Someone tweeted me a question yesterday, “Is GPA [Grade Point Average] an accurate summary of how someone will be as an employee?” I checked the source of the tweet and — no surprise — it seems to be coming from a student. I don’t know the person but my guess is that he is either struggling and trying to rationalize his lower grades, or he’s got a high GPA and he’s trying to justify his hard work. But the question seems to be asked in a way that wants a “no” answer, kind of like a kid asking, “Do I really have to do my homework?”

Well I’m going to surprise the questioner by answering “yes,” but then I’ve got a major disclaimer to go along with my answer. That’s because I believe that GPA does in fact highly correlate with how you’ll act as an employee. Students with high grades have shown that they can:

• Focus their energy on following directions even when the directions are unrealistic and make no sense
• Perform as well in subjects that they can’t stand as they do in subjects they love
• Treat emotional and social growth as secondary to memorization of dry facts and performance of mind-numbing repetitive activities
• Defer gratification by postponing what they really want so they can focus on what other people consider important right now
• Suppress their creativity to slog through subjects that have no relation to real life

Yes, a high GPA does make you a better employee. But only under the 1950’s definition of employee: a clerk, a ditch digger, a mindless construction worker, a soldier in the infantry, a machine operator.

And that’s the core of the problem: our current educational system is still focused on turning out the kinds of workers that were needed 50 or 60 years ago. We still need some of those people today, so it’s not a total loss. But advances in technology have drastically reduced the number of jobs that require mindless focus on following tedious directions without any understanding of why things are being done or how they might be done better. And our economy has shifted from a labor force of industrialized workers to a more diverse set of creative jobs that require specialization in design or people skills or problem solving.

When I hire someone right out of school, I look at GPA, but higher isn’t better. I try to get a sense of the person. Is the person bright and creative? Does the person understand how things work or do they just follow directions? Is the person curious? What motivates the person? What are they interested in?

GPA is part of the picture, but only to see if it fits into the whole. A lower GPA without an explanation is a red flag, but there are lots of valid explanations: focus on part-time jobs, taking care of a family, interest in student politics, etc.  A lower GPA can mean that you don’t care about anything — low motivation, which is a bad thing.  Or it can just mean that you care about something else more than you care about academics, which can be perfectly fine.

A higher GPA also demands an explanation. Did they push for the high GPA for the right reasons? Was it because of a strong interest in the major? If so, what about it was so interesting? Was it because they sacrificed all other aspects of their life? If so, why was that so important?

GPA is kind of like body temperature. You don’t use a thermometer to take a child’s temperature because you want to know how hot or cool she is. You want to know the temperature because a high temperature is a warning sign of an infection in the body. Similarly, GPA doesn’t have a value in itself — it’s just an indication of a student’s dedication to following the rules in her curriculum.

In today’s world there is a need for a certain number of employees who can follow the rules. They probably make up 50% of the work force. Another 25% of the work force is made up of people who barely hold on to their jobs — they’re unmotivated and just do enough to get by. But the true success stories come from the remaining 25% — the employees who not only know how to follow the rules but they know why, and they know when to break the rules to make things better. This 25% of employees gets promoted to better jobs, to higher pay and to higher recognition. Some become outstanding individual contributors: the designers and engineers of a new era. Some become managers or executives where they set direction and strategy for workers who continue to just “follow the rules.”

Yes, GPA is an accurate summary of how someone will be as an employee — at least to start. But sometimes those students with a high GPA manage to overcome their too-focused-on-grades early years and become successful anyway.

Hi, I’m Harwell, and I’m a recovering high school valedictorian.  Yes, a higher GPA can make you a better employee.  But why be just an employee?

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In a previous article I talked about the loss of my wife and some of the things I’m going through. Since that time I’ve gotten a little better at dealing with my loss. In this article I’ll share some of the techniques I’ve been using. I think they’re applicable in dealing with any loss, whether it’s a loved one, a friend, or even a job. Here are the eight techniques:

1. Let go of the guilt
You probably feel guilty about things you did or said, or things you didn’t do or didn’t say. Unfortunately, it’s too late for that now: what’s done is done and there’s no going back. So forgive yourself and forgive those in your past. There’s nothing to be gained by carrying that guilt, and there’s no one imposing it on you but yourself. Let go of the guilt and move on. Focus on what will be — not what was or wasn’t.

2. Put regret behind you
Regret is a lot like guilt, but maybe not as intense or destructive. Nevertheless there’s no room for it now. Regret is sometimes described as “woulda, coulda, shoulda thinking” because you’re constantly thinking about what would have happened if you had done something differently, what could have happened if you had taken a different path, or what should have happened if only you had acted in a different way. But it’s focusing on the past, and on things that are unchangeable. Maybe in an alternate universe things did happen that way. But you’re living in the now, in our current universe. Push the regret into a tiny corner of your mind and try not to think about it.  It should gradually take a smaller and smaller role in your life.

3. Accept things as they are — you can’t go back and change them
You are where you are. How you got there is not important. What you do now is paramount. If you like where you are, then learn to live with it. If you don’t like where you are, then decide where you want to go instead, and then take steps to get there. Yes, it’s disorienting to be where you are, and maybe it’s not where you had hoped you would be. But you’re not stuck where you are — it’s just a starting point. And you should think of it that way: as a starting point — not as an ending point. The old cliché applies, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It’s not the end — it’s just a different beginning. Start over — there’s still time.

4. Integrate the good elements of the absent person (or job) into your life
You may worry that you’ll somehow forget the person (or job) that you lost. Don’t worry — it will never happen. Your interaction with that person has fundamentally altered you in ways you can’t imagine. You’re not the same person that you would have been if the two of you had never met. And you’re a better person for having known the person you lost. So don’t worry about forgetting. You may go increasing amounts of time between thoughts of your departed, but underneath it all — inside of you — you’ll always remember because of the ways you changed. So consciously integrate some of what you’ve learned into your life if you like, but unconsciously you’ve already done so.

