secret:How To Go Over Your Boss's Head

If you want evidence that the standard corporate or institutional hierarchy is a broken system, ask yourself “What would happen if I went over my boss’s head to see my boss’s boss?” In some organizations, no one would notice. In those organizations, people talk to their boss’s managers all the time.
In other organizations, you might as well clear out your desk the minute you decide to step outside the chain of command and talk to your boss’s boss about something on your mind. You know that when you make that visit, you’re not going to come out in one piece.
Either your boss will get wind of your treachery and fire you, or your boss’s boss will pretend to take your issues very seriously and then completely by coincidence, your job will be eliminated.

A lot of senior managers, sad to say, don’t know how to make themselves more available to their ‘skip-level’ reports, as one-down employees are known.
Do you know how I know that? I know it because I sit in depositions and answer questions about good leadership practices. Companies pay enormous sums to employees who were abused or harassed by their bosses. It is a sad thing to witness, much less to be part of.
My part of it is to state for the record how eyes-open employers avoid problems by opening up communication up, down and across their organizations. Sometimes when my deposition is finished, the employer settles the case the same day. They can see that they’re not going to win at trial, so they pack it in.
The higher-level boss never knew about the bad behavior his or her subordinate manager was engaging in. There was no practical way for an employee to skip over their own boss and go see the higher boss to report the problem. They would have been fired if they’d tried.
How can an employee prove that belief? It’s easy to prove if it has already happened to someone else. They went over their boss’s head and voila! their job disappeared – completely by coincidence.
You have to know the organizational culture where you work if you’re thinking about paying a visit to your boss’s boss to talk about something that isn’t working.
Here are some clues:

• Does your boss’s manager know you well already? Does he or she talk to you when your boss is not around? If so, you might have a chance to start a productive conversation with him or her.
• If your boss is difficult, unqualified, dealing with a personal problem that gets in the way of work (like a substance abuse problem or a mental health issue) does your boss’s boss seem to notice? If not, do you think he or she is really going to take your input seriously? Everyone is busy at work, but when you’re so busy that you’re completely unaware of an elephant in the room that is trumpeting at a hundred decibels, I’m not sure it’s worth your trouble to talk to your boss’s boss. You might be better off just getting out of Dodge alive.
• Is your company’s HR team very involved with employees, and easy to talk to? If so, you might skip the boss’s boss approach and talk to HR instead. If your HR team is distant, hard to talk to or disinterested, you might be wasting your breath and worse, you might be hurting your own future job reference (even if the information you have to share is offered with the best intentions).

We had a client who was in a tough situation. Her boss had an out-of-control alcohol problem. Our client, Rita, had no relationship at all with her boss’s boss, the company CFO. Rita was terrified of her direct manager, the woman who was struggling with alcoholism.
The CFO didn’t seem to notice anything wrong, although everybody in Rita’s department knew about the alcohol on the boss’s breath in the afternoons and had seen her slumped over her desk snoring many times.
Rita called us one day. “Listen to this,” she said. “The CFO called me and said he wants to meet with me tomorrow morning. I can guess what he wants to talk about. What should I say? I’m very nervous. I’m caught between a rock and a hard place.”
“You are not in a safe space to say what you know,” we said. “Why should you share your perspective on your boss’s substance abuse issues without any protection for yourself? Your boss is out of control. In our experience, the CFO will ask you a lot of questions about your boss.
“He will listen to whatever you tell him and he’ll take a few notes. Then you’ll go back to work and worry your head off. Your CFO is very unlikely to act immediately.  You’ll be wondering who knows what and what’s going to happen and you won’t be able to sleep.”
“So what should I tell my CFO?” asked Rita.
“Sadly for your company and for your manager, who needs help, I wouldn’t say anything,” I told her. “Say that you’re saddened to hear about your CFO concerns, if he even shares them with you. He may not say a word. He may just be digging right now. That’s too bad for him.
“You are paid to be an accountant, not a private investigator. Let the guy get out of his office once in a while and wander around. He should have been doing that all along. He would see the problem with your boss in two seconds if he used his own powers of observation rather than relying on yours.”
We would love to coach people to go see their boss’s manager if something were amiss, but in way too many organizations it isn’t safe to do that. That is why plaintiff’s-side employment attorneys keep their jobs. People like Rita quit and then file a lawsuit over bad behavior, because all roads to do something about the problem while they still worked for the company were effectively blocked.
It might be worth making that trip if you think there’s a chance your boss’s boss  will take your concerns seriously and act on them.

That could happen in a case where the company is put at risk by the problem you’re planning to report. A supervisor with an alcohol issue is probably not one of the risk factors that keep CEOs up at night, but there are plenty of other risky situations that do.

If your boss were your company CFO and he or she were siphoning money away, that would get the CEO’s attention. If your boss were systematically sexually harassing people and building up a stockpile of aggrieved employees who might one day band together for a class action  lawsuit, that would do the same thing.

