Category Archives: Business

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A Gathering of Nothingburgers


Shortly before my latest college reunion, one of my classmates wrote on our class Facebook page that she partially dreaded attending the milestone gathering out of fear it might cause her to feel she was somehow a nothingburger.

Imagine that! Anyone else feel this way? Perhaps a truer question might be: Who hasn’t compared themselves to others and come up short? The real question is why at our age would it matter at all.

Were I to enunciate the personal and career accomplishments of this particular individual, I can assure you of all the descriptors I might be able to call upon to describe her, the term nothingburger would miss the target by at least a solar orbit.

Yet that doesn’t matter. She felt it, and following her enunciation, several dozen others shared the same sentiments. When I tell you these are highly accomplished people, I am not strictly speaking to their landmark achievements. I am speaking to their voices. I am speaking to their self-reflection. I am speaking to their commitment to family, friends, and strangers. I am speaking to their character.

Someone on that Facebook thread also suggested that most of the truly important and successful people in our class don’t bother to come to our reunions. I guess that would put us into a debate of what constitutes importance and success. For me, this argument would quickly devolve into the equivalent of a left-leaning politico trying to convince a right-wing politico of their unfounded opinions, and vice versa.

I don’t want to debate the definitions of importance or success, nor do I wish to admit by virtue of traveling to see some of the most interesting people ever to grace my life that I am somehow in a lower echelon of life progress. Let’s just say I am convinced that plenty of the most important and successful people in our class attended our reunion, and the ones who couldn’t make it or missed out will have an easy opportunity to correct this choice in slightly less than five years.

So what exactly happened at this gathering of nothingburgers? There isn’t time or space in a single blog post to recap the full play-by-play of events, but let me illustrate a few items that might cause you to rethink your own attendance at a reunion the next time you are invited.

First, we remembered with great affection those who graduated with us who no longer share the planet. Somehow that In Memoriam list has a bad habit of growing every five years. Once you pass a half-century in age, the curve seems to take on nasty exponential acceleration. To celebrate the lives of those no longer with us is to restate our love and admiration of their camaraderie. We did this with healthy respect and healthier zeal.

Second, in a closed-door session, a number of individuals stood up and shared some of the debilitating curve balls that hit them in life when they least expected it. We heard authentic stories of job loss, wrenching divorce, health ailments, children suffering serious medical concerns, regretful addictions, business betrayal, conflicted patriotism, losing one’s parents, self-doubt, lost dreams, and spiritual abandonment. The people who spoke were mirrors for those who didn’t. These otherwise private themes dominated sidebar dialogue for days and continue to do so now on social media. We listened with healthy learning and healthier comfort.

Third, we ate, we danced, we sang, and we talked. We did all of those in abundance. Okay, some people even drank, can you believe it? Mostly we just shared. Remember how much real conversation meant to you in the years shortly after adolescence? Remember how much pure ideas meant before mortgages, car payments, IRAs, and tax returns (unlike an endless conversation, those obligations all have to be handled on time, you know?). We did this with healthy appetites and healthier vigor—except for the dancing, only a few of us can still pull that off fluidly, though there were no penalties for trying.

Why might the people around us feel they are nothingburgers when they are nothing of the sort? I have two possible answers to offer, one awful and one remarkable. To the awful, people often feel they are inferior when they are belittled by others, to their faces or in abysmal gossip. To bypass this ramp, be neither actor nor audience. To the remarkable, humility and insecurity are often two sides of a coin. No matter how a reflective individual might care to value his or her life summary, seldom will a summary be satisfying. To bypass this ramp, we learn to accept who we are with the simple caveat that improvement is always within our grasp.

I also heard many people talking about whether they felt at home at college, either at the age of 18 or now. My answer coincidentally is the same way I respond about feeling at home in Los Angeles: not all of it, and not all the time. I find pockets of warm association, and that is usually enough for me to accept the whole, both with my flaws and the flaws of the whole. It sort of works for college as well.

I’ve discovered again that a school reunion doesn’t have to be about nostalgia. It can be about reconnecting. Where reconnection might be in short supply, it can be about meeting someone for the first time where fate and circumstance might have precluded an introduction in any of the previous several decades. It can also be a reminder of the simple things that reinvigorate our spirits: heartfelt dialogue, hard-won empathy, and genuine encouragement that the future doesn’t have to be the past.

Sometimes I think the creation of memories is a mystical algorithm all its own. Every memory has a starting point. It can begin 35 years ago or it can begin now. Both are valid. Neither makes you a nothingburger.

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Image: Pixabay

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What’s a Good Day at the Office?


She said a good day ain’t got no rain
She said a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been
– Paul Simon, Slip Slidin’ Away

It’s the small things at work that can change everything, even if only for a moment.

A good day is when I am surrounded by good people.

A good day is when I participate in a conversation where I learn something.

A good day is when a friend reminds me I am a friend.

A good day is when we get to promote someone.

A good day is when someone who used to work for me is promoted by someone else whom I’ve never met.

A good day is when a customer writes or calls to tell us we’ve exceeded their expectations.

