Showcased last Sunday on "60 Minutes" in a segment on the new 60-80 hour workweek "norm," were a group of twenty-somethings from Best Buy in Minneapolis and a "married" high tech couple from the San Francisco Bay Area. By program's end, one had to ask if they all worked 80 hours a week because they were tethered to their jobs with Blackberries, cell phones, and laptops, or the use of the latter took 80 hours a week to coordinate, unload, and reload. The five people who were interviewed said that they were downright ecstatic with this arrangement, that they loved to work those long hours, and that the ability to text message, email, and use cell phones into what most of us would prefer to be leisure hours allowed them to be most productive and "independent." They were not tied down to offices, well except for eight to 10 hours during the rest of the day.
Get real people! While admittedly I have spent most of my life looking for short cuts to reduce my work load and, in the process, have often spent 20 hours to get rid of an hour's work, if I can get away from the phone or computer for any time at all, I'm content if not ecstatic. Yet there they are, even at baseball games, with laptops or cell phones ablazing. Why bother going to the game?
It just so happens that I know how this phenomenon took place. If you care, I'll tell you and I'll also give you the recipe for avoiding these pitfalls in modern work. Here are four or five lessons for making your career more enjoyable though I do warn that there is always the risk of having to look for jobs at several companies before you find one with the appropriate management philosophy and know how. You've also got to be of strong character and convictions, and an ego and wallet the size of Larry Ellison's wouldn't hurt.
Principles:
1. Teamwork: "Teamwork" has become a catch phrase like "challenge" was 30 years ago. The mistake that most thirty-something managers have made is that teamwork means that every worker bee has to be part of every activity from meetings to real work to leisure activities like joining the softball team or going to the company picnic.
The truth is that there are many who work better alone and are much more productive when they get their piece of the puzzle that they're supposed to solve, and then go to their respective cubbyholes to work it out. They may come back to the group periodically to give or get input, but they are often impeded or put off by the persons and personalities of others in the group. The productive individual can be identified by the fact that he doesn't have a cell phone, a Blackberry, and only uses a laptop when he can't accomplish what needs to be accomplished in an eight hour day. He uses technology to his advantage without being a slave to it.
He bugs the rest of the group because they're so busy being busy, they don't realize that they've fallen behind the guy who thinks instead of does. Left to his own, he is the energetic, constructive, dynamic, creative, effective, and generative member of the group. The ones who spend the 80 hours a week are the weak links who hold back the one deemed not a "team member."
2. Meetings: Eighty percent of all meetings are a waste of time. They are often an excuse to get the "team" together at which time everyone finds out that all but one or two have accomplished nothing. Most people in meetings complain about not getting what they need from someone or something else. Or the meetings become finger-pointing and blame sessions.
One of the more amazing things I've seen was a person in a meeting who needed a spreadsheet, and was text messaging someone he left behind to guard his cubicle to bring it to him. Why "amazing?" Because he was "team leader." With all of his equipment that he carried with him, he should have been able to access it himself; he never thought of using the phone. Then again, he never thought.
I once worked in Southern California and was required to attend a meeting in San Francisco once a week. This was long before everything except phones -- and I'm not kidding for those of you who think that faxes, PDAs, or even human assistants always existed. I attended one meeting which, as it turned out, was to set the agenda for the next week's meeting. Heretic that I was, I refused to attend any more meetings. And I was a "lowly" VP in a company with more VPs than worker bees. I was transferred to Northern California when Southern California decided I wasn't a team player. At least I kept my job, but jobs were somewhat easier to find back then.
Anyway, if your "team leader" is the understanding sort, ask that meetings be held only when necessary, not just when they're scheduled. Ask that meetings with no real purpose on their scheduled dates be canceled. If you are the team leader, make certain that meetings have agendas, and that the agendas are adhered to. And, as one very wise Chairman of the Board once did, conduct all meetings without chairs. Amazing what you'll accomplish when you have to stand and can't doodle. You guys still doodle don't you, or can you only do things connected to some sort of keypad?