If you’re an executive wondering whether the employees who work for your subordinate managers would feel comfortable talking with you directly, the answer is probably no. Unless you are actively cultivating relationships with those people, they wouldn’t have any reason to think you would listen to them.
If you feel awkward about establishing relationship glue between you and the people who work for managers on your team, let that concern go! If your managers are freaked out about you being friendly with their employees, you can coach them out of that fearful state.
Don’t, of course, bypass the managers who work for you and give instructions to their team members directly. That will confuse everybody and beg the question “Why do you have managers working for you, if you intend to manage everybody directly by yourself?” In my experience, this is a much less common situation than the opposite one — the scary one where employees have no access to their boss’s boss at all, even in emergencies.
That’s what you have to watch out for. Our client Rita buttoned her lip and didn’t say anything to her boss’s boss about her manager and her alcohol problems. It was not her fault — her boss’s boss asked her oblique cat-and-mouse questions to see how much Rita would spill. No dice! Rita had us in her corner.
It took months, but finally Rita’s manager passed out at a staff meeting and was sent to rehab. Rita never talked to her boss’s boss again. She got another job while the company was busy cleaning up the mess that had accumulated while its incapacitated accounting manager was on her downward slide.
You can begin to create a relationship with your boss’s boss if he or she doesn’t reach out to you.
It’s good to get to know your boss’s boss if you can. Establish a relationship if the opportunity presents itself. Let your boss’s boss know your name, and don’t be shy about chatting in the hallway and sharing your opinions. You never know when that relationship might become a lot more central to your working  life than it is right now

Need To Innovate The Science Business Model

In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the man that led the nation’s scientific efforts during World War II, delivered a proposal to President Truman for funding scientific research in the post-war world.  Titled Science, The Endless Frontier, it led to the formation of the NSF, NIH, DARPA and other agencies.

The payoff has been nothing short of astounding.  The NSF has funded innovations such as barcode scanners and next generation materials.  NIH backed the Human Genome Project as well as research that has led to many of our most important cures.  DARPA invented the Internet.

It’s an impressive record, but the future doesn’t look nearly as bright.  Part of the problem is funding, which has fallen off in recent years.  Yet the practice of science also needs to be updated.  Much has changed in the 70 years since 1945. In order to honor Bush’s legacy—and maintain our technological leadership—we need to adapt it to modern times.

The Bush Model

For most of history, scientists were men of means. Although some from of humble origins, like Gauss and Faraday, managed to slip through, it was mainly wealthy people that had the resources and leisure time to pursue serious inquiry.  In the 20th century, the circle was expanded to a small group of university researchers, but it was still an exclusive club.

World War II changed all that.  As head of the OSRD, Vannevar Bush led government into the science business, funding enormous research projects that led to the development of proximity fuzes, radar and, most famously, the atomic bomb.  After the war ended, the question arose about what form, if any, scientific funding should take in peacetime.

Bush noted that most research performed in industry and government was of an applied, rather than a theoretical nature.  He also argued that without vigorous funding for basic research to expand the frontiers of knowledge, advances in technical applications would be limited, endangering our national security, health and economic well being.

So the architecture he envisioned would fund research at outside institutions, rather than within government or industry. Grants would be given out on a multi-year, rather than an annual basis, to provide stability, and research would be published widely to ensure dissemination of knowledge.

Bush’s architecture served us well and transformed the US into a scientific and technological superpower. However, to maintain supremacy, we need to innovate how we pursue discovery.

Fostering Broader And Deeper Collaboration

One assumption inherent in Bush’s proposal was that institutions would be at the center of scientific life.  Scientists from disparate labs could read each others papers and meet at an occasional conference, but for the most part, they would be dependent on the network of researchers within their organization and those close by.

Sometimes, the interplay between institutions had major, even historical, impacts, such as John von Neumann’s sponsorship of Alan Turing, but mostly the work you did was largely a function of where you did it.  The proximity of Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, for example, played a major role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.

Yet today, digital technology is changing not only the speed and ease of how we communicate, but the very nature of how we are able to collaborate.  When I spoke to Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at Digital Science, which develops and invests in software that makes science more efficient, he noted that there is a generational shift underway and said this:

When you talk to people like me, we’re established scientists who are still stuck in the old system of institutions and conferences.  But the younger scientists are using technology to access networks and they do so on an ongoing, rather than a punctuated basis.  Today, you don’t have to go to a conference or write a paper to exchange ideas.

Evidence would seem to bear this out.  The prestigious journal Nature recently noted that the average scientific paper has four times as many authors as it did in the 1950’s, when Bush’s career was at its height.  Moreover, it’s become common for co-authors to work at far-flung institutions.  Scientific practice needs to adopt to this scientific reality.

