Attention Employers...

A very good executive once said to me 'The job of leadership is to get the right people on the right bus to the right destination.' The right people. If you don't have the right people looking for people, you're done right there. If they're not using all the resources at their disposal correctly to find those people, it's fail time again.

I'm writing this because over the past few years, I've heard quite a few comments about how there is a talent shortage. At the same time, I've been hearing from talented individuals that they can't find positions which utilize their talents; instead they wind up in positions that 'pay well', or 'have a good atmosphere'. When I combine those two observations with the first hand experience of technology being misused badly at the very start of an employee search, I begin to have an inkling of where the problem lies.

An example I have seen very frequently recently is the online manual resume breakdown. This would be where a potential employee uploads a resume (fine so far), fills out some standardized contact information (ought to be on the resume, but maybe it's not easily parsed) and then fills out more or less entire content of the resume, line by line, in an online form which often doesn't accept copy/paste from the resume itself.

The information is on the resume. If it's not, there's really no need to consider that applicant any further. If there's some questionable item, forcing them to retype the contents of the resume is not going to present the data any more clearly; they will probably retype the same data from the resume. Use some judgement as to whether the applicant has enough other qualities to bring them in for an interview or not, then move on. If the person reviewing the resumes has no ability to determine if the person is a good fit for the position by looking at a resume, why are they the one reviewing resumes in the first place?

There is a problem here. There are probably a plethora of causes, none of which matter. We're talking about business, and we're talking about something with a very simple solution, part technical, part operational.

First, the technical part. Instead of spending the IT budget on a number of web forms, spend it on a document converter and / or search tool. There are tools built into most OS's that will do either or both, but if you want a bit more speed, you might want something more specialized. The alternate would be to hire more technically capable people in the department that does first review of resumes, but that might not be possible or desirable depending on your field.

Second, the operational part. Have HR use the aforementioned tools to do simple keyword searches with a keyword list created by the new employee's future supervisor, coworkers, and direct reports. They probably know the job better than anyone else in the company, and can let the HR person know what to look for. Once the keyword searches narrow the field enough, send the resumes to those same groups. Expect some to be shot down. Call the remaining folks in for interviews, and make sure one of each of those groups previously mentioned is represented during the interviews. Give each group's input equal weight in the final decision.

I know that last sounds a bit odd; having prospective direct reports interview a potential supervisor. However, if someone is already a valued member of your team, it's important that the new person you're adding isn't going to be completely incompatible with them, no matter the relationship between the two. That's all part of the 'right people'. The direct reports can also tell you if the person they'll be reporting to is going to have any clue whether the prospect has enough technical expertise to tell if the employee is doing a good job or not.

Remember, right people is step one. Without it, you're opening a big can of fail. With that in mind, odd but workable solutions beat conventional but non-functional ones any day, hands down.

Advice for companies hurting in this economy...

In times of economic stress, companies tend to make cutbacks. That's understandable, it's both difficult and risky to grow in a depressed economy. Also understandable is the general strategy of making cutbacks in cost centers and maintaining revenue centers as undisturbed as possible.

The definition of a cost center and a revenue center is the point of this advice. Common wisdom is that Sales is a revenue center, and everything else is a cost. This is based on the thought that if you get a sale, you can find a way to fulfill the order, somewhow.

The trouble is that paradigm requires uninformed consumers. In hard economic times, consumers begin informing themselves to a greater degree. In other words, the harder the times, the more likely a consumer is to see that you've maintained Sales at the cost of Operations. In simpler terms, if you have a product with value, it may not require active selling at all. I can't, for example, recall the last time an advertisement for basic staple foods (meat, fruit, veggies, bread) made the slightest difference to my decision to buy. Price does, but sales does not. The same holds true on entertainment; where costs are equal, I go with the greatest value, no matter the sales efforts made; where costs are inequal, I go with the less expensive option.

The point is fairly straightforward; despite years, even decades of salesmen selling the idea that Sales is the only Revenue center, it's not. Operations is. The revenue center are the folks who Get The Job Done. Sales, Management, HR, Admin are all Overhead.

