Firm Leadership

Rants, Raves, Rebuttals, Reflections, Revelations & Ruminations

Whenever my day gets a touch stressful and I'm needing a bit of a reprieve, I gravitate to a little web site that I happened across that helps me relax.

Take a few minutes out of your day to have a look at this: http://wonderofitall.com

Kudos to it's creator. It's insanely cool!

Here to make you smile and to help put your own woes into perspective, is a collection of a few of the disaster stories experienced by professional service firms with their year-end celebrations.

* Visualize the discomfort and embarrassment when an accounting firm had to trash 15,000 copies of its annual review as the firm's largest and most important revenue-producing client was listed on seven separate occasions -- with their name spelled incorrectly!

* Then there was the Senior Partner who called the marketing department, the day after a major internal client seminar, to say that although everything had gone really well, he was perturbed that several presentations had been badly interrupted by a door banging in an adjacent room. An unplanned career change followed when the tired and emotionally drained events coordinator quipped, "Well, why didn't you think to get up and close it?"

* A large consulting firm paid significant dollars to sponsor an exclusive con ference fielding one of the world's most influential management gurus. In his closing remarks, the senior partner managed to undo all of the firm's good work by saying, "Really good stuff. Shame none of our consultants know it -- but they will try to help you anyway."

* To be a fly on the wall, during the partner discussions in the boardroom, following a really successful client party to which no one had invited the firm's most prestigious client -- because they all thought someone else had invited them.

Today's question is, why is the U.S. dollar falling? The answer to that question, says one respected economist, can be found by studying a chart of U.S. corporate profits since 1991. Profits, he reminds us, are the result of capital investment. In order to make a profit, you have to buy new machinery, train new workers, and create new products. When you stop making capital investments, profits disappear.

Profits hit $508.4 billion in 1997. Six years later, based on annualized figures from the 2nd quarter of 2004, they are $448.8 billion. Something went wrong.

Actually, a number of things went wrong. But they all center around the U.S. trade deficit. Instead of making capital investments in America, the new factories and new products were crea ted in China and other parts of Asia. Profits that might have been earned by American companies were instead earned by foreign companies, and then recycled back into the U.S. financial markets. That is why this "recovery" is so odd; it is not only jobless, but low on profits and income growth too.

The way to fix the problem, in the view of nearly all economists, is to let the dollar fall . . . and pray that it does not fall too far, too fast. I must admit that this is just too, too weird for me, and I thank my lucky stars for the calming effect of modern pharmaceuticals, doctors who are not squeamish about keeping me overly-sedated and a wife who prefers it that way.

I got a kick out of a recent poll of 150 senior executives of U.S. and Canadian companies which asked, "What is the most unusual thing you have seen or heard of a job candidate doing to stand out from the crowd?" Here are a few of the winners:

* One candidate sent his resume in an o ld shoe with a note stating, "I want to get my foot in the door." He ended up getting the boot!

* Another candidate circled all the important words in his resume . . . which was seen as a clear signal that the applicant might not respect the employer's intelligence.

* A job seeker included an enlargement of a beauty pageant photo of herself. It unfortunately was not considered an example of her qualifications for the job.

* Finally, one candidate came to the interview dressed as a clown. Surprisingly, the potential employer found it difficult to take him seriously.

I guess the lesson here is similiar to that of attracting and serving clients . . . while many candidates may try to do unique things to stand out, organizations are often looking for a portfolio or presentation that demonstrates how you can bring a creative solution to issues the organization is facing.

I've just had the honor of taking my first trip to Hong Kong where I spoke to a group of over 100 managing partners. One of the participants expressed this view, "I wouldn't be surprised to see $100 or $200 for a barrel of oil in the next five to ten years. That is not a projection. It's that I wouldn't be surprised."

Frank lives in Asia. He looks out his window and sees a huge uptake in the use of fossil fuels. He says, "We [in China] have a per capita consumption of oil of 1.7 barrels. In America it's 28 barrels, in South Korea 17 barrels, Japan 17 barrels, in India 0.7 barrels. In Vietnam it's probably also less than one barrel. So, in Asia with the population of 3.6 billion people, we consume less oil than the United States, with a population of 295 million.

"I would imagine that in Asia the demand will certainly double by comparison. Say Mexico has a per capita consumption of 7 barrels, Latin America 4.4 barrels. In Asia, as I said, it's anywhere around 1.5 barrels."

Asia is where the majority of the world's people live. It is also the region that has benefited most from Alan Greenspan's very stimulating credit policies. Making things for people who can't really pay for them is not a long-term success strategy. But in the short-run, it has caused a huge boom in Asian industry and put trillions of dollars in Asian hands. As long as oil is priced in dollars, Asians can buy a lot of it.

Anonymouslawyer.com writes about the big firm rat race and answers the question posed by one of his partners, "Why do my kids hate me?"

"They hate us because we're never home. They hate us because we're pulling out our Blackberries all weekend while we pretend (and they can tell when we're pretending) to enjoy being around them. They hate us because work is #1, and they're #2 -- or #3, or #4. It's sad. Because it's not like years from now we're going to regret not checking the Blackberry more often. It's sad because time passes really quickly and it starts to feel like 'too late' very quickly. That's what keeps people here."

