Learn from the past

You Salute the Uniform Not the Person in It

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Rank Has Meaning in An Organization and Should Be Respected, But A Jerk in A Position Is Still a Jerk.

McFerrin was a tough old military nurse.  She was the supervising nurse at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital where my father worked for a time as an orderly. She expected everyone in her charge to work.

That was not a problem for Dad. He was accustomed to work and believed he owed his employer a full day’s work for a day’s pay.

At a point, the VA sent down a dictum that its employees were to dress in a military fashion on the job. To Dad that meant spit and polish and a crisp white uniform. To that end, he polished his shoes and belt regularly and wore fresh clothes every day.

One summer day, in the then non-air-conditioned wing of the hospital, he was cleaning out bathtubs. The place was hot, especially in the humidity of the bathing area.

As Dad told it, he was standing on his head cleaning a tub, was wringing wet with sweat, and was thinking about the way Mrs. McFerrin had, in his opinion, mistreated a coworker earlier in the day.

Sweat had soaked Dad’s shirt and run down across his belt, leaving black streaks on his white pants. Mrs. McFerrin happened to walk up behind him and began to “dress him down” for the condition of his uniform.

Dad took the assault without comment until Mrs. McFerrin came to a pause. Then he asked, “Are you finished, Ma’am?”

She snapped, “Yes.”

“Then, as of right now you have my two-week notice.” He said.

Two weeks later over protestations from hospital personnel, including Mrs. McFerrin, Dad was done with that job.

He never failed when talking about that to emphasize to me that when you do your job to best of your ability and follow organizational rules, you do not need to, in fact should not, allow yourself to be mistreated by anyone in the organization.

More than 20 years later, I found myself in a situation at work that harkened back to that lesson. I worked for a publishing company when the company moved one of its editorial operations from Boston, MA to Iowa City, IA. The move created several openings when people chose to leave the company rather than move to what they perceived as nowhere in the middle of the country.

I transferred from a regional office to a Senior Editor position. Ed, who would be my direct supervisor, was the only transferee from Boston. The new Department Director was from Iowa City and brought a lineup of his cronies into the newly formed department.

I had a pretty good time in the editorial job for a couple of years, got some great experience hiring and working with professional staff, and in working with a variety of high-powered authors.

There were a number of things that transpired over that couple of years, though, that made me happy to have Ed between the Director and me.

Then there came a December day, when I was called into the Director’s office along with Ed, to discuss a performance review I had given for a relatively new editor that reported to me. I had been very pleased with her productivity and with the accuracy of her work; and I had rated her relatively highly.

In the meeting, the Director told me he didn’t want to have ratings go in that were “too high” and he wanted me to change my rating of the editor.

I suggested that I had followed the personnel review directive from headquarters and was not inclined to change my evaluation.

As the discussion continued, Ed suggested that we submit two evaluations, one that represented my assessment and another that represented the Director’s. That solution was not acceptable to the Director and he said he was going to alter my evaluation before submitting it to headquarters.

The meeting ended under those terms and as we walked back to the suite of offices we shared, I asked Ed, “If I resign today will I get my bonus for the year?” His answer was that I would have to be employed at the end of the year to qualify. I said, “Then, I will wait until after the holidays.”  When I returned to work on January 3rd, I presented Ed with my resignation letter, giving 30-days notice.

I later accepted an extension, agreeing to work until the end of February. Some 26 years later that same company rehired me and gave me employment credit for those early years, much to the inconvenience of the personnel manager who dug through long-warehoused paper documents to verify that employment, but that is another story.

The Point of this Story.

It is easy for some people to take on the role of being trapped in a job. When a person in a position of authority abuses that position, fails to give you reasonable respect or demonstrates that they are not worthy of your respect, you need to think about what you will do.

Feeling that you have no alternative but to stand there and take it, is detrimental to your need to do first, what is right. That, in turn, is detrimental to the organization in which you go to work dispirited, and to the potential organization you would better contribute, but where you don’t work.

Don’t be a Dapper Danny

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By Oliver Cummings

“Make hay while the sun shines” describes a farmer’s reality.

The sun came up hot on hay-bailing day and the dew was off the grass very early. By 8:00 I was throwing up wind rows of hay mown two days earlier and left to cure in the field. The side-delivery rake was just the right tool to pull behind the little red-belly Ford. Dad wasn’t far behind on the John Deere, pulling the bailer that produced 70-pound rectangular bales of alfalfa hay that would feed the cows and horses come winter. As the morning sun climbed the scent of the new mown hay gave way to the smell of dust kicked up by the raking and baling processes.

