what the athlete is "worth."  At least the athlete has to be able to do his job well enough to produce points or prevent them from being produced before some silly executive will assign a value to that job.  Second, it's indirectly possible to pretend that there is a marginally direct link between an athlete's performance and the dollars spectators will spend to witness that performance.

No such logic exists for executive salaries.  An exec can completely suck at his job, providing no leadership, no technical skills, no Big Picture insight, and no useful reason for his or her existence and that exec can still drain big bucks from the corporate till.  Any half-competent corporate researcher can find examples of thousands of execs who have mismanaged their company into oblivion and walked away with a magnificent golden parachute.  Sometimes those parachutes can be directly attributed to the company's death and that doesn't seem to phase anyone. 

No, I think the reason American companies pay such ridiculous salaries for non-performing execs is because we're looking for King George. A paltry 1% of the original citizens of the United States participated in the American Revolution.  The overwhelming majority were perfectly happy with taxation without representation and a class system that stifled England into 3rd world status in the next 200 years.  A disgusting number of the elite who participated in the creation of the Constitution wanted a government similar to the one the country had just defeated, many of them urged George Washington to become King George Washington.  Today, most Americans are doing everything they can to return to the social structure and economic system that killed crushed the life out of Jolly Ole' England. 

We're happily and stupidly electing an inherited political system, setting ourselves up for years of inbred Bush family-screw-ups.  We've created a class system of upper crust, Ivy League morons who float to the top of almost every corporate institution, in spite of inability and lack of imagination and infected by the age-old ruling-class-total-absence-of-ethical-standards. 

Humans are an incredibly simple-minded animal, at the core.  We're desperately hoping that there is more to life than . . . life.  We want "meaning" to be applied to this painful and degrading existence, but we don't want to work for that significance.  We want someone to impart it upon us.  Since gods are notoriously absent during times of trial and turbulence, we hope that the gods will speak to "special people": the inherited ruling class.  As stupid as that theory is, it's as old as human society.  If you can find a single example of a king being anything but a drain on his culture or a queen being anything but a useless figurehead sucking the lifeblood away from the folks who do actual work, I'll be astounded.  But I won't be convinced that your one example establishes anything but an incredible example of dumb luck in a single moment in time. 

The best companies are more democratic than autocratic.  The most successful companies in modern history have a structure that is dramatically more flat that pyramidal, decision and salary-wise.  Not that anyone cares.  We're more interested in being comfortable than in being productive.  Apparently, most of us are more comfortable when we're being ruled by a royal class whose inheritance is decreed by non-existent gods.  P.T. Barnum must have been thinking of this trait when he said "there is a sucker born every minute."  The only thing wrong with this sentiment, in 2005, is that suckers are born at a much faster rate. 

February 2005

#117 Why A Business Exists (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The MBA folks will tell you that a business exists to make money; period.  Businesses that operate that way don't succeed for long.  Businesses that start out with that simple-minded motivation rarely survive the first year of operation.  So much for what MBAs know about business.

Businesses that succeed serve their customers, first, and profit from that service, second.  Businesses that succeed really well know their customers really well and know exactly how to meet their expectations.  The only way to do that is to set out with the intention of serving a group of customers with a product or service that will meet the needs or desires of those customers.  The word that keeps appearing here is "service." 

Most execs have absolutely no idea how to provide service.  They believe the world was set up to provide services to them, not the other way around.  However, many successful business ventures were started by people who were driven to provide a service and wouldn't let anything, including financial or personal hardship, get between them and the people they intended to serve. 

Bill Gates and his partner dropped out of college and set up shop in a New Mexico Holiday Inn so that they could be close to their first customer, Altair (a long dead, early computer company that provided as little service as possible to its customers).  Their product was a simple version of Basic (a product that Microsquash is still promoting and supporting) that had been specially ported for the Altair's processor and I/O.  It's tough to provide much more service than moving into your customer's backyard and developing the product exactly to their application.

A company I worked for, a decade ago, once filled it's assembly lines with musicians and music lovers because the founder/chief engineer and the rest of the execs had absolutely no idea how to design the professional music products they intended to build.  They were bright enough to hire people who might use the products and would criticize the products until they were right.  Now, that same company has staffed its sales and marketing departments with ex-professional sound engineers who provide the same capability. 

