At the Job Fair

When I left Corporate America and headed off into this strange and frightening place they call “Academia” I told myself that whatever else happened, at least I was saying “good-bye” to some of the worst aspects of a career in business, including cubicle farms and job fairs. College professors don’t go to job fairs as such; they apply for individual openings in a business school that has the correct balance of applied versus theoretical (and macro versus micro) to suit their requirements, and only very junior faculty in institutions which are too poor to build a new business complex will ever be assigned to share an office. The sense of relief was short-lived, however, as within hours of my arrival at Michigan State I’d been assigned to one of six workstations built into a disused conference room – a very small cube farm, but a cube farm just the same. Still, I got assigned to share an office after the first year was up, and had fondly imagined that I was past such things – until last week, when I attended my first job fair in over five years…

If you’ve ever been at a cocktail party with two or three thousand other people, none of who you know and none of whom have any particular reason to like you, you’ve got a basic idea of what goes on at a job fair – except there’s no alcohol, no music, no food, no party games, everyone is in full business dress (or at least something they fondly imagine to be business dress), the climate control is stuck (either on “Southwestern Desert in August” or “Arctic Chill,” depending on the season) and everyone is standing around in long lines that don’t go anywhere. If you’re getting the impression that I believe the average job fair pales in comparison to, say, being repeatedly hit in the groin with a large fish or thrown off the roof of the business complex into a dumpster, that’s only because I do. I had hoped that since this job fair was being put on by the Business School itself that it might be better than the last few such events I had attended, but I knew from personal experience that there’s only so much you can do to keep a job fair from turning into an elaborate (and expensive) game of freeze-tag…

You see, the problem is the websites. Back in the day, actual hiring managers attended job fairs along with recruiters and senior Human Resources personnel, and they met job-seekers and talked about what the company needed and what the applicant could offer. The events would last two or sometimes three days, and we’d work in shifts, since that one key person you needed to find could turn up at any moment, like a gold nugget in a screen. Compared to the effort required to read dozens of resumes that arrived by mail every day, the hours spent at a table in a convention hall or conference center were well worth it. Today, though, most resumes are received via the company’s HR website (a lot of companies don’t even bother with Monster or Career Builder anymore), and the HR department will have software to pick out the specific credentials you want; you just search by keywords (“accounting” for an accounting job, “supervised” or “managed” for a supervisory job; “alligator” or “crocodile” for an alligator wrestling job, or whatever) and then sort by years of experience, credentials or degrees…

Consequently, most of what goes on in a job fair these days is standing in line for half an hour, finding out that the live people are either looking for a single specific applicant type (a bachelor’s degree in Thermal Duct Deployment and 3 years experience in deploying left-handed thermal ducts, whatever that means), or that they’re not accepting resumes at all. In either case, unless you would fit some immediate (and desperate) need the company has, you’ll probably just be told to visit their website and apply online. You will be told this over and over again, until you want to scream. And that’s just the beginning…

The Ethics of Manners

There’s a story going around the Internet about a CEO of a firm in New Jersey who sent a memo around his company saying that the next time he caught someone emptying the milk (used in coffee) and not replacing it, he was going to fire them. The memo made it very clear that the company pays for the milk; all the CEO is demanding is that if you are the one who finished the milk, you should be the one to go and get another carton; the story also confirms that the CEO and his office manager are generally the ones who end up having to do this – they’ve replaced the milk carton many times as of the day this memo went out. Most of the online news sources are treating this as a “Lighter Side of the News” story, and most of the comments on those stories seem to feel that the CEO is over-reacting, but it struck me that we should probably take a closer look at the issue…

First of all, there’s nothing illegal about the CEO in our story asking his employees to make sure there is milk available for the next person. Many people believe that if something is not in their job description they can’t legally be asked to do it, but this is only true if you have a work contract that specifically states that you must do the listed duties and only those duties, such as those negotiated by unions for their membership. Some people would tell you that demanding that someone perform menial duties when it is inappropriate for their position within the company (like demanding that a highly-trained CFO fetch your coffee) is demeaning to that person, and therefore morally wrong; others will insist that asking a woman to do so is sexist, asking a member of any ethnic minority to do so is racist, and so on. But even if we agree with those positions, the memo in this case was addressed to all members of the company equally, and can’t therefore be considered discriminatory against anyone…