About 9:30, Johnnie and his hay-hauling crew pulled into the field. A couple of days later, we would move the whole operation to Johnnie’s farm to take in his hay crop, too.

Johnnie’s crew was his son, Jerry, just turned 17, Danny, one of Jerry’s high school buddies, and Bobby a 14-year old buddy of mine from school. All three were buff; strong. Jerry and Bobby, farm boys, a little rough around the edges. Danny was slicker, a town boy.

As they pulled into the field, Jerry and Danny dove off the wagon and started walking alongside the vehicle, now crawling along between two rows of bales. Jerry picked up a bale by the seagrass strings that bound it. He walked it to the wagon and heaved the bale up to Bobby, ready to start meticulously laying out the stack so the loaded wagon could move across the rough field without the load shifting. By the time Bobby got the bale positioned, Danny pitched the second bale on the wagon from the other side.

This ritual was repeated, with Bobby placing bale upon bale overlapping the so that one layer locked the next layer in place until they had five layers high and a tie-bale row down the middle, the length of the wagon.

Now they were thoroughly soaked with sweat, covered in hay dust, and ready to make the slow ride from the field to the barn, hoping for a breeze along the way. Johnnie turned the tractor over to Jerry to drive the half-mile to the barn for unloading and started walking home. He would be mowing the rest of the day on his own property a mile away.

The barn was a large central hallway flanked by stalls on either side. The hayloft was the second floor covering the main hallway and the internal stalls. It was cavernous today because last year’s hay crop had been almost totally fed out.

Jerry and Bobby climbed into the hayloft to carry back and stack the hay. Danny had volunteered to pitch up the bales from the wagon. With a light breeze at his back the outside work wasn’t too unpleasant. He would pitch a bale onto the hayloft floor; Jerry would hook it with the hay hook and drag it back to Bobby to stack. The hayloft was hot and stuffy.

All went well until the load was about two-thirds in the barn. Danny bucked a bale up and, more or less, pushed it into the door to the loft. With that, Jerry said, “Don’t strain yourself, Danny Boy.” Danny shot him a look and said, “Hey, I gotta go to the toilet.”

Jerry, short curly red hair glistening with sweat in the sunlight, jumped down onto the wagon and started bucking bales up for Bobby, now having to both drag back and stack. By the time Danny finished his toilet visit, the other boys had the wagon unloaded and were ready load number two. Danny trotted out to the road and jumped onto the wagon as they headed to the field. It was going on noon.

The second load went much as the first until half way through the unloading process, Danny got something in his eye and had to go to the house to see if Mom could get it out for him.

On the third load, it was a splinter in his finger that disabled poor old Danny, yet again.

Danny was a “goldbrick,” a slacker. Johnnie tolerated Danny on the crew because he was Jerry’s friend. But, when it came time for Dad to put a crew together to help Johnnie, Danny was not among those considered.

Goldbricks in Business

In the business world there are many ways that people exhibit slacking behavior.

Cyberslacking applies to employees who use company Internet connections and time for personal activities. However, there is a more subtle form of goldbricking in business that is a problem for managers and may result in personnel actions that the goldbricker may not expect.

As a young manager I hired a clearly talented person, I will call her Malinda, to evaluate training programs. In the first year she quickly became a good on-site evaluator.

I noticed, however, that on courses where she had some apparent investment (e.g., personal interest in the subject matter) she did a superior job. But, on assignments where she perceived the content to be boring, or the client to be “difficult,” her work output and the clients’ ratings of project quality were significantly degraded.

Over a period of three years Malinda’s performance was up and down, from excellent to below average.

I documented and discussed her performance on a project by project basis, summarized it during mid-year and annual reviews, and discussed it in career coaching sessions with her. The behaviors, however, persisted in a pattern that became predictable.

Toward the end of her third year, in spite of the negative feedback and coaching I had given her in the various venues, she apparently expected to be considered for a project lead position in the department. When I told her she would not be considered for the position, and that her performance was too inconsistent, she acted surprised and offended. Shortly thereafter she resigned, “to pursue other interests.”

The moral of the story.

Every employee needs to have some expertise that they are “known for.” This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for being really successful in a career. To be successful on a job you must also be known as a steady performer, willing to take on every assignment with a clear intent to do it to the best of your ability.

