simplerich

How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Conners and Tom Smith is my most recent non-kindle read book. I say that because this is a prime example of a book that’s better on paper than on a kindle because I was constantly going back to previous pages, underlining, circling, and generally marking up the book. While I’m sure I’ll get used to those things on a kindle, this book’s scars from my reading and writing in it are proof enough that print isn’t dead!

Full Disclosure: I didn’t pay for the copy I’m reviewing here. I was sent an advance copy to review. I don’t believe that impacted my review at all, but thought it would only be honest to mention it to those of you who read me. OK. Disclosure over, on with the review.

As I read the book I had a lot of time in MANY of the chapters when I was thinking to myself, “This is exactly what THAT boss of mine did wrong!” As the evidence started piling up I started worrying that if my employees were to read the book they’d say the exact same thing. I know I’ve found Dilbert comics on their peg-boards that I thought were funny… even after I realized they had to mean I was the pointy-haired boss. I will be getting a copy for managers of mine that I think would read it and take it to heart. I don’t think all of them would… they’re not all the avid reader that I am.

The start of How Did That Happen?, where it talks about the title is a real eye-opener and a game changer for the way people think. If I had to sum up the impact of the book in one line it would be way towards the front of the book where it suggests instead of looking at a problem or break-down of some sort and saying “How did that happen” we should ask “How did I let that happen?” Those two words are so powerful. It addresses where I so often see a breakdown in communication. That sort of personal accountability is, I believe, the hallmark of a good manager. If I find someone who does that automatically instead of blaming their employees, the weather, or the economy I’m thrilled and work hard to get out of their way and help them to be great.

One of the breakdowns that hit home the closest was when a manager will give vague expectations, unclear boundaries of responsibility and authority, and accountability and then be surprised later when expectations aren’t met. Vague goals of “Make more money.” Would certainly fall into that category. Sure… it’s an easy one. But should we make more money or make more profit? I can make more money by marking things down steeply, but that will decrease our profit. I can make more money in the short term by cutting back on merchandise in a store so I’m not spending any more. Without giving clear, concise, and measurable outlines of my expectations my employees will find it hard to not disappoint me. I will be setting them up to fail over and over again by my own carelessness.

I’m one who typically scoffs at acronyms, as annoying mnemonics along the lines of Every Good Boy Does Fine for the piano. But Framing an expectation using the acronym given in How Did That Happen looks about fool proof, even for ingenious fools.

Expectations should be Framable, Obtainable, Repeatable, and Measurable.

Framable as in the expectations fit within the framework, context, business environment and culture of the business.
Obtainable, this one’s obvious and one I’ve been good at following. I once told a new supervisor they should ask for things a little sooner, faster, better than the employees volunteered to do as he was the leader, and should pull them forward, not let them wander wherever they wanted at their own pace, but I cautioned against giving impossible goals that nobody could finish in that time as it set them up to fail. He wanted to help them to exceed their expectations, not to teach them to expect to fail.
Repeatable was the one I had the most trouble “getting” as I read the book. It finally clicked when I quit thinking as in “do it over again” and thought of it as “communicated over again to other people who are working on the project. If the goal or expectation is so numinous and vague that only someone with a degree in macro-economics can get what is being talked about it’s going to be hard to get everybody on board with working towards that goal. Making sure that the goal is something that can be conveyed to everybody involved easily, and in a way they understand is important. It will be hard for them to get invested in a goal they don’t “get.” “We need to increase mom and pop profit store to store year over year by 5 percent” is not meaningful to a lot of front-liners who haven’t a clue what that means but they KNOW that they don’t work for their parents.
Measurable was and is my favorite part as my biggest “Ah Ha!” moment for me. Having a measurable goal makes it so much easier to know where on the progress bar we are towards achieving the expectations. Having delegated parts of a job that is measurable into other measurable parts it makes it easier for me as a manager to find where my bottle neck is and address that with further training, or reassessment of  how even I was at delegating the jobs.

I hate to sound like this was a new concept to me, it wasn’t. But in this context it was put in a way that something inside clicked that I just liked. I’m not a complete convert to acronyms yet, but I don’t hate this one.