Since then I've been employed by, or temporarily contracted to, a variety of companies, in a variety of industries, that have not managed to develop any sort of corporate service attitude.  I wish I could say the experience has been enlightening, at least, but it's mostly been depressing. 

The fault always lies in the same location; at the top.  CEOs who believe they've paid their dues and deserve royal treatment start the attitude disadvantage.  CFOs, CMOs, UFOs, Vice-Presidents of Nothing Useful, Directors of Nobody, Managers of Managers, and all of the pointless, overblown titles that amount to folks serving no one but themselves and performing no work that benefits the organization follow down the chain of power.  By the time the company's pecking order reaches down to the people who actually perform the function of the business, the business focus is totally blurred. 

Generating a business statement is a pointless exercise in a business where the people who stand to profit the most are completely disassociated from the business activities.  And that's the way smart companies think; the people who gain the most from the business success should work the hardest and smartest.  If the folks at the bottom of the totem pole believe the people at the top are supporting the company's reason to exist, everyone is going in the same direction and the whole can exceed the sum of the parts.  When that happens, it's fun to go to work in the morning.  When it doesn't, the lion's share of paperwork generated on the company printer is resumes.

#107 An Impossible Dream (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Bobby Dylan sang, in "Talking World War Three Blues," that "we're all havin' that same dream."  Dylan was talking about being the last person left on earth after the final war.  Management's dream is that execs can screw off and their low paid employees will take up the slack for them.  It's a dream because it doesn't make a lick of sense and, on the rare occasion that it appears to be working, it won't last. Like a good night's sleep, this pipedream comes to an end way too soon.  The simple fact is that corporate motivation is directed top down and when the leadership's flow of activity, energy, and ideas stops flowing, the business is heading for bad times. 

While it's possible to convince people to work harder than their bosses for a short time, it only makes sense that the people receiving the most benefit should do the most work.  When that isn't true, there better be a clear, available, and direct chain of succession or the most productive people will look for other opportunities or put their energies into more interesting activities.  In business, survival of the fittest often looks like rats leaving sinking ships.  There is no low-level fix to inactive management, so anyone with the skills to be somewhere else is likely to start shipping resumes when it becomes obvious that management isn't on a temporary vacation. 

For everyone else, the company becomes a place where the goals are incredibly simple.  If the execs aren't working, they have no effective way to know that no one else is working.  "Looking busy" isn't a difficult task in an organization that has minimal management.  On the rare occasion that management is in the vicinity of activity, it only takes a little ass-kissing and random motion to convince inactive management that something is being done.  It may not be work, but it looks like work to someone who isn't familiar with functional activity.  If you've been employed, you've experienced this traditional American phenomenon.  Most large companies generate much more random activity than directed, functional work.  Unfortunately, way too many small and mid-sized companies sink themselves imitating dysfunctional Misfortune 500 disaster zones. 

As consumers I think we've come to expect lethargy and incompetence from the management of companies with which we do business.  My home town recently acquired a new grocery chain, ALDI, that specializes in low cost, no-name-brand, bulk stock groceries.  The store doesn't accept credit cards or personal checks.  ALDI stores don't even provide free grocery bags, plastic costs 10¢ and paper is 5¢.  The result is that most items in the store cost a fraction of our local "bulk" grocery's prices.  Even more dramatic, though, is the difference between the two store's management styles. 

Recently, I was standing in a long line of ALDI shoppers waiting for my chance to pay money and escape the store.  One of the folks in front of me "discovered" (regardless of dozens of signs all around the store) that his credit card and checkbook weren't going to be accepted at the checkout counter.  The line came to a halt while he meandered toward the ATM.  A light came on next to the register and I began to consider pushing my cart to the side and leaving.  I'm not a great fan of standing in line.  Apparently, the light was a request from the checker for backup.  In a few seconds a manager appeared and opened a second checkout line.  Big surprise, management doing work!

An even bigger surprise was yet to come.  Not only did the manager know how to work the register, he was a lightening fast checker and the folks who'd moved to his line (including me) practically ran through the line with their groceries.  Our local ALDI's checkers are famous for being efficient, but this guy was easily twice as fast as his employees. 