Then we have the question of over-reaction. Certainly, failing to replace a carton of milk one time is no reason to terminate a valuable employee who has generated millions of dollars of revenue for the company. However, it is rude, and it does show a lack of concern for anyone else who uses the office coffee service. Suggesting that this behavior might lead to worse ones if left unchecked is absurd, but the concept that somebody who is casually rude to his or her co-workers and dismissive of management’s directives (to stop this behavior, or anything else within reason) might have a poor attitude is not. The CEO in our story isn’t asking anyone to wash his car or fetch his dry cleaning; he’s asking everyone in the office to behave like adults and be polite to one another. And as far as we can tell from the story, they’re ignoring him…

That brings us to the concept of insubordination. Granted, this CEO’s directives in this case are trivial, but one assumes that they aren’t always – or, at least, that they won’t always be. If he were asking them to do something illegal, immoral, or personally degrading things might be different, but all he’s asking for here is some basic courtesy. Of course, following through with such an action might also be problematic. In addition to the possibility of losing valuable personnel, there’s also the matter of being sued for discrimination (if one of former employees believes the termination is actually about their membership in any recognized minority and is willing to bring suit), looking like an idiot in the national media, and being mocked by Internet commentators and scruffy bloggers alike. If the CEO’s first duty is to increase stockholder equity (which it is) while doing what is best for all of the stakeholders affected by his decisions (which it also is), then this may not be the best use of either money or resources, especially when he could solve the problem himself by just detailing a specific person to replace the milk every day…

So should this CEO have handled the situation differently? More to the point, perhaps, how would you handle the situation if the company was yours, and you were the one who kept coming in to find an empty milk carton every morning?

It’s worth thinking about…

Writing a Business Plan: Getting Started

The first step in writing a business plan is the simplest, and predictably, it’s the one people most often get wrong. There’s a common perception, especially among entrepreneurs without formal training in business, that a business plan is somehow being imposed on you by outside forces – banks, or venture capitalists, or private investors, or grant makers, or even the Small Business Administration are making you write this document instead of spending the time running your business. Even people who are still in the planning stages of a new business (and therefore have no business to run) can fall into this thought pattern, seeing the planning process as a kind of initiation or hazing being inflicted upon them for no good reason. When I teach this subject, I usually start by pointing out that a business plan has both an internal and an external function – and both of them are important…

The external function gets most of the ink – you will be showing this plan to people with money in the hopes that one or more of them will give you some. Unless you can explain why your business will succeed, and generally why you would be a better choice than a number of other entrepreneurial projects, you are not likely to get the funding you need. There’s a natural tendency to resent this sort of demand that you prove yourself, but when you look at this from the other side of the desk, it’s a completely reasonable question. Consider if it was your money; wouldn’t you want some indication that the people you were going to invest in knew what they were doing? For that matter, how would you rank a given project against others you could invest in (or, for that matter, against investing in the stock market or a treasury bond) if you didn’t know anything about it?

The internal function of the plan isn’t as flashy, but it’s actually more important: working out what you actually intend to do, and why. Most entrepreneurial ventures begin with an idea, or sometimes just a mental picture, of a product or service that you could provide. This may not include details of where you would base your operations, or how you would market your product or service; it probably doesn’t include details like licenses, permits, bank accounts or tax issues, and it almost certainly doesn’t include supply, human resources or vendor relations functions. And unless you’re a very superior business planner, it won’t include a detailed budget or timeline. Writing these things down won’t make them work, any more than creating a budget will somehow cause money to appear in your bank account, but you can’t explain them to anyone else until you’ve worked them out for yourself – and this is where you get started…

The first step in writing a business plan is the decision to do it – to actually invest the time and effort that you will need to create both the document and the business template it represents. Because you’re not writing it for anyone else, or for any extraneous purpose; the plans you are making are the ones you intend to build on, the timeline is the one you are going to follow in order to get everything done on time, and the budget is what you’re really going to spend for the things you’re going to purchase. The difference between being an entrepreneur with a new business concept in development and a dilettante who will always talk a good game but never amount to more than a poseur is always going to be the willingness to do the things that need to be done – and this is the first one. Before you decide to invest your life, your fortune, or your sacred honor in this new venture, you’ve got to ask yourself the first question an entrepreneur faces: do I want this badly enough?