There has been some progress in this area.  The Internet, in fact, was created for the the explicit purpose of scientific collaboration.  Yet still, the way in which scientists report and share their findings remains much the same as a century ago.

Moving From Publications To Platforms For Discovery

One especially ripe area for innovation is publishing.  Typically, a researcher with a new discovery waits six months to a year for the peer review process to run its course before the work can be published.  Even then, many of the results are questionable at best.  Nature recently reported that the overwhelming majority of studies can’t be replicated

Many are calling this a “replication crisis.” Duncan Watts, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research  says “Journals are heavily biased toward novel findings. There’s no incentive for a scientist to replicate another scientists work.  It’s hard to get such work funded and it’s hard to publish it.  It’s almost unheard of to build a career on checking other people’s work.”

A recent episode shows just how important this issue is.  In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, published a working paper which warned that US debt was approaching a critical level.  As it turned out, they had made a simple Excel error, but if the issue hadn't been so politically potent, the mistake would probably have never been found.

Clearly, we need to go beyond publishing papers with charts and tables and move to platforms that incorporate open data as well as negative results.  As Jonathan Adams of Digital Science puts it, “We need to move to a rolling process that doesn’t start and end with publication and includes negative, as well as positive, findings.”

We’re starting to see some innovation in this area.  ArXiv, a project at Cornell University, allows scientists to self publish with post-moderation.  Macmillan, a top publisher recently announced an interesting new initiative and tools like iPython Notebook are specifically designed to foster better collaboration.  Yet there is still much work to be done.

The Politics Of Scientific Investment

When Bush wrote his famous proposal for public financing of scientific research, we had just defeated Hitler and his allies with help from scientific miracles like radar and the atomic bomb.  That created enormous support for the public funding of science to enhance the private sector as well as national defense.  Times, unfortunately, have clearly changed.

Today, there is a veritable war on science, with politicians quick to score cheap political points by accusing researchers of waste or merely declaring that science is irrelevant to everyday concerns.  Ed Lazowska, who co-chaired President Bush’s Information Technology Advisory Committee sees this as a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation takes place.

“There’s a big misunderstanding of today’s industry R&D, most of it is ‘D’ rather than ‘R,’” he told me and points to Google X as an example.  Although Google has taken on major business risks with things like autonomous cars, the basic research was funded by the federal government through places like NSF and DARPA, so there is little technological risk.

He also points to the principle of appropriability as a foundation for thinking about scientific funding.  Enterprises understandably have a bias for investments from which they will benefit directly.  That’s why public funding is the most viable source of support for basic research, which leads to applications that are not only broad, but often unforeseeable.

Lazowska notes further that market leaders may have an interest in investing in scientific inquiry that benefits their industry broadly and highlights Microsoft and IBM as two firms that invest in basic research and publish openly.  Yet they are the exception, not the rule.

Promoting Exploration And Discovery

When Vannevar Bush created the OSRD, the agency which oversaw wartime research, the funding mechanism he created was innovative, even revolutionary.  Rather than have government bureaucrats directly supervise scientists, it issued grants to research institutions for specific projects.  It was a system based on responsibility, not subservience.

In his proposal for the formation of a new agency, (which came to be the NSF), he was so adamant that scientists themselves would approve funding that it held up the legislation for several years.  In the interim, the military took over much of the funding for scientific research.

Today, the military dominates the US government’s research budget, making up slightly more than half of the total.  The NSF, by comparison, only accounts for 4%.  That’s led to exactly the situation that Bush had feared, an excessive focus on developing applications rather than expanding frontiers in public scientific funding.

The situation represents a serious threat to our national well being.  As Lazowska stresses,  “Market leaders are likely to derive the most benefit from expanding the frontiers of knowledge.”  The US, being the world’s undisputed technological leader, has the most to gain from new discoveries and the most to lose from a neglect of basic scientific research.

In many ways, the issue of scientific funding mirrors the current controversy over auditing the Federal Reserve Bank.  The proper role of politicians is to reflect the public will, not to meddle in the technical work of specialists.

How To Move Forward

Science is a necessarily conservative enterprise. The scientific establishment, while slow and plodding, also serves a purpose—to protect research from corruption by a cadre of propagandists, kooks and corporate rent-seekers who would corrupt its integrity to serve their own purposes.

So while we do need to transform many of the practices that got us to where we are now—such as how scientists collaborate and make their discoveries known to the world—we still need to stay true to Bush’s vision: the funding of basic scientific research to provide the “seed corn” from which exciting new technologies bloom.

As Steve Strogatz puts it, “When you do something transformative, it usually comes out of left field.”  So we need to look beyond the mere applications of science—the end products that make modern life possible—and learn to value the wonder of discovery once again.  It is by expanding frontiers that we better our everyday lives.

Most of all, we need to accept that we all have a stake in the public funding of science.  It is, after all, government funding that made the iPhone possible, has led to miracle cures and blockbuster drugs and decoded the human genome.  We’d all be poorer without it.

