Random Thoughts from Judd

No Iraq Timetable Means No Accountability

I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, regarding a recent article about President Bush's refusal to set a timetable for Iraq. I've posted it here for your interest.

To the Editor (New York Times):

RE: "Bush Acknowledges Difficulties, Insisting on Fight to the End" (June 29)

The Bush administration claims that setting a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would "throw a lifeline" to the insurgency. This rationale misses the point. We won’t leave before the job is done anyway, so there's no such risk.

The purpose of the timetable is for us. It is a commitment to ourselves, crystallizing what we must accomplish and agreeing on the price we are willing to pay to achieve it. This kind of self-accountability strengthens our resolve, it does not weaken it.

As the old saying goes, "A goal without a deadline is simply a dream." Refusing to make this public commitment suggests that the administration simply dreams of a solution, and in the end, evades specific accountability for the goals and sacrifices we are making. Without a deadline, the administration has essentially declared that America is willing to stay forever, and pay any price. Are we?

permalink | email me | 0 comments

What Makes A Good Manager?

I spend a lot of time thinking about leadership, but not so much thinking about management. Probably because the idea of management scares me. I mean, leadership is warm and fuzzy, like curling up in front of the fireplace with hot cocoa and a teddy bear. Visioning, coaching, seeing the best in people and inspiring them to contribute their gifts to a great cause and, as a group, to create something magnificent and greater than the sum of them, something that stands the test of time and advertises how brilliant and lovely humanity is....Ahhhhh. Sign me up.

But management? Ho-ho. Different animal. It's gritty. Dirty. Scary. You gotta tell people what they need to do. Then (and this worse for some), you gotta hold them to it. And you got people above you telling YOU what to do: storm heavily defended forts, piss off the wrong people, violate your common sense, and just generally do things you wouldn't do at your most insane. Yes, you parachute through the fluffy, sunlit clouds of leadership down into the dirty muck of ground combat. Where results are what matter, not vision. Where the battlefield of daily business dictates its own brand of dirty trench politics.

Let's face it: in the clouds, everybody's a winner. On the ground, though, there are winners and there are losers, and even the winners sometimes go home feeling scarred and battle-weary, wondering what point it will all have when they're laying on their bed with nothing between them and death's door but the bland hiss of a respirator.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating. Surely a good manager has a healthy dose of leadership at his or her core, a generally sunny and well-considered influence that informs and enlightens the sometimes harsher realities of balance sheets and production results, accountability, resource management, and competition.

You know, popular culture likes to speculate on the variety of passive and aggressive natures that might charactize the extraterrestrials who will one day visit Earth. We forget that WE are extraterrestrials: Our trash pollutes Earth's orbit and threatens the skylanes; we've got scrap metal scattered across the plains of moons and planets. At least one of our machines has passed beyond the outer rim of the solar system, while another has parachuted into the gaseous storms of Jupiter. Two of our robots have invaded Mars, hunting for water and life. And a few of us have already strolled across the Moon, with more on the way. Have we asked ourselves what kind of extraterrestrials we are, or will be? And do we dare?

Ahem. But back to Planet Earth. I've known all kinds of managers, but what kind of manager am I going to be? How will I know what to do? How does a good manager behave? Naturally, I reflect on the managers I've had; some were good, others were bad. This is very useful data. And I think about how I like to be treated in general by someone I work for.

I've documented some of my reflections below, in hopes that it will help me form the internal compass of management integrity I will need as I parachute through my clouds of optimistic visioning into the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of the daily business.

I certainly haven't completed or refined the list, but some particular qualities and habits come to mind, listed in no particular order:

Competence
Competence means a couple things to me: knowing what you're talking about, and being able to articulate yourself clearly; being well-informed, both about your discipline and your environment; being generally capable at the skills of your profession and at management in general. It doesn't mean being smarter than your people, or knowing everything they know. But you have to have enough of a handle on their business to make intelligent decisions with the information, skills, and issues they present to you.

Consistency
You can't lean on a person if you don't know where they stand. And you can't know where they stand if they keep moving around. I am NOT saying that a manager shouldn't change his mind. As the mystic and philosopher J. Krishnamurti once said, "Only a closed mind doesn't change." But you have to be clear about your overall direction, your expectations of your staff, and your feedback to them. And then you have to stick to it. And you must have spent enough time thinking about these things that well-considered convictions underpin them, protecting the overall health and integrity of the house during the occasional buffeting storm.