That said, I'm not actually anti-Overhead. Most of those things are actually multipliers for the revenue generating portions of a business. HR can find the right Operations people and arrange training to make them more effective. Management can ensure that the right people are on the right jobs, and deal with obstacles that aren't within the ability of the Operations folks to deal with. Sales and Marketing can make sure that everyone in your target market is aware of your product, facilitate purchases, and even find entirely new markets for you to enter.

All of those, however, are multipliers. Not additive. If you start with a zero in Ops, it doesn't matter how much you lay on. You still wind up with zero. If you start with too small an Ops division, you wind up with a very brittle organization, where Ops is overloaded; not only will individuals be more prone to failure, but when they fail the effect will be felt far more than in an organization where Ops has enough depth.

Really, the point isn't exactly that Ops is a Revenue center and everything else is a Cost. My point is that everything in an organization costs money, and everything in a for-profit organization should be ultimately directed toward producing revenue. If companies cut back during tough economic times, which can be just as risky as trying to grow during those same times, they need to be very careful to make cuts across the board; ensuring that no portion of the company is cut disproportionately to the others.

Teaching, Lies and Patience

As some of you may know, I'm applying for a teaching certificate. Some of you who didn't know are probably saying 'wait, isn't that putting students into Bob's Head on a regular basis?'. Probably, but Only a very specialized part of it that deals with Biology. Ok, that might not be better. Biological Science is one of those fields that squicks people. Still, High School Biology only leaves so much room for squick. In point of fact, my own preference is for less squick; molecular biology rather than zoology. Anyhow, I still remember enough to ace the Praxis general science test and score over 90% on the biology test, so I know the material. Now it's just a question of background checks and such. With the level of checking done in the past, I'm not too worried about that bit.

There are advantages and disadvantages to teaching as a career. One disadvantage is a comparitively low pay rate. One advantage is that pay rate increases reliably once you've achieved tenure. Another advantage is benefits. I was recently talking to my dad, who is due to retire from teaching in another half dozen years or so. I asked him how much he pays for health insurance. His response of 'Pay? You mean deductible?' floored me. I've been used to having half a grand or more docked from my pay each month to pay medical. Actually, if I add that money back onto the pot, it makes up about half the difference from my old job and a teacher's starting salary. Retirement benefits are another perk. The only 'retirement' fund available to me previously was a 401K. Employer-paid pension funds don't happen often for IT folks, and they don't happen at all for IT consultants. My dad's retirement is going to be better than what I was making at my last job, by quite a good margin. Don't get me wrong; I don't begrudge him that, but I've been employed for roughly 18 of the last 20 years and not once have I had an employer do more than 'matching funds, vested when you've been with the company longer than we keep employees'.

So yeah. Teaching looks better and better from an economics standpoint. Then there's the work itself. I hear a lot of teachers complaining about a lack of respect, but I can't think of a single person I'd be embarrassed to tell what I did for a living as a teacher. More importantly, I don't think there's a single person I'd need to tell what teaching is. You just say 'I'm a teacher', and they reply 'what do you teach', and you respond with a subject or grade level for elementary teachers. I've had hour long discussions with people about what a Project Manager does, and there are people who still think I wrote code for a living. Then again, that's a popular misconception: if you are in IT, anywhere in IT, you write code. The popular belief is that you also know how to solder, can't spell, live with your parents and are bereft of meaningful social skills.

OK, each of those is accurate in some cases. Some IT guys write code, although they're mostly in departments that have broken themselves off from 'IT' now. Some IT guys can repair electronics, although most of them realize that it's cheaper, more reliable and faster to swap out the broken part for a new one. More than one IT person I know of can't spell beyond a phonetic level, but that's by no means a universal trait. I know of a few IT folks who lived with parents until later in life, but that was mostly a cost-saving measure, not a social one. Finally, I've known IT guys with no social skills, but I've known many other professionals with no socials skills to speak of either. Actually a final note is that I've known nearly as many women in IT as I've known men, so they're not all 'guys', except in a metaphoric sense.