Well? Do you?

Not to Be Missed

I don’t do a lot of restaurant reviews on here, mostly because there are already lots of blogs and websites where you can get that kind of information, and partly because this is a business blog. But I’m going to make an exception this time, because this is really a follow-up on an earlier post, because I like this place and want it to succeed, and because I feel the company has things to teach us. And if you eat as many hamburgers as I do, it’s really hard not to comment on a company that appears to have put a new spin on this most basic of American favorites…

Regular visitors to this page (assuming I have any) will recall that for nearly three years there had been a large storefront sitting vacant in the strip mall right at the north-eastern end of MSU’s campus, which I mentioned in an earlier post when it appeared that there might finally be a new tenant going into that space. For a commercial property to have been left fallow for that long there almost had to be something wrong with it, and as far as any of us could tell nothing had changed about the location. There were no new housing units around that corner, nor had there been any change in traffic patterns or public transit, and the only changes in the mall itself had involved a few long-term tenants leaving and a few new ones arriving – a possible change to the center’s primary demographic, but nothing that should have made any difference to a potential renter…

What eventually arrived wasn’t a retail store at all; it was a restaurant called Bagger Dave’s – which calls itself a “Legendary Burger Tavern.” Talking with one of the senior staff, we found out that it’s a native Michigan company, founded about five years ago in Berkley, Michigan and now up to six locations in the lower part of the state. The company uses local sourcing for all of its meats, cheeses, produce and microbrew beers, and they’re apparently working on getting in local wines, too. The local sourcing is good for community relations, of course, and it’ a great way of getting local customers to accept you when you move into a new market – we’re all loyal Michigan people, just like you. But the thing is, this really IS good for the local economy, and it helps your new neighbors to get work, be more profitable, and make enough disposable income to go out for meals…

As an example of enlightened self-interest or good business practice, you’d be pressed to improve on it. But the other interesting thing is that while there are literally thousands of businesses in America that will sell you a burger and a beer, very few of them attempt to raise this product mixture to an art form, let alone a way of life. By offering the best (local) beers, premium-grade ingredients, and an unlimited number of possible combinations – the company offers several “standard” burgers, but will let you combine literally anything they have on hand in any order you want to create whatever you consider the “perfect” burger – they really are offering a product that no other company in this market has even considered. The closest thing in any local market would probably be the Five Guys burger stand, and they don’t have wine, salad, desserts, appetizers, or beer available, let alone table service. There are a few companies in the US that split the difference (they have the customizable burgers, but not the other menu items or table service), notably the Fuddruckers chain, but none of them are to be found in the Central/South Michigan market…

I don’t know how well Bagger Dave’s is going to do in the long term; their business concept appears sound, and their products appear to be superior, but I’ve seen a lot of good companies that didn’t quite make it through no fault of their own. So let me encourage anyone who might be passing by the corner of Hagadorn and Grand River in East Lansing to stop in for a burger and a beer. You’ll be doing a good thing for your friends and neighbors, or at least for my friends and neighbors, and you’ll also get an absolutely world-class hamburger out of the deal. What more do you want for lunch?

The White Collar Bad Boss Blues

I was reading Liz Ryan’s Businessweek column on the things crappy managers say via the MSNBC site the other day and reflecting that I’ve heard every one of these at one time or another, but I can’t recall ever saying any of them. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m some kind of world-class management savant; most of what I’ve learned about the practice of management came by trial and error (since business schools don’t teach the practice of management), and I initially took to it like a duck to investment banking. But if you stick with it, eventually it is possible to learn how to manage people without being a complete a-hole and doing things that will insult, annoy and de-motivate your people to the point where they spend more of their time daydreaming about pushing you into a giant septic tank than they do on their actual job duties. And the first step in this learning process is realizing that anything that would insult, annoy or outrage you will probably have the same effect on your employees…