Communication
This means keeping people informed about what's going on, and why. Giving them clear and straight answers. Being clear about your expectations, and providing feedback on how they're doing. Yes, this must include telling people when they're not meeting the mark. Former GE CEO, Jack Welch, has a great chapter in his latest book, "Winning", on the importance of candor and honest feedback in an organization. He gives a lot of good reasons why it's the RIGHT thing to do, not just for the organization, but for the person as well.

Challenge
Challenge means giving people opportunities to grow, to shine, to stretch, to screw up, to play. In short, helping people to grow, and to help them identify and stay in that state of flow so eloquently described by Csikszentmihalyi, that place where things are not so hard they're frustrating, and not so easy they're boring. Also, I think Challenge not only means giving people vocational challenges, but personal challenges as well: challenging people to be their best, to develop and show up with the best part of themselves. Challenge a person to demand more of themselves. To trust themselves more. To risk more than they like. To reflect more than they like. To commit more than they like. Not just for the organization's sake, but for the person's own sake. Perhaps a manager's credo could be: Leave them better off than you found them.

Of course, knowing your people well enough to challenge them, vocationally and personally, requires the next quality, Commitment.

Commitment
Obviously there's a manager's routine commitment to the organization and the hot projects and all the rest of it. But more importantly, there's the commitment to the people he or she is managing, which means taking good care of them, keeping faith in them when they make mistakes, defending them from others who would harm them or their credibility, advertising their skills and acts of distinction. It also means listening carefully and actively to them, and it means trusting them when you know they have done their best.

Circular
And lest we forget, a good manager must practice all of these on him- or herself. Staying competent and informed, being consistent with one's own expectations and feedback, communicating effectively with oneself, challenging oneself, and committed to oneself -- that is, allowing mistakes, standing by oneself, and determined to do the best that he or she can.

Conclusion
No, that's not a management quality. Well, ok, maybe it is. Knowing how to bring something to a productive end, wrap something up and say it's done. Like this article. :-)

Anyway, these are my random thoughts. What do YOU think? Leave a comment.

permalink | email me | 0 comments

Getting Ahead Without Being A Head

People who think they have authority peddle paygrades, job titles, and speakerphones. People who know they have authority traffic in one thing, and one thing only: influence. If you have influence over other people, you don't need a fancy job title or a speakerphone to exercise your will. On the other hand, if you don't have influence over other people, those trappings won't help you, except at a superficial level.

This was always true, but especially so now, in this knowledge-based economy in which we live and work.

It reminds me of something the wonderful Dr. Susan Langlitz said once in a leadership workshop she led: Who decides which people become the leaders in an organization? Not the CEO. Not the board of directors. The followers do. By the virtue of their following, they choose the leaders in an organization.

Job titles and perks do not give you influence. It's the other way around.

How do you influence people? There are lots of skills and techniques to use, and your local library or bookstore can help you there. Broadly speaking, I think successful influence hinges on understanding people and what makes them tick. That instinct, which we all have to some degree, tells us how to relate to each person with whom we wish to connect. People perceive and organize their worlds differently, and they have different styles of operating. The key is to find the common ground between the two of you and to start there.

To use a less flattering analogy, it's like a game of cards. Your winnings depend on you showing the right cards to the right people at the right time. If someone likes people with sympathy cards, show them your sympathy card. If someone really grooves with people who hold intelligence cards, show off your intellect.

For example, there's a mid-level executive in my organization that is very knowledgable, and just as intolerant of incompetence in others. The level of attention he will give you is proportional to how much of an idiot he thinks you are. The less he thinks of you, the less he'll do for you. I happen to have a good working relationship with this man, not because I'm terribly competent (I don't think I would ever measure up to his standards if scrutinized), but because I understand what motivates him to be helpful toward me. I don't share my worries about fatherhood, or ask him if he saw this cool movie I just saw. I relate to him with all the focused competence I can muster, and we get along fine.

Then there's another, higher, executive that I cross paths with occasionally. He's a very upbeat, team-spirit kind of guy. So when I'm with him, I find that upbeat, team-spirit part of me and, hey, whaddya know, we click!