That actually leads into my next point, which relates to teaching. Terry Pratchett nailed it in The Science of Discworld, where he referred to it as 'lies to X', the most repeated version being 'lies to children' which are generally imparted by teachers attempting to get students to understand something at a basic level. People tell lies for a variety of reasons, but a very common reason is when they can't understand something and need a simplified version to grasp. In the case of IT guys, the original IT guys were a iconoclastic bunch, with the only unifying characteristic being that iconoclasty and a rather different worldview, one in which things worked if you follow rules. Minus the iconoclasty, that's rather the same as clockmakers and engineers, so the stereotype of the IT guy was born as a 'particularly weird engineer'.

Similar things happen with the sciences at a high school level. I realized once I was in college that High School Biology covered biology up until, say, the mid 1800's, with vague allusions to the 1900's. Bio I & II in college covered that same ground, but actually pulled in some information from the 50's. It wasn't until I hit junior & senior level coursework that I started learning things from my own lifetime. Quite often, they contradicted things that I had learned in High School, just as later discoveries contradicted things that were believed earlier. In some cases it was clarification rather than contradiction, but there were some contradictions. There were some huge ones in my physics courses, as I recall, and even some in my Chemistry courses, although I couldn't be sure; my High School Chemistry was too involved with making things go 'boom'. So there exists the very real possibility that I'll need to simplify things to the point of being incorrect in order to simplify them enough for students to understand. I hope not, but we shall see.

Either way, Teaching will be a different kind of career for me. My previous career, IT, is all about speed. Make it work faster, get it done faster. Cheaper is often a goal too, but faster is the name of the game, especially as a consulting IT person. For those in need of clarification, a 'consulting' IT person is one who doesn't work for the company he's supporting. He works for a dedicated IT company, which lives or dies based on the contracts it gets. Teaching isn't.

About speed, that is. Short of reverse engineering the brain and uploading memories, there's no way to speed up the learning process. So I'll be forced to slow down, from a tactical perspective. From a strategic one, too. Ask anyone in IT, and they'll have a plan for early retirement, if they plan for it at all. It may not be a good plan, but they've got one. Teaching, on the other hand, is a long term thing. It's a different way of thinking, one more suited to patience and contemplation. Those of you who have read this far might guess that I'm all about contemplation. Plus, there are summers off. To a guy who once had multiple employers seriously care that people were 'unproductive' during the 30 to 90 second periods when we were waiting for the phone to ring, the idea of two to three months of scheduled downtime is downright odd.

So yeah. I'm hoping that CE comes through soon, because all in all, teaching looks like a place I'd like to be.

On Polymathy, Entrepreneurs, and Recession

Ok, Polymathy is a little strong, but I was looking for something with more impact than Dilletantism, a less corrupted connotation than Jack-Of-All-Trades, Multi-Talented usually implies a limited, if broad skill set, and I've recently seen Renaissance Man repurposed to describe those who engage in serial soft polygamy, so I'm stuck for a word. The idea I'm looking for is someone who performs at a level of professional competence or even excellence across multiple areas of expertise. The guy who can reliably fill any role in an organization. Some places they're called the 'go-to guy', but that again has connotations of connections rather than skills, and I'm really talking about someone who can do any task set in front of them, not someone who can find someone who can do that task.

For the sake of argument, let's assume when I use the word Polymath, I'm referring to a 'field expedient Polymath (f.e.p.)'. Someone who can by dint of vast experience, mental acumen, psychological flexibility, or whatever, pick up any task fast enough that people think they're already an expert at best, or 'relearning' something they've done before at worst. Someone who can speak intelligently on a wide range of topics; business, the sciences*, popular culture**, interpersonal relationships, and art of whatever stripe***.

Now, some people are immediately giong to disbelieve. That's fine. Not only are there the examples of the 'real' polymaths to counter that, there are likely enough examples than given reader knows one or has met one personally. Successful entrepreneurs often are, because they need either that or top notch networking skills in order to fill all the roles a starting business needs with the limited number of personnel available. What often happens is that the entrepreneur hires specialists in the core areas of the business, then steps up and fills all the empty roles until the business can afford to fill them with specialists. Most mid-sized and larger businesses have individuals with that same type of field-expedient polymathy; their the ones thrown wherever the fire is hottest. Small businesses tend not to get them, not because they don't want them, but because the individuals are uncommon. Not rare, really, more on the one in a hundred scale, and with one in the driver's seat running things, the odds are just that the business won't get another unless they're specifically selecting for them. If they are, they'll have different problems.