Overall, How Did That Happen? is about accountability, it’s right in the sub-title, and it talks about accountability in way that makes sense and is applicable with real world examples. This brings up one of my stylistic complaints about the book. At the outset of How Did That Happen? the authors point out that they’re going to change the names of people and businesses to protect their identities and they’re going to put their names in quotes whenever the name is changed. Here’s the thing… those quotes get really repetitious and distracting really fast. I get it. In examples about the real world people names and company names are changed. Honestly, you’d be crazy not to for liability reasons. I think most readers assume that’s going to happen. Attributions, quotes, advice and suggestions coming from someone, those are attributed to real people. We understand that. It’s the reason I use names like “Mongo” and “Roy” in my blog. I have no employees by either name. They’re safe names to use, as are “Mega-corp,” and referencing products as “widgets.” We don’t need to put quotes around everything that is changed. Seriously, I got it, and by the end of the book I was seeing sly wink and air-quotes every time I came across it. It really took me out of the book. This is totally a stylistic quibble. The content was really good. I just wish they’d dispensed with the quotes around altered names.

There’s a diagram three-quarters of the way through the book that talks about people who are above the line and below the line with personal accountability. The above the line employee will see a problem, own it, solve it, and do it. That’s obviously the desired approach. The below the line people are depicted with someone with a lot of other options going through their head as they encounter a problem, choices like: Wait and See, not my job, cover your butt, and finger pointing to name a few.

This huge difference in above and below the line employees was highlighted for me personally when I went to work one day recently and found a note in my fax machine from Mongo, a relatively new employee who used to work for a competitor with a very different culture: “Rich, A customer bought a widget and when he came back later he said the box had been empty. I tried to call Manager and Assistant Manager but neither of them answered their phones so I told him I couldn’t help him. He got hostile so I called the police and had him removed.”

I was floored. The police had been called to remove a customer who was upset because we’d done something wrong and Mongo really thought this was a good answer. The cost of the widget in question was around 8 dollars. Obviously there’s room for improvement in this one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation to fix it. I don’t know if it CAN be fixed. I haven’t got the customer’s name and don’t know how to reach them but I really really want to. There isn’t enough time today for me to apologize for what went wrong there if I can ever find that customer again. But as soon as I read the note in my fax machine the graphic for below the line accountability came to mind. (As an aside the manager was on vacation and the assistant manager called minutes later after leaving doctor’s office, but it was too late it’d already happened. It was the perfect storm of bad timing.)

The take-home from How Did That Happen? is that accountability isn’t a bad word. It’s not the stick part of carrot and stick. Accountability is akin to ownership. I won’t equate it with ownership, because it’s bigger than that. It’s an empowering tool as much as it is a tool that makes us responsible. Accountability as it came across in How Did That Happen? was the perfect marriage of responsibility, authority and drive. I know — that’s a three way marriage, but just go with it would you? Please?

Some management/business books are thin, have fun drawings in them, clever titles, and have the feeling of a fad diet to them. This book is not that kind of reading. It’s not diet, it’s a lifestyle change. I say that in a good way. Those purple cows out there moving fred’s cheese factor are all great books I’m sure, but they all left me feeling a little hollow. Something like Angel Food cake. Yeah, I know I ate something, but it’s later and I can’t remember what it was I ate and I’m hungry again. How Did That Happen? isn’t a beach book and it’s not a read in a day and walk away book.

There was a point in How Did That Happen? where they said feedback was a habit that people quickly fell out of or started with good intentions but didn’t keep up with and I smiled to myself and thought immediately of Rosa Say’s Daily Five. Anybody who is a practitioner of that will take to the feedback discussions in here like a duck to water and will also smile at the idea that they wouldn’t give feedback.

I was pleasantly surprised by How Did That Happen? by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I’d never heard of them or their other books before now and I find I’m going to have to go back and read The Oz Principle and the only real decision there is whether I’ll read it in kindle or paper edition. If the marking I did in this one is any indication I should get the paper edition. It might be a good time to learn to mark-up a kindle edition of a book though. (I just checked and The Oz Principle is available on the kindle. I’m going to get it that way.)