At the other end of the management equation is the Cub Foods management; the other bulk grocery in our neighborhood.  I have never seen Cub's managers run checkout and I'd be amazed if they are capable of doing anything that technical.  I have seen Cub's managers watch, disapprovingly, as their employees struggle with moronic customers and malfunctioning equipment.  They didn't lift a finger to improve the situation, but they do take every opportunity to work on their Scrooge facial expressions.  As a result, the Cub store is consistently filthy, disorganized, and the general attitude of its employees could be summed up with the word "disinterested." 

To take the inactive manager motif to the extreme, you could look to our current Commander in Thief.  G.W. Bush is the laziest, most uninvolved President the nation has seen since Reagan or Eisenhower.  In his first year of office, one of the most catastrophic in the nation's history, GeeWiz was on vacation more often than he was "working."  However, when he's working he's mostly on vacation.  The status of the current executive summaries is something slightly less sophisticated than a series of "where's Waldo" illustrations.  Whether Bush is intellectually incapacitated is unknown, because he's so lazy that his capabilities are completely untested.  Bush has tossed his responsibilities off on a variety of subordinates, none of whom are equipped (technically, ethically, intellectually, or psychologically) to handle the job.  As a result, the nation's national security experienced it's worst failure since WWII and the worst ever failure to protect civilians.  The economy has stumbled from a booming, energetic, and creative high to a malaise nearly equal to the mess that Reagan's corrupt mishandling created for the early Clinton years.  And, maybe worst of all, the nation is practically perfectly polarized; unequalled since the years leading to the Civil War.  We have two, nearly equally populated sides that absolutely, totally hate each other.  Bush and the Neocons have turned the country so completely against itself that we ought to rename ourselves the Disconnected States. 

Typical of what happens when a corporation is experiencing this kind of failure of leadership, many of the nation's best and brightest are contemplating jumping ship.  Fortunately for the world, this happened when Hitler's Germany was misled by a similarly lazy, incompetent, and uninvolved "leader."  Without an intelligent, moral, and aware top executive, the marching morons took charge and drove Germany in so many foolish directions that the nation's energy was misspent far more quickly than it would have been if there had been executive planning and guidance behind the mischief.  Lucky for us.  If Germany had retained its best and brightest, they would have had the atomic bomb years before us and their missile program would have been capable of delivering that bomb to our continent. 

Bush's amoral 30% majority is a similar crowd.  They are mostly out for themselves, taking on an occasional distraction like school vouchers, abortion, and pointless wars against third world nations.  They're uneducated, unscientific, uncreative, and selfish.  In the end, the Bushies will dissipate our national resources, international respect and power, and convince many of the most intelligent and talented citizens that America's time has come and that it's time to move to a more hospitable and dynamic country. 

Uninvolved leadership always self-destructs.  You'd think the free market advocates would be a little concerned about this fact.

#97 Management Perks and Necessity (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

From the working class employee’s perspective, "upper management" is the portion of the company that has no purpose.  The higher-ups attend every party-time trade show, personal improvement seminar, and marginally work-qualified travel junket the company can afford.  They often attend events the company can’t afford.  In many organizations, a "need/not needed" formula can be applied to the company’s positions: “the people who are required to do work are necessary, the people who are are not are expendable.”  Using this formula, you may find that most of your company’s executive branch is expendable. 

For example, assembly personnel are logically required to be at their work stations on time, every day, for the whole day.  They have to be in place because they are part of a  process that allows for no surplus staffing.  Many executive positions are allowed total freedom of  arrival and departure.  They don’t have to be in place because the company will function just as well without them.  Their absence is often an improvement in the workplace.  Using my formula, these executives are expendable and the assembly personnel are not. 

I’m not interested in why business works this way, it just does and every company generates its own reasons for executive existence.  “They were there first,” is as good an explanation as you are likely to get.  What I am interested in is the few managers who actually want to make a contribution and don’t know what that contribution should be.  So, if you believe you “deserve” your big office, your tiny work load, and your out-of-proportion salary, find something else to read.  The rest of this article is going to continue to insult you and question your value to your company, the economy, and world ecology.  If you want to make an important contribution to your company and employees as a member of what Peter Drucker calls “the management class,” please read on and I hope to repay your effort.  You are a rare bird who needs help to avoid extinction. 