On the other extreme is another executive who just doesn't want to be bothered. So for right now, I don't bother him. While this is not a satisfying relationship for me, and I know that it won't work indefinitely, I also know that people who don't like to be bothered also don't enjoy much influence with others, so it hasn't gotten in my way yet.

You're not being unethical in tailoring your response to a person's particular frequency. The truth is that you are both sympathetic and intelligent, proactive and patient. If a person wants to communicate at a given frequency, meet them there at that same frequency. As the poet Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I'll meet you there." You're not being untrue by emphasizing one mood or style over another, unless you are actually lying to the person, which is something else entirely, and not what I'm talking about here.

Sometimes you get your cards confused and show the wrong one, which can backfire. Or you get emotionally attached to a certain card (e.g., indignance, righteousness, anger), and you wave it around even though doing so is not in your long-term interest. That's ok, you're human. You have feelings too. But except for some fortunate coincidences, you'll lose those hands.

The people that scare me the most are the people who don't show any of their cards, so I don't know what frequency they're operating on. In these cases I have to press ahead with nothing but my own integrity to guide me, which is obviously sufficient in any case. But even those people will reveal themselves in time. They're at the table; they have to play a card eventually.

The point I want to make is this. This business about the value of influence over job titles is good news for those of us who want to make a difference but don't wear the formal clothes of authority. Influence is available to anyone, and when it is exercised with grace and integrity, you can get what you want regardless.

Best of all, the trappings will eventually catch up to your well-cultivated influence. And when an influential person is vested with formal authority, the results can be spectacular.

permalink | email me | 0 comments

How To Do A Great Job Interview,
In The Form Of A Tale

It was January, 2002. I was a brand new dad. My son, Sam, was a mere two weeks old. It was a breathtaking, exhausting, vast new horizon I was looking out on as a parent, a role I had never been able to see myself well in, but here I was anyway. And even with all of that, I never knew that I could love someone so deeply as I loved my baby.

And then it happened. It was, I dunno, late morning I guess when the call came. It was Jeff, the CEO of the Internet start-up I had been associated with for a couple of years, first as a happy and determined freelancer and finally, after much wooing back into the corporate fold, as a full-time telecommuting employee. I greeted Jeff warmly on the phone and asked how he was doing. Not so well, he said. It was a tough day today. The company had been suffering financially for some time now, for lack of sales, and it was his unfortunate duty to call me and tell me that today was my last day with the company.

I was floored. Speechless.

You know how authors describe the blood rushing from one's body in a moment of stark terror? I finally understood what that felt like. Your heart suddenly stops, there's this rush of heat and adrenaline, followed by a drenching chill, and then your body goes numb. This all happens in about a second. Your breath stops. And then your brain stops. You can't even muster a single coherent thought. It's an instant...hot...freeze. My mind was chanting over and over, "This can't be happening," as if to make it real by sheer repetition. The room down-shifted into slow motion, like you see it do in the Matrix, and my peripheral vision started to go fuzzy. Yes, surely, this was a dream...I could hear a dull roar in my ears.

Jeff bought me time as he kept talking, and the room speeded up. I stammered silently, then forced myself to think. I couldn't let this happen. I was a minted family man now, and there was no way I could afford to lose my job. My son was just two weeks old! And I had just blown a week of my vacation time on paternity leave. Of all times...No, there were options. We had to discuss them.

I tried to negotiate with Jeff. I asked him about going part-time, about reverting to contractor status, even job-sharing with somebody...anything to keep some money flowing until I could sort this mess out. He was sorry. He just didn't have any money left to give me. Before we clicked off, I think I asked him if he would write me a letter of reference (and he kindly did). He thanked me for my graciousness and professionalism, and that was it. As I hung up the phone, my network access had already been revoked. There I was, standing at the edge of the abyss of oblivion, and I could feel my body falling helplessly forward.

Scary times.

Fast-forward five months. The adrenaline rush is over, we've been plugging along. Unemployment insurance and my small savings have helped me stagger through the drought. But another moment of stark terror is looming, because the unemployment insurance is about to run out, and my savings are gone. I'm about to fall headlong once more into the abyss. Fortunately, after five months of searching, I have two job interviews lined up, one with a non-profit, another with the government. (There aren't a lot of commercial IT shops in my area, and I have pretty much exhausted those.)

