Guest blogging

In the past year I’ve been encouraged to start guest blogging.  I’m told it is great for your brand and your visibility.  I’ve also been told it’s good for your complexion, but maybe I just made that part up.

oh the pressure.

As I’m sure you might have guessed, it’s hard to follow up with the idea of guest blogging when you have a very hectic schedule and just blogging seems a huge time commitment.

but then, along comes a close friend that knows how to get you to act.  The key to get me to do something is to keep asking.  I think this is because I admire persistence vs. that I’m just susceptible to peer pressure, but I could be wrong.

So I’m now guest blogging over at Tahlent.

Of course, I started before I read these great tips Sharlyn shared with her network.  My lack of research on the topic might have been a good thing, since top of the list was make sure your content is good.  At least I am sure I nailed the final suggestion.. keep it short.

Check it out and let me know how much you love it .

Safe at Home

Like the saying goes, “What is measured is what gets managed.” And while you may rationalize that you are measuring things that really ought to be managed, what about the things that aren’t getting measured or aren’t being measured the best way?

Let’s take costs as an example. Businesses often focus on costs because they are a more “tangible” item on the books. You “see” costs all around you; people, supplies, capital equipment, etc. Their impact on the bottom line seems very clear as well. So, you measure costs, then you imagine lower costs, and you think, “There is where we will get our profit!”

Yes, profit can come from lower costs. But if those lower costs result in lower revenues by more than your costs were lowered, what happens to your profit? You get one guess.

Measuring revenue is not difficult, but understanding the connection between what you did by lowering costs with what happens to revenues is a little tricky.

Lessons from Baseball

What’s the connection to “Safe at Home” and baseball? Think of Profit as scoring a run – i.e. “Safe at Home.” How did that happen? What contributed to scoring a run?

For a long time, the most common measurement of a player’s contribution to their team’s score was based on the “Triple Crown” of offense: Home Runs (pretty obvious), Runs Batted In (almost as obvious), and Batting Average (not so obvious). What is common about these measures is they are tangible and/or easy to measure.

The problem is that by focusing on these measures, teams can end up encouraging or pay too much for behaviors that don’t really help them. That’s because these measures don’t give a very good picture of how individual performance affects team performance.

It turns out that there are two (instead of three), better measures: Slugging Percentage and On Base Average. These measures step back and think about scoring runs more in terms of “production” (hey, a business term!). These measures aren’t as tangible, but together they were found to better relate individual performance to team performance.

Back to Business

It’s the same for Profit. A big component of cost is often labor, but do lower labor costs always mean higher profit if there’s also a connection between labor and revenue as well? Since cutting a cost can mean reducing revenue (and likewise, increasing a cost can create revenue), it’s vital that your measurements take into account the real relationship between the two.

That seems obvious. What’s not so obvious is what measurements to use to make the best decisions. Conventional wisdom and best practices might point out what not to do, but they really won’t give you the insight to beat your competition. You must think in terms of your company’s production.

Is there a magic answer? No. But if you’re only measuring things in a way that doesn’t really show the connection (think “Time to Hire”, “Total Payroll”, etc.) you run a high risk of pulling the wrong levers and losing profit unnecessarily. At the very least, step back and think about how all the pieces relate and fit together to bring in Profits “Safe at Home” and then make the call.

Photo by SD Dirk

Lessons in Management from Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is one of the longest running network television programs in the United States.  In its 36 years of existence, it has recruited and developed some of the best comedians of our generation, has established and protected its brand as a bedrock of comedic Americana, and to this day, continues redefine itself to remain relevant in a continuously changing social and political environment.    This long history of success is due in large part to its creator and producer, Lorne Michaels.   One of many Lorne’s brilliant hires was Tina Fey – he brought her on to be a writer for the show, and the rest…well, you know, is history.   Tina wrote an article in the March 14^th New Yorker that described in an amusing way, aspects of his management style she thought drove the success of the show.  Here are a few:

1)    When hiring, mix Harvard nerds with Chicago improvisers and stir. Both of these types think and approach comedy differently; their mixture provides a balance in the show between the heady and more visceral sketches.  She notes the Harvard guys check the logic and grammatical construction of every joke and the improvisers teach them how to be human – in other words, both Kirk and Spock are required to finish off every Star Trek episode with success.

2)    Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning. There are lots of late nights writing for the show.  No matter how good the writer, if the person is too talkative, needy or angry to deal with by the printer in the middle of the night, give them the flick.

3)    Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy. Tina notes cases of eccentric writers turning in 17 minute sketches and immature performers going into fits and tears when their sketches appeared later in the show than they wanted.  Her initial instinct was to take a self righteous, direct approach in attempting to help them become more acquainted with reality – an impulse to shake them straight with “How dare you pitch a fit about what time your sketch is on? Some people don’t get to be in the show at all.”  She describes Lorne’s style in dealing with crazies by recounting the joke about a man who walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says that his brother has gone crazy. “He thinks he’s a chicken”.  And the psychiatrist replies “Have you told him he’s not a chicken”.  And the man answers, “I would, but we need the eggs”.    Some of the most exhaustive people can sometimes produce the best stuff – there are often no percentages in trying to correct human, flawed mental algorithms that in the end,  get you what you need.   And this one doesn’t conflict with 2) as all of these charming and clever people would be a pleasure to run into at the printer in the middle of the night.

Of course, these tips are not just for producing prime time television.   We all know diversity can be an asset, a hiring manager needs to feel that a candidate “fits in”, and that a manager has to be tactful when dealing with quirky, yet valuable employees.  But what resources are at an organization’s disposal to act on this advice; not everyone has a Lorne Michaels to make calls on talent.  Social networking has a role in creating that mix of perspectives to wrap creative solutions around business problems.   And during the recruiting process, social sites can be quite revealing when you’re trying to figure out whether or not you’d want to bump into someone at the printer in the middle of the night.  As for an ability for tactfully dealing with crazies, perhaps that just has to be something that needs to be added to a competency model .