5. Accept the memory flooding and flashbacks, but learn how to control them. Be able to say, “not now.”
I still get sudden flashbacks to things my wife and I shared. They’re triggered by something I see, a song I hear, a sudden thought, or even a gentle breeze. But I’m getting better at controlling my reaction to a flashback. If I have a moment to savor the thought, then I’ll do so. But if I’m in the middle of doing something else, then I’ve learned to say, “not now.” I’ll note the thought, think “maybe I’ll think about this later” and then go on with my previous activity. This is an acquired skill, but you’ll get better at it with practice.

6. Focus on the good memories rather than the painful ones
Think back to when you were a child and you lost a baby tooth. Or maybe you’ve lost a tooth as an adult. Either way, you probably had the experience of having your tongue continually find its way into the gap in your teeth. It just seems like you had no control over it; no matter how you tried, you couldn’t keep your tongue out of that gap.

I think it’s the same way with memories of the person we’ve lost. No matter how much I try to remember the good things, my brain keeps taking my thoughts back to some of the bad things, like the actual time of Sharon’s death. It’s just like my tongue — I have no control over it. But you eventually get used to the idea of a gap in your teeth, and your tongue gradually stops finding the gap. And I think it works the same way with the bad memories: eventually you get better and better at focusing on the good memories, and then you don’t think so much about the bad ones.

7. Turn grief into pride
When the memories do come flooding back, you’ll find that it makes you sad and depressed. But it helps if you sometimes let the memories come but train yourself to consciously pursue a different outcome. I’ve found that when I get a memory that makes me sad, it helps if I try to invert my thinking about the memory. So, for example, instead of having negative thoughts about Sharon dealing with her disability, I think how proud I am that she was able to deal with it so well, and how proud I am to have known and loved a person who was so loving and patient. Turn grief into pride, and you can begin to put a positive spin on a negative thought.

8. Remember the nice memories without adding “and we’ll never do that again”
There’s a tendency to take a positive memory and turn it into something sad and depressing because you think to yourself, “and we’ll never do that again.” But be fair: there are probably a lot of things that you did when you were younger that you’ll never do again — not because someone died but because they were things that you’ve outgrown, things that you no longer have the physical stamina to do, or things that were better off just being done once. Let it be enough that you were able to enjoy them when you did. Life changes, we change, our bodies change. Enjoy the memories for what they were: an experience you’ll never forget. When you find yourself trying to add the words “and we’ll never do that again” to a memory, cut yourself off. Don’t let your mind go in that direction.

Conclusion
I’m still disentangling, and I’m still trying to get focused on what I want to do now. But I’ve found some of my lost focus, and I’ve found it by doing some of the things I’ve listed here. Getting better is an evolving process, and like any process it has techniques that work and others that don’t. If I find other techniques that help me, I’ll let you know.

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My wife Sharon passed away July 31st, and I would like to describe some of the thought process I’ve been going through for the last month. My wife’s death wasn’t sudden. She was diagnosed with ALS two years ago, and she’s been through a progressive loss of muscle control over various parts of her body. First she had difficulty walking, then she started to slur her speech and she gradually lost the ability to speak altogether. She had trouble swallowing and ended up getting a feeding tube through the stomach. Soon she needed a wheelchair, and then she couldn’t hold her head up. And toward the end she lost the ability to use her arms and hands, and eventually the ability to breathe.

But this article isn’t about Sharon — at least not in that way. It’s about the way that we tend to tangle our lives up with the lives of others, until we find that we sometimes have a hard time figuring out what our lives are like as individuals.

Sharon
Sharon and I had been married for seventeen years when she began to show symptoms of ALS. We started our marriage as individuals, but as two people live together and love each other you find that sometimes it’s hard to tell where one person stops and the other one starts. You make plans based on a combined set of goals. Sometimes you remember whose goals are whose but often you deal with an amalgamation, a blending of goals and desires that develops organically through the process of living together. You unconsciously divide tasks between the two of you based on ability, interest and desire: one person mows the lawn, one person vacuums the house, one person makes decisions about those seemingly trivial home decorations that turn a house into a home. It gets to the point where you don’t think about it. Things just happen, whether out of habit or repetition or unspoken mutual agreement.

As Sharon’s health declined, more and more responsibilities shifted to me, until I was doing all of the day-to-day stuff plus taking care of her. The time commitment caused me to cut myself off from many of my outside activities. I cut back on working, I resigned my positions in various community and non-profit organizations. I focused all of my time on caring for Sharon and in trying to keep ahead of her progressive decline by looking for tools and techniques to make her life better and easier.

Before the diagnosis, my life was already pretty much intertwined with Sharon’s. But after the diagnosis, Sharon’s declining health forced me to dedicate virtually every waking hour to making Sharon’s last few years on earth more enjoyable and loving. I think I succeeded, although even now I can look back and see things I could have done better — I guess that will always be the case.

So why am I writing about this on a business blog? For a couple of reasons. First, because in trying to deal with the grief of my wife’s death, I’ve learned things that I think are applicable to other situations — I’ll get to some of those things in a moment. And second, because I now recognize that there’s a lot more to grief than just getting control of your emotions, and I think my readers could benefit from some of my thoughts along those lines.

Grief
In reading and thinking about grief, I’ve found that:

1. Everyone grieves differently because the relationship between the griever and the lost loved one varies greatly from situation to situation. Yet in spite of this, you’ll undoubtedly have 100 people tell you, “I know how you feel,” even though they don’t, and you know that they don’t.