And once again I stand at the crossroads of a critical decision (we all have those every once in a while). One of those decisions that you know will make or break you. Guess wrong, and you're finished. Do I focus all my effort on making these the two best interviews I've ever done in my life (they're going to have to be), or do I keep shopping around for more, and trust that I'll be able to wing it?

For better or worse (I believe better), I decided to bet the whole house on those two interviews. I took a deep breath, pushed my stack of chips across the table, and watched the roulette wheel take its fateful spin.

I began preparing in earnest. I was going to blow these people away. It was clear to me from the beginning that in order to do that, I had to take the issue head on, go straight for the jugular. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was sit there, my feet swinging in the air like Pinocchio, while I answered a bunch of inane questions and begged my pesky nose to stay in place. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Ugh. What skills do you think you bring to our organization? Please. And then the worst one of all: So, tell me about yourself. Just thinking about answering those kinds of questions made me want to vomit.

The problem with that kind of interview is that it didn't give me a way to distinguish myself from every other Pinocchio swinging his legs. That kind of interview would really be a test of how quick I was on my feet, and I didn't want to be tested on my deftness of wit under questioning. And especially not on my poise under pressure! I wanted it to be a genuine showcase of my talents, which was what I was selling. I wanted to assertively demonstrate the value I brought to the table. And that meant that I had to be the one asking the questions. It meant I had to turn the interview from an evaluation into a conversation. Or even better, a consultation. With me as the consultant.

I knew I could do that, because as a freelancer, I had experience in going into organizations, evaluating their systems, and proposing ideas and solutions. That was the kind of interview I wanted to have as a supplicating interviewee, a family man at the end of his financial rope and truly desperate for a job.

So I researched my interviewers' computer platforms and tools, and got conversant with their capabilities. I studied their organizational goals, and brainstormed ideas for them. Most importantly, I prepared a demonstration package of my own work, an IT professional's portfolio if you will, of database schemas, code examples, and screenshots. When the interviews came, I was ready. I was a super-consultant ready to help another good, law-abiding organization.

The first interview, with the non-profit, went very, very well. I literally interviewed in front of a group of about ten people, in addition to the department of three I would have been managing. The last time I interviewed in front of a group, I had been 22 years old and scared out of my wits. That unpleasantness happened in the high-flying, take-no-prisoners atmosphere of Washington, DC, and, quite honestly, they ate me for lunch. This one, however, was at a retreat center in sunny California, so it was a little more relaxed (and I was a few years older). I was able to keep breathing this time and actually maintain sincere eye contact. I ended up as a finalist with only one other person, which was impressive given that I had no recent experience in their computer environment, nor any management experience at all, which was what the job was all about. In the end, they gave it to the person with the management experience, and looking back on it, I thank them. The job wasn't truly right for me, and I wouldn't have enjoyed it. (And the pay was awful.)

The second interview was, in my humble view, smashing. When I met my host, Beth, I liked her instantly. She gave me an introduction to the project in question, showing me what they already had and where they wanted to go in the future. Their business was foreign to me, with a lot of words and acronyms I didn't understand, but I tracked what I could and stayed with my expertise, which was web application development. I know a usable interface when I see one, and I was able to suggest some cool things I had done in the past that could be applied here. She seemed to like this proactive approach.

And before we could ever get to any absurd questions about my strengths and weaknesses, or what part of a toaster I would consider myself to be, I pulled out my portfolio and gave her a personal, guided tour of my recent professional experience. I showed her a vast database schema which I had contributed to, and discussed the kinds of applications I had built. I showed her screenshots and explained what the applications did, and what kind of problems I had solved in building them.

She asked me numerous questions about the programs I was showing her, and then, more importantly, we discussed how those tools applied to her environment. She got to have a problem-solving session with me, a free consultation if you will, rather than an applicant interview session. And I never had to answer any of those damn Pinocchio questions.

She called me some days later to offer me the job. Cue John Williams finale. Cue Sunshine. What can I say? It was a very happy, gratifying day. I got to keep a decent roof over my family's head, and watch my son grow into a vigorous, healthy three year-old!

Can you say, "And they lived happily ever after..."?