Goods Buying On-Line, Picking Up in Store Saves Little Time

A recent survey of online shoppers found that online shopping combined with in-store pickup shaved only about 96 seconds off a typical shopping trip. But the survey didn’t include shoppers at Apple AAPL +0.69% retail stores, where the company has spent the past six years chipping away at the time and inconvenience of plunging into their crowded retail stores to make a purchase. Apple hasn't released any official data to show if their various initiatives have been successful. However, anecdotally, it has reduced grumbling by frequent store visitors and those who pop in for a small accessory. (I am an Apple stockholder.)
As originally conceived, Apple’s retail stores were purposefully intended to be busy, crowded places, filled with people trying out new and existing products, checking their email on display computers or attending training classes and live music events. But over time, Apple shoppers—especially those who already knew what they wanted to buy—started to feel neglected. In mid-2010 Apple introduced the Apple Store app for iPhone, allowing simple and direct ordering of products through a clean and simplified, non-browser interface. Then in 2011, Apple acted again by adding a Personal Pickup option to its on-line store that allowed buyers to select and configure products using their computer, and then efficiently pick them up at a specified Apple store. The option included same-day pick-up for all the standard products and configurations, and even some custom-configured items like desktop Macs.

But Personal Pickup didn't help another major category of Apple shopper, the impatient expert who knows exactly what he or she wants. For these people, Apple provided the ultimate speed-up: Easy Pay. Using the Apple Store app, you select a product from the store shelf, scan its bar code and pay using your on-file credit card. You then simply walk out of the store with the product, unchallenged by any employee. Elapsed time, perhaps under 60 seconds.

Now a study of buy on-line, pick-up in-store (BOPIS) by Stella Service shows that Apple’s time and hassle-saving techniques aren’t universal. A personal store visit averages seven minutes, the survey found, compared to an average of 5.4 minutes for a BOPIS purchase, a difference of 96 seconds.
The study was made in October 2014, and included big-box retailers Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Sears, Staples, Target, Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart. It turns out there are several elements of the purchase process that create inefficiencies, even for a person who has already ordered and paid on-line.
First, and perhaps foremost, is the on-line confirmation that the product you want is in-stock at a specific store location. Shoppers universally don’t want to drive 20 to 30 minutes, only to learn their product isn't available. According to the survey, some chains provided an availability confirmation within 10 minutes, while others took over two hours. Apple’s product availability is generally believed to display in real-time. Most Apple products are available within an hour at a nearby store. But just in case, Apple offers to send you a text message the moment a purchase is ready for in-store pick-up.

Once you're at a store, the pickup process is another area of time-savings—or not. The pickup process doesn’t need to be instant to be perceived as speedy. It only needs to be continuous and coordinated to provide satisfaction. Are pick-ups centralized at a single counter, conspicuously placed close to a main store entrance? Apple stores have an employee “on-point” near the entrance, ready to help or direct new store arrivals. Are online payments quickly recognized by the store staff, and how much purchase confirmation paperwork do shoppers need to provide? Apple’s on-line buyers can pick up the purchase themselves, or designate someone else. A photo ID and the order number are all that’s needed for pick-up in either case.

The survey found that Office Depot shoppers spend the least amount of time picking up their products ordered online—just two minutes on average. At the other end of the scale, a pick-up at Sears averaged 16.5 minutes to complete.

 The challenge for Apple and other retailers is to streamline every step of the purchase process, removing unnecessary steps and eliminating disincentives to visit their retail stores, where on-line customers might actually decide to buy add-on merchandise beyond their original purchase.

China Mobile's Explosive 4G Growth Is Positive For Apple

The China’s three wireless companies published their January user metrics and China Mobile registered another strong gain in its 4G user base. While China Mobile saw its 3G subscriber numbers decrease by almost 5 million from December it added almost 17 million new 4G users in January. China Telecom and China Unicom did have 3G and 4G user growth but not nearly to the degree that China Mobile did. Apple should benefit from such strong growth in 4G subscribers as described in the analysis below. (Note that I own Apple shares and have sold Calls against them).
China Mobile’s 4G subscriber base passed 100 million in less than a year
China Mobile started selling Apple’s iPhone 5c and 5s in January 2014 and did not report any 4G users in the month. February 2014 was the first month China Mobile recorded 4G users which was only 1.3 million. Over the past twelve months China Mobile has grown its 4G user base to 106.8 million and has added over 10 million per month for the past five months. In January it added 16.7 million so it would not surprise me to see China Mobile add 150 million in 2015 out of its over 800 million total customers.
Apple’s China revenue exploded in the December quarter
China Mobile’s explosive growth is positive for Apple as can be seen in Apple’s China revenue results. In the March 2014 quarter Apple’s total revenue grew 5% year over year (3% when China is excluded) while its China revenue grew 12%. The June quarter saw Apple’s China revenue grow 26% year over year vs. total revenue growing 6% (again 3% when China is excluded).

