Management – Andrew Minko

2002: Quit Humping The Intern’s Leg

Bad dog! No intern!

Sometimes people suggest I know nothing of male/female relationships in the workplace because I’m gay. To the contrary, metaphorically I’m in the stands so what I see is a different and possibly better view from those on the field (so to speak).

I asked one of the senior analysts if I could speak with him privately. I said: “Quit humping the leg of the intern.” Now, to be clear, he was a good man with strong ethics and very professional. I can’t read minds, but my guess is that he got his signals crossed.

The intern in question sat at the desk next to me. So I saw firsthand how uncomfortable she was with the attention from the senior analyst. (Finding reasons to drop by her desk every few hours, trying to get to know her personally with questions, etc., etc.)

I saw something and I took action.

Three Take-Aways:

1
If you see potential harassment, speak up. A lot of trouble for everyone can be averted.

2
There’s a big difference between a one-time thoughtless lack of judgement and a predatory repeat offender. A man who responds appropriately to being spoken to privately may not express thanks, but he will be glad.

3
You don’t have to be the person’s boss if you know them. This is a good way to de-escalate a potentially volatile situation.

Back to the gay thing: As a gay man, I’ve learned to suppress my instinct to stare at or pay attention to men I’m attracted to in the workplace. This is so because a lot of straight men hate being hit on by gay guys. Straight men ought to suppress their attraction to women in the workplace, too. Gay men who hit on straight men risk getting their ass kicked. Maybe the workplace would be better if straight men faced the same risk?

Content May be King, but Data Is Power Behind the Throne

I have often heard that “content is king” when it comes to demand gen. Yes, content can drive people to your web. Yes, content can fill the lead funnel with the names of people¹ who download content after filling out a form. But, content alone cannot and will not help you understand your install base and how to find others who want to buy your product/service. Only data can do that.

A lot of companies spend tremendous effort on creating content for blogs, white papers, and social media. I guess it makes sense. After all, lead scoring and customer profiling are hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it, no? While it’s true that sophisticated tracking programs² can determine which content is performing well, much more important data is elsewhere. Every company in this millennium uses some form of CRM,³ but strangely most companies don’t seem to use their CRM data base to capture vital information, such as:

Why did we win?
Who did we compete against?
Which people within a customer performed various roles?
What other technology is part of the customers’ stacks?
How many customers do we have by industry?

One of the blind spots here is that the answers to these questions are known by some people. Certainly, eStaff level executives have a good feel for this. For everyone else in an organization, it’s usually buried in emails (unstructured) or known to different people scattered in the organization (fragmented). This important knowledge is just beyond the grasp of effective up-sell, cross-sell, customer references, and other campaigns.

The last question about customers by industry is highly significant. When a company starts to grow their customer base, one of the first questions new prospects typically ask is: How many customers do you have in my industry? In olden days (15 years ago), we called this our “quals” — our proof that we are qualified to work in your industry. I find it remarkable that 5 out of 5 start ups I worked at could not run a simple query in their CRM to determine precisely how many customers they had. This was so, in part, because it wasn’t always clear what was a customer. (I used the word “precise” because cross-referencing the account receivables data base with the CRM data base and tediously resolving the inconsistencies is less than precise.)

A great management consultant⁴used to say: “The truth is usually found in the middle.” To that end, my take is that you need both content and data. If you don’t have an organized and systematic way to obtain data, maybe some of the resources applied to content could be redeployed for data.

Notes:

¹ It amazing to me that most companies have to learn the hard way that people are clever enough to put in bogus information and disposable emails to get content. Thus, putting content behind forms is not a foolproof way to capture leads. At one company, I was in charge of the lead routing table. The first 3 of 80+ “routing rules” disposed of bogus names such as Buggs Bunny and swear words (lol).

² Those sophisticated tracking systems are not cheap. Many companies pay tens of thousands each month for search engine optimization, syndication of content, pay-per-click ads, and “pixel fire” unique browser surveillance. Even more companies layer on more surveillance when they do not get tangible results. Is there any end to this?

³ CRM stands for “customer relationship management” (such as MS Dynamics or Salesforce.com). Here’s another unpopular observation: It’s the customers who manage the relationships they have with companies and not vice-versa.

⁴ My blessed mother taught me that line about the truth being the in middle. It has been borne out countless times in my experience. She also said: “People like to shop, but they don’t like to be sold to.”

For further reading

A simple online search for “best practices customer profile” yielded hundreds of results. One of them provides a nice step-by-step process for using customer profiles for revenue: Five Steps to Creating an Effective Customer Profile for Lead Scoring Note: This resource is 7 years old. Further support for the notion that there is no excuse for modern start ups to trip and fall because of this.