This is how it all started over at smartypig. Well, that’s not how it started, that’s how it ended. The smartypig savings goal was reached and I cashed it out into amazon gift cards. I didn’t have to wait for the cards, they e-mailed them to me.

Rich,

Congratulations on closing your “Kindle” goal to
Amazon.com!  Your gift card codes are as follows:

Yep, that’s right. A personalized letter congratulating me on my success at savings along with the benefits of my savings. I immediately felt good about the whole savings thing. I enjoy saving money. But this money wasn’t saved to sit around in a bank for them to screw it up. I t was saved for an amazon kindle 2.

Next I got this e-mail from amazon.com

The following items have been shipped to you by Amazon.com:
1  Kindle: Amazon’s 6″ Wirele…

After ordering it I sat at home and waited to regret spending that much money on what is essentially a luxury item. I don’t do that a lot really. I didn’t though. Instead I had visions of my reading all the classics. Me sitting in a recliner sipping hot tea listening to light music. Me tearing through all those books I need to read that I’ve got added to my to-read list over on goodreads. I was pretty sure that the kindle 2 was going to solve all my problems.

No pressure at all on this chunk of plastic and circuitry that is currently whizzing it’s way towards me in a brown truck. All it needs to do is give me more time in the day so I can get some reading done just like my Google profile says I need! It will help me manage my time better, Google Calendar is helping with that when I sync it with my blackberry too. But this kindle… coming Monday I think? THAT will be the panacea that cures everything for me.

So… the summer of gadgetry is off to a good start. I’ve got another smartypig savings goal coming up in the beginning of September when I go buy myself a new laptop, a PC. I’ll let you know what I decide on. I’m sort of doing the PC challenge that Microsoft ads have been talking about on TV lately.

My favorite book of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
It’s my favorite for a couple reasons; not the least of which is that while it can be had for free download on the internet, provided by the author, not theft, it is also for sale and is a HUGE sales success.

From the author’s site:

The US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover’s selling so well that my publisher’s delayed the paperback for a year!). The book’s made just about everyone’s best-of lists for 2008:

It’s a young adult novel that,  briefly, tells the story of a high-school kid, group of kids, who live in a surveillance intensive society. The government, city, state, federal, watch and track almost everything, and then a terrorist attack happens and the tracking gets worse. Freedoms are curtailed, and people are kidnapped by their own government to be investigated for behavior that doesn’t match societal norms as determined by the surveillance. It’s a fight back against Big Brother by kids, hence the name. That’s such a brief thumbnail description it doesn’t do it justice.

You don’t have to trust me on this one. You really can get it for free from the author’s site, and if you like it you can buy a dead-tree version if you like, or even an audiobook version. I got it for free, read it on my palm and liked it enough to buy the dead tree version and the audiobook version.

Little Brother a great book, and it changed the way I look at the world around me. No higher praise can be given a book.

Back in the 80s and early 90s you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a movie or tv show that Christian Slater was in. Somehow I managed to miss everything he was in for years. The first time I saw him was in Pump up the Volume and it was on video. I don’t know what year it was, but back then videos didn’t come out as fast as they do now after theatrical release so it was late in his career.

Enter Seth Godin on the Internet. Every business, managerial, productivity, marketing blogger out there mentioned Seth Godin with the same breathy enthusiasm as a Beatles fan at one of their concerts back in the day… with much squealing, waving of hands, and tearful adulation of all things Sethy. He was so popular I wouldn’t go near him. “Purple Cow?” Yeah… I don’t think so. I’m sure it’s yet another manager book full of trite crap that’s easy to say, incredibly obvious, but so hard to do in real life outside the confines of the trade-paperback sized hard-cover book with over-sized type that makes up 98% of all those business books that airports are full of. I was sure he had all the buzz words and said them in a great way with stunningly exciting anecdotes so everybody was sure they could go right out and do it. He built an empire out of that sort of stuff. I assiduously avoided everthing he wrote. If a blogger quoted him I’d mark the post read and move on. He was too popular to be that good. If he WERE that good, and what he wrote WERE that great then everybody should be up to their eyeballs in money. Banks would all be full, and everybody would be in business for themselves crapping hundred dollar bills and taking six month vacation to the islands. I wasn’t seeing anybody crapping hundreds except Seth from his book sales. I had him pinned as a modern day snake-oil salesman milking the business men for all they were worth.

