As we enter this holiday weekend here in the United States, my best wishes for a safe return next week to the world of management. For now, stay safe, play hard, recharge. Management Skills Blog will return September 5. -TF
“So, how did it go?” I asked. Cheryl had just emerged from her team meeting. Her eyes were still wide in partial disbelief.
“I am not sure, but I think we have solved the quality problem with the incoming plastic parts,” she replied.
“How did that happen?”
“Instead of telling the team what to do, I just asked questions and listened. I knew how I wanted this problem solved, but I listened. At first they were going off a cliff, so I asked the question in a different way. It was like magic. They gave me the solution I was looking for. Before I could say anything, they started volunteering to fix the problem.
“It seems that the burrs on the plastic parts were all from the same lot number. Sherman volunteered to run the defective parts over a grinder to remove the burr, but it was Andrew who surprised me.
“He volunteered to call the molding company and find out what was causing the burr. In fact, he left the meeting for five minutes and had the answer. The molder knew there was a problem with that lot, but didn’t think it would matter. They have since fixed the problem and are sending a short run over for us to inspect. Andrew said he would be standing by.”
“So, why does this surprise you?” I asked.
“I didn’t sleep last night worrying about how the meeting would go. I was expecting a big confrontation. Turns out, all I had to do was ask two questions.”
“So, what are you going to do the rest of the day?”
“I was thinking about taking a nap,” Cheryl said with a smile.
As Matthew looked across the manufacturing floor, the machines stood silent, the shipping dock was clear. Outside, the service vans were neatly parked in a row. Though he was the solitary figure, Matthew shouted across the empty space.
“Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.”
He reached for the switch and the mercury vapors went dark. He slid out the door and locked it behind.
We hope you all have a wonderful holiday. Management Skills Blog will return on January 3, 2006. We will be checking email over the holidays, so if you need us, you know how to get us.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. -TF
I want to tell you an incredible story.
Last Wednesday night, a close friend of Managementblog, Cathy Muth, CEO of O. R. Colan Associates, watched the stream of video from Hurricane Katrina and recognized the need for a central place where family and friends could locate people displaced from the disaster. Her company manages relocation programs for public agencies and has worked for FEMA in the past. She contacted us with an idea to see if we could help create a web registry called “I’m-OK.”
So, we became a team. OR Colan immediately agreed to fund the site. Our chief programmer Brandon Stone (photoblogs.org) had specific ideas of how this site had to be put together to accomplish its goal.
We thought long and hard about how to handle the data requests, how to make the site quick, accurate and simple. We looked at other boards and noticed that they were jumbled, jammed with messages, ultimately irrelevant to the search for a family member or a friend. In 99% of the searches, it was all noise. With im-ok.org, the user puts in a phone number and immediately finds information about a person.
Or not. On most message boards and other registries, if there is no news about a family member, it might take an hour or more of useless searching to find that out. With im-ok.org, using the person’s phone number, the search takes three seconds. If there is no news, the visitor knows that immediately. The design team did not want to string someone out for an hour searching a database in vain.
We observed other message boards that became overloaded to the point where users experienced significant slowdowns. We knew that if the site proved successful, it would get hit hard. All of this was carefully considered in the architecture of the site before a stitch of programming was done.
The idea was simple, yet overlooked by most people trying to create registry sites. Tell a database programmer that thousands of people are going to input data and watch him cringe. How many different ways can you spell New Orleens, Biluxi and Metaree? Designing a site using a traditional database approach is flawed before it gets out of the gate. The overhead to handle the queries and the variations of queries is of immense proportions, which is fine if you have three or four months and an unlimited budget. Im-ok.org was structured in a few hours and functional within 24. We chose a single piece of meta data (a person’s telephone number) and created message boards around that. The site was up and scalable.
The launch was critical. Friday, September 2, at noon, the site was up, yet, no one knew about. We contacted newspapers, television stations and networks, but quickly understood that traditional media outlets might not be effective or fast enough. Because of our active participation in the blogging community, we knew the success of the launch would depend on the power of the internet and its connected groups of people.
The momentum began to pick up steam with blog postings, email lists and message boards. After two hours, people were posting real messages on the site. Within 24 hours, sampled traffic rates were running 1200 hits per hour. We put a stats stream on the site, so visitors could see, in real time, who was clicking through back- links from other sites all over the world. After 36 hours, we held number one listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN for Katrina I’m OK. MSN search also showed number one for I’m OK. The Alexa rating for the site hit 46,005 on Sunday, just 48 hours after launch.