No soup for you

About once a quarter my husband makes the suggestion I should go into sales.

This is mostly based on his interest that I make more money, but it’s also tied to the fact that translating technology offerings into business value is something I do instinctively, and so it’s not a bad idea to want to monetize that better.

The problem with putting me in  a sales role, is that I am a bit of a Talent Soup Nazi.

I have a strong need to see customers provide tools to make the lives of employees and managers better.  Too often, I find customers planning to implement a painful or cumbersome process, without understanding what managers need.

Having dedicated myself to building great tools , I can’t help but have a “No soup for you” reaction, when people want to use my tools and don’t plan to actually make things better.

Managers need their talent tools that:

• better align the talents of their teams to the needs of the business.
• provide frameworks for critical conversations that bring out the best of their staff.
• show them how to get their team in the right roles based upon their strengths and passions.

I’ve said it before — software is only a tool — you must first have a strategy or you will not accomplish great things.

Get a great plan, get a great tool..

don’t make me take back your soup!

Where you been?

No I have not left the building… oh wait I have.

I have been a bit hard to reach these days.  There are a lot of reasons, but none are a reflection of my reduced interest in blogging.

Here’s what I’ve been up to

• Day job is heating up.  Turns out you can’t just write code all the time (as if I do that myself), at some point you have to deliver it to customers.  That tends to be when things get complex for development.  Consider my day job complex right now.

• Moving back into my house.  As most of you know, we’ve been remodeling our house for the past year-ish.  We had to move out as the project was huge (2nd story, new basement, garage, etc.).  While we are not done, we are now moved back in.  I’m happy to report I have found my toothbrush and my checkbook.

• Lost my iphone – nothing good to report here — sucked all around.  I understand that buying a new iphone is not that hard… unless you have complex internal processes that make it so.  Over two weeks later I’m receiving text messages again and somehow things feel more in control.

• TED – Took a week out to go to TEDActive.  Lots of blog posts to write from that, but again I return a firm member of the cult-of-TED.

And so I am back.  I have less time than I had before (if that could be possible) but I expect I’ll soon be writing down the blogs that have been swirling in my head.

Thanks for waiting, and thanks to Ken, for keeping the dream alive on TalentedApps, while I’ve been absent.

The Doctor and The Portability of Talent

This weekend the 2011 MotoGP season begins in Qatar and the most fascinating aspect of the racing year for me will be how well Valentino Rossi performs with his new team Ducati. Rossi,  nicknamed “The Doctor” as a mark of respect, is arguably the greatest of all time. He has won nine grand prix world championships, a record seven in the premier class. Rossi won the 500cc World Championship in 2001 and the MotoGP Championships in 2002 and 2003 with Honda. Some commentators suggested that the Honda motorcycle’s superior technology, rather than his talent, was the key factor in his success. Rossi switched to Yamaha, won the opening race of the 2004 season and the championship. Another back to back championship followed in 2005 and he repeated the feat in 2008 and 2009. No one doubts his genius when it comes to riding a motorcycle.

Given his success at Honda and Yamaha, does Valentino Rossi stand in contradiction to the central finding in Boris Groysberg’s fascinating book  “Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance” (summarized in an excellent article by Chip & Dan Heath )? Groysberg’s study of the portability of the talents of Wall Street research analysts  argues that outstanding individual performance is far more context-dependent than it appears to star performers themselves. In short, the talents of stars are less portable than they think they are, and when they move their performance declines. The reason this happens is that there are crucial “in firm” networks and resources that contribute to the analysts success, but that they don’t necessarily appreciate.

Does The Doctor have perfectly portable talent? Not quite. Whilst Rossi has moved from Honda to Yamaha to Ducati, so has his supremely talented and experienced team. Crew chief Jeremy Burgess has worked with Rossi since he joined Honda, as has mechanic Alex Briggs. Mechanics Bernard Ansiau, Brenth Stephens and Track Engineer Matteo Flamigni also moved to Ducati. Why would the team move? Groysberg gives a comprehensive explanation but Alex Briggs has put it quite succinctly - ”… the reason I enjoy my job and laugh every day is because of the close group of people I work with. JB, Gaz, Bernie, Brent & Matteo. I left Honda with most of the guys for Yamaha & will head to Ducati with them to finish the story Valentino started with us in 2000.”

Confirmation that a further observation Groysberg makes regarding star analysts probably holds true for MotoGP stars  – those who change firms along with teammates experience no decline in either short or long term performance. The team clearly has a powerful cohesiveness and loyalty to The Doctor that enables them to all achieve great job satisfaction and success. Something that if he had moved alone Rossi would need to replicate, and would adversely affect his performance.

For their part Ducati provide the third key “in firm” resource for winning – a competitive motorcycle. Or, to put it another way, the technology for winning. Technology is crucial for modern racing motorcycles and this year’s Desmosedici GP11 is brimming with it – carbon fibre chassis, slipper clutch, fly by wire throttle, sophisticated traction control. And it is red. Rossi will be relying on Ducati to outpace the season long technological innovations that will be made to the Honda RC212V and Yamaha YZR-M1 machines.

Perhaps, then, The Doctor’s real genius was the early recognition that his talents alone are not enough to sustain consistent, career long  high performance. Outstanding teamwork and technology are also required in the right blend. Can he, his team and Ducati achieve the synergy that will enable him to win in 2011?

Time will tell.

Photo – MotoGP.com