A simple perspective every manager should take is, “What services do I manager provide to the people who work for me?  Do those services justify my existence to them and to my own managers or customers?  How do I add value to those services so I can continue to justify my existence and increase my value in the future?”  The answers to those questions will return an answer to the next question, “What am I worth to my customers?”  You can replace “customers,” with employees, supervisors, other departments, and the end users of your product or service.  In most companies, the customer is the enemy; no matter where he comes from.  In a well run company, customers come from every direction. 

In the usual organization, the only real customer inside of the organization is the CEO, owner, or Big Cheese.  If Cheese has lost that critical bit of perspective, the company will exist soley to provide for his gratification and only the foolish dedication of a middle manager or two will drag out the company's painful death.  If Cheese has at least some grasp on reality, he or she will give some direction to the people who do the work and that will contribute enough to the company direction to prevent bankruptcy.  If your name is Cheese and your style falls in these two categories, either you go away or your company will; it’s only a matter of time.  If Cheese is one of those rare birds who recognizes and promotes the company’s real customers, the problem becomes a matter of pursuing excellence with some real hope of achieving it. 

How do you know if your company is mismanaged?  If you are the mismanager, you probably don't have any way to know, because your employees won't be honest with you and you aren't likely to be honest with yourself.  But positive answers to the following questions are a good sign that your company is troubled:

• Is there more than one corporate vice-president? (If the country only needs one, and no one knows what he does, why do companies need more?) 

• Are the executives more inclined to play golf/tennis/etc. than to do work? 

• Does the company tend to have "jeans days" when the execs are on business trips? 

• Do people act cautious when you're around?

• Get resources, protect from other managers and customers, play politics?

• Do unsigned memos about “dysfunctional companies” appear on your desk? 

The most important thing to remember about managing is "power corrupts."  If you know that your position is corrupting you and you attempt to limit that effect, you have a shot at doing something positive in your position.  If you pretend that it can't happen to you and ignore your power abuses, you will drift into uselessness; eventually becoming a person the company can do without.   

September 2004

#96 Hairy Jealousy (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

The older I get the more I notice idiotic little things popping up in my psyche.  Thirty years ago, I watched “suits” march off to work and marveled at how robot-like they seemed.  While I was not exactly a freak, I was confident in my safe distance from the average working man.  I had hair over my shoulders.  I wore sandals to work.  I played guitar and wrote stories and read science fiction.  I was cool.  Thirty years later, I was a minor league suit.  Monday through Friday, I wore a tie and shoes that are less comfortable and more socially acceptable. 

More than the tie and dumb shoes, I think a sign of my sellout is that I sometimes caught myself thinking another man’s long hair is “unprofessional.”  You know the guys I’m talking about.  The lawyer with a ponytail.  The computer programmer doing a Jim Morrison imitation.  The dreadlocked engineer.  It only passes through my mind for a moment before I snuffed it out, but it irritated me that it was there, ever. 

I admit that a lot of  the origin for the thought comes from my work environment.  I’m was an engineer in a medical devices company.  There is probably no more stodgy, uncreative, mindlessly, conservative business in the world than those companies producing products for doctors.  No one with half a talent world ever work for an established medical devices or drug company, because those places are so stifling that ideas slip out of their hands like a bar of buttered, wet soap.  In a medical products company, “unprofessional” means anything from not being properly dressed to discussing screwed-up  products out loud.  You can stumble into more “career limiting mistakes” in that business than you can on a battlefield.  People are judged by microscopic social errors and inane business traditions and surviving every workday is a painful test.  So we get really critical of diddly, unimportant things.

But that isn’t what the hair thing is about.  Long hair is a completely different “professionalism” issue.  Being successful and letting your hair grow flaunts male modesty.  It’s a way of saying, loudly, “I don’t give a damn what you think. I don ‘t have to kiss anyone’s ass.  I’m talented enough, or rich enough, that don’t need this job.” 