"By the time, maybe eight months into your first year, maybe a year a half - - but not much longer than that in most cases - - by the time you realize what this job is doing to you it feels like you're stuck. 'It's too late.' And so you hope it gets better. And you hope, and you hope, and you work, and you work - - and then it's no better, and even more so, 'it's too late.' And then you may as well stick around and try and make partner, and then if you're lucky enough and skilled enough and effective enough at what you do, and the right people know it, you make partner, and you think it's all going to change. And a lot does change."

"But the hours are still long, and there's still a hierarchy so you 're never really at the top of the totem pole, and the money jumps but the pressure doesn't really slow down, and the people you compare yourself to change, and you aren't really relaxed about it . . . and it really is 'too late' now, because this has gone from a job to a career, and you're stuck. And you never see your kids. And they hate you. And then you don't even want to go home, and so you stay at the office, and the spiral continues . . ."

Before I digressed into another of my ranting hissy-fits - - as I am doing again right now! - - which should PROVE that I am very disabled in a weird, mental way, but that is STILL not enough to get a lousy handicapped parking sticker for my car . . . here are a few more of those e-mail sins that drive us all nuts!

Blitzing. Send an e-mail to many people and your colleagues will think you're spamming them. Only copy the most relevant people. What can you do? If you must copy others on your messages, include only those people who have an active interest in the subject. The benefit to you? You'll get a more immediate response.

Sloppiness. Neatness counts! Fully 81 percent of the survey respondents said bad grammar, misspelling, and disconnected arguments gave them a "negative feeling" about the sender, while 41 percent of senior managers said badly worded e-mails implied laziness and even disrespect. What can you do? Remember your seventh grade grammar lessons. Use proper spelling and a verb in every sentence. Treat every e-mail like a formal letter. Proof it before you click the "send" button.

Tactlessness. Since no one can see that sly smile on your face or that sarcastic tone in your voice, be careful! It's easy to get the tone wrong in an e-mail and then your casual comments or humor are misunderstood. Short, sharp e-mails can unintentionally damage relationships. What can you do? Never reply to an e-mail if you're feeling angry or emotional. Avoid snap judgments.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Ignoring. Fully 79 percent of those polled said they resented having to chase e-mail responses when their important messages are ignored. In addition, 25 percent said they had to do this for more than half the e-mails they send. This impacts business. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said business decisions were delayed due to a lack of e-mail response. What can you do? Always acknowledge receipt of an e-mail. Use the "out of office" function religiously when away.

Lying. "Oh, I never received that!" No one lies about e-mails like the Brits. About 11 percent of Britons actually confessed they lie about receiving an e-mail, which is twice as high as other countries. As CNN notes, denying that you ever received an e-mail just breeds distrust. Remember, it's easy enough for the sender to confirm whether the message was delivered. What can you do? You ignored an e-mail. Acknowledge that. Don't embarrass yourself by denying you ever received it!

Presuming. Never presume that sending an urgent e-mail without a follow-up phone call is enough. Twenty-seven percent of survey respondents said they were annoyed when urgent e-mails were sent without an accompanying phone call to draw a ttention to it. What can you do? When you send an important e-mail, pick up the phone.

Waffling. Be succinct. Sending verbose e-mails when a few well-written sentences will do is irritating, particularly to senior management. What can you do? Get to the point. Say less and your e-mail will be read more.

In this corner, Napster. In the other, the Grateful Dead. Both are music industry innovators. Both gave away music for free. One made money, the other didn't. One is relevant, the other isn't. Why?

Napster was rendered irrelevant due to its apparent inability to make money -- to say nothing of lawsuits. Conversely, the Grateful Dead, who set music free long before Napster -- their own music, of course -- had a viable economic engine to support their habit. In fact, at live shows, the band would invite fans with recording devices to the engineer's sound board, allowing them to render CD-quality recordings directly off the board -- free!

The Grateful Dead had an innovation system, an innovation hybrid of marketing and finance. While Napster's economic model is beholden to an ill-designed advertising/subscription pricing strategy, the Grateful Dead focused on the sale of concert tickets and merchandise, not music, for their bread-and-butter. Music was the hook, the "opium of the people." This expl ains why you could sell practically anything at Dead shows, from peanut butter sandwiches to hair braids -- with one exception. Grateful Dead merchandise was verboten (unless of course sold by the Dead). The Dead broke the stranglehold of music distributors by changing the economic engine that fueled their success.

Ask yourself! Is there a better economic engine for our services? Can we package and price our services differently?

Here's an exercise for you to try. Take a blank piece of paper. Draw a vertical line straight down the middle. On the left-hand side of the page, jot down five recent occasions wherein you didn't give someone feedback when maybe you should have. This can be anything - from not complaining about bad service, to not telling your partner how she could have handled a difficult situation more diplomatically.

Now look at the first of your examples and in the right hand column write the reason you didn't say anything. Do this for each situation. I'll bet that the rationalizations you've cited in the right hand column are: "no time, it's not worth creating a fuss, why bother? , I've tried it before and nothing changed, I don't want to offend." These are some of the countless justifications we all use fo r doing nothing.

Let's turn this situation around. If you were on the other end of a confrontation that someone thought you could have handled better, would you want to know? Of course you would. So what prevents you from providing constructive feedback?

I guess the only legitimate reason would have to be that you either don't like this individual or you don't really care! After all, there is only one reason you should give feedback. You give feedback because you want to help someone. You're giving feedback because you are genuinely concerned for them. You want them to do something differently for their sake, not for yours.