Monthly Archives: May 2010

Generation-Y does not exist

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Inspir­a­tions about man­age­ment some­times arrive from unex­pec­ted sources.

In my spare time I occa­sion­ally per­form magic shows for chil­dren. Recently I was read­ing a book­let by David Kaye, who per­forms under the name Silly Billy.1.

“Through the so-called bene­fits of sci­ence — the impossible exploits of movie her­oes, blood-curdling action stor­ies in video games — the child is thrilled to such an extent that a magician’s bag of tricks becomes a poor sub­sti­tute. All this has brought about another more mali­cious change. Fif­teen or twenty years ago the aver­age child was well-mannered, quiet and attent­ive. The magi­cian had very little dif­fi­culty keep­ing them under con­trol. Today it appears that those few excep­tions have become the rule. Chil­dren are more ill-mannered. They have less respect for their eld­ers and the con­duct in pub­lic places is often far from commendable.”

This is an often heard com­plaint about the younger gen­er­a­tions. But there is more to this quote that meets the eye.

This para­graph was writ­ten by Eddie Clever in 1939! Kaye only changed “radio shows” to “video games” and all of a sud­den it looks as if it was writ­ten yes­ter­day. We can go even fur­ther back to find sim­ilar con­cerns about the younger gen­er­a­tions. There are records of Dutch priests in the 18th cen­tury that lament the lewd and drunken beha­viour of the young people in his par­ish. Have young people really changed? I think not — it is us our per­cep­tion that changes as we grow older.

This has dir­ect bear­ing on a concept that that is used fre­quently in our cul­tural land­scape and con­tem­por­ary man­age­ment: Baby Boomers, Generation-X, Generation-Y and other broad sweep­ing cat­egor­isa­tions. In much of the man­age­ment lit­er­at­ure on this topic it is made to believe that the young pro­fes­sion­als of today are dif­fer­ent to they way the authors them­selves once were and should thus be treated differently.

There are obvi­ously dif­fer­ence between age cohorts. As we go through the stages of life we mature and our pri­or­it­ies change. There are, how­ever, no psy­cho­lo­gical dif­fer­ences between age groups in the past, present or future. Our psy­cho­lo­gical make-up simply does not evolve fast enough for us to notice any differences.

Sure, there are people born between cer­tain years, but to think that they are in any way psy­cho­lo­gic­ally dif­fer­ent to the way Gen­er­a­tion X or Baby Boomers were when they were at the same age is not sup­por­ted by any evidence.

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Notes
  1. David Kaye, The First Cen­tury of Children’s Magic. [↩]

The Battle of the Teaspoons

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It doesn’t mat­ter how well-designed, func­tional or beau­ti­ful your office tea-room or kit­chen is, it almost seems com­pletely use­less if you can’t find a tea­spoon. From time-to-time someone will snap and there will be a call to arms. The indig­nant party who leads the charge will usu­ally be well-meaning and genu­inely con­cerned about stand­ing up for the rights of oth­ers need­ing to cre­ate a vor­tex in their hot bever­age of choice.

Emails go out, com­plaints are made and, if the work­place cul­ture is entirely wrong, pain­fully polite and hil­ari­ously hos­tile pass­ive aggress­ive notes will adorn the tearoom. After some weeks of tor­ment the appar­ently intract­able prob­lem will be solved by simply buy­ing some more spoons, but not before sev­eral people have walked around feel­ing guilty while the spoon cru­saders end up mut­ter­ing about never being listened to. All of this is avoid­able once you under­stand the sci­ence behind spoon migration.

The battles of the teaspoons

Sci­ence? Spoon Migra­tion? Yes, it has been stud­ied and pub­lished in the Brit­ish Med­ical Journal. A research study at the Centre for Epi­demi­ology and Pop­u­la­tion Health Research at the Mac­far­lane Bur­net Insti­tute for Med­ical Research and Pub­lic Health in Mel­bourne, Aus­tralia found that the half-life of tea­spoons in their com­munal tearoom was 42 days.1.