I recently was talking with a friend (who qualifies as a field-expedient polymath and an entrepreneur). He made the following observation: "The trouble with someone who is good at everything is that they have no clue what they should be doing." I really wish I could claim that line, but such is life.

If you're only good at one thing that you enjoy that pays the bills, you know what you're 'meant' to do. If in a professional sistuation there are ten things that need to be done, but you only have the skills to do one of them, you know which thing you ought to be doing. If the other nine jobs still need to be done, you may try after the one you're capable of, but there's no sense of personal failure if the job you can do is done. You're going above and beyond, if you reach for the stars and fail, you were still doing more than you really should have had to.

Now take our hypothetical f.e.p. If there are ten jobs that need to be done, odds are he can do between six and eight of them well enough to get the job done professionally. If it's a ten man job, odds are he has a few coworkers, hopefully nine, although there are times when he won't. The guy who can fill in any of the holes has to wait for the other nine to step up before he can fill the whole. The hesitation is often taken as laziness or lack of initiative, but it's actually a strategic choice. Were our f.e.p. to step into a role prematurely and fill a role one of the other employees is capable of, there is now an unfulfilled role and an excess employee.

All of that is pretty straightforward. Most of you playing at home can see the best use for someone like that; keep them on the bench until you have a job no one else can do, then throw them in the gap until you can get someone new. When you do, return them to the bench until the next gap appears.

Now, the failure modes, and I've seen a few.

The first failure mode is a growth failure. When a business is growing, having one or more f.e.p.s is a must; eventually you need more than just the owner / entrepreneur. However, companies often try to keep costs as low as possible, and the failure mode occurs when leadership fails to replace the f.e.p. with a speicalist once the need is identified. Instead, more and more hats are stacked atop one another until the f.e.p. fails due to overload. In our hypothetical ten role situation above, instead of having nine specialists and one guy to fill in the blanks, the company sees an individual who can perform six of the roles and repurposes five of the other people. One person, if pushed to complete six persons worth of work, is eventually going to fail, and not just in the 'fail to cmplete the task' way. Since the failure is usually a component failure, rather than a task failure, and that component was tied to several key tasks, the results are often widespread and fairly serious.

The second mode, which is related, is a failure mode that happens frequently during Recessions. When companies cut back, they frequently do the 'everyone justify their existence' thing. Ironically, the f.e.p. is often caught out. There are two common reasons. The first is excessive cycling roles, which causes the 'by the time I communicate this back to you, two of these four items will be out of date and three more will have been added' situation. When the evaluator sees the justification, he sees a person not fully justified, despite being over one hundred percent workload. the second is excessive small roles, which causes the 'None of these are justification' response. When the evaluator sees the long list, by the time he hits the bottom of the first page his eyes have glazed over, but nothing has jumped out at him, so the f.e.p. is marked as unjustified. Note that in both cases, the f.e.p. is likely holding down multiple mission-critical roles; that's what they do. However, it's often a case of 'none of these files in the windows folder look important, I'll delete them to save space'. By the time anyone realizes what happened, an implosion is usually well under way.

The final failure mode is actually what I mentioned above, the company comprised of nothing but f.e.p.s. It sounds great; anyone can do anything! However, think about the 'who does what' scenario. Instead of everyone grabbing a chore, each of them is waiting for the list to narrow to what everyone else can do. In addition, the company often has no 'core competency', nothing they're better at than everyone else. That's not quite correct; they're often quite good at things that require massive flexibility and broad skillsets in very little time, like innovation and crisis resolution, since in the first they can fit pieces together in ways others woudn't think of, and in the second, assuming they have at least one person who can manage the crisis that person can throw anyone anywhere at any time for the duration.

Ok, it's late, I'm rambling a bit. Short version, for those following along: there are folks in any business that do whatever the business needs. Every business needs some, too large a percentage can actually be a problem. They can't do everything all at once or they'll implode, and if you have one, it's a bad idea to get rid of them because they don't do any single 'critical' thing.


*Gaps in scientific knowledge are ok as long as areas of knowledge appear to outnumber gaps.
**Same here, only applied to details of pop culture.
***Ditto, although applied to areas of art.