Image courtesy of GIPHY

Sending “Is it done yet?” Emails on Fridays is Not Leadership

When I was first promoted to managing people, I was fortunate to work for a big bank. Fortunate because they had a leadership training program. There we learned how to deal with both project and people problems – and how often they are intertwined.

Most of the startups I’ve worked for since don’t offer very much training. Leadership is admired and promoted. However, no matter how cute, funny, or cleverly worded the emails, “leaders” who ping people Friday asking about project status are signaling a red flag of poor management skills.

This is so because project management is far more than leadership. It requires organizing the people and the work. It also requires controlling for progress. No amount of emails (or task management software) can make up for disorganized people and/or lack of resources. If someone wants to be a leader, then they must own the fact that it’s their job to get people and resources organized. If someone else does that, they are not the leader (regardless of title).

Note: Misusing task management tools such as Wrike, Asana, or monday.com is not leadership, either. One can create to-do lists and assign people all they want, but if there is no clear agreement on roles and responsibilities, they are missing the all-important aspect of organizing for success.

Image via GIPHY

Originally published by me as a LinkedIn in 2018

Heat Seekers Love Your Technology, but Mere Mortals Have All the Money

I once heard the phrase “heat seekers” used to describe the people who are always first to adopt new technology. I like it. This is just my opinion, but I’ve seen this at 5 out of the 5 startups. During the early days, the first customers are organizations that have ample in-house technical resources; they have “heat seekers.” These in-house engineers can evaluate different solutions using their own fairly objective proof-of-concept criteria. They quickly learn the technology and conduct the trial on their own. For these organizations, the superior technology wins the deal every time.

However, I suspect most companies do not have this in-house expertise. They rely heavily on analyst reports (such as Gartner Magic Quadrant) and references. They may struggle with developing criteria for a proof-of-concept trial. They may also give more weight to ease of use and low admin overhead than technical superiority. These potential customers vastly outnumber the early adopters. In order to grow revenue, you have to sell to ordinary companies — mere mortals.

Advice: Use the experience of early adopters to repurpose/reuse POC plans and create ease-of-use features. Makes sure your product benefits companies that do not have large in-house technical resources (use “wizards” and automation to streamline processes).

Better Advice: One of the great sales execs I’ve met taught the team: “When a customer asks for a POC trial, ask him if they’ll share the POC plan with you. They may well say, ‘I don’t have one, yet.’ That’s when you say: ‘Well, here’s one you can start with.’ That’s when you give them our POC plan. Of course our plan will highlight our strengths – the ones in which we’ve invested the most engineering resources and meet the most customer feature requests. Just be upfront about it.”

AI for Your Business — Not Just Your Product

I find it baffling how many starts up bloviate about machine learning and artificial intelligence in their product offering, but completely fail to use any of it in their own business processes. A classic example is RFP/RFIs. These start out as handcrafted, bespoke documents. But when a company becomes successful, they often receive more RFP/RFI requests than they can handle. Why aren’t automated tools for this standard best practices? We’ve had latent semantic analysis (LSA)* of unstructured text for more than 20 years. However, it seems mostly limited to advertising that is supposed to be “more relevant.” This automation could be a powerful force for streamlining proposals and quotes. This is especially true when it comes to answer GDPR and other questionnaires.

Advice: Start using ML/AI tools for proposals and quotes immediately. Don’t wait until you’re overtaxed and deals are falling through the cracks.

Suggestion: Two systems I much respect are Loopio for RFP/RFI automation https://loopio.com/ and Deal Hub https://go.dealhub.io/demo

* Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations. It could be used to take a body of RFP/RFIs and then generate reusable content for completing new RFP/RFIs. While Wikipedia has an excellent overview article on LSA, the main point of this blog post is we can use natural language processing to eliminate the tedious handcrafted approach to a document that is almost universal in technology sales.

I explore this topic from a different angle in my previous post: We Only Sell to Smart People

We Only Sell to Smart People?

In my opinion, a lot of product and engineering managers in hi-tech are unwittingly hostile to potential customers. Their attitude, almost incredibly, can be misinterpreted to mean: “If prospects aren’t smart enough to understand our products, they do not deserve to buy them.” While no one ever said this in actual words, the constant conflict over how to market products and services indicates there is something under-the-surface.

One submerged aspect is revealed in the question: How you shop for technology?