That’s right, it’s been stud­ied by a group of epi­demi­olo­gists and, to para­phrase and butcher their res­ults, the con­clu­sion is: com­munal tea­spoons will even­tu­ally dis­ap­pear. This has sparked a range of pos­sible man­age­ment inter­ven­tions, including:

  • Don’t provide spoons
  • Provide dis­pos­able stirrers
  • Provide spoons on a heavy chain
  • Just accept that people are going to take them and buy more spoons

Do we defend the prac­tice of steal­ing office prop­erty, regard­less of how small, shiny and appar­ently value­less it is? Of course not! We should, how­ever, under­stand which fights are worth fight­ing. Or in the wise words of Sun Tzu:

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

To provide a simple guide to where loss-of-teaspoons fit into the scheme of things, con­sider the fol­low­ing list:

  • Occu­pa­tional Health and Safety issues
  • Work­ing to gain multi-million dol­lar rev­enue streams
  • Tea­spoons
  • Ensur­ing you’ve employed the right people for the job
  • Mak­ing sure your tele­com­mu­nic­a­tion sys­tems are run­ning effectively
  • Ensur­ing your cor­por­ate image is one that appeals to consumers

Note that the list above could have been writ­ten in any order and the addi­tion of tea­spoons will always appear unworthy and unwelcome. This is, quite simply, because it is not an import­ant issue.

For the amount of time and effort people will spend badger­ing other staff mem­bers about the loss of spoons, com­plain­ing, writ­ing nasty notes and gen­er­ally dis­rupt­ing the work­place, based on epi­demi­olo­gical sci­ence, if you have a tearoom it is best to accept that you will reg­u­larly need to buy spoons. This one simple tip will help avoid a lot of the angst and pain of not being able to accur­ately meas­ure your morn­ing caf­feine dose.

He who knows when he can fight and when he can­not will be vic­tori­ous.He who knows when he can fight and when he can­not will be victorious.
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Notes
  1. Lim, Megan S C and Hel­lard, Mar­garet E and Aitken, Camp­bell K (2005) The case of the dis­ap­pear­ing tea­spoons: lon­git­ud­inal cohort study of the dis­place­ment of tea­spoons in an Aus­tralian research insti­tute. BMJ (331)7531: p. 1498–1500. doi: 10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1498. [↩]

Make Time Poverty History!

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Good morn­ing Agnes, how are you? You know how it is, busy, busy, busy … Have you read my latest pro­posal? No sorry, I am very time poor.

As afflu­ence has spread across Aus­tralia and parts of the rest of the world, time seems to be the new fron­tier of poverty. When ask­ing the aver­age pro­fes­sional what is hap­pen­ing in their life, the word ‘busy’ is fre­quently uttered. If they seek your sym­pathy, the super­lat­ive neo­lo­gism Time Poor is used.

The under­ly­ing mes­sage is that, although these time poor people are fin­an­cially wealthy, we should feel sorry for them as they equate them­selves with the poor people of the world. They are, how­ever, not poor cash poor, but time poor. We need to estab­lish a char­ity and sell white sym­pathy wrist­bands:

MAKE TIME POVERTY HISTORY

Time Poverty is, how­ever, more often than not a self-induced state of mind and not an actual state of affairs. It is not about a fac­tual lack of avail­able time, but the per­cep­tion of a lack of avail­able time. Being time poor and being busy has almost become a status sym­bol in what Scott Ber­kin describes as the Cult of Busy :

“That simply by always seem­ing to have some­thing to do, we all assume you must be import­ant or successful. It explains the beha­viour of many people at work. By appear­ing busy, people bother them less, and  sim­ul­tan­eously believe they’re doing well at their job.”

For some strange reason, as Ber­kin points out, a man­ager with a long line of people at her door will com­mand respect, but a long line at a super­mar­ket register will cre­ate frustration.

The Cult of Busy has a large fol­low­ing and has spawned numer­ous courses and books for man­agers seek­ing to squeeze more pro­duct­ive minutes out of a day. A man­ager I worked with some years ago was always busy, but never seem to achieve much. He decided to sign up for a time man­age­ment course. Unfor­tu­nately he was so busy that he for­got to attend the course!

for­got to attend a time man­age­ment course.