The moral of the story is this. If you want to do a killer interview, don't wait for stupid questions and hope that somehow your skills will be revealed as a result. Don't subject your own future to an interviewer's whims, inexperience, or plain ignorance.

Give your interviewer a free consultation with you. Find out what problems they're trying to solve, and show them how you can solve them. Don't talk about your work. Show them your work, in the context of how it brings instant solutions to their table. Every interviewer is praying for someone like this.

Please note that this approach does not guarantee you'll be hired. I have used this approach before and been washed out. But it does guarantee that your interviewer will get a front-row seat to what you're really selling, which is your talents and experience, not your poise under bright lights as an interrogation subject.

Well that's my tale. Hope you enjoyed the moral.

Happy Job Hunting!

permalink | email me | 0 comments

Things That Make You Go Hmmm....

(cross-posted at the Cordless Quill)

Down the rabbit hole we go. Read the following passage:

"First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

"If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

"On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."

Would you like to know who the author is? Carl Sagan, perhaps? Isaac Asimov? Click for the answer. And apparently, he's not alone.

Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote an intriguing article back in April 2000 for Wired magazine, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us", that cites the book by Ray Kurzweil that cites the passage above. Joy, a leading computer architect, is also deeply troubled by the ramifications of unlimited development of robots, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, and he suggests some frightening scenarios that could result.

Personally, I think our drifting into complete machine dependence is virtually inevitable. We've been doing it for years, and I don't see us ever stopping. We just can't resist the benefits, or the competitive necessity. I also think increased and perhaps total integration of machines into our bodies is virtually inevitable (here's why), something I took for granted in my last novel, Asteroid Burn.

But I'm also not sure it's a bad thing. Sure, being wiped out in a matter of hours by a nanotech accident in New Mexico is a bit alarming. But the evolution of humans into cyborgs over the years? Not so troubling. Joy cites his alarm that "on this path our humanity may well be lost." Lost in its current form, yes. But lost completely? No. Not for a long, long time. It will change, evolve. If this is the evolution of humanity, it is what we chose for ourselves. The shift may happen faster than I think (as Kurzweil argues), but I still think we won't be able to say no seriously enough to avoid it. Bill Joy and Freeman Dyson may criticize the scientists for succumbing to the irresistable seduction of more power through knowledge, but consumers, corporate managers and government planners are just as guilty, if not more so. They create the market for the scientists to play in.

I do have to say one thing, though. Will you futurists, technologists and armchair theorists PLEASE STOP SAYING TECHNOLOGY WILL FREE US FROM WORK?!??! I'm so tired of hearing that. Technology MAKES work, people. Every invention that "frees" us, whether it's a fax machine or a cellphone, increases the productivity demands that are placed upon us and the overall complexity that we must manage on a daily basis. If that weren't enough, you also have to maintain each fancy new invention with things like a renewable power supply, file and resource management, preferences, updates and patches, repairs, and all the rest of it. This is why I think, as the writer up top suggests, we will eventually be reduced to the status of domestic animals. We simply don't claim for ourselves what we work so hard to get, namely time for ourselves and for our lives as humans. Truthfully, we'd all rather be robots.

We envy their efficiency and productivity. We wish we could see the world with as much certainty and authority as they do. We envy their ability to get the job done, no matter how mundane or dangerous, without the trouble of fears and anxieties and office politics and last night's dispute with the spouse getting in the way. We love the entertainment that we get from them and from other forms of technology. In short, we admire them, and even if we knew how to stop their march across our species, I'm not convinced we would want to.

I have many more thoughts about this subject, and could write for a couple of hours about it.

But the battery in my Palm Pilot is running low, my email icon is flashing, and I want to create a new playlist for my iPod. My hard drive will be sluggish unless I defragment it, I need to replace the printer cartridge, the fax machine is beeping for a paper refill, my cellphone will die if I don't plug it in, my computer has reminded me to scan it for spyware, and Windows wants to install a new security patch. Oh, and at some point today, when I get a break, I need to eat lunch. (While I'm doing that, I'll relax from all this techno-slavery by downloading a new ring tone for my cellphone.) Oh, and it's a good thing I have a good-paying job, or I wouldn't be able to afford all this maintenance!

Sorry, folks, I would like to write more, but duty calls! (But isn't this an amazing time we live in?!)

What do you think? Leave a comment...

permalink | email me | 0 comments