Avatars and office decorations - sometimes little things matter

I've never been one for personal office decorations - family pictures, inspirational posters, desktop golf putting games, etc.  I always kind of felt like putting up pictures of the family or the pets on my desk or walls was sort of dumb - after all it was just work, I wasn't going to prison or on some kind of arctic expedition. I'd just seen all these people and animals in the morning, and I'd see them all again that night. I would put a calendar on the wall maybe, but that was about it.  And for me, that was perfectly normal and acceptable. If other folks wanted to 'personalize' their work environment with photos and other items, more power to them, I mean to each their own, right?

Except for some folks, and surprisingly even some leaders I have known over the years, my decision to leave my office free from flair was (at least sometimes), interpreted as a demonstration of a lack of commitment to the position and to the organization. For some folks, a colleague that doesn't take the time to put up a few pictures reads to them like someone that doesn't really intend to stay very long, and/or doesn't really care enough about the job to make the space more warm, welcoming, and personal. While I wish that workplaces would be free from these kind of petty and trivial situations, I am also enough of a realist or pragmatist to understand that is often not the case.

I thought about that former job of mine when I caught this recent piece on Business Insider, A Simple Illustration That Shows How Steven Sinofsky Wasn't a Team Player, about former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who up until a few weeks ago, ran the huge and lucrative Windows business. Apparently, and for reasons that remain unclear, (probably forever), Sinofsky did not join the rest of the Microsoft executive team by replacing their corporate website headshots with a cutesy Microsoft Kinect-style avatar.  Check out the image below, and notice how this lack of participation stands out.

According the BI piece, this seemingly small, unimportant detail spoke to a larger point, that it "symbolized Sinofsky’s reputation inside Microsoft — (he) focused intently on controlling the success of his own division, and not all that interested in playing along with the rest of the company."

Silly right?  I mean Sinofsky was an important, busy executive. He probably couldn't be bothered to supply an avatar image, (or more likely, just approve one), for the website. I mean, who cares anyway? What does that have to do with building great products?

I suppose nothing. But somewhere, someone, maybe more than a few folks, interpreted this as Sinofsky's lack of 'buy-in' to the team.  It's likely people that felt that way probably felt it all along, and this little example helped to cement their feelings about him.

Either way, and whether we like it or not, sometimes these tiny, insignificant things matter. It would not have killed me to put a few photos up in my office, heck, I could of just bought a couple of new frames and left the stock images they usually come with in them. No one would have known the difference.

But it would have at least made them feel like I was more like one of them, and I was indeed also part of the team.

And that is not insignificant.

Can there be a middle class if there are no middle class jobs?

If there was one term we heard more than any other here in the USA during the recent Presidential election contest it had to be 'middle class.'  

The 'middle class', sometimes depending on what group is doing the defining, consists of that large swath of average, normal, or 'regular' people - neither rich nor in poverty, and that have typically worked in a wide range of jobs that provided solid but not spectacular earnings, some potential for growth, were fairly stable, and crucially, were generally accessible to just about everyone who was willing to put in the effort.

In the election both sides talked a lot about the middle class, mostly coupled with words like 'save', 'strengthen', or 'protect'. While the opposition parties advanced different proposals and philosophies that they felt would be in the best interests of the middle class, there was at least consensus across the board that the welfare of the middle class is of significant importance to the health of the nation overall.

But no matter what political philosophy you take up with, one emerging reality about the overall job market seems to be this - that the recovery from the 2009 recession, (such as it is), has not extended to many of these 'middle class' type jobs. 

The below chart showing how 'routine' job levels have been impacted by recent economic recessions is from a piece by Economics professors Henry Siu and Nir Jaimovich titled 'Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations' that paints a really grim future for the middle class and many of the professions that have typically been held by middle class workers.

Take a look at the data, with some additional comments/analysis to follow.

From the author's analysis of the data in the above chart:

Figure 1 highlights our simple point; it plots per capita employment in routine occupations (in log levels) from 1967 to the end of 2011. Since about 1990, there is an obvious 28 log point decline in routine employment.

What is equally clear is that this fall has not happened gradually over time but that the decline is concentrated in economic downturns. 92% of the 28 log point fall occurred within a 12 month window of NBER-dated recessions

Equally important to identifying the dramatic loss of these historically middle class 'routine' jobs is the researcher's conclusion that once lost, these jobs do not ever come back - as firms elect to offshore, automate, or increase technology investments to maintain overall output using a reduced number of employees.

Jobs on the 'high end' like software engineers, analysts, and economists, (lucky for the authors, I guess), as well as ones on the lower income levels like in retail and hospitality, have shown to be resilient, and nearly recession-proof. But the 'middle' and by extension the middle class - well not so much.