The success of www.im-ok.org will ultimately be determined by how useful and helpful it is. It was created so other people could assist in its proliferation throughout the internet. It was a simple idea, to create a scalable application, using message boards centered around phone numbers so people could truly help each other in this time of chaos.
Here is where we need your help
You can help by coordinating volunteers at aid stations and relief centers to relay information back to people with computers to input the data. It is quick, just a phone number and a name. Then click a button that says, “I’m OK!” This will take initiative on the part of people to just do this. We are in Florida and cannot physically be there to do that work. We have more information on the site. You can volunteer at this email address: volunteer.im.ok@gmail.com. Please help. -TF
Special Edition of Management Blog
Survivors can register “I’m OK”
The site is now up and operational. It’s scalable and should do the job.
Family and friends continue to search for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Our new web registry will allow someone to search for a specific person instead of combing message boards organized by city.
Survivors can register “I’m OK” or have someone else register for them that “I’m OK.” Aid stations and relief centers can use this registry to assist people in making their whereabouts visible to their family and friends.
The search side of the site allows for a specific pinpoint search for a person by household rather than generic searches by city. All the search requires is the person’s telephone number from before the disaster. Family and friends searching for the same person can communicate with each other through the message board tied to that phone number.
We need your help to make this registry known ASAP. Please forward this link to people you know who may be searching for people affected by the disaster.
Your help is sincerely appreciated.
-Tom Foster
As of right now (7:00pm Thursday), the eye of Katrina is passing over my house. We have had power flickers as the worst of the feeder bands are over us. We will see you all back here on Monday.
Batten down the hatches. Make sure we have beer in the fridge. -TF
That’s Blog, with a “g,” not Blob. I chuckle, then explain. Blog is short for Weblog, it’s like a daily journal, kept on the web for all to read. This innocuous writing form earned its journalistic stature in 2002 when Trent Lott was slated to become Senate Majority leader in January 2003. Most recently, bloggers were credited with the debunking of a Dan Rather report on 60 Minutes II about a letter related to the military service of President Bush. More on the origin of blogs.
So, what is ManagementBlog?
I spend most of my days with managers and owners in this great free enterprise system. We talk about the frustration, consternation and downright pig-headedness they experience as managers. We talk about business lives and personal lives. We talk about goals and objectives, measuring performance, in short, trying to get groups of people to work together as teams.
Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. ManagementBlog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, I change the names to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies. -TF
Discover Executive Management Online. Next Orientation opens in 12 days. Session One opens in 26 days.
Stephen Covey calls it the tyrrany of the urgent. I don’t think it’s tyranny, I think it is a subtle seduction, the seduction of the Red Zone.
Take two parameters of time, IMPORTANT and URGENT. Now, that’s where the action is. When I ask for a list, I get enthusiastic responses:
URGENT and IMPORTANT!! Stuff a manager can really sink their teeth into. Are managers good at this stuff, these special requests, last minute deadlines and BIG customer problems? Yeah, baby, in fact, they are Managers because they are good at this stuff.
“I am on a break in a meeting, thought I would call in, please, give me a problem to solve.”
This is the juice that managers thrive on. They begin to fall for anything that even looks URGENT and IMPORTANT. After a while, URGENT alone is good enough. Please give me some more juice.
But, what about the IMPORTANT, but NOT-URGENT stuff? What kind of management behavior is that? You know, planning, delegating, coordinating, controlling, directing. Not much juice there, but what impact would these behaviors have on things in the red zone? With better planning, delegating and coordinating, some things in the red zone go away.
By the way, the red zone is where heart attacks start. -TF
Gunfighters don’t get paid by the bullet.
Managers get paid for results. Management is about leverage and impact. Management is not “doing.” Management is making sure the work is done and creating a system in which the work is done. Management is hard work requiring skills which are seldom taught. Promoted managers are expected to just “get it.” The problem is they don’t “get it.”
They could if they knew what “it” was, but most companies don’t have a clue. A colleague of mine will conduct a study inside your company to help you figure out why things are not working so well. This is an extensive survey and costs about $10,000 (USD). The survey always says the same thing, so he has started a new discount program. For $5,000, he will just tell you the results of the survey without actually conducting the survey. You see, it’s always the same. The leadership in your company sucks (scientific term meaning underperformance). If you take a look around you, if that is what you see, then please send me the $5,000 so I can forward it to my friend.