2. Grief happens at different levels simultaneously. There’s the emotional grief of never seeing a loved one again — the loss of future love and enjoyment. There’s the grief of guilt — wishing that you could have done things differently. There’s life disruption grief — all of a sudden your world is turned upside down and you have to do things differently. And there’s the grief of lost goals and objectives — your perspective has suddenly changed and now you have to reevaluate your life goals to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. There may even be PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — due to the intense stress of the circumstances just prior to the death of the loved one.

3. We commonly use the word “grief” for situations relating to a death, but the term applies equally well to other non-death situations that are traumatic in nature and which result from a sudden break from one reality to another. We can grieve, for example, after a divorce (essentially the death of a marriage) or even after a job loss (the death of our relationship with our employer). All of the same symptoms of grief may apply in these situations, and indeed in many cases the grief may be just as severe as it is for the loss of a loved one.

Entanglement
In thinking about these different aspects of grief, I realized that in many ways grief is about sudden, forced disentangling. We’ve spent years wrapping our lives around others, whether it’s life as a married couple or life as a member of a work team. The longer we live or work in one place, the more our lives get connected to others. That’s a good thing — not something to be avoided. We’re a social species, and connections make us happy and give us joy on a day-to-day basis.

Often our relationships change over time, but usually the change is slow and easy to accept. We get promoted and our job relationships change. We move from one location to another and our neighbors change. Some friendships fade, other friendships blossom. Change is constant, but usually it’s not abrupt. We still stay in touch with our old neighbors. We maintain loose connections with old friends on Facebook. All the change is gradual.

But then, once in a while, the change is startlingly abrupt. We’re laid off. Our company goes bankrupt. Our child dies. Our spouse dies.

This is harder to accept. Too much is changing all at once. The mind boggles at all of the disconnections and sudden changes in our lives. All of our mindless day-to-day activities which we have performed on autopilot now have to be revisited and reassessed. Our world turns upside down. We’re strangled by our entanglements. All of a sudden we’re grieving.

Grieving
This is where I am right now. It’s a weird place to be. I’m perfectly functional and lucid — most of the time. I can do mundane things like buying groceries and doing laundry. I can even write articles like this one.

But I get flashes of emotion, sudden floods of thoughts or images or feelings that take me back to the days before Sharon’s death. Some of them are “woulda, coulda, shoulda” thoughts: things that I wish I could have done differently, words I wish I’d said or that I wish I hadn’t said. I guess I would classify these as guilt, maybe deserved and maybe undeserved. Guilt is a funny thing — you feel it whether or not you should, because you tend to measure yourself in hindsight against perfection. And not just any perfection, but the perfection that comes from knowing all you know now, even though you didn’t have that knowledge at the time you made those past decisions. You think, “If only I had seen that coming and done this other thing instead.” But you can’t keep beating yourself up over this. What’s past is past, and the only thing you can do is to file your knowledge away in case the situation ever arises in the future.

Other flashes of emotion are empathy pains. I keep imagining what it must have been like to be Sharon, slowly losing all control over her body, as if she were being sealed inside a tomb while still awake, her brain still functioning perfectly but her body not responding to her brain’s commands. I keep thinking of the actual moment of Sharon’s death, when she died in my arms. But somehow I’ve got to train myself to stop thinking this way. It’s like being in a car wreck and remembering the events of the wreck itself over and over. It does you no good; it’s just torture. I’ve got to instead focus on remembering the good times that Sharon and I had together, and let those happy memories drive out the thoughts of Sharon in distress.

Disentangling
Perhaps the hardest thing to do in grieving, whether you’ve lost a loved one or a job, is to rebuild your sense of self. It’s a disentangling process, but it’s focused on the future — not the past. You don’t have to disentangle the past. The things you did together — the experiences and pleasurable moments — will always be a part of you, and you don’t have to forget them. But now it’s time to separate out your goals and dreams from the goals and dreams you shared with your loved one or your employer. Maybe those goals you held together will take on less importance now that it’s just you again, or maybe not. The key is to recognize what you really want for yourself. Not things you think you want because other people told you they’re important, but the things you truly want and would want even if no one else cared one way or the other.

The disentangling process can be a shock. In my case I’ve been focused on Sharon’s needs for so long that I’m having trouble figuring out what I want to do now. Sometimes it’s difficult to hear your inner voice when all you’ve been hearing is the voices of others. And you’ll probably have no shortage of people telling you what you ought to do now. Listen to them if you wish, but listen to your heart more. Do what makes you happy — not what other people tell you to do.

Conclusion?
There is no end to this process so there’s no conclusion I can draw. I’m not done with my grief, but I hope and expect that I’ll get better and better at dealing with it. And maybe I’ll also get better and better at handling those sudden flashes of emotion. I hope I’ll eventually recognize them as gentle reminders of a wonderful woman whose life I shared for twenty years, a woman whose love continues on inside of me and inside all the people who knew her.

Sharon, I love you, always and forever. And maybe someday I can put all of this into a better perspective.  But for now, I’m still disentangling.

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Listening is one of the most important traits of a good manager. Good managers spend most of their time listening: listening to their employees describe the problems they’ve encountered, listening to what their bosses tell them to do, listening to what customers have to say about products and services.

Beginning managers listen
It’s easy to listen when you’re early in your career. After all, you don’t know very much, and the people around you can provide you with useful information. You learn about how things have always been done, and if you push a little, you’ll even learn why. Dig a little deeper, and you can learn whether the reasons are still valid.

You’ll learn about your customers, what they like, what they don’t like, how their lives can be made better through use of your products and services, and how your products and services sometimes make them miserable. You’ll learn that customers enjoy being listened to, and you’ll learn that very few companies listen enough.

You’ll learn about your employees, who they are when they’re away from the office, what they want out of life, what they enjoy and what they worry about at night. You’ll learn that they’re individuals — not just robots who take direction — and that they respond to different kinds of motivation depending on their nature.

You’ll learn that your bosses are individuals too. They have doubts and fears just like you do, and they’re often driven more by individual aspirations than by the perceived good of the company.

