Andrew Lisy's Blog » management

Find Your Torchbearers

aj — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:17:37 +0000

When an organization is still in the small, startup phase, it’s not hard to have employees that each feel like they have a stake in the company and are willing to rally behind it. As the company grows, however, subsequent employees get distanced from management and from company success, so it is easier for them to treat the job less like their own undertaking, and more like a paycheck. Too many employees treating their work as just a job will end up affecting company culture and ultimately, product. Identifying and rewarding torchbearers helps to ensure that the cultural message is effectively conveyed and carried out at all ranks.

I witnessed a prime example of this last weekend when I was, of all places, in a bar. Not just any bar, this was a “trendy” place that specialized in exotic drinks crafted by “mixologists”. We sat down at the counter, and began conversing with the mixologist, who was extremely knowledgeable about the menu and obviously took much pride in his craft. When I didn’t like the first drink I ordered, he offered to “surprise me” with the next one, and made me one of the most interesting concoctions I’ve ever had. Needless to say, we were sorry to see him go when his shift ended and he was replaced by a listless bartender who barely spoke a word.

The first mixologist, Steven, was a torchbearer. The interactions with him defined the experience for us, the customers. It’s easy to imagine that his enthusiasm for the job rubs off on many of his coworkers (with the possible exception of the bartender that replaced him), and elevates the quality of the entire establishment. Employees like him are by far the most valuable, and must be retained even at high[er] cost. The idea of paying every worker the same is fine if you consider your employees to be commodities, but for a truly differentiated business, this shouldn’t be the case.

Create, Don’t Destroy

aj — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:33:39 +0000

Jotted down in a file I keep called “life rules”, I have a simple phrase. Create, don’t destroy. It sounds trite, and perhaps it is. But I firmly believe that the most successful people in the world follow this principle every day, whether or not they have specifically written it anywhere. While it may not make you rich and famous, if you spend your time creating instead of destroying, it will undoubtedly make your life far better.

What does it mean, “create, don’t destroy”? There are countless opportunities every day where we make decisions to add to or subtract from something. Projects at work started by an adversary that you’d rather see fail, cynical observations that don’t have any constructive benefit, favors that you could easily do for someone, but choose not to — these are all chances that we have to build on something, but instead choose to detract from it. There are all sorts of underlying roots — jealousy, political gain, personal grudges — but in each case the effort in the task is designed to undermine.

Instead, spend your time improving anything and everything you can. Even if you secretly want a project to fail, put that aside and contribute earnestly. It might feel good or be easy to criticize or be cynical, and often it is. Far more difficult is actually helping out and building. You’ll find, however, that those that build are far better rewarded and end up far happier than those that destroy. Creation itself is an additive process — the more you create, the more you’ll be able to create. Why waste effort in making something fail when you could have a hand in making it succeed?

Build a Culture of Ideas

aj — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:21:03 +0000

The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a “culture of ideas”. Google is the prime example of this — if you work at Google, you’re encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this — Google “loses” one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting!

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time. [wikipedia]

Some of their best products, such as Gmail and Adsense, originated from this revolutionary policy!

So what does an ordinary company get out of encouraging employees to dream up ways to do things better? Perhaps a day a week is a bit much for most enterprises, but this sort of out-of-the-box thinking can do wonders to spur new innovation or improve operations at any company. Traditionally, change follows a top-down approach: managers devise a new product, process or protocol and the employees implement the change according to instructions they receive. The communication is often one-way so feedback doesn’t effectively flow. The result is few sources of innovation and an inefficient system for improvement.

A better way is to “design” all aspects of the company culture so that any employee can have an input on key aspects of the company. Simply telling workers that “the boss’s door is always open” is insufficient, since it still requires a person to put themselves on the line. Mechanisms like encouraging employees to pursue their own ideas, setting up constant feedback and suggestion sessions (online is particularly good, since people may tend to be more honest), idea contests and frequent communication from management work far better and allow employees to feel that managers are listening and valuing their contributions.

Putting power in the hands of employees to suggest and improve their daily routines has several advantages. It allows the people who know the processes and systems the best to have a hand in improving them, instead of relying on higher-ups who may not be as well versed in the day-to-day. Furthermore, it makes employees feel like they have a chance to stand out in their company and contribute more than a 9-5 workday. The entrenched culture of many companies that exist today makes it difficult to establish such a culture, but the ones who do will find themselves amply rewarded.

Management is Engineering

aj — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:07:38 +0000

As legend has it, the humanities program at MIT was started by an MIT president who quipped “too many MIT graduates end up working for Harvard and Yale graduates”. The thinking then, which remains to this day, is
that engineering classes make a person narrowly focused whereas humanities classes help a student to see the full picture. Although I can see some truth in this, I would argue that a person is far better equipped to be a great manager having taken engineering than its “softer” alternatives.

What does engineering have to do with management? Systems. If I were to describe any sort of engineering — chemical, electrical, financial, whatever — in one word, it’s about systems. A system is a collection of unreliable components arranged together in just the right way such to create a stable, predictable, reliable outcome. Proteins assembled in a drug, transistors arranged on a chip, mortgages bundled in a CDO (well, maybe a bad example…) — all of these are relatively unstable parts with little use by themselves that become predicable and useful because of their alignment with other parts.

So how is management engineering? A business, by nature, is a system. The parts are the inputs — employees, inventory, capital — and profit is the (hopefully steady) output. It’s popular for business managers these days to say that “the value of our business is our employees”, and that is certainly true, but the human nature of an employee means that they are inherently unreliable. Plans change, new jobs come along, retirement beckons — all of these things mean that the human element of the system needs to be designed to be fault-tolerant. An engineer understands this concept, and has a natural insight into ways of building efficiency and redundancy into the organization. A more streamlined process that reduces needless overlap while maintaining critical redundancies will maximize profit and ensure business continuity.

The sweet spot in management is a manager who can balance the vital “soft” aspects of motivation with the organizational awareness that an engineering background can provide. Either trait by itself can do an adequate job, but the combination creates a truly capable and effective motivator and manager.