Being busy is status sym­bol for the appar­ently suc­cess­ful man­ager. If you are not busy or if you have enough spare time to speak to people, you are obvi­ously not very good at what you do, is the sub­con­scious reasoning.

Sadly, accom­pa­ny­ing the new Cult of Busy, is also an abund­ance of guides avail­able to sup­port this hyper­act­ive charade. Wiki­How even provides a com­pre­hens­ive pro­gram for those who want to join the ranks of the appar­ent time poor:

  • Know what the stand­ards are (so you just meet them).
  • Cre­ate the illu­sion of furi­ous activ­ity (some­what messy desk, lots of win­dows open on com­puter, post it notes around the monitor).
  • Ask lots of intel­li­gent ques­tions to make each task appear more com­plex than it actu­ally is.
  • Be alert and watch out for ‘big brother’.
  • Carry a back-up prop or doc­u­ment and make sure you have a cover story ready.
  • Send pack­ages to your­self with doc­u­ments to ‘review’.
  • Have per­sonal con­ver­sa­tions and phone calls away from your workspace.
  • Don’t brag to any­one that you’re doing any of the above.

In con­trast, a lucid man­ager is never time poor, but takes con­trol over the avail­able time to them. A lucid man­ager might have a lot to do but rarely says “I don’t have time” or “I am busy”. A lucid man­ager works effi­ciently and does not choose to live in false poverty but  leads a rich life full of achievement.

Next time when you are very busy and some­body asks a ques­tion, don’t brush them of with say­ing your busy but listen to their needs.

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Enter the Dragon

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Wear­ing bright pink pants, white T-shirt and green sash, I stood look­ing through the barbed wire and plague locusts at the trees filled, for the first time in Bendigo’s his­tory, with a smelly and squawk­ing colony of fruit bats. The sound of Mancini’s Pink Pan­ther theme was a stark coun­ter­point to the apo­ca­lyptic feel of the mar­shalling area and was an odd but pleas­ing reminder that, out there, were the fest­iv­it­ies of the 140th Bendigo Easter Fest­ival. My strange out­fit matched that of the other sixty men, whose job it was to spread out over the length of Sun Loong – the forty year old, one hun­dred metre long imper­ial dragon – and carry him through the crowd; the grand finale of the Festival’s Easter Monday street parade. When I hois­ted the bam­boo and silk dragon’s mid­sec­tion above my head, the one thing I least expec­ted to receive was a motiv­at­ing insight into entrepreneurship.

After being swept the 500 metres toward the parade start­ing area, each of the dragon-bearers had an hour to wait. This is when I met Ewan.

Ewan was a fifty-something with close-cropped hair and a no-nonsense atti­tude. We talked about our kids and he men­tioned how he enjoyed the time he could spend with his chil­dren because he works from home – some­thing he has done for a great many years. Ewan explained he could do this because he has a pas­sion for start­ing up busi­nesses and grow­ing them. He also men­tioned the many and var­ied indus­tries in which he’d worked: pay-TV, repos­ses­sions, logist­ics, tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions; to name a few. Though I have no idea what level of suc­cess he’d achieved in any of the busi­nesses in fin­an­cial terms, it was clear that he had thor­oughly enjoyed start­ing each busi­ness, each industry (with the excep­tion of tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions) and he really loved the life­style his choices afforded him.

Through­out our dis­cus­sion he gen­er­ously offered a lot of advice about how to “avoid work­ing for someone else … there’s only one way to do some­thing: your own way.” Some of Ewan’s views were:

  • Start small and build up – that way you avoid get­ting trapped if the idea doesn’t work
  • Seek out a niche – some­thing that no-one has thought of or bothered with
  • Avoid employ­ing people – where pos­sible use subcontractors
  • You don’t need train­ing to be an entrepreneur
  • Treat oth­ers the way you expect to be treated: with hon­esty and integrity
  • Avoid the tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions industry – no one is mak­ing money in telecoms.

