After the storm is over

Millions of people and organizations continue to deal with the after-effects and devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.  From the personal tragedies - a number of incredibly unfortunate deaths, injuries, loss of property, business interruptions; to the larger, more macro items like getting air travel resumed, major city mass transit restored, and determining if indeed the superstorm will effect next week's election, the storm will have a lasting and historical impact.

For many organizations in the Eastern part of the country, one of the residual effects has been not just damage to facilities, but also and variously, lack of power or other essential services, the inability for many employees to safely commute to the workplace, and the need for many employees to have significantly increased flexibility as they deal with the storm themselves, (take care of their property, stay home with school-age children, etc.). The fallout from the storm will continue for a while certainly, but eventually things usually return to 'normal'. Offices will re-open, the subways will resume running, kids will go back to school, etc., but for now, many organizations are kind of in a odd middle-ground between full operations and complete shutdown. Where possible, employees are being encouraged, sometimes even directed, to work from home, and are also being supported in their efforts to ensure their homes, families, and property are being attended to in this time of crisis.

In this time of natural disaster, both organizations and employees are being forced to think about work, the workplace, individual needs and responsibilites at home, and the relationships among them very, very differently. And I imagine most organizations, even if they did not have an articulated plan for dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, will eventually emerge in about the same place as they entered. It may take some time to repair damage to facilities, sales might be depressed for a bit as customers have their own issues to deal with, but pretty soon the clean-up will progress to a point where the storm will be behind us, and 'normal' will resume.

But the larger question I think is whether incidents like the recent storm will have a lasting impact on the way that many organizations think about work, how and where it is done, and the needs of their workforces, not just in crisis, but all year long.  

This isn't one of those horrible 'What can we learn about work from Hurricane Sandy' articles. Those are dreadful.

But rather this is just an acknowledgement that in these incredibly trying times for so many people and organizations we can see where necessity has brought out and shone a light on the best attributes of our nature. Whether it was health care professionals going to extraordinary measures to care for their patients, first responders (again) risking their own safety to protect life and property, and the innumerable businesses that have exhibited care, concern, and compassion for their teams - we are left with much to reflect upon.

Let's hope that after the storm has passed and the roads are clear, that we can take some time to think about how we can best continue to care for and support each other not just when unprecedented disaster strikes, but in the normal, mundane, and largest part of our lives. 

I hope everyone reading this is safe and warm and can even manage to have a Happy Halloween.

You look familiar...

Quick - without thinking too hard, or lingering over any of the individual profile pictures too long, take a look at the images below and tell me what would you say you are looking at?

Here are some logical guesses, (assuming you did not actually recognize any of these gents and figure it out already), take a look and pick the one you think is most likely to be correct:

A.  The members of the local school board from the nicest neighborhood in town

B. Your teammates from the Over-40 basketball league from the local YMCA

C. The highest ranking executives at a major, huge, colossal, global corporation

What do you think? Actually, all three options are pretty likely to be accurate, but the correct answer in this case is 'C' - take a look at the original, undoctored image below.

So you've probably sorted out by now the gentlemen pictured above represent the highest ranking executives at everyone's favorite mega-corporation, Apple, in the news this week for announcing a pretty significant shake-up in their executive ranks.

Do you notice anything about the picture?  Maybe that, I don't know, everyone in it looks pretty much like everyone else?

Do you care at all about that?

Does it matter?

Does it not matter because it is Apple, and well, everyone loves their iPhones and iPads?

I wonder.

Carp, addictive bait, and just showing up

We have all heard the old chestnut about the connection between 'showing up' and success - there are a few variations of the idea, but the one that is most often repeated, and that we probably cringe in horror when we see it randomly shoot past on a Twitter feed or a Facebook page is attributed to Woody Allen, and reads something like:

'Eighty percent of success is showing up.'

The idea being, I suppose, that often we short-circuit our own chances for success by not doing theI prefer Romanian bait simple, basic, and often kind of easy parts of the work, making true success even more unlikely. It is a kind of comforting notion as well - one begins to think that merely 'showing up' - i.e. getting to work on time, doing the pre-reading, passing on eating the extra donut - will put you 80% of the way towards wherever you'd like to go. And maybe that is true. But often just showing up won't get it done in a truly competitive situation, unless of course you call 'showing up' arriving five months before it is actually required, and creating a set of conditions from which, during the actual competition, you will be certain to win. 

Submitted for your review, from a piece on the sports blog Deadspin, the story of the recent World Carp Fishing Championship, (yes, such a thing exists), and how 'showing up' five months early paid off for the Romanian team.  

Winners Romania had spent the five months preceding the tournament feeding the fish of Lake Corbu with a secret bait recipe. Unfortunately for the 10-man England side, who finished 18th, they turned up at last month's tournament with £10,000 worth of traditional "boilies".

The mash-up of flour, egg and flavorer such as blended dried dog food is popular with British fish but failed to spark a flicker of interest in the Romanian carp which were happy to gorge on the feed offered on the hooks of their hosts which they had grown obligingly fat on throughout the summer.

The debacle has prompted fury in the highly-competitive world of carp fishing, a discipline where technical know-how and secret techniques can make the team tactics of cycle road racing appear as complex and cut throat as a round of tiddlywinks.

I don't know why, but I dig this story. Maybe it's the underdog angle, except I have no idea if the Romanian team were truly underdogs. Or maybe it's the appreciation for the way they figured out there was more than one way to win at this contest, and if they were willing to do the lengthy preparation and pre-work that was needed, that they would win in the end, with the extra bonus of it seeming like cheating or at least unsporting behavior making it even more compelling.