Higher managers tend to stop listening
As you move higher in the management ranks, you start filtering what you hear based on your experience. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s natural for your brain to apply pattern recognition to the new information you receive. It’s the brain’s way of making sense of all of the increasing amount of data. When you hear something the first time, you listen carefully. But by the 100th repetition of the same information, you tend to filter it out. You zone out during the repetition and try to skip to the bottom line.

Experienced managers think they’ve heard it all before. They listen to a message, categorize it based on their experience, and apply the standard response that they’ve developed for this particular message. That can be good up to a point, but you have to be very careful.

Good managers listen with confidence
Listening with confidence means that you apply all of your knowledge and experience, but that you still listen very carefully and attentively. You listen to the message, but also to the nuance. You listen to the words, but also to the emotion. You listen to the meaning, but also to the innuendo and hidden subtext. You listen to what’s familiar, but you carefully explore subtle shadings that make this telling of the message slightly different. And you always remember that even though you’ve heard this message (or a similar one) a hundred times, it’s probably the first time that this particular speaker has given the message to you. It may seem boring to you, but it’s an emotional event for the speaker. And every version of a message is slightly different depending on the situation and the speaker.

Bad managers listen with arrogance
Listening with arrogance is hardly listening at all. It’s hearing what someone says, but rapidly discarding the words, and then pigeonholing the event based on prior experience. It’s listening while doing something else — maybe checking email or looking out the window. It’s cutting off the speaker in mid-sentence, not allowing the speaker to finish. It’s listening passively — not asking questions to clarify or get a better understanding of intent. It’s being impatient and showing that impatience to the speaker. It’s knowing the answers without asking the questions. It’s applying your experience in a way that only perpetuates the past, instead of learning that things can indeed change.

As a speaker, how do you tell the difference?
How can you tell if someone is listening to you with confidence or listening with arrogance? Good listeners pay attention. They aren’t distracted — they’re focused on you and your message. They try to truly understand you, whether or not they agree. They ask questions to clarify areas of your message that are unclear or ambiguous. They probe for intent, and push for clarity. They ask you for your opinion on how to resolve any problem you describe. They ask for pros and cons of various approaches. They seem interested in you and in what you have to say. You leave the conversation feeling good about yourself and about the communication.

Arrogance sneaks up on you
I don’t know of any manager who chooses to be arrogant. It’s the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. There’s a progression from timidity to confidence that continues into arrogance if you don’t keep your ego in check. But arrogance is one of the worst traits a manager can have, because arrogant managers resist change. They build their organizations to work a certain way and then use their arrogance to set their beliefs and their processes in concrete. Arrogance leads to bureaucracy, and bureaucracy leads to failure in a world that’s rapidly changing.

Are YOU an arrogant listener?
If you see yourself in any of these descriptions of arrogant listening, then it’s not too late, since a truly arrogant listener probably wouldn’t have read this far in the article. Take steps to return to confident listening, and you’ll get a better organization with better morale.  And you’ll probably find that you’ll enjoy your job a lot more too.

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There’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing, and mobility has been in the news for years.  But apps and an enterprise app store are going to bring it all together to remake the face of IT.

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a method for delivering computing resource.  Its principal attributes are outsourced management, ubiquitous access and elasticity.

• Outsourced management allows us to obtain the use of software without having to deal with installing it, maintaining it, or managing the associated databases.
• Ubiquitous access means we can use the Internet to get to our software and data.  Anywhere you can get access to the Internet, you can get access to your cloud computing application.
• Elasticity means we don’t have to worry about technology sizing.  We don’t have to buy a server that will accommodate our peak demand, which maybe occurs only when the last Friday of a quarter corresponds to a full moon.  Instead, we just use the resource we need, and we pay only for the resource we use.  This is a very fair approach, and CFO’s love it.

Mobility
Mobility is one of those things that has snuck up on us.  It started with mobile phones, then texting and mobile email, and now it’s gotten to the point where you can do anything just about anywhere.  And if you think about it, that’s where things started in the first place.  Before we got to the point of using computer systems, we relied on what we carried around with us to get our jobs done.  We could move around freely to meet with customers and co-workers in the most appropriate environment for the job we needed to do.  The idea that we should have to retreat to a single “corporate” location to find relevant data is an artificial creation of a time when computers were too bulky to carry around.  The new reliance on portable computers and hand-held devices is just a return to where we started.  We’ve thrown off the shackles of our behemoth computing captors and returned to a world where location is determined by our task — not by our limited access to data.

Apps
There’s a huge difference between an app and a traditional software application — particularly a Windows application:

• Apps can be self-installed in a few minutes by a novice.  Traditional applications require lots of steps, the answers to a number of unanswerable technical questions, and often a restart of your computer system.
• Apps are intuitively easy to use.  Applications require training and rote learning of arcane codes.  That’s often because applications are more sophisticated than apps, but who came up with the stupid idea that an application has to be a swiss army knife and do hundreds of things when only a few things are really needed?  Apps just do what’s needed; applications try to be adequate at everything and often end up being good at nothing.
• Apps automatically know how to get data from the principal data sources on your device.  For example, apps which need address book or calendar information know how to get it.  Traditional applications, on the other hand, require extensive configuration.  You’ll have to be specific about telling your application exactly where to get data, even down to the directory where you’ve chosen to store it or the server where the data can be found.
• Apps can be installed without hurting other apps.  Applications often interfere with other applications due to DLL overlaps and conflicting registry entries.
• Apps can be deinstalled without incident.  Applications often leave behind old files and even software which will continue to haunt you when it conflicts with other applications you’ll later install.

Basically, apps are the new applications.  They’re what applications should have been if we had been working in an environment which made apps possible.