A good day is when customer service completes an interaction that began with an unhappy customer with someone who will again trust our company.

A good day is when we stop paying legal fees on a settlement that never should have been a legal matter.

A good day is when a great former employee stops by just to say hi, then casually asks if we happen to have any openings that might be a good fit for a familiar someone.

A good day is when one person stops by another’s desk, thanks them sincerely for almost anything, and acknowledges them for a job well done (bonus points for heartfelt gratitude expressed by managers and executives).

A good day is when one employee apologizes to another for being rude without the prompting of Human Resources.

A good day is when no one has any reason to complain about anything to Human Resources.

A good day is when no injuries have occurred in the workplace for many, many months.

A good day is when someone tells me they accomplished something they never thought they could do.

A good day is when someone tells me a colleague helped them accomplish something they never thought they could do.

A good day is when a collective brainstorm that seemed to be going nowhere for hours (or days, or weeks) ends with a big idea embraced by consensus.

A good day is when we achieve a milestone, whether customer #100 or #100,000,000, celebrate together, and maybe add a sticker or t-shirt to our collections.

A good day is when bonuses exceed budget because employee performance exceeds budget.

A good day is when children visit the office and ask lots of innocent questions like: “Do people like coming here?”

A good day is when someone brings a dog to the office, and right when you are about to lose your cool, the pup jumps into your lap and you keep your head on straight.

A good day is when pizza is served, good or bad pizza. Or ice cream. Or both.

A good day is when I hear someone articulate clearly what they like most about their job—it’s especially good if I overhear it from afar, ensuring the reflection is purely authentic.

A good day is when I get to share stories like this.

A good day is when someone chooses to share one of their favorite stories with me.

A good day is any day I remember for years to come for any and all the reasons mentioned here.

A long time ago—toward the beginning of my career—a wise boss told me I would be surprised over time how many of the complex projects I would forget, how few of the business struggles I would remember more than vaguely, but how many of the people I worked beside I would long remember with deeply embedded impressions. I have come to realize the truth of that prediction with extraordinary predictability.

Many of us in high-pressure environments tend to have more bad days than good days, but a rough day doesn’t have to be a bad day if there is a turnaround event that reminds us why we originally choose our current job.

What about you? Think about it. What in your experience makes a good day at the office?

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Image: Pixabay

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Embrace Turbulence

How many really bad things can go wrong in business in a single day? One or two? Five? Dozens? Dozens of dozens?

A key employee leaves because a spouse is offered a job a thousand miles away.

A key partner botches a supply chain handoff and your warehouse is empty ahead of an annual sale.

You discover a critical hidden formula error in one of your financial spreadsheets that even your auditors missed.

Your customer service lines light up for a problem with your competitor’s product being confused for your own.

Sound like a normal enough day?

Then why do we think of turbulence as extraordinary?

Maybe a better question is how many things can go right in a day. Sometimes if you achieve one modest success you count your blessings and call that an outstanding day! A win is the welcomed exception. Problems are the norm.

Just remember one of the key maxims in career longevity: If you’re a manager, problems are job security. If there weren’t problems in business, we wouldn’t need management. Lucky for us, huh?

I was recently talking with a colleague about his desire to offer calm to his staff after a rough few weeks. He wanted to give a talk where his message and tone signaled that the bad stuff was behind them.

I advised against it. How could he possibly know what fate might bring even later that afternoon. You never want to make a liar out of yourself with stuff you can’t control. Besides, the very notion of calm to me signals surrender.

What is the stuff you can control? Attitude, anticipation, and readiness.

It’s a question of urgency over fear. Fear in the form of debilitating anxiety may not be your friend, but urgency in the form of nimble responsiveness is always your friend. There is so little in our future that we can control, pretending it is otherwise is advancing the clock on the certainty of smack down.

Complacency lets down your guard. Predictive, proactive realism keeps you sharp at all times.

How many times have I heard hardworking but tired employees utter the phrase: “If only we can get through this [fill in the blank], we’ll be fine.”

Remember this instead: The reward for getting over a hill is the opportunity to climb another hill. There is always another this to get through. Beyond each valley is always another hill, often steeper and higher than the one behind you. That is the nature of economic cycles. That is the nature of problem-solving. Whatever you solve today may create an opportunity, but the market response to that opportunity will likely create the next problem on your plate.

It’s no different for capital and equity markets, where despite our hope for smooth sailing, volatility is the norm. That’s why for so many stock picking is a loser’s game. You’re in for all the good and bad days or you’re out.

What to do then?

Embrace turbulence before it becomes turmoil.

Make turbulence your constant companion. Celebrate small wins, but never be fooled by a quiet few hours. Once you are comfortable with the inevitability of unpredictability, your confidence level will rise. You will learn to address change because you accept the inarguable market force that change is constant.

A good sales quarter is always exciting, but as every prospectus states, past performance is no guarantee of future results. You know that like you know your boss’s ugliest shirt. Why pretend otherwise?

Did AOL fall on hard times or fail to respond to turbulence?