If You Want to Fish in My Pond, Come by the House First

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Oliver W. Cummings

Johnnie was as fine a neighbor as a guy could have. When I was a youngster and our families visited, swapped work, butchered hogs together. We also fished and went on the occasional fish fry together. Johnnie favored fishing with a seine, or hogging. I learned to hog fish (now sometimes called noodling) in what we called the creek (actually the Cache River) with the likes of Johnnie, Seedcorn (my dad), Edward and Terry. It was quite a crew: jockey-sized Johnnie, smart, but barely literate; Ed, a hefty, farm-boy-strong, young man; Terry, a church choir boy; Dad, a farmer, trader and all around self-sufficient man; and me, an early teen eager to be one of the men.

Going hogging was a process. We met at Johnnie’s house and filed into his garage to dress for the occasion. This involved some real get-ups. Johnny with his old overalls, patched over knees and a gallus held by a ten-penny nail punched through a pucker of cloth where a missing brass button had been, and old shoes tied with seagrass string for laces. Dad, dressed in a worn-out long-sleeved khaki shirt, old worn out work pants with a rope belt, and a hat he didn’t mind getting wet with the muddy creek water. The rest of us equally fashionably dressed.

We looked like a bunch of happy tramps going down the road. The two men in the cab of Johnnie’s recently-purchased used truck. In the back of the truck with us boys were a couple of tow sacks for carrying the fish that we expected to catch. Down the road, dust fogging up behind the truck we started off.

For most of the last mile leading up to the creek, the road was bordered on either side by fertile farm land supporting a full stand of corn. The humidity put a blue haze above the fields and the heat made the air shimmer. The cool water was going to feel good.

We pulled off the road at the bridge, parked a few yards off the road, and walked another hundred or so downstream to one of Johnnie’s favorite fishing holes. There we made our way over the levee and down to the water level. Then one by one we waded into the muddy water. The mud on the bottom of the creek tugged at our shoes as we waded carefully across, feeling our way with each step to make sure we didn’t step off into a deep hole. As we got distributed along the banks, Johnnie eased down into the water until all you could see of him was his head and one shoulder above the water. He felt along the bank and the fallen tree trunks in the creek. Finding a hollow fallen tree under water he felt into the hole, gently, slowly, touching the sides of the hollow as he explored it for the catfish that should be there.

We had been in the water just a few minutes, hadn’t even caught a fish yet when the farmer-landowner walked up over the levee, a double-barreled shotgun cradled in his left elbow, and his right forefinger on the trigger guard. Johnnie looked up and said, “Hello, Jack.” in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear. Dad waded back toward where Johnnie was standing waist deep in the creek and greeted Jack.

After a short exchange of pleasantries Jack said, “I didn’t know who you guys were, didn’t recognize the truck. I don’t want just anybody driving back here, so I came to check it out. Hope you catch a sack full of fish.” With that, he swatted at a horsefly that had lit on his shoulder, turned and walked off of the levee.

Dad said, “I guess we shoulda gone by the house before we came down here.”  Then we went back to fishing.

Some years later, I was the Director of a Research and Evaluation function at a major corporate university. My colleague, Pat, headed the Management Development group in the same organization. We both hired people with similar backgrounds; industrial/organizational psychologists, organizational development specialists, and instructional designers with program evaluation and other specialty skills.

I had recruited a very high performing young woman into an evaluator position and within a couple of years, she was being considered for promotion.

I got wind, from a third party, that she had talked to Pat. I decided to talk to Pat about it.

It was clear that the young manager candidate was interested in the broadening experience that Pat’s group could provide. Our company valued personnel development, movement across the organization was not unusual and I was certainly not going to stand in the way of her further development. Yet, I wanted to make a point with Pat, that I expected to be informed soon after the first contact and before she went forward with serious discussions about a transfer. In the course of the conversation we had, I related the story about the fishing trip and ended it with, “If you want to go fishing in my pond, just come by the house first.”

Pat has reminded me of that story more than once, since. It served to strengthen our communication and friendship with each other, and we did a number of successful joint projects over the years.

Moral of the Story: Having the kind of open communication that allows you and your colleagues to do what is right for the people in your organization in service to strengthening the organization overall should be considered to be a prime directive for all managers. And, how you behave in crossing boundaries in your organization will impact your reputation as a manager. You will likely be recognized as a developer of people if you talk to a person’s manager before inviting them to apply for a job in your group; if you fail to do that, you’ll more likely be known as a poacher.