With the rumored and then announced iPhone 6 and 6 Plus not being available in China until October Apple’s China revenue only grew 4% in the September quarter while the rest of Apple grew 14%. However, China came roaring back in the December quarter with 70% growth vs. the rest of Apple at 22%. The December quarter also saw 49.1 million 4G subscribers added to China Mobile’s network after 27 million in the September quarter.
My initial calculation has Apple selling 14.6 million iPhones in the December quarter in China. While China Telecom and China Unicom combined grew their 3G and 4G user base by 10.2 and 9.5 million in the September and December quarter’s, respectively, China Mobile grew it’s by 27 and 49.5 million. It isn’t hard to determine that China Mobile probably got the bulk of iPhone sales in the December quarter and that its strong 4G growth in January is positive for Apple.

Never ever Say Anything About Yourself That You Don't Want To Come True

I still remember as a child seeing my mother standing in the kitchen talking to herself. No joke. She would literally have entire conversations with herself. At the time I just assumed my Mom must be a little bit crazy, after all the woman had ten children so by rights she was entitled to be at least somewhat nuts. Then I grew up and became an adult myself and realized that those conversations she had with herself didn't mean she was crazy at all, in fact they were a stroke of genius, and probably the only way she kept her sanity while raising those ten kids (or I would argue nine since I was of course, an angel child).
When I became the CEO of my first company I found myself having all kinds of conversations with myself, only I found it was far less suspect to have them inside my head, rather than out loud because, let’s face it, doing it out loud is just plain awkward. But I learned quickly that there were two types of conversations I could have with myself: the positive and uplifting conversations, or, the negative and destructive ones. I learned that the key to being successful came down to my own ability to limit those conversations in my head to the positive and uplifting ones.

Research has shown that it is our thoughts that drive our emotions, and our emotions that drive our actions. Therefore, if we want to act in a way that will bring us the most success, we have to control our emotions by learning to control our thoughts.

I find self-talk to be the most effective way to control my thoughts. When I find myself in a situation where I am feeling stressed or anxious or overwhelmed I immediately begin having conversations with myself inside my head. If you were to jump inside my head you would hear a typical conversation going something like this:

“I am seriously stressing out.”

“Why are you stressing out?”

“Because I am never going to get everything done.”

“All you can do is continue taking steps on what needs to get accomplished, there is absolutely nothing more you can possibly do than that, so take a deep breath and quit stressing because stressing won’t change anything here, it will only slow you down. Just keep moving forward doing the best you can do and it will all work out in the end.”

“Good point, thanks.”

It may sound silly to have that type of conversation with yourself, but I can tell you with certainty that it works. And the more you do it, the better you become at it. Think of it as having your own personal therapist with you 24×7, free of charge. Positive self-talk is one of the very best ways to improve your emotions and build your self-confidence.
Unfortunately, negative self-talk works just as effectively. “I can't do it.” “I’m fat.” “I’m stupid.” When those are the types of things you are telling yourself repeatedly you're bound to actually start believing them. You begin doubting yourself and you in turn you limit your actions, thus inhibiting your own success, which makes it imperative to learn to control it until you can stop it completely.

“Never say anything about yourself that you don't want to come true.” – Brian Tracy

One way I have found to control my own negative self-talk is to immediately ask myself, “How would I feel if someone was saying that to my child?” That particular question is the perfect kick in the behind to help motivate me to snap out of it and change my thought pattern. If the voice in your head is saying something that you can’t imagine saying to a person you love then you shouldn't be saying it to yourself.
Beyond the self-talk that happens inside our heads, we have another form of self-talk that is happening with our body language. I think this particular type of self-talk is one that we tend to overlook completely, yet it too can have a powerful influence on our emotions. Have you ever observed yourself in the mirror while you are talking on the phone? If you haven’t, then I suggest you do. Many times in phone calls we feel bored or irritated with the conversation. However, when we are watching ourselves in a mirror as we are talking on the phone we will find that we are far more engaged in our discussion with the other person. We tend to smile more often during the conversation and we tend to show concern on our face while listening as someone shares their problems with us. When we are observing our own facial expressions during the call it literally causes our voices to sound different as well. Our voices sounds happier when we are smiling and our voices reflect more concern when we have concerned looks on our faces. It was this very reason that I purchased small mirrors to put on the cubicle of each of my sales and customer service people at my company. I wanted employees to observe themselves as they talked on the phone because we knew it would help them to communicate in a more caring and sincere way. The results spoke for themselves.
I have always been a big fan of surrounding myself with motivational quotes and sayings at home and in my workplace, but I find that writing notes of self-talk advice to myself can actually have a greater impact. Try writing yourself a note on your bathroom mirror saying things such as, “You are going to ace your project today” or “You can totally handle whatever challenges come your way today.” For some reason when the advice comes from yourself to yourself, it seems to have a greater influence on your thoughts and thus your emotions.