Take, for example, such pithy demonstrations of wit as “If you don’t want this job, I’ll find someone who does” and “In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all.” Ryan correctly points out that these are both annoying and stupid; threatening to fire someone for any suggestion that conditions are less than absolutely optimal is idiotic, and even in the worst possible economy (with 10% unemployment, for example) most people have jobs, and could get other ones if they really wanted or needed to. Not only do these statements not address the problem, concern or discontentment expressed by the original employee comment, they’re also things that any reasonable person would find annoying, if not arrogant, condescending and completely stupid. Telling someone that you don’t agree with their concern or that there is nothing that can be done about it is reasonable, but either of these responses just means that you’re slapping someone down for daring to challenge what you see as your authority…

Then there’s such control-freak favorites as “I don’t pay you to think” and “Who gave you permission to do that?” Ryan notes that the first of these usually means that the manager is either threatened by the idea or too lazy to think about it (let alone take action on it), or sometimes both, while the latter indicates a manager who is more concerned with maintaining a “proper” hierarchy than he or she is with using it to accomplish anything. A manager’s first duty is to accomplish whatever tasks are necessary, using as few resources (including employee time) as possible – and the task of maintaining efficiency, effectiveness, and morale in the workforce is always necessary. Any idea that helps you to complete that duty is worth having, no matter how unconventional it might, or how little you care for the source, and any hierarchical structure that interferes with that duty should be ignored, or at least minimized. Anything else is just egotistical crap…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there is no such thing as a bad idea, or that employees should be allowed to just make up their own rules about everything; I’m not a “huggy-bear” type, and I’m not saying you should be, either. But the truth is, unless you’re employing someone as a piece of furniture, you are paying them to think, and if what they are doing is better for the company than the official procedure would be in the same circumstances, you are the one who gave them permission to do it – retroactively, perhaps, but I hope you did. The other side of the coin – telling someone that their conflict with another employee is their problem (not yours) is even worse; you’re the one who is being paid to run the unit and keep order, and failing to do so is just abandoning your job. But I think the worst one on Ryan’s list has to be telling someone that “I’ll take it under advisement…”

Stop and ask yourself how you feel when someone says that to you. Ryan points out that what this really means is “I am not going to do whatever you just suggested that I do, and I want you to know that I value your opinions less than I can tell you.” You don’t have to be a management savant to know that you should never say that to anyone, especially if it’s true. You just have to remember that any attempts at management that wouldn’t work on you are unlikely to work on anyone else, either…

A Matter of Trust Revisited

Last month I wrote about a story on the Consumerist website about a customer whose wife started getting emails addressed to him from an online florist site that asked if he wanted to purchase additional gifts for someone named “Margaret” – which was a bit of a problem, since his wife’s name isn’t Margaret, and neither of them could figure out what these messages where about. Inquiries to the company and to their credit card providers confirmed that their identity didn’t appear to have been stolen, and no fraudulent charges had appeared on any of their cards, but the emails kept coming anyway. In my last post about this, I noted that the company could have caused some real trouble if the couple in our story wasn’t as confident in their relationship as they appear to be, and could have found themselves in real trouble if someone had decided to sue them over this little faux pas. However, the follow-up indicates that the situation is actually much worse than that…

On this week’s installment, the couple in the original story got fed up with the ongoing sales messages and decided to see if there was shipping information on file for “Margaret,” since online order forms will sometimes store that kind of thing. And, sure enough, when they hit the “order now” button the order form came up, complete with an address and telephone number for the mystery woman – who turned out to live in a city neither of them had ever visited, in a state neither of them had ever been to. The folks over at the Consumerist urged them not to contact Margaret directly, and to instead try (again!) to inform the company that they were screwing up by the numbers, but as of this writing there has been no further rely. I have to wonder if the company has any idea how badly things could have turned out…

Consider, for example what might have happened if this contact information had been sent to some unscrupulous person, such as an identity thief, or even a telemarketer. Just the name, address and telephone number could have been used for any number of scams, but the inclusion of Margaret’s email address would have made it almost too easy. If the database glitch that caused this information to be routed to the wrong person had also included credit card or banking information almost anyone could have taken advantage of it, and if Margaret herself had anything to hide the account information could have turned up in another family tragedy – or blackmailing scheme…