Enterprise App Store
Anyone with a smart phone is familiar with the concept of an app store.  You search for an app for a particular need, then buy it, download it and install it all in one easy step.  An enterprise app store is just like the app store for a smart phone, except:

• The apps have gone through a selection and weeding-out process so that only the best and most appropriate business apps are available for your use.
• The store contains a mixture of generic and proprietary apps.  The proprietary apps were designed, tailored, written or customized by people in your company to provide for the specific needs of your business.  Those proprietary apps know how to access your corporate information and the cloud databases they use.  And so when you use one of these proprietary apps, you’re actually updating the same corporate database that your company relies on for its day-to-day business.
• Access to the enterprise app store is secure, and only authorized employees are allowed to see certain apps.  The apps you see in the store are restricted to those apps that make sense for your job and for your level of authorization within the company.
• There may be different versions of the same app.  The version of the app you download will be determined by your job and level of authorization.  For example, your app may let you look at your department, while your division vice-president’s app may let her look at the entire division.

Bringing It All Together

It you put all these things together — if you use cloud computing, mobility, apps and an enterprise app store — you can totally change the face of IT in your company.  For starters, you have no need for a data center, since all of your data is stored in the cloud, and all of your applications are delivered through the Internet.  Then you can drastically cut the size of your help desk, since you no longer have to worry about PC configuration issues for applications, and since apps are so much easier to use than traditional applications.

Of course, someone still has to develop the proprietary apps, but you’ll probably outsource most of that work.  So the primary work of the IT organization will be:

• Strategic Technology Leadership — determining what ought to be done
• Systems Architecture and Integration — determining how corporate systems should look, breaking the requirements down into individual products, databases and apps, and then developing an overall approach for implementing what’s needed
• Project Management — leading projects for major technology initiatives

And yes, there will still be a need for some help desk support, but with properly designed apps, the amount will be much less than what is required today.

Conclusion
Each of these factors — cloud computing, mobility and intuitive apps — has had an impact on IT.  But together these three factors, in conjunction with an enterprise app store, are going to totally reinvent IT.  You can lead the change in your business, or you can drag your feet and get left behind.  The choice is up to you.

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I’ve talked about the changing nature of IT in a previous article, but it’s amazing to me how fast some of the changes are taking place. Ten or twenty years ago the key skills for someone in IT were systems analysis and programming — mostly technical skills. But more recently the need for those skills in a typical IT shop has declined drastically. Now the key skills are project management and system integration — skills which are not nearly so technical.

Changes in the Way We Deal with Food
There’s a parallel to be drawn between IT and the way we get our food in the United States. A couple of hundred years ago we were a nation of farmers. Most people participated in the growing of their own food. They prepared the ground, they planted the seed, they tended the growing plants, and they harvested their food. Only then did they think about cooking and eating the food.

Now the farming process is performed by a small minority of people, mostly operating under the control of a few large corporations. We don’t participate in the growing any more — instead our focus is on shopping and cooking. It’s no longer important for the average person to know how to best prepare a field for a certain crop, to know how to correctly place seeds in the ground and then tend to them to best encourage their growth, or to know how to harvest the resulting crop to avoid damaging the food. Those skills have been outsourced.

Changes in the Way We Deal with Software
Forty years ago there was virtually no packaged software. The IT world was all about systems analysis and programming because everyone had to develop their own software. The IT organization determined business requirements, designed systems, and then built those systems from the ground up, writing every line of code. Since the software was all home grown, it was up to the IT organization to do systems integration as the systems were built. Part of every business requirements document was the detail on how the system needed to interface with other business systems.

Today most software comes from a few large companies. And just as the need for detailed information on farming has become less commonplace, the need for systems design and programming has moved from the everyday IT shop to those large companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Apple which specialize in designing and building software. Your average IT shop does very little systems design and programming. In fact, I’m guessing that the majority of IT shops in small and medium-sized businesses do no programming at all — they just configure newly acquired software, adjust parameters to optimize the software to their operating environments, and use high-level systems tools to integrate systems into something that resembles a cohesive whole. You’ll still find IT systems design and programming in larger companies, but it’s mostly where those companies use home-grown software to provide a specialty product, service or process that differentiates them from their competition.

So just as we’ve gone from a nation of farmers to a nation of shoppers and cooks, our IT organizations have evolved from designers and programmers into a group of project managers and system integrators, with a few support people included to help resolve day-to-day issues.

What’s the Impact of This Change?
Looking back at the impact of the change in the food process on our lives, we see the following:

• High volume farming is more efficient but the compromises made in high-volume farming lower the quality of the food. Because the time from crop to plate is longer, the high-volume farmers optimize their seed and harvesting around that longer time. You won’t find anyone who will tell you that corn bought at a store tastes as good as corn you just picked. Yes, the corn from the store is OK: it generally tastes like corn and it provides most of the nutrition that fresh corn provides. But you can’t beat fresh food grown without the compromises made on a high-volume farm. That’s why there’s a demand for local organic food — it brings back some of the advantages of growing your own: fresher food and fewer preservatives.
• In an attempt to satisfy the majority of the market, the high-volume farmers focus on a more generic range of tastes. If you grow your own tomatoes, you can pick the seed that gives you exactly what you want: big tomato or small, just the right amount of acidity, the perfect texture. Your range of choices in store-bought tomatoes is much smaller.
• With meats, the high-volume farms optimize their production in a way that is often inhumane. Chickens are confined to tiny cages for their entire lives. Cows and pigs are mistreated and sometimes tortured. All of this is hidden from us because we only see the finished product — not the process used in its production.

Now let’s look at these same issues in the evolution of an IT shop:

Large software companies are more efficient at creating products like inventory systems, customer relationship management systems, payroll systems, and accounting systems — essentially any software that’s large and complicated. A standard software product can be developed for any business process that’s relatively consistent across an industry. With software you don’t have the issue of preservatives, but you do have the problem of freshness. One of the compromises you’ll make in using off-the-shelf software is that any improvements or bug fixes will take longer to implement. You don’t have the option of choosing to use your IT resources to make an immediate improvement to the way that a particular screen works or the way that a particular process step is handled.