Brighteyes’ Bad Business

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Another bit of wisdom not found in books

Oliver W. Cummings

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown millions out of work. Some jobs were stable throughout and some companies were and are hiring; some jobs lost will come back, some sooner, some later; and some jobs lost are gone, period. Whatever job you land eventually, there are still some fundamentals to which we all should pay attention.

The Lesson.

It was the 1930’s and hard times on the farm. Crops were not good; farm products were not selling for anything. Eggs were about 8 or 9 cents a dozen delivered to the Produce Company. Getting ahead or saving for the future was not even a question – just getting by was the issue.

One morning in the middle of the week, after the early morning chores were done, as the story was told to me, my dad appeared at the breakfast table dressed in his only, very old, suit, frayed white shirt and tie and his “good” shoes with a fresh coat of polish on them. When Mom looked at him with her most inquisitive look, he said simply, “I am going to get a job today.”  

He drove the eight miles to the nearest town of any size, Vienna, Illinois, and started looking for work. The third place he stopped was the local Buick dealership; they were looking for a salesman. Dad got the job, though he had never had a sales job before. He took the job seriously and for many months, in spite of the fact that the country was in a depression and almost all of the trade was in used cars, was a successful car salesman.

He worked with another salesman, a man called “Brighteyes” Miller, known for his sparkling blue eyes and glib manner. Almost everyone around home had a nickname – Dad’s was “Seedcorn,” but that is another story, and no, mine was not “Nubbin.”

Brighteyes was apparently one of those people that helped establish the used-car salesman stereotype.  More than once, Dad told of the customer that came back, after having bought a car from Brighteyes, and complained bitterly and long about the car he’d bought. The customer got no sympathy from Brighteyes.

The confrontation ended in an exchange in which the customer called Brighteyes a bastard, to which Brighteyes replied, “You can’t prove it.” 

The unsatisfied customer left in a huff and Dad observed that for the next twenty years, that dissatisfied customer drove Fords and Chryslers bought from local dealers, but never drove another Buick.

Listen to Dad

The sales job provided Dad and Mom the money they needed to get through a rough economic period and allowed them to save enough money to start a small produce store of their own. He told me this story many times in various circumstances and there were always three points to be made:

  1. If you are willing to work, you can always find a job. If you present yourself as confident and trustworthy, even if you aren’t the most experienced or sophisticated person around, people will appreciate doing business with you.
  2. You may need to be willing to accept a job that is not the job you wished for and/or where you would like it to be. If so, then make that job a steppingstone to your next one.
  3. You need to always do your job ethically and work with all people in an evenhanded manner, because not to do so can have very long-lasting negative effects.

The Duh-Factor

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Another from the lessons-not-found-in-books series

VisualHunt

Life is full of the Duh-factor.

What, you may ask is the Duh-factor, and why is Duh always capitalized? I am not sure I can precisely define the word and I have no idea why Duh should always be capitalized. It just seemed the right thing to do. Perhaps a couple of examples of the Duh-factor in operation can help.

Comedians, especially it seems hillbilly comedians, can make a career of the Duh-factor. Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if …” comes to mind, or better still Bill Engvall’s “Here’s your sign” bits. If you haven’t had the good fortune to see these guys, I can’t help with that. Try Youtube.

My father knew the Duh-factor approach and used it with me when I was a kid. It sometimes remotely resembled the Socratic Method. That is, it usually, but not always, involved a question.

An example is: “Do you know what that white stuff on bird sh*t is?” Now if you have ever studied bird sh*t, you could have observed that for many birds, from sparrows to chickens, their poop consists of at least two tones, one dark, almost black, and the other white. These appear to be two parts of the same piece of poop. But, if you haven’t made it your goal to ponder bird poop before, you might simply respond to such a question as Dad posed with something like, “No, what is it?” His immediate response would be, “Its bird sh*t, too.” Duh!

There is evidence for the Duh-factor in business as well. Look at some of the failed products that abound in the marketplaces of our lives. Things are made or services developed that people do not want and will not pay for. Witness the Edsel automobile (Ford, 1958-1960), Frito Lay’s Cheeto’s Lip Balm (2005), Google+ (2011-2019) and the list can go on. The blunder by Coca Cola when they tried to abandon the original Coke formula in the mid 1980s in favor of “New Coke” is a good example of the need to listen to your clients, understand what they value and offer products that satisfy that value. Sales of Coca Cola slumped and continued to be poor by historical Coke standards until they reintroduced the original formula in “Classic Coke.” The turnaround in sales that occurred after that reintroduction was attributed to listening to the customer.