In my original post, I noted that even a few years ago this sort of clerical or database error would have had limited effect, and left the company open to extremely limited liability as a consequence, but in the Internet age it wouldn’t take much more than this to bankrupt the company. I should also point out that there has never been any such thing as a database with no errors in it, and no company going forward is going to have one, either – and certainly no Internet retailer ever will. If the company carries general liability insurance on its operations (our consulting company did back in the early 2000’s, but not every business does this) it might cover the potential lawsuits from this sort of problem, but it would probably be a good idea to check the exact language on the policy…

And if your business has any contact with its customer base that depends on a database being maintained without a single embarrassing error every happening, you might want to consider checking the language on your own policy – or getting such an insurance policy, if you don’t already have one…

The Ethics of Boycotts

There was an opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer this past week urging all male readers to boycott the upcoming season of the Lingerie Football League because it promotes violence against women (and ultimately rape), even when the watchers are fully committed to the idea of gender equality and disgusted by crimes of this type. The theory goes that since this type of violent crime is the ultimate expression of lack of respect for another person, any behavior (however trivial) that supports or fosters disrespect for anyone is simply a point on that spectrum, and once you have taken the first step all of the subsequent ones become easier. Like all “slippery slope” arguments, this one suffers from several logical fallacies, but it does raise several important points about boycotts of business operations. So let’s consider the ethics of the situation…

First off, I want to make it very clear that I have no information regarding the influence television events like the Lingerie Football League games have on human behavior; I’m not a specialist on gender equality issues, and while I am a behavioral scientist I only study behaviors relating to business. That said, there exists in any slippery slope argument the difficulty that the progression the person making the argument sees may not appear that way to others viewing the same facts – and that what appears to be an escalation to one person may not be. Certainly, without a great deal of highly consistent data to support the contention that exposure to images of women playing football in their underwear leads to an elevated rate of violence against women, we can’t accept any one individual’s opinion that this is so, no matter how expert that individual might be. If we wish to be scientific – or even merely professional – we cannot justify such a boycott simply on the grounds of outrage. But can we support it on purely commercial grounds?

Suppose for a moment that sponsorship of this programming generates additional sales for the companies paying for advertising time on those channels – which we can safely assume, considering that the “league” is continuing operations for another year and companies are still buying the ad time. Let us further suppose that those sales contribute wealth to the stockholders of those companies, allow for the creation of new jobs and raises for those currently employed, and increase the tax base of the communities where those companies (and their employees) live. We have no information to suggest that the people producing the Lingerie Football content are also prospering, but it is reasonable to assume that they must also be paying their employees, suppliers and stockholders (if they are publicly held), as well as giving work and media exposure to the young women who constitute their “players.” Can we assume, then, that any of these actions are unethical?

At the same time, it does not seem unreasonable that some elements of our society might confuse the members of the Lingerie Football league with real female athletes, or that such an association might make it more difficult for real women’s sports (those conducted for the purpose of athletic competition, rather than mere titillation) to gain and hold credibility in a media-dominated era. It is possible, in fact, that viewing such programming really will contribute to unrealistic views of women, disrespect for female athletes and/or women who are willing to perform on national television in their underwear, or even the gradual deterioration of behavior suggested by the opinion columnist in the Plain Dealer. However, I feel we are justified in questioning whether the Lingerie Football programs are the only source of such influences, or whether the vague possibility of bad behavior at some unspecified future point outweighs the positive benefit of jobs, standards of living, profits, and other forms of economic prosperity in the present…

Or, to put it directly, do we as viewers have an ethical responsibility to boycott programming that might, possibly, have bad social consequences at some point in the future? Do we, as citizens of a free-market economy, have an ethical responsibility to allow any business enterprise that does not present any clear and present danger to anything to conduct business in compliance with the laws of our country? Or do we, as members of a society possessing both the right to free expression and the right to the pursuit of happiness, have an ethical responsibility to let people make up their own minds about what they want to watch, what they want to believe, and what they choose to do as a consequence of those behaviors and beliefs, even if we know that a non-zero number of them will choose to do things we find repugnant as a consequence?

It’s worth thinking about…