3. Expectations: I can't remember how many articles I've published about expectations, but it must be close to 20 (At least five are in the subscriber's section.) From hiring to "downsizing," work is a series of expectations. It's also a series of traps. The biggest trap starts with, "Do me a favor..." If someone starts a statement with that, run! I've seen this happen hundreds of times: the boss or even a coworker says to you, "Do me a favor. Can you stay and get out this memo for tomorrow's meeting?"
Say, "No, I'd like to help, but I have a meeting of the Galactic Leaders of the Milky Way and I'm their president. Why don't you ask Jill?" And why do you fail this individual and make her think that you're not a team player? Because if you accept and do the memo, you'll be doing all future memos for all future useless meetings. A favor done for another becomes an expectation, an unwritten responsibility that won't be found on your job description (if one exists), a responsibility on which you will be evaluated at the time of your next performance evaluation, and an expectation that, even though done with all the grace and skill of a matador, you will receive no additional compensation let alone a "thank you" for. But should you screw up, and not get the memo done, there will be plenty negative written or talked about.
The twenty-somethings interviewed at Best Buy have made a huge mistake. I mean HUGE. First, by saying that they actually prefer the 80 hour week and working at home and having the freedom to get out of bed at 3 AM to email somebody over something insignificant, they have forced themselves into the position of always having to accept the 80 hour week. The 80 hour week becomes the norm, and Best Buy as well as every other such company will EXPECT their twenty- and now thirty-something managers to work an 80-hour week. Hell, Best Buy is probably thrilled. They pay one guy $45,000 a year to do the work of two people. Even the laptops they get are amortized. And these poor employees don't get it. Best Buy isn't taking advantage of them. It's taking advantage of employees who think that the 80 hours now expected of them is just fine. The trouble is, they're going to pass this on, a form of corporate genetics.
It becomes an expectation in perpetuity so that by the time my granddaughter enters the workforce, she's going in with the thought of starting her own business as soon as possible. After all, my granddaughter will know how to produce more in less time because her entrepreneurial parents will have told her what her grandfather said before they put him away.
4. Don't Confuse Efforts With Results: If I've written about expectations 20 times, I've written about the difference between being busy and being productive 50 times. I can even remember the first time: I had only seen the title of George Odiorne's fifth book, Management and the Activity Trap, and I knocked out an article which was subsequently published in "Western Banker."
I was as caught up with activity as anyone else until 1977. I used to conduct performance appraisals on subordinates, and give them an "A" for effort and a "C" for accomplishment which averaged a "B," and they'd get their semi-automatic six percent increases. I wasn't ignorant. I was stupid and lazy. Everything changed in 1977: I started Winning Associates. Now, "busy" cost me money. Eighty hour weeks cost me leisure time and a certain amount of contentment. An employee, a nonexempt employee at that, who worked 50 hours cost me 10 hours of overtime. A commissioned sales person cost me a base. A salaried person cost me a salary. With salaries being the most expensive cost center, I didn't have meetings: I set goals with individuals. Meet the goals; get rewarded. Don't meet goals (expectations), and you might get fired.
Every employee should have to run his or her own company. Two things become evident: (1) time is money, and (2) you can't confuse effort with results because there's nobody left to blame. A corollary to this is that you can't blame employees for putting you under. You hired and kept them.
So forget about, "But boss I tried so hard," and "But I worked 80 hour weeks for the last two years." Well, if you can't produce something in 8,320 hours, you're going to have to find that rare if even existent job where nothing is expected of you. Maybe this will make more sense: Tiger Woods practices 14 hours a day, and he's become the superstar of golf. Now what if you worked at your golf game 14 hours a day. Would you be as good as Tiger? You'd still be lucky to be working as a grounds keeper. It's not the time, it's the yield.
I said not to confuse effort with results. "Production" is not always "results." Results are profits or lead to profits or lowering of costs or a pill that cures some obscure disease (which, once made popular through TV advertising, will be profitable). Production is often activity, and activity is often just being busy or looking busy. If handed a responsibility which is near impossible to fulfill, say so and get it on paper. Just before you get fired, at least you can say, "I told you so, and you agreed." That's akin to the epitaph in a New England cemetery that says, "I told you I was sick." (With the possible exception of me, New Englanders only get funny when they're dead.)