You get my feelings right? Here’s the best part. I’d never read anything he wrote. Not a word. Maybe a quote of his made it across the Quote of the Day and I didn’t notice it w†as him that said it until it was too late but honestly. Never read anything he wrote.

Then he gave away his newest book, Tribes, on itunes for less than a buck. Crap! How’s he milking people at under a dollar? What snake-oil salesman GIVES his snake oil away?!? I decided to see if he was worth a damn after all. I’d made up my mind about him so let’s see what he had going for him. He was certainly worth what was it? Eighty-five cents? I was willing to spend that much for trite crap that would be completely forgetable like most of all the rest of the business feel-good garbage out there. (You may notice a certain disdain for much of the stuff out there right now for business readers. That doesn’t apply to all business books at all. I will only link to and recommend stuff I like. If I mention a book and don’t link to it that means I don’t recommend it.)

Some personal background. I’ve been fatigued with my job lately. I don’t remember much of last month. I was going through the motions, performing check-lists, and making an appearance and punching a time clock. I was NOT excited about it. There was no passion in it. I didn’t love it, hell, many days I didn’t even like it any more. I was waiting to be down-sized and looking forward to it. Waiting for it… hoping for it to end the misery that my job had become. I was NOT in a good place. It’s a lot of why my last blog didn’t come back. I felt like a fraud writing about management when I wasn’t managing at all but just sort of putting in time.  So, when I read Tribes it was really going to be a hard-sell. I was fed up with management, I disliked Seth Godin precisely because everybody else in the world seemed to worship the water he walked on, and I was considering looking for jobs as a bag-boy at a grocery store because I didn’t want responsibility, creativity, authority, or calls after my shift was done.  I was completely checked out.

And the book didn’t give me any secrets. It really didn’t. There was no top five action items to do every day or magic checkbox format to use to guarantee success. No secret hand-shake, mesh the thumb webs, tilt to the left and down with firm squeeze, nope, not in here. There wasn’t a formula to find and apply to every situation that would guarantee me anything.  What it DID do was remind me what I had loved about my job. Back in the day I was a manager of a store and I built the store and customers into a community. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody knew me. I loved hearing them saying things like “I’ll come back when you’re here and I’ll bring a friend…” That’s my passion. Not because they loved me, but because they loved what I was doing and so did I. I built a community and built a place people liked to come. Customers would visit with each other, and if I was visiting with some I’d bring others into the conversation and we’d all talk and that I loved. That’s what I was great at. Seth reminded me of that.

I can still do that. It may well be that I will at some point be downsized. I may lose my job and I might get demoted. I have no way of knowing. What I do know though is that I loved building community and I am good at it so I’m going to do that again… some more. I can do it within the confines of my job description as well as the tedious parts of my job (I’m sorry, but there’s no exciting way to verify proper inventory is on hand in the stores and notify buyers’ etc that I need more. There’s no love for that and that’s what my job had become at the expense of the part of the job that I’d loved.).

Now, I have no intention of going back to read anything else Seth has written. The odds of him cranking out two books that will hit me in the sweet spot in a row are pretty slim. Not to mention my November is busy enough already. I want to go about making my job something I like again rather than reading about jobs. So If you like community building. If you’re part of a community or want to start one either in your workplace, family, town, city, state, world, internet… Tribes is the book you need to read now. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you’ve never heard of Seth Godin this is a good introduction to him. I can’t recommend any of his other stuff because I’ve never read it. I’m sure it’s fine. 

Just as songs we grew up listening to in High School are better because of where we are then in our lives… this book is hitting me at the perfect time for it to have an impact on me. I don’t know if it would have been as great a year or two years ago. But at this time in this place it’s a great book and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Oh… after loving his book and looking up his blog to link to him here… I STILL won’t subscribe to his feed. I’m a fan but can’t be a fanboi. I’ll give you the links. I’ll let you follow his blog if you like. He’s really a good writer and probably a great and charming guy. I’m sure there’s a zillion people out there who would swear he is. I’ve been avoiding him too long to start subscribing now.