Intertech was named the #1 mid-sized employer by Minnesota Business magazine for 2014. This is the second time we’ve received the top slot. I’m humbled and at a, rare (Cousin L… hold your remarks ;-), loss for words.
My thanks to our clients, employees, their spouses, and business partners for making us possible.
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“There’s an app for that.” We’ve heard it so many times—from the punch line of your late night comedian’s new joke to the pastor on Sunday striving to connect with church youth—but is it really true?
If a recent New York Times article (“Statisticians 10, Poets 0” – May 18, 2014) is any indication, there now exist apps that measure:
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And much, much more!
Some speculate that the Internet and social media have fueled our national obsession with metrics. Or maybe we need more numbers because people are spending very little time actually reading words. A study by Chartbeat looked at “deep user behavior” across two billion web visits and found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a single page (I’m hoping you’re still reading by now!).
So we’re tracking more, but reading less. Is this necessarily bad, as long as we’re obtaining useful information to enable good decision-making?
According to the author Anne Lamott, who provides the mandatory counterview to this fairly upbeat article on apps, using metrics to measure aspects of our personal life is making us zombies (Hey, maybe that’s why all those books, movies and TV shows about zombies are so hot right now!). Says Lamott:
“What this stuff steals is our aliveness. Grids, spreadsheets and algorithms take away the sensory connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we’re seeing, all the raw materials of life, which by their very nature are disorganized.”
She also opines that our current obsession with quantification represents a male point of view, because it favors order.
“Women have always been handmaidens of birth and death, and that means mess and instinct,” she said. “Data, by contrast, gives the appearance of control. Everything that is truly human is the opposite of that. It’s about surrendering control. The surface and the numbers aren’t going to hold if your child gets sick or your wife gets cancer.”
Point well taken, but I think there’s a middle path between slavish obsession with metrics – in our personal and our business lives – and just “letting it all hang out!”
Using numbers to track business progress and results is a time-honored tradition. I bet fur-traders kept a diary of how many pelts they sold or traded in some old worn leather-bound journal, tracking results year after year to find patterns and maximize their success.
At Intertech, the numbers we use to track our progress against SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) goals are essential to keeping us focused. Along with clear goals, we have consistent and frequent communication around the goals. But we balance our clear-headed review of numbers with time spent talking, playing and enjoying time together as human beings (from leadership daily huddles to ensure we’re all on the same page with what’s happening across the firm to fun social gatherings with the whole firm).
And as leaders, my partners and I always factor in the human equation when metrics tell one story but our understanding of a situation provides another perspective.
So count me among those who agree with that wise guy, Albert Einstein, who famously warned, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Now where are the pivot tables for today’s meeting?
Building A Winning Business — Section: Hiring
Hiring someone is a highly human interaction. After all, it’s a matter of people coming together and making a decision to spend 40-plus hours a week together for an undefined period of time well into the future. It’s easy to let emotions, especially positive ones, tempt you into skipping your due diligence before offering a job to someone who appears ideal.
Here’s my advice: don’t let this happen to you.
Tom’s Takeaway: “There are three places where you can’t always see someone’s true personality: on a first date, at church, and at a job interview. Increase your odds of hiring someone whose personality, values, and work ethic match your own by thoroughly checking him out before you extend an offer of employment.”
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Thoughts Since the Book
A gated, defined hiring process is huge in building a solid organization. A perennial discussion at Intertech is if our hiring process is too rigorous. We’ve had candidates opt out because our process because it’s too long or involved. I have counter thoughts:
After flying 1,000 miles to meet with me, a prospective client and his team from one of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies kept looking down at their “productivity enhancing” gadgets—smartphones. I stopped talking. I waited. He and his team were physically in the room but mentally 1,000 miles away.
Finally, one of them looked up and said, “Oh, sorry, there’s stuff happening back at the office and these keep us connected.” “Yes, they do,” I replied sarcastically. They were too disengaged to notice. They have technology-enabled Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) I thought. A few years later, I learned I was right.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts psychiatrist and ADD expert, says the symptoms of ADD, such as the inability to focus and make thoughtful decisions, are surfacing in the workplace. The source is technological interruptions.
Forbes magazine has pegged the number of e-mail messages received each week by the average office worker at a whopping 470! That’s nearly 500 interruptions, and that doesn’t even include regular phone calls, cell phone calls, or text messages. An article in Time described a study of 1,000 office workers at an information technology firm which found that interruptions waste 2.1 hours a day per person. Extrapolated to the entire U.S.-based workforce, the financial impact is more than $500 billion per year.
Let’s face it folks, we’re frazzing!
“Frazzing,” is a term by Edward Hallowell his book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap—Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD, means “frantic, ineffective multitasking, typically with the delusion that you are getting a lot done. The quality of the work, however, is poor.”
And while no one can say for sure how frazzing affects productivity, psychologists have long known that performance decreases in direct proportion to each additional task being juggled. What’s the solution? Go old school… prioritize and problem solve.
Prioritize: Figure out what tasks you must accomplish in a given day, week, or even month. Then, organize your work day so those tasks get done first. Turn off email notification, hit “do not disturb” on your phone, shut your door and hunker down.
Problem solve: Of course, the top of any priority list should be the most difficult tasks, which typically involves solving problems. Start by writing down a clear statement of the problem at hand, continue by listing all possible solutions without filtering good or bad, then move on to prioritizing the potential solutions, pick the best one and begin executing.
Here’s to anti-frazzing!
My thanks to the the Public News Service for their radio interview on Net Neutrality. My $0.02 appears at 1:25 into the audio.