Here is the self-talk litmus test: If you find yourself feeling unhappy or stressed out during the day you can bet that you have subconsciously been listening to your own negative self-talk. You have likely been telling yourself to expect the worst, or you are seeing everything as a horrible disaster, or you are telling yourself that things are “always” bad or “never” okay. So of course you feel horrible! Who wouldn’t hear horrible if someone followed them around all day criticizing everything they did. Yet we do it to ourselves and we don’t even notice we’re doing it.

“Tell the negative committee that meets inside your head to sit down and shut up!” – Ann Bradford

The key is to realize that if you feel like garbage then your thoughts have been garbage, so take out the trash and start talking positive! Then watch as your positive self-talk leads you down the path toward amazing success.

The Goal Is To Be Better Today Than Yesterday With A Plan To Become Even Better Tomorrow

How do we stack up? It’s a question we seem to constantly ask ourselves. Our brains want to know how we are measuring up compared to everyone else. Do we matter more than other people matter? Is our position more valuable than another person’s position? People can spend their entire lives trying to determine where they stack on the proverbial totem pole of the human race, however, those who do will one day be sorely disappointed to find out that there was no ranking measurement against anyone else at all. There was only the assessment of how their life measured up to their own personal potential.

“Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world…if you do so, you are insulting yourself.” –Bill Gates

When we compare ourselves to someone else we will always have to rank ourselves as either superior or inferior to that other person, and neither of those assessments will ever be factually accurate. Admittedly, a person can be better than someone else at one particular task, but that doesn’t qualify them as superior. Attempting to gauge how we are doing in comparison to someone else will never lead to an accurate evaluation because no two people are ever exactly alike. We come from different backgrounds. We possess different talents. We have different strengths and weaknesses. So how then would it ever be a fair assessment to hold ourselves and any other person to the exact same measuring stick?
In life there is no “superior” or “inferior” and there is no measuring stick that ranks us in order of importance. Everyone is exactly equal in importance to this world and it isn’t possible for any one person to become more or less important than any other person. So then what do we aim for? How do determine excellence? How do we become “the best”?
We start by redefining what we believe “the best” is. We start by recognizing that being “the best” is something relating to you, and only you. It’s about achieving YOUR best, ranked solely against yourself and your own past performance and your own future potential.
Some exercises that can help us do this are:

• Look at your own natural talents and abilities and write them down in a list. Then ask yourself, how you can further develop those talents and abilities? How can you hone them to make them the very best they can be? In addition, ask yourself what natural gifts you have that you have not yet begun to grow and develop? Write those down too. Recognize that becoming your very best will take an ongoing effort of improving the talents you already have, discovering your gifts still waiting to be developed, and continuously looking for undiscovered gifts and talents yet to rise to the surface.
• Make a list of the qualities we don’t like about ourselves that we would like to change. For example, are we impatient, are we judgmental, are we lazy, etc. Write these qualities down and then set goals to help you change these into qualities you can be proud of.
• Recognize that every day we are the result of every past decision we have made up to that point. And tomorrow we are going to be the direct result of the decisions we are making today. So if we are doing things today that will make us better tomorrow, and we continue that pattern day after day, we are always going to be in the process of becoming our best. One way to do this is to ask yourself, “Where are the decisions I am making today going to lead me?” and, “Am I better today than I was yesterday?” and, “Do I have goals in place to help improve me tomorrow?

Coming to recognize every gift and talent we possess within us takes a lifetime.  Many of them surface during times of trial and difficult experience. Many surface as we gain more wisdom. Let’s face it, we will likely never know everything we are truly capable of until life forces us to prove it to ourselves.

It is often said that “If you continuously compete with others, you become bitter, but if you continuously compete with yourself, you become better.”  We have to remind ourselves daily that our goal isn’t to be better than anyone else. Our ultimate goal is to be better today than we were yesterday, and have a plan in place to help us become even better tomorrow.

Let's Be Honest to all: Business Is Theatre

One day years ago I was at work. I was on the loading dock at the back of our company’s building, having a chat with the loading dock guys. It was all guys in that department at the time, and I stopped by the loading dock in our Shipping and Receiving area to talk about the calendars on the walls.
Back then, vendors and freight companies would send their clients calendars, and on every month there was a picture of a Hotsy Totsy girl in a skimpy outfit. Sometimes the model was sitting on or holding a piece of factory or loading-dock equipment.




