This one isn’t a question, but an axiom: If you throw it out the back door and the dogs won’t eat it, it ain’t dog food. Duh.

It always pays to ask yourself the right questions along the way. And, in our current world in turmoil asking those questions is more urgent than may have been the case ever before.

  • Do our customers want something significantly different than what we currently have to offer?
  • Do our employees need changes in our processes that management can make?
  • If we need to make changes in the implicit employment contract will employees go along with them?
  • How can we reconcile differences between what we perceive we need to change in our business and the needs that our employees want to see us address?
  • What do the other players that impact our markets have on their horizons?
  • Is now the right time to make a change?
  • How similar is our “new Normal” going to be to our past “normal?”
  • What is our formula for making “dog food” going forward?
  • And, the list goes on. …

So how do I define the Duh-factor? I am still not sure I have a precise definition, but it does have something to do with trying really hard to recognize the obvious and apply, that all too often uncommon, common sense.

The Pool Hall

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This is the first of a series of lessons not found in books

Freddy G on Unsplash

A Lesson in Life and Business at the Pool Hall; Or, You Can Learn Good Stuff from Unexpected Places

By: Oliver W. Cummings

Sometimes, when life seems particularly unpredictable and hard to cope with, it pays to think back to what we have already learned and put to use over years of experience.

My father used to say, “In life the strong live off the weak and the smart live off the strong.” This is a, perhaps less elegant but equally to the point, way of saying that the art of success in life (and business) is about finesse, not force.

Here is the Lesson

One of my favorite hang-outs when I was a teenager was a brightly lit, clean pool hall. The place was opened in town as a place primarily for young men of the community. The proprietor served pop and snacks, but no alcohol, and kept an orderly place.

One spring a drifter showed up and the pool hall became his place to pass time just about every day. He disappeared when the weather turned bad in the fall and then showed up in springtime in the subsequent years. His name was Norman. No one seemed to know where Norman went for the winter and I never really knew where Norman stayed when he was in town. Gossip said he slept in the barns at the fairground. He was not particularly spiffy, but he stayed clean shaven and his clothes were kept in better shape than those of other drifters that passed through in the 1960s.

Norman was pretty mysterious to the boys that hung around the pool hall. Many of them didn’t want anything to do with him, but I thought he was interesting. He talked philosophy and religion as if he were well-educated. I don’t know how schooled he was, but he went to the town library sometimes during the day, before he came to the pool hall in the evening. Maybe it was just a comfortable place to kill time, maybe he liked Miss Maude, the Librarian. But, I think he went there to read interesting things.

I learned some important things about pool from Norman. Most importantly: the art of shooting pool is one of finesse, not force.

How you hold the cue stick is the beginning of executing a good shot. Too much tension and you will be jerky in your execution and can’t hit the cue ball accurately. Too little control and you can’t hit the cue ball accurately either. Both ways you lose.

You need to think two or three shots ahead, because how you play one shot leads to the next opportunity you have. If you don’t think about your leave (i.e., where this shot will position you for the next shot), you can block yourself out, and, again, you lose.

You should never take a bank shot when a straight shot is possible. When you shoot a bank shot, it may look impressive, but the added variables of the angle of the rebound, the English you put on the ball, and the performance of the rail cushion make the shot more difficult than a straight shot, even if the latter is at a significant angle. Taking the straight shot represents foregoing showboating for a winning strategy.

It takes balance and planning. It takes knowing your equipment, the shot you are going to take, and your situation on the table to make a good shot.

Maybe these lessons came from Norman’s study of eastern philosophies or maybe it was simply that he was passing along a skill in shooting pool.

Either way these things are important to me because it is just that way in business and other aspects of life: the secret to success, as in shooting pool, is one of finesse, not force.

Taking the smart shot, stroking the cue ball so that it touches the target ball precisely and gently and lets it roll softly into the pocket, is always preferred to slamming the cue stick into the cue ball, making a jerky shot, and hoping that you get to hear the target ball rattle into the pocket.

In other words, in business and in life if you:

  • pay attention to doing the right things and, then, doing things right;
  • neither do things the hard way, nor shrink from the hard to accomplish;
  • sense and make sense of your environment;
  • know yourself and your equipment (i.e., what you have to work with);
  • find an appropriate balance of flexibility and control;
  • focus on what is important to winning and decide what you will do next; and
  • execute as well as you can, without fanfare;

then you can call the shots for your own game and you will win more often than not.

Learn from the past - deal with today - prepare for the future.

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