Men don’t mind brilliant or rich men who conform, like the rest of us, to robot-ness.  But it really annoys us to have our own menial, gutless, slave status thrown back in our faces.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Arnold Swartzenegger, and the majority of rich, famous guys respect this ritual.  They wear uncomfortable, geeky looking clothes.  They cut their hair so short that their ears protrude from their heads like microwave antenna.  While we might resent their wealth, we never have to resent their freedom.  For some of these guys, the richer they get the more enslaved they look. 

That’s comforting, from a sick, pack animal kind of logic.  That’s the way it should be, as far as the herd is concerned.  Don’t show off your wealth and your freedom, pick one and keep the other hidden from our view.  We can deal with a long haired dude flipping burgers or pushing a broom.  A pony tail and a Mercedes is too much of a blow to our pride.  Success and freedom are so far out of the reach of the average working stiff.  We don’t want to think about what we’ve given up to be useful corporate fodder.  So keep your hair under your hat if you don’t want to be called “unprofessional.”  Like you’d care.

September 2004

#95 Going Postal, a Rational Response (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

If you talk at any length to those of us who works for a large company, you’ll eventually hear some comment about “going postal.”  When you dig a little ways into why they might use this language, you’ll find that they may not be kidding.  Even more to the point, it probably makes sense to consider that line of thinking.

The U.S. Post Office, for instance, is not much different from the worst-case major corporation.  The working class is stressed, strained, and maligned by a management class that is unskilled, unsympathetic, and rarely available or useful. Post Office employees often complain about working under conditions where they are treated as not much more than a part of the machinery.  Management considers their employees' lives to be of no more importance than the junk mail they sort and deliver.  People are hired and fired and reassigned for the strangest, most irrational reasons imaginable.  People are put into situations where they snap.  When they do, they sometimes come to work heavily armed.  They “go postal.”

Using the classic Western model for heroism, the lone gunman who finds protection from injustice by blasting his way through the bad guys, going postal may not be an irrational response.  We are surrounded by a barrage of major powers that don’t care about justice.  The workplace is just the first in a long line of conflicts where we are helpless to put things right.  From the IRS to the welfare system to chain stores where we return defective products to minimum wage workers who could care less if we “have a nice day,” we are powerless to find a fair deal.  If Bruce, Arnold, Sylvester, and the other muscle guys can shoot their way out of impossible situations, why can’t the rest of us? 

Let’s face it, there is nobody out there protecting the ordinary citizen. The people who are supposed to be protecting us are just in it for the power and money.  We’re like Joseph Heller’s man in the street crying “Help, police!” hoping someone will step up to save us from the police, lawyers, employers, government, and our violent neighbors.  But we’re alone against those hazards.  No can or will help us fight those battles.

The Dilbert^© cartoon constantly illustrates what life in corporate America is like.  A mindless herd of marching management morons make decisions that destroy the companies we depend on.  MBA pinheads who know more buzzwords than an Air Force general, but who don’t meet that same low common sense standard, decide what we do and when we do it for the majority of our waking hours. 

That’s no small portion of life, either.  Someone estimated that, out of a 30 year working career, most of us get 1 1/2 years away from the job before retirement.  You work until you're mentally dead, you retire, you die.  What a life!  If anything puts the phrase “wage slave” into context, that ought to do it. 

If we screw up and step over one of the thousands of boundaries that define the margins between legal and illegal, the penalties often make the Spanish Inquisition look like the good old days.  We are under threat of imprisonment or poverty for more causes than Sam Clements ever imagined back in the 1800’s when he analyzed the English penal system and found a few hundred capital crimes.  We have crime in the streets, in business, and in government.  We have redefined capital crimes in the twentieth century.  Unless you are a case-hardened criminal, going jail isn’t just “paying your debt to society.”  In the U.S., when you go to jail you might as well be dead.  You can get hung, gassed, or injected through a direct sentence.  You can get any of those things, indirectly, as part of a minimal sentence in our over-crowded prison system.

With the exception of Tim Allen and one other guy whose name escapes me, jail time is pretty much the end of any hope for a normal life in this country.  Rehabilitation is a concept that only applies to white collar prisons.  The rest of us are tossed to the wolves.  So the only honorable way out, when backed into a wall, may be going postal on the folks who built the wall, put you against it, and laugh at your predicament when they escort you to the door.

September 2004