“Guys,” I said, “I love the artwork on the walls in this department, but the calendars have to go. There’s a thing called Hostile Work environment that says that we can’t have stuff on the walls that could be offensive or inappropriate.
“Not everybody wants to walk by Miss February a hundred times a day and look at that g-string bikini she’s wearing.”
“What the heck, Liz?” asked the guys. “We have to look at our calendars all the time – the least you can do is let us look at a picture we  like.”
“Nice try,” I said, “but the calendar has to go.” Just then I heard my name over the company PA system. “Liz Ryan to the front office,” said our receptionist, Donna. That was very  unusual. I had a cell phone. Who was looking for me, and what was their urgency?
I left the dock and headed back down the long hallway to my office in the front of the building. I stopped in my office to throw on a blazer and some red lipstick, then I sprinted around the corner to Donna desk in the lobby. “What is the story?” I asked her. “Casey wants you for something,” she said. Casey was our CEO. His office was at the end of the hall on the next floor, one floor above the lobby. I dashed up the stairs.
In Casey’s office was a prim-looking older lady from a state pension board. She was on a visit to our company to make sure her pension fund’s dollars invested in us were in safe hands. Casey looked relieved to see me. “I hope you can answer a few questions about our employee stock option plan for us,” he said. We stepped into his office.

I know how to play that role in my sleep. I answered the pension lady’s questions carefully and with grace. I brought her tea. I let her know how wonderful it was to meet her and how important her role in safeguarding her pension fund members’ investments were. It is true. The lady had a big job on her shoulders. At the same time she wanted to be made much of, and I know how to do that. I’m the youngest of five daughters from an Irish Catholic family. I was raised wearing a hat to Mass every Sunday. Do you think I don’t know how to treat people nicely?

The lady left happy and well-informed about employee stock options. “You saved me,” said my CEO.
“That was impromptu,” I said. “I was on the loading dock talking about girly calendars.”
“Good switch-up,” he said.
“If I have to do that again, you have to get me an Actors’ Equity card,” I said. Business is theater. We should tell the truth about that.
Sometimes the roles we play at work help us out. The part of the super-polite, attentive younger lady was a familiar script to me. The role of the hey-guys-what’s-up sisterly calendar-snatcher was familiar too. I have three brothers in addition to all those sisters. I know how to talk to guys.
We all find roles to play at work, and they can make our work easier in lots of situations.
They can hurt us, too, especially when we fall into roles we didn’t choose and stay in them because we’re afraid to step out of them. We stay in our familiar roles far past the point where they serve us.
Sometimes we’re afraid to bring ourselves to work. We fear what would happen if we did. We say “I can’t be myself at work,” and we blame other people for keeping us in a role. But how would they know we were playing a part, if we never came out from behind the mask?

I used to notice the behavior of young people like me in meetings before the big guys, the executives, walked in. The twenty-somethings were comfortable and goofing around right up until the C-level people walked in and sat down. Then they snapped to attention — me, too.

We can say words we don’t believe when we’re in character, because the script takes over and we speak the character’s words. I used to lie in bed at night and wonder “Did I say that asinine thing? Oh God, what kind of dweeb have I become?”

I remembered when I was cool and I didn’t say dweeby things because they were written into the script I believed I had to follow.
I noticed that when my mojo was up, I felt more free being myself at work. When I was discouraged and tired, I let my suit and my business card do the job for me. I didn’t speak up about things I should have been yelling and screaming about. That’s when I would lie in bed at night and think “Why did I say that idiotic thing?” or “Why didn’t I say anything when my gut was screaming at me?”
It is easy to fall into the script at work. The business structure itself encourages us to do that. The hierarchy, the rules, and the fear of displeasing someone higher up the chain all act as dampers on our humanity and integrity, too often. Out the window with our human honesty and street-level good sense go creativity and passion, the two things the business world needs most.
When we launched the Human Workplace movement to humanize work in 2012 we knew that Business Theatre would play a major part.
Until we can talk about the masks we wear and the scripts we follow at work, often unaware of the separation between who we are at home and who we are on the job, we won’t climb out of the hole we’ve built.
We won’t make our organizations any more vibrant and alive than they are now until we can tell the truth about the theatrical aspect of work. We won’t become more productive or more innovative by tightening the screws one more time on our employees or creating new, fake yardsticks to hit and measuring the tar out of every activity we can.
We won’t get anywhere until we learn to talk about fear and trust.
We have to learn to talk openly about the times when it’s hard to say the things our bodies wants us to say. We have to talk about the excessively – sometimes obsessively – left-brained and data-driven persona we take on at work, and its harm to our right-brained, earthy human side.
Every good thing humans have ever accomplished came from the power a team of passionate people can harness and feed on. Nothing creative or exciting ever came from a spreadsheet, a policy manual or a starched shirt.
It is time to bring the human side of business to the forefront, and challenge ourselves and one another to step out of the artificial and diminished versions of ourselves who so often inhabit our jobs.
I almost forgot! When I went back to the loading dock after the pension fund lady left us, the guys had covered every month’s Hotsy Totsy girl with my theatrical head shots, of which somebody had gotten hold and made multiple copies. My eight by ten black and white face stared out from every month in every calendar. “Cute,” I said.