Did Yahoo suffer an explainable devastating blow or wander aimlessly amid turbulence?

Did Kodak get ambushed by new technology or fail to play its strongest hand in a climate of turbulence?

Each of those companies allowed turbulence to become turmoil. When turmoil escalates to the unbound, creative destruction has usually made its decision.

Think about what those implosions mean to you.

Did the last project that didn’t go your way take you down or prepare you to outperform it?

Did your last failed product launch demoralize you or teach you how to make a better product?

Are you looking for comfort in the quiet ordinary or comfort in outrageous curiosity?

Big Company Syndrome is believing your paycheck will always show up. Smart Company Syndrome is knowing you have to earn your keep every day. Doing work and adding value are not the same things.

Turbulence in business is the norm, not the exception. Companies that win do so because they surf over, around and through turbulence. They might purposefully avoid an obvious storm they can’t navigate, but they expect storms, they don’t anticipate their magical elimination.

In daily business dealings, if you know that bombs are regularly going to drop, you won’t be surprised when they do, no matter from where. If you’re a CEO or close to one, you know it’s the job of leadership to address crises, not to hope they will slink away.

Make peace with turbulence. Pace yourself for a ceaselessly bumpy endurance contest. Expect an unruly rollercoaster ride and be mildly pleased the days it doesn’t throw you from the train.

When you have one of those good days—and you will—you will appreciate it even more. Your definition of a good day may also begin to change. Mine certainly has. Stay tuned to this channel for how.

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Image: Pixabay

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Staying Alive

This will be the third post in an unintended trilogy following my last two on why companies that might appear to be “built to last” may suddenly evaporate before your eyes. In response to those stories (Gone So Soon and 8 Warnings That Your Company Is Toast), I received several inquiries wondering if there were ways to spot an imminent mudslide while there’s time to escape.

Executive turnover is something to watch closely, especially the C-suite. Either too little or too much turnstile rotation can be a warning sign. With no leadership change over long periods of time, a company might become entrenched in its plodding, convinced it knows how to do things so well no seismic shift in the landscape requires reinvention of the company’s ways. When executives are repeatedly jumping ship in under a year, the lack of stability in teamwork, embrace of new ideas, or core strategy might be signaling a torpedo crater in the ship’s hull that can’t immediately be seen underwater. Certain presidential administrations come to mind.

An escalating executive dump of equity holdings will usually light up an analyst’s eyes, but what about yours? If top management is seeking liquidity while proclaiming they are simply reducing concentration and balancing their holdings, ask yourself why now. It’s good to be loyal when there’s a reason to be loyal. Ignoring the siren to go down with the ship will never seem as noble when your colleagues have departed in first class and you are left treading ice water. Much of the dot-com bubble unraveled this way, with most of the stock prices dropping swiftly to zero.

Ever sit in a meeting, listen to a colleague or team of co-workers present an innovative, visionary solution to a core concern the company has long identified as critical to its survival, only to see the framers of the big idea summarily dismissed without adequate explanation? Sure you have, most of us have. Perhaps those framers then quit, go across town and put their concept to work for a competitor, of course without violating their nondisclosure or trade secret agreements, modifying their ideas to a variation on the theme. If you believe they are as smart as they think you are, consider following them. That’s how companies like Intel started.

Do you observe evidence that your company understands its core competency, protects it through a culture of learning, and openly admits its weaknesses as opportunities for improvement? When you go to an offsite, is the point of that retreat an honest evaluation of the company’s strengths and threats, or is the current leadership pontificating on how unlikely it is that your competitors can take your market share? Sears has been dying for decades. I wonder when in each of the past years they thought they were winning.

Are you building a project or a company? A lot of people aren’t sure. Most startups begin with a product offering, but if the company building that product defines itself too narrowly, it may soon cease to be a company when it is folded into a larger company with a lot of “synergies” found in the combination. If the word “synergies” doesn’t ring a bell for you in the world of mergers and acquisitions, it usually means overlapping functions that are removed as redundant costs, possibly you. Look at the string of product builders that companies like Microsoft and Google synergized throughout their history. How many of them can you still name?

Are analytics, diagnostic evaluation, empirical assessment, and primary research core to your company’s self-evaluation? Are key decisions made on gut instinct or debated with facts? Ask yourself if that’s what the top leaders in your company say they want to do or if it’s what they really do. That which gets measured gets done. That which gets quantified gets fixed. If you’re in the room where people are swapping stories rather than interpreting data, you’re probably better off gambling in a casino where the odds are at least known.

Another way to think about this is whether you believe top management in a company is truly focused on staying alive, and whether you can help overcome the challenges to a company you love or want to love. If the decision-makers around you are people you trust who are committed to vetting solutions, perhaps you can be as well. Too often when the axe falls, we acknowledge in hindsight what we should have applied in advance thinking. There are artifacts of knowledge all around you—both positive and negative—if you choose to pay close attention to the reality of your situation.

You can always be pleasantly surprised or devastatingly rocked by good or back luck on the job. Predicting the likelihood of an outcome is a learned task that is likely more tangible than you think.