5. Electronic Hell: Leslie Stahl interviewed a married couple in California: both are attorneys and high tech professionals. They have an 18-month old daughter, the latter being responsible for Mrs. Attorney giving up one of her cells phones. Both work 80 hour weeks, often text messenging each other from different rooms in their house. He often gets up at 3 AM to email, and both will sit on the couch and email, TM, and do whatever else it is you do on laptops, Blackberries, cell phones, and PDAs that you can do. You call that a "relationship?" (As far as I'm concerned, the couch is for two purposes: Tivoing and canoodling, period.)
She's cut back to 60 hours a week. He's still doing his 80 hour stint. In one section, they showed him handling Blackberry and cell phone while driving. Not even hands free! If I were his insurance company, I'd cut him off now.
Prediction: They will divorce in three years, and will fight over custody of the laptops rather than the kids.
Multitasking: There have been many new studies which show that thousands of accidents were caused by using cell phones while driving. Some were attributed to the lack of hands-free earphones. Doesn't matter. The "60 Minutes" folk all extolled multitasking, but I'll guarantee that none of them could do two tasks as well as one. Unless a task has been done hundreds of times, and are therefore mindless, it's doubtful that anyone can do a second or third task at the same time, giving each task the necessary time to do it well. The Best Buy employees who were interviewed would be the first ones I'd look to to terminate. Anyone who puts that much trust into this new skill and who works 80 hours a week is doing something wrong. If you can do three things at once, why does it take 80 hours to do them? For that matter, if you can do three things at once, why can't you do six and then be twice as productive in your new work week? And the answer is simple: you probably can't do one complex thing that well let alone drive and text message at the same time.
It all reminds me of the guy on Shop at Home or one of those networks who is extolling how many programs the computer he's selling can do at once. And there on the laptop or PC he's showing six or more programs going at once. They include a movie, a slide show, a spreadsheet, browsing the Internet, email, and ... I don't know ... writing a novel in Word. The people who buy by phone probably are going to have trouble opening the box, and then be totally lost when looking for the cup holder and cigarette lighter. Look, you can't do six things at once. Well, not more than once. After all, being drawn and quartered is only four things.
Give me the employee who can get one thing done, and done well. I doubt if I would hire anyone who says that his special skills include multitasking. Show me someone who multitasks, and I'll show you a Workers' Comp claim in the making.
Summary: When Leslie Stahl was interviewing the twenty-somethings at Best Buy, she asked if each had a Blackberry, and each proudly - yes, proudly - showed the Blackberry attached to their belts. What they don't realize is that the Blackberry, laptop, and cell phones are umbilical cords which keep them connected to Best Buy, connect like a chain gang in Georgia. It was as though they were nourished by this, but I have news for them: data is not even mental food. Seventy percent of it is brain garbage detritus which, if not discarded, will replace other perhaps more important scrap.
On Monday following the show, by the way, Best Buy announced and contrary to Google's "hits," actually laid off 300+ employees in order to cut costs. I don't know if any of the three who were interviewed by "60 Minutes" were part of it, but they would have been my choices or, barring that, something out of 1984 or The Manchurian Candidate, sent somewhere to be "reprogrammed."
Anyway, Just because you're "busy" doesn't mean you're productive, but there are certainly guys at companies who evaluate subordinates based on how busy they are, how available they are, and how much they play the role of team member. And what does "team member" mean? It means someone who does what everyone else does, and who acts the way the boss acts. So now you all know why I'm in business for myself: it's easier to advise than to follow especially after 35 years. Well, I never was much of a follower. I, and sometimes my mind, tend to meander too much. But it's amazing what you see when you wander off the beaten path. And to quote Polonius, "To thine own self be true," the only intelligent thing the "tedious old fool" says. On the other hand, if he's such a fool, why is he the key advisor to King Claudius?
For those of you who would like to disagree, by all means, go to the bulleting board at http://www.ewin.com/bbs and start a discussion. Put it in the "Editorial" section. If you want to put it in two sections at once, I'll bet you can't do it.