Let’s be human at work, tell jokes and be vulnerable and stop worrying about where we stand and who’s pleased or displeased with us or whether we’ve stepped on an invisible land mine that might not detonate for months. Work is a human activity, like making a ham sandwich or changing a baby’s diaper.

There is nothing elevated about the suits and the forecasts and the earnings per share, not unless we elevate those things with the human passion that can lift any activity to the altitude where great things are possible.

I Love people of HR, But I Hate Their Job Titles

I am an HR person. I know how hard it is to please hundreds or thousands of employees. Let’s face it, people can get whiny. You can’t walk ten feet down the hall as an HR person without having someone say to you “At my old job they treated us better. They gave us our birthday off with pay.”
You have to bite your lip in half to prevent your tongue and teeth from saying “Why don’t you go back there, then?”
You bite your lip all day long! Still, HR is an awesome field. I love it. I love HR people, too, but I hate the language they use. Where does it come from? Who made up all the awful, weenietastic terms HR people use?



















The field of HR is a wonderful thing, but it’s also awash in the most awful terminology. Some of the most obnoxious HR terms are the titles HR people have foisted on them by folks who don’t understand what their jobs are all about.
HR people have some of the worst titles ever invented. A jack-or-Jill-of-all-trades HR person is called a Generalist. What the heck kind of title is that? It comes from a horrible place. It comes from the school of thought that every job title has to refer to the tasks and duties the person performs, as though we are all working in Henry Ford’s assembly lines, bearing titles like Drill Press Operator and Forklift Driver.
An all-purpose HR person has a critical job. His or her job is to listen to and take care of the employees so that they can focus on their jobs. Human problems crop up in any organization, and someone has to sort them out so the team can keep moving.
There are a million human ways to describe that job. Here are just a few of them:

• HR Consultant
• HR Coach
• HR Advocate
• HR Adviser

What does your embedded HR person do, after all? He or she listens. Sometimes the local HR Consultant has an answer right away, and sometimes s/he has to talk to other people to get the information an employee needs. Sometimes the HR Coach spots issues that need resolution and digs into them, without anyone asking him or her for help. It’s an insult to a talented and people-aware HR Advocate to label him or her based on the weenie subject-dividers that people use to classify HR people who specialize in one thing.

You know the chapter headings I’m talking about: compensation, benefits, payroll, training and so on.

Those things are means to an end. They are ways to get your team the information and support the team members need to do their jobs. Why would you saddle your most employee-facing person, the HR Advisor, with the awful title HR Generalist?
If you’re going to do that, why not go whole hog and call your CEO “Business Generalist?” The CEO has a high-altitude mission: to set a vision for the organization and lead the people there.
Your HR Consultant has a noble mission, too. S/he has to remove all impediments that might keep your team from racing down the field. Who came up with the stupid Generalist label? It’s the worst!
Another godawful HR title is Strategic Business Partner. Whenever I hear that one I picture adorable little Shirley Temple stamping her adorable foot and pouting with her bottom lip out, saying “But I AM strategic, I AM!” The first rule of strategy if that if you are doing strategic things, you don’t have the word “Strategic” in your title.
Your CFO has a strategic job. Does s/he have “Strategic” in his or her title? Nope!
HR Strategic Business Partners are like HR Generalists, although I hope that if you have either of those titles, you insist on a new title immediately. The first rule of partnership is that you don’t become a partner by putting the word “Partner” on your business card.

If people want to partner with you, they know how to find you. Here’s what partnership is: partnership is Morry and Solly, who met on the boat from Eastern Europe to Manhattan in 1905 and when they landed, started a deli together. Their great-grandchildren are still running the deli today. They are true partners. They found one another and they started something cool.

HR people have an important job to do, and that job is not running around looking for people willing to partner with them. How come your IT and Finance people don’t have “partner” in their titles? They don’t need to. They perform a vital service to the organization, and everyone knows what it is.

They don’t need to pander by putting words like “Strategic” and “Partner” in their titles. And let’s not forget the word “Business!”
Why would HR people want the word “Business” in their titles? More pandering! That’s to let people know that they are businesspeople, in case anyone might be confused that HR people are zookeepers or hairstylists who wandered into the wrong building.
In the Human Workplace, the role of HR is obvious and fundamental. They are Ministers of Culture. Their job is to keep the energy moving in the organization, to spread the critically important cultural pixie dust that makes an organization hum.
If you don’t see pixie dust, you might have trouble seeing the vital work that HR people do. That is your energetic impairment. If you can’t see anything that isn’t on a spreadsheet or a bar chart, I feel sorry for you. You will not become a great leader until you learn to read between the lines, the way your valiant HR champions do every day.