Last, I will leave with this conclusion from the piece, about where long-term job growth has occurred, and where it hasn't:

Thus, all of the per capita employment growth of the past 30 years has either been in ‘non-routine’ occupations located at the high-end of the wage distribution, such as software engineers and economists, or in low-paying jobs, such as service occupations like restaurant waiters and janitors. For this last set of occupations, this has been especially true in the past decade. 

A conclusion, if indeed accurate, (and it seems to be), that makes the recent blustering and posturing in the election about 'saving' the middle class, which mainly consisted of arguments over a point or two difference in marginal tax rates and simply calling the other guy 'wrong', a demonstration of a deep lack of understanding, or willful ignorance of the realities in the job market and the economy.

Saving the middle class is going to be a much more complex and difficult task, no matter which side wins elections.

And yes, this a kind of downer post for a Friday - you have to cut me some slack, I may have just eaten my last Twinkie.

Have a great weekend! 

Tuesday, rain, and playing the long game

Ever since Malcolm Gladwell pitched his now famous 10,000 hours theory, it cemented into our awareness what most everyone has known for a really long time - overnight success is usually not overnight at all, and the long, slow grind of experiments, failures, refinements, learning, and disappointments is what (mostly) leads to what only seems like overnight success.Johns - Figure 4

Even the 'Gangnam Style' guy has been plying his craft in one form or another for over 10 years.

We all know this to be true, it isn't novel, we were usually taught this in school starting in about 3rd grade, or whenever it was we ran face first into that first subject or concept that we didn't just 'get' right away. Maybe it was fractions, maybe sentence structure, adverbs, or long division - once that first bit of frustration with not understanding hits, we generally realize pretty quick the only (ethical) way forward is long, boring, hard, and largely unsatisfying effort. Unsatisfying until we do finally 'get it' and say things like 'It's all been worth it', or in the case of calculus, 'I'm glad I'll never have to go through that again.'

So while the 'you have to work really hard for a long time to become great at anything' isn't news, it still is a sentiment or guide that still bears repeating from time to time, (at least for me). And rarely have I seen it expressed as well as in a recent piece on the ESPN True Hoop blog called 'The long game is the only game', by Henry Abbott, (I know you are shocked, a basketball site).  

Here's the money quote from Henry:

It may appear that NBA games are won with big moments when everybody is looking -- dunking over people, blocking shots, hitting a momentous jumper. And once in a while that does happen. But the reality is that many more careers and games turn on getting things right in the millions of small moments when nobody is looking. The big moments will always dominate the Hollywood version of events. But in real life, if you want to do the most you can to get the best possible results, it's a long game of putting together one solid day of training after another.

You want to know who's going to have the best NBA career? You could do worse than to simply figure out who puts in the most work to prepare.

Maybe in the NBA there are some exceptions to this, there are some supremely talented and physically gifted guys where the need for the day-in, day-out slog is not necessary to have successful and even legendary careers. But those guys are extremely rare, often work and practice much, much more than they let on, and often are looked back upon as not making the most of their physical gifts.

For the rest of us, who can't dunk a ball, or for whom irrational number theory never came naturally, we have to continue to grind away. 

I got up early today, it's Tuesday, it's cold and raining. The kind of day that is pretty easy to fold to, to simply go through the motions,  and come back tomorrow.

But that never gets it done.

There's only 14 hours in a day

You only have 12-14 working hours in an average day to get done what you need to get done, so you better get proficient and diligent about scheduling and time management.

That is the paraphrased advice I caught from one of the guests on an MSNBC show called 'Your Business', a show about tips, strategies, and advice for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.

It's pretty easy to take that '12-14 hour' assertion and break it down to see if that kind of level of effort and commitment would work in your life of course. It's just a numbers game really.

Take the midpoint of 'working hours' say - 13

Give yourself an (optimistic) 6 hours for sleep.

That's 19 hours accounted for so far. You have 5 hours left, but that still seems like a lot, right?

Do you physically have to go to an office? If not, you likely on most days, have to go somewhere. Let's be conservative and say 1 hour a day (on average), is spent in transit, and such, more or less not available for 'work', or at least not usually.

4 hours left. That still feels like plenty.

There was a really popular book that came out a couple of years back that suggested 4 hours was enough to get a week's worth of work done. I admit to not reading the book and knowing anything about how one might actually successfully pull off that trick, but if someone can figure out how to cram a week's work into 4 hours, then that same amount of time each day has to be plenty for non-working, non-sleeping activities.

So what would need to be fit into the remaining 4 hours? Well depending on your personal situation, interests, and motivations, you'll need to select however many items you can from the (incomplete) list below:

1. Eating

2. Obtaining and/or preparing food and related items to support your need to eat

3. Personal care and hygiene

4. (If you have kids) whatever you do each day that passes for parenting

5. Family/friend social time

6. Everything else I missed

Can you fit that all in to 4 hours? Maybe. Again, on average maybe for a while.