But in the end, I guess I like the story because it pokes a little bit at the Woody Allen quote that I am sick of hearing. The other teams all 'showed up' at the Carp fishing contest, but were crushed by the Romanians who just 'showed up' as well.  The difference was only how they interpreted 'showing up', something that no pithy quote from a celebrity can teach.

So here's my (non-celebrity) advice on when you should show up - earlier than you planned.

Have a great week!

Playing offense on social media

Some time back the great Paul Hebert wrote one of the best pieces in the last few years over on Fistful of Talent, titled, HR Plays Too Much Defense.  You should stop what you are doing and read it, or re-read it as the case may be, then come back for a recent and I think perfect example of Paul's ideas played out in the corporate social media space. I'll wait.

Ok, back? I told you Paul's piece was money.

So here's my example of playing offense, or at least not sitting back and playing defense, from one of those classic 'Love them or hate them' organizations, Goldman Sachs.

Of course you'll remember the recent resignation flame-out from former Goldman Sachs employee Greg Smith, who took to the New York Times op-ed page to trash Goldman's culture, draw attention to their bad treatment of clients and customers, and essentially portray the firm as a horrible, horrible place to work, one where a high-minded and formerly optimistic, but now jaded person like himself could no longer be comfortable with.

Well last week Smith sat down with the Times once again, to talk about his soon to be released tell-all memoir 'Why I Left Goldman Sachs'.  Turns out that according to the piece in Times last week, the 'tell-all' doesn't really have that much to say, in fact the headline of the piece, 'A Tell-All on Goldman Has Little Worth Telling', paints Smith equal parts greedy, out-of-touch, and disappointed with his personal compensation, as some kind of crusader to protect customers and reveal deficiencies in Goldman's culture.

Goldman, upon seeing the latest Times' piece, issued the below tweet from their official Twitter account:

For the @nytimes latest take on the GS VP they made famous, click here: link.gs.com/r4xW

— Goldman Sachs (@GoldmanSachs) October 19, 2012

Man, that's a burn.  At least from Goldman's point of view, the Times' provided the initial platform for Smith's enmity and accusations, and now after some time and more details are revealed by Smith via his memoir, essentially has to admit there really isn't much there there. Goldman's swipe at the Times is, at least to my view, a great example of taking the offense, in a way that is snarky but still measured, and one that certainly seems to be in line with their reputation and culture.

Let me be clear about one thing, I am not an apologist for Goldman at all, and their role in the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has been pretty well documented. Next year a former Goldman trader will be tried for civil fraud for his role in the subprime mortgage scandals. Goldman's hands are not at all clean.

But that makes their little dig at the Times even more refreshing I think.  It is easy, especially when you might not have the most respected brand, to sit back, to try not to offend, to play by a really restrictive set of rules, but like Paul pointed out in the FOT piece, playing defense all the time is playing not to lose.

Do you want to play to win, whether it is in HR, marketing, recruiting, or social?

Then you have to score some points.

And the Goldman example above reminds us even the 'bad' guys can get over sometimes as well.

I'll trade you a Carl Sagan for your double of Niels Bohr

I am out at HR Technology Europe in Amsterdam the rest of this week, and working on about 2 hours of dodgy sleep on the overnight flight from New York last night, so today's post is totally being mailed in. If you are disappointed, please feel free to fill in the complaint form and ask for a refund.

I am pretty sure my favorite non-reality TV show, and really the only TV show that I actually try and catch semi-regularly is Big Bang Theory. If you are not familiar with the show, it is a comedy that features as its main characters a group of four friends that all are highly educated university level scientists.  They also happen to be a bit geeky, are irrationally focused on comic books and Star Trek, talk often of how they were, (and in some cases still are), mocked and picked on by 'cooler' people, and often struggle with a world that at times seems kind of stacked against them. The good looking, socially confident, and outgoing people seem to get most of the breaks in life, while their incredible intellectual capacity seems only valuable in the workplace, and kind of a hindrance everywhere else.

So when I stumbled upon this post on the It's Okay To Be Smart blog titled 'Scientist Trading Cards - Collect the Whole Set!', I immediately thought about the guys on Big Bang Theory, and the probably thousands of science students everywhere that look up to and hold in extremely high regard these legends of science that are depicted in the set of Scientist Trading Cards. 

The trading cards, each one representing a legend of science, ranging from physics, to chemistry, to astronomy, are purposely designed to mimic the styles of famous sports trading cards of the past, (the Isaac Newton shares a design with baseball legend Brooks Robinson for example).

Why bother taking note of these scientist trading cards? Why not just look at them as an amusing bit of fun and an interesting bit of design completed by someone clever with photoshop?

Well, here's why I think they are worth thinking about. In the HR/Talent/Recruiting industries we seem to have been talking for ages about hard to fill roles in the technology fields, and the seeming lack of suitable, trained talent for many of our most technical and scientific jobs. And while lots of potential remedies for this problem continue to be suggested, things like getting more training for displaced workers, loosening up the H1B visa process to welcome more foreign workers, and even increasing the numbers of 'smart' automation in our businesses, we never seem to attack the problem at a basic, more fundamental level.

Namely, convincing the next generation that science, technology, engineering etc. are not just important, but they can and should actually be careers to aspire to, and possess incredible legends, heroes, and role models - just like the professions that we routinely train our children to idolize - athletes, entertainers, and reality TV personalities. What if we could convince kids that being a great scientist could actually get them there own trading card?

I dig the scientist trading cards. I wish they were actually real. I think I'd like the kinds of kids that would want to collect them.