The shout went up that it was time for the dragon to march its way through the streets lined with fam­il­ies from all over Vic­toria. As I watched Ewan’s feet shuffle ahead of mine, I thought about what it is that really makes him or any other entre­pren­eur suc­cess­ful. It’s an indefin­able mix of self-confidence, energy, clev­erness and determ­in­a­tion that pre­dis­poses them to succeed.

After 4,237 steps over 2.1 kilo­metres, I helped Sun Loong rest in his Museum home to reluct­antly sleep for another year. I returned to my reg­u­lar cloth­ing, none of which is pink, and walked out into the sun­light and away from the barbed wire enclos­ure, the bats and the locusts.

I don’t believe in signs, omens, or ‘mes­sages from the uni­verse’ and hav­ing walked through an appar­ent apo­ca­lypse, I left with a much bet­ter sense of what it is to have a real love of busi­ness – some­thing I never expec­ted when I entered the dragon.

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When you see an MBA on the road, kill them!

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© Stephen Coburn | Dreamstime.com

After two years of intense study­ing, writ­ing more than 75,000 words, many exams, hun­dreds of hours of lec­tures and a fas­cin­at­ing exped­i­tion to Hanoi, Ian and I have finally form­ally gradu­ated for my MBA.

When start­ing this jour­ney I asked myself whether I would be wast­ing my time. Well, it def­in­itely was not a waste of time — learned some inter­est­ing things; vis­ited a fas­cin­at­ing city; met great people and did some inter­est­ing research. Dur­ing my two years of intens­ive study I have, how­ever, also cul­tiv­ated a crit­ical atti­tude towards the mater­ial gen­er­ally touted as man­age­ment theory.

One import­ant aspect that seems to be for­got­ten in many man­age­ment books is that run­ning a busi­ness is first and fore­most about the actual pro­duc­tion pro­cess and/or pro­vi­sion of ser­vice. Man­age­ment sup­ports these activ­it­ies, but can­not replace them. Study­ing man­age­ment does, for example, not teach you any­thing about how to make the best horse saddles or provide world class healthcare.

If man­age­ment the­ory is sep­ar­ated from what the busi­ness is actu­ally about, the organ­isa­tion can fall vic­tim to fads that only achieve to ali­en­ate the people it is sup­posed to help.

Henry Mintzberg, copi­ously ref­er­enced in gradu­ate schools around the world, is crit­ical of the MBA phe­nomenon and argues that no edu­ca­tion can teach intu­ition, cre­ativ­ity or insight:

Man­age­ment is not a pro­fes­sion, nor is it sci­ence. It is a prac­tice that depends mostly on craft and sig­ni­fic­antly on art. Craft is learned by exper­i­ence. Art can, of course, be admired in a classroom–think of all the vis­ion­ar­ies you read about in cases. But voyeur­ism is not man­age­ment, either, nor does it develop creativity.

The Frugal Law Stu­dent refers to a New York Times art­icle about the favour­ite books of the most suc­cess­ful Chief Exec­ut­ive Officers. Inter­est­ingly enough, they do not seem to read books like From Good to Great, Seven Habits of Effect­ive People, Six Think­ing Hats or any other self help book. Their favour­ite books are fic­tion, poetry, philo­sophy and bio­graph­ies. To become a good man­ager it is import­ant to be well roun­ded and read the classics.

The title of this post is inspired by the tra­di­tional Zen koan attrib­uted to Zen Mas­ter Linji:

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

What Linji is try­ing to say is that those who are on the road to enlight­en­ment should ignore all their per­ceived con­cep­tions of what enlight­en­ment is. This also applies to the halo some people seem to apply to them­selves after com­plet­ing an MBA.

Now that I have been adorned with aca­demic robes myself I will decon­struct everything I have learned at the Gradu­ate School of Man­age­ment and share my thoughts on hypotheticorp.org. Ian and I invite you to join us and share your thoughts on this jour­ney of cre­at­ive destruction.

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