Of course you or someone you take care of might get sick. Your car might break down. Some inconsiderate friend or family member might actually need more than about 45 minutes of your time at a stretch one day. And of course you need time to keep track of and update, (variously), Facebook, LinkedIn, (well that might be 'work'), Twitter, Instagram, Tumbr, Pinterest, etc.

But the interesting thing to me is not that the guest on the small business focused talk show casually tossed out the 12-14 hours as the standard or expected allotted or expected 'working day', it's that none of the other guests nor the host challenged the assertion in any way. It was a given. It was 'normal'. And while interesting, it certainly isn't surprising, everyone knows, (except maybe the 4-hour work week guy), that small business owners and entrepreneurs have to work longer and harder and give up mostly everything else in their lives for a time in order to get a new venture off the ground.

That kind of grind, and maybe even worse, comes with the territory. Which is one of the many reasons that small business ownership and entrepreneurship will never be for everyone. Lots of smart, talented, and dedicated folks simply can't or don't choose to sign up for that kind of grind, particularly when they hit a stage in their lives when personal and family obligations increase and become more important, (think kids' school and sports activities, elder care, spouse or partner job transition, and more).

What's the point?

I guess that 5 years in to a slowdown-recession-recovery-slowdown cycle that seemingly will go on another 5 years or so, and with so many organizations that have had to fight to survive many of the actual 'survivors' have had a long stretches of time where they've been asked and expected to have the dedication and submit to the lifestyle of the 12-14 hour a day entrepreneur, but usually without any (or many) of the associated benefits.

The owner and entrepreneur grinds it out because they have a vision, passion, and 'need' to see that vision realized. The W2 wage guy grinds it out usually for different reasons, to fulfill different needs, (almost all of which are financial), and that might be met just as easily somewhere else, and maybe in only 10 hours a day instead of 14.

I guess I really need an editor because after re-reading this I think I just churned 800 words to re-state the obvious - that leaders and organizations can't really expect the kind of sustained passion and dedication and commitment of an entrepreneur when all you are really offering is a few more dollars and the likelihood that your team members are making incredibly tough choices about what they have to miss each day that many of them never thought they'd have to make.

How many of your team, or possibly even you yourself, are thinking - 'Hey, I never signed up for this?' 

Could a robot do your job?

I've run about a gazillion posts on this site over the last few years about the increasing encroachment of automated technologies and the continual forward progression of smarter and smarter robots that are relentlessly replacing human workers in all manner of capacities and in more and varied industries.

Robots and robotic technology and their growing presence in the workplace are no longer new or even novel subjects. But still, even when I know I have read hundreds of these kinds of pieces, and written more than my share of similar, every month or so a new and detailed examination of the new era of robotics at work gives me pause, and smacks me across the mug as a kind of reminder that while we like to talk about some vague concept called 'The future of work' as some kind of nirvana of social, mobile, and virtual collection of random and fantastic collaborations, that really this 'future' has just as much a chance to look grim, dystopic, and (mostly) lacking in actual people.

Do yourself a favor and take some time to read 'Skilled Work, Without the Worker' from the New York Times. The longish piece written by John Markoff does a thorough job presenting examples of the ever-growing application of robot technology in the workplace, particularly in areas and in functions where robots had previously feared to tread, like in distribution centers and even in sportswriting.

If you don't have the time or are not as inclined as I to read yet another 'robots are taking our jobs' piece I will save you some time with three paragraphs that will give you the flavor of the article, and hopefully make you stop for a moment or two to think about your role, your company, and the real 'future of work' our children will inherit"

Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large banner proudly proclaims “Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California!” (Right now China makes a large share of the solar panels used in this country and is automating its own industry.)

Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass. The human workers do things like trimming excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.

Such advances in manufacturing are also beginning to transform other sectors that employ millions of workers around the world. One is distribution, where robots that zoom at the speed of the world’s fastest sprinters can store, retrieve and pack goods for shipment far more efficiently than people. Robots could soon replace workers at companies like C & S Wholesale Grocers, the nation’s largest grocery distributor, which has already deployed robot technology.

Sure, you can read pieces like this, or read posts like many of the ones I have done over the years about this topic and think - 'That's interesting, but I don't have to worry about that. I'm a knowledge worker,  I'm a leader. No robot can do my job.'

Maybe so. Maybe no one robot can do your entire job as it is constituted today. But probably some element of any job could be fully automated, and who is to say that a more flexible approach to both role definition coupled with we know will be the continuous improvement and advancement of robot technology would change the way your organization looks at all kinds of jobs, including the ones held by smarty-pants knowledge workers like you.

So if the question is really 'Could a robot do your job?', it is increasingly looking like there are only two possible answers. 'Yes' and 'Not yet.'