Trade-offs are made in developing a product that has to satisfy so many companies in so many different industries. An off-the-shelf software product is never as good for your individual company needs as a product that’s been custom built. Sure, it’s less expensive — it would cost a small fortune to develop a custom-built product, and most small and medium-sized companies can’t afford it. But you definitely have to compromise when you buy an off-the-shelf solution, even if you configure it for your company, and even if you tailor it (actually change the software code — not something I would recommend).

Is there a backlash? Is there a demand for “local organic software”? I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe I’m wrong, but U.S. businesses don’t seem to care about where their software comes from. And as for the compromises required to tailor the software to your exact needs, most companies don’t see enough cost/benefit to justify going the custom route. And the freshness issue is one that companies seem to live with.

And how about inhumanity? Much of the off-the-shelf software being used today was developed using inexpensive developer labor in other countries. Those developer jobs you no longer need in your business don’t just move to the software development companies — they move offshore. So while I haven’t heard stories about programmers being confined to tiny cages their entire lives …. No, wait a minute. Do cubicles qualify?

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A Job
A job is an exchange of work for money: for every hour you work, you get an hour of pay. Although you might derive some satisfaction from doing the job, and you might enjoy the people you work with, the reason you do the job is for the money.  If you win the lottery, the first thing you’ll do is quit your job, because, after all, you’re only doing the job for money anyway.

There’s usually very little advancement within a job. Maybe you’ll get a seniority raise if you stay in the job long enough. But for real advancement you’ll have to change jobs. You’ll have to get “promoted” from one job to another higher-paying job.

Jobs can be tedious, frustrating and dull. But most people put the job behind them at the end of the day when they go home to their family and friends. A job is something you compartmentalize — there’s the job, and then there’s your life.  The two are quite different, and often unrelated.

A Profession
For many people, a profession is a glorified job. That’s true whether you’re a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, a policeman, a fireman, or an executive. You still get paid for each hour of work you do, although that fact is often disguised by a “salary” that is paid to you every few weeks. The salary makes it possible for your employer to ask you to work more than 40 hours a week without any extra pay. Successful professional people rarely leave their work at the office at the end of the day. The work is constantly on their minds, and their personal lives may be interrupted by work issues at any time of the day or night.

There are three primary distinctions between a job and a profession. First, a profession usually requires more training, and likely an advanced degree or certification. Second, a profession has more prestige than a job. People who have a profession are more likely to be regarded as being successful. Third, a profession usually reflects a personal choice in the type of work you like to do, where a job is more associated with finding the highest-paying available position.

A Career
When people use the word “career” they are usually referring to a progression of professional positions, starting with an entry level position and then moving up to higher-level positions with more responsibility, more prestige and higher pay. A career may reflect a conscious plan for advancement, but more than likely a large part of a career is determined by accident. You’re in a certain position and another position becomes available. You jump to the new position, and your career “advances.”

People often refer to a career in hindsight rather than looking forward. I seldom hear a young person talking about a career choice (which is a shame, since people seldom achieve what they really want without a plan). You’re more likely to hear an older person at a retirement dinner talking about his or her career, with that career being viewed through the rear-view mirror. A career is often a reflection of what we did during our life, viewed from the endpoint.

A Passion
What are you passionate about? What gets you excited? What do you enjoy doing that you can do for hours without noticing any time passing? That’s your passion.  All of us have  one, but many of us ignore our passion to focus on a job, a profession or a career. Why should this be? Does it make any sense for you to work 40 hours a week at a job while somewhere in the back of your head you’re longing to go somewhere else and do what you’re passionate about?

If you look at truly successful people (defined in just about any way you like: money, power, happiness, acclaim), you’ll find that almost all of them have figured out how to turn their passion into an income. Their time is focused on doing their passion, and doing it really well. And because they live and breathe their passion, they become really, really good at it. They become the best in their field, and that’s how they achieve their success.

To these people, their work isn’t a job. It isn’t a profession (except by someone else’s definition). And it isn’t even a career. It’s just spending their time doing what they truly enjoy.

Conclusion
Do you have a job? A profession? A career? Or are you pursuing your passion and getting income from it?

And if you’re not pursuing your passion, then why not? What’s holding you back?  And what are you going to do to change things?

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The question about the pros and cons of using a business/IT liaison person came up at a meeting I attended last week. I’ve got to admit some bias on this issue. Long ago I tried using a business/IT liaison person for one of my software development groups, and I wasn’t happy with the result.

The person typically assigned to a liaison job seldom has enough technical savvy or in-depth application experience to fairly represent IT to the business.  As a result, the liaison person will often make inappropriate technical assumptions that create unrealistic expectations for the business.  That’s what happened when I tried using a liaison, and I ended up getting rid of the position.

Here’s the Problem
In theory using a liaison person sounds like a good idea. We know that many IT people have difficulty communicating with business people, and so it seems reasonable to put a “translator” in place. But while language translators like those in the United Nations mostly translate what’s being said in an unbiased way without having their own agenda, the same cannot be said for liaison people. Invariably I’ve found that over time the liaison people gravitate toward either the business or IT camps, and begin to take sides in disagreements. Often their job turns into more of an expeditor function than a translation function — they badger the IT people to get the business people what they’ve asked for, and usually do little to clarify requirements or to help negotiate a smaller set of requirements that can be delivered faster.

Eventually a two-way disagreement between business and IT evolves into a two-way disagreement through an intermediary. This magnifies the problems rather than solving them, since all of the interactions take longer, and it’s much less likely that personal relationships will develop between the business people and the IT people.  Often the business people will feel better using a liaison person, but the IT organization will lose touch with what’s really going on in the business.  The net long-term result will drive a wedge between business and IT.

Why Do Companies Use a Liaison?
So if liaison people are so likely to cause problems, why do so many companies use them? There are a number of scenarios:

• The business forces the position on the IT organization. This is a sure sign of imminent IT organization failure, and usually precedes the search for a new CIO.  The business is essentially saying, “I’ve given up on dealing with you — give me someone new to talk to.”
• The IT organization is so caught up in constant interruptions that they create the liaison position to keep the business people off their back — kind of like setting up a complaint department. Again, this is not a good sign. Why are the interruptions occurring? You should solve the problem instead of trying to cover it up.
• The IT organization has done a poor job of hiring project leaders and analysts with business communication skills, and the liaison position is created in an attempt to work around the hiring problem.
• The business organization has abdicated their own responsibility for designing and improving business processes, and the liaison position is created to fill the gap. In some cases this means that the liaison person tries to design systems (usually with limited success due to lack of experience). In the worst case (I’ve seen this happen), the liaison person can get so frustrated with the IT group that the liaison person tries to outsource the systems design or even purchase an outside system directly without going through the IT organization at all.  But guess who ends up inheriting the support and integration of the outsourced system? The IT organization, of course.

Is There a Solution?
If you’ve already fallen into the liaison trap — or if you’re seriously considering it, then here’s my advice:

1. First, get the support of your CEO (or lower-level senior executive if you’re trying to solve this problem at a lower organization level) for integrating process and system responsibility into the business organization.  I’m not talking about the technical responsibility — that stays with IT.  I’m just saying that business processes (how a business operation is carried out) are a part of the business — not something that should be handled by IT.

2. A business should be responsible for the processes it uses — you can’t delegate processes to another organization like IT. Bring in a process consultant if necessary, but some way or another, get a basic understanding of the fundamental business processes that you use in your business, and how the computer systems fit into those processes.

3. Get an overall picture of the status of each of your business processes. Are they working well? Do they need improvement? Are they broken? Can they handle the current and future volumes that are required by your business? Are they cost effective? Where deficiencies are noted, what plans exist for corrective action? Joint meetings between business and IT people are required to plan and implement the required corrective action.

4. Eliminate the liaison position(s). Replace them with regularly scheduled get-togethers between business and IT people. Hold joint training sessions if necessary to improve communication between the two groups. It’s not important for business people to understand all of the technical stuff in IT, but it is a requirement that IT people understand the fundamental aspects of the business processes they support, and are able to communicate with the business using business language. If your people can’t do this, then find someone who can (as a replacement — not as the totally unnecessary liaison position).

5. Prioritize your business needs so that IT can focus its limited resources on the most important things. Many liaison positions are really just ways of coping with a lack of business priorities. When everyone in business wants everything at once, how do you expect anyone to successfully perform? Having a liaison doesn’t solve the problem — it just gives you a full-time person to hear complaints.

6. If you don’t have an IT strategy to help you prioritize your IT effort, then get one. See some of my other articles on strategy, or take a look at my book or white paper on the subject.

Conclusion
There are situations in life where a liaison person makes sense.  You typically see the liaison position successfully used when two independent organizations want to share information.  For example, the liaison job is widely used to coordinate the sharing of information between different parts of the armed forces, or between different government agencies.  The key to success in these situations is that there are no critical dependencies and few time-critical issues.

That’s not the case between the business and IT organizations, where there are many dependencies and tons of time-critical issues.  Using a liaison person forces you to do partial delegation — something that’s almost impossible to control.  To the IT organization, the liaison person is representing the needs of the business users, but you can’t get user buy-in through a liaison, so a project failure is much more likely.  To the business organization, the liaison person is representing the collective technical expertise of the IT organization, but the nuances of design choices often get lost in the translation.  To both organizations, the liaison person creates a barrier to trust — how can you trust the members of the organization when you don’t ever spend any time with them?

The net result is that using a liaison person is a short-term way to postpone dealing with a longer-term problem.  You’re better off facing the problem directly and helping your business and IT organizations work together to achieve a good day-to-day trusting relationship. 

How Does Your Experience Differ?
I have heard no stories about the successful long-term use of business/IT liaison people. I occasionally hear about a short-term success, but invariably the stories have an unhappy ending in the long term. If you have a story of long-term success, I’d like to hear it.  Please leave a comment on my blog.

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A lot of people tend to confuse these two words. We work hard, focus on our goals, and figure that happiness will come once we achieve success. Don’t fall for this deception.

Happiness
Happiness is a feeling. It can be triggered by external factors — a friend, a lover, a place, an event, a food or a drink — but it comes from inside ourselves. We can choose to be happy, even if things around us are chaotic and we’re all alone.

There’s a tendency for some of us to rely on others for our happiness. It’s more likely if we were raised in an environment of rewards and punishments. It’s more likely if we were not given unconditional love as a child, or if we were constantly criticized by those around us. In a hostile environment like this, we can unconsciously give away our ability to find happiness in ourselves. We become dependent for our happiness on external forces. We set goals and tell ourselves, “I’ll be happy when I achieve that goal.” Then often we’ll find that happiness continues to elude us when the goal is achieved, and so we set yet another goal, continuing to strive for that ultimate happiness that never seems to arrive. We fall into the trap of equating happiness with success.

Success
On the simplest level, we succeed when we achieve an objective. That’s technically what the word “succeed” means, and success is what comes from succeeding. But for many of us the word “success” means so much more. It’s more personal. Success is not something we do — it’s something we become: we strive to become “a success.” And so being successful becomes our all consuming goal, the thing that justifies all of the frustration and pain that we endure on a day by day basis.

Ironically, our personal definition of success keeps enlarging as we get closer to our objective, so we never quite reach it. According to a survey I once read, most people say someone is “well off” if they make 50% more than you, and a “rich” person makes twice as much as you do. Your definition of wealth changes as your income increases — the more you make, the more you think you need — and the same thing is true with your definition of “being a success.” It’s like a dog race where the dogs can never catch the automated “rabbit” that runs in front of them — the target always stays a little bit ahead of you.

Happiness Does Not Come from Success
This is the biggest mistake many people make. They think they can postpone happiness until they achieve success. But happiness does not come from success. Instead, success comes from happiness. Ultimately your success in life will come from the amount of happiness you feel and the amount of happiness you share. Someone who enjoys life and makes life a joy for others will have a far greater impact on the world than someone who achieves an executive position or becomes rich.

And here’s the real irony: someone who enjoys life and makes life a joy for others is more likely to achieve an executive position or become rich! That’s because people who find their passion — the thing that makes them happiest — are more likely to be successful at it. When you really enjoy doing something — whether it’s art or design or building or math — you get so immersed in the process that you become truly great at doing it. And that greatness will position you for whatever kind of success comes from your field.

We’ve Got It Backwards
So many of us have been looking at things the wrong way. We have assumed that we have to postpone happiness in order to achieve success, and that the happiness we’re missing now will come to us once success is achieved.

But that’s backwards. We need to focus on the things that make us happy, find our passion, and discover the strengths that will maximize our happiness. And through that happiness we’ll achieve success.

I remember a cartoon in the New Yorker many years ago.  It showed a songbird talking to a human.  The songbird was saying, “I don’t sing because I’m happy.  I am happy because I sing.”  The bird discovered its passion, and so can you.

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People who complain fall into two categories: those who complain because they want help in resolving a problem, and those who complain because they want sympathy. Often the complainers themselves don’t understand why they’re complaining, so it’s up to you to figure it out for yourself.

The Complainer as Problem Solver
The first category of complainer is easier to deal with. They have a problem and they sincerely want the problem solved. The problem may be simple — “my computer keeps crashing” — or very complex — “children are starving in Africa.” But this first category of complainer isn’t just looking for sympathy — they honestly want help in solving the problem. For simple problems you might be able to provide help yourself, or you might know a good resource to provide the assistance the complainer needs. Once you provide the help or the resource, the complainer stops complaining on that subject, but may move on to complain about something else.

For complex problems it’s more difficult to provide assistance. The problem won’t be solved with a simple solution, but you might be able to offer some general guidance on first steps toward a solution. Moving in the right direction often provides relief for the complainer — he or she feels like they’re on the way toward a solution.

The Complainer as Sympathy Seeker
The second category of complainer is more difficult to deal with. These people aren’t looking for solutions — they’re looking for sympathy. This type of person may feel overwhelmed by certain circumstances and possibly by life in general. They want to feel that they’re not alone in their perception of things being the way they are. They’re looking for the psychological equivalent of a hug — a sense of sharing that enables them to face the world knowing that no matter how bad the world might be, we’re all in this together.

Sometimes this second category of complainer can get out of hand. They complain so much and so loudly that their friends and co-workers begin to tune them out — to ignore their complaints and discount their importance. The problem is compounded if the complaints are repeated over and over. The complainer gets a reputation as a negative person, and people begin to avoid the complainer. If things go this far then intervention may be required. The complainer must be confronted and told that they need to consciously edit their words or risk losing the respect of their coworkers and friends. Constant complainers are annoying.

The Non-Complainer
There’s another type of person who never complains at all. Some people are naturally optimistic, and they see the good in most situations. They seldom complain because they see nothing to complain about.

Other non-complainers have learned to work within the system. They don’t complain — they act instead. If they have a problem then they actively try to solve it. If they want help then they ask for it instead of complaining. This is usually a more productive route toward problem resolution, and it’s much less annoying to coworkers and friends.

For this type of person, complaints turn into “war stories” — anecdotes shared over dinner or drinks about problems they encountered and how they solved or avoided them. The war-stories approach gains the same sympathy and comradeship that complainers seek, but without the annoying negative side effects. The key difference between a complaint and a war story is that a war story has a resolution while a complaint is open-ended and leaves the audience with unresolved tension and stress. War stories are appreciated when shared among a group, especially if they’re told in a funny way. But care must be taken to avoid telling the same war stories over and over; repetition destroys the value of the story.

A Memorable Complainer
Many years ago I had an employee, Steve, who constantly complained about everything. Some of the complaints were problems that could be solved. But most of the complaints were general comments on his work environment that weren’t problems to anyone else. Steve had an overly sensitive sense of “the way things ought to be,” and anything that didn’t live up to his standards resulted in an immediate complaint to me as his boss as well as to his co-workers.

I tolerated Steve because he was good at his work, but he was definitely high maintenance. I tried to help Steve see that his volume of complaints was inappropriate, and I counseled him on a combination of acceptance and quiet problem-solving. This seemed to help, but not enough.

Steve eventually got fed up with what he considered an unacceptable work environment,  and he left to join another company. But he soon discovered that the other company was much worse, and his new boss was less tolerant of Steve’s complaining behavior. Steve sheepishly returned to me asking for his old job back, and I consented. If Steve had been less good at his job then I would have never taken him back. You can only deal with so many high maintenance employees at a time.

Conclusion
Everyone is different. All of us have good personality traits and bad ones. Complaining is a behavior that can come across as annoying to most people, so if you’re a complainer then you should make an effort to change. Changing doesn’t mean that you have any fewer problems — it just means that you try to be more positive, that you try to make requests instead of complaints, and that you’re selective about the problems you take to other people.

And if you’re on the receiving end of constant complaints, then try to refocus the complainer on a more appropriate behavior. Show the complainer this article, and maybe he or she will get the message. But above all, try to be sympathetic.  Sympathy is what most complainers are really trying to get, so give it to them once in a while.

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