Engineers and product managers have the intellectual capacity to review detailed specifications and make rational assessments of which products/services perform best.
Executives, on the other hand, often focus on productivity and efficiency enhancements. They may not understand the technical details, but they respect and understand cost/benefit analyses — especially when costs can be reduced.
Mid-managers with operational responsibilities take the broadest view of all three by considering how technology will affect processes and staffing. It’s may seem illogical, but mid-managers will gladly choose a product that is technically inferior if the selling company is easy to work with, provides excellent training/support, and takes ownership of the employee change management process.

I’ve head these three groups called “tribes” within a corporation: The Executive Tribe, Operational Tribe, and Technical Tribe. The starkly contrasting values of these three tribes can be seen in their answer to a basic question: “What are people?”

To members of the Executive tribe, people are expensive.
To the Operations tribe, people are how you get anything accomplished.
To the Technical tribe, people are single largest source of error.

Moral of Story: The companies that can address the values and concerns of these three tribes will be far more successful selling to large enterprises and agencies.

Image courtesy of GIPHY

First-Name Basis?

Nothing reveals corporate sloppiness more than addressing customers by a name they do not use. I’m referring to the rampant practice by interactive voice response (IVR) units and customer call center personnel using the first name datum in all customer interactions. I know many people — including some of the most successful people in the world — who use a nickname or their middle name socially and professionally:

FirstName-PolitenessMan

It’s Larry Ellison, not Lawrence

. . . Mary Kay Ash, not Mary Ash

. . . Zig Ziglar, not Harry Ziglar.

Maybe in the interests of national security, these people use their legal name on airplane tickets and opening banks accounts, but that isn’t the same as giving permission to use that legal first name. Good customer service demands that companies make a note of a person’s preferred name in their data bases. It’s a minimal courtesy.

Also, as the customer, people should be allowed to opt-out of “first-name basis.” Again, it should be very easy to store this option in the data base.

My blessed mother had an interesting approach to this situation. When customer service reps or shop clerks would attempt to address her by her first name she would cheerfully say: “Oh, please feel free to call me Mrs. Minko.” She wasn’t scolding people, just indicating her preference.

>>> Update: On a related note, when it comes to speech-to-text voicemail transcription, an end-user name should be spelled correctly. For example, if a person’s name is spelled Jaymes and the voicemail is being transcribed to text, then the way Jaymes spells the name should be used. Yes, this is an extra step in the speech-to-text process, but it matters.

The 3rd Perp in the W-2 Phishing Scam?

In systems theory, a useful tool is looking past the “presenting problem.” When it comes to the W-2 phishing scam, we find the typical explanation: Humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity. (Info Sec magazine* called this particular phishing scam an “epidemic” because more than 55 companies have been identified as victims and CSO magazine** reports it as more than 60 companies.)

The standard narrative is that one individual in finance or HR fell for a phishing email that looked like it was from his/her CEO. In the case of Alpha Payroll Services, reported in CSO magazine, the employee who complied with the fake CEO request was fired. “Alpha Payroll leadership promptly terminated the employee, hired experts to assist in the investigation and response, and has been in contact with law enforcement, including the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS and the FBI, regarding the incident.”

What I haven’t heard once in the coverage is any acknowledgement of how truly insidious this phishing scam is: It’s the companies with decisive and commanding CEOs who are most likely to be victimized. The very attributes that make for a charismatic leader are the ones that have been exploited the most in this scam.

From a “presenting problem” view point, we have two perpetrators:

1. The cybercriminals who devised the scam and exploit reponses

2. Employees in HR and Finance who fall for the scam

But when we look past the presenting problem, we have a third actor:

3. CEOs who request reports and data expecting unquestioned obedience

In the cases that have been documented in the press, not one analyst or journalist has suggested that CEOs send emails to their entire company granting permission to challenge requests from the CEO. Instead, they either talk about awareness training for all employees or the need for sophistical data loss prevention systems.

In most of the high-tech companies I’ve worked for, it was standard operating procedure to respond to any request from the CEO within 3 hours — even if the requests were sent at 11pm or 4am.

Security awareness training often starts with the instructor saying: “Don’t be the weakest link.” I think that is wise counsel to both rank-and-file employees and executives.

* http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/55-companies-and-counting-fall-to/

** http://www.csoonline.com/article/3064675/security/alpha-payroll-fires-employee-victimized-by-w-2-phishing-scam.html

Teamwork versus Cohesion — How “Let’s go bowling!” Can Actually Hurt Productivity

Every semester when we got to textbook chapter on “Understanding Groups and Teams,” I would ask the class: “What does teamwork look like?”

People really struggled with that. Participants in the class started with words like “cooperation” and “friendly.” My job as the instructor was to press the point, so I’d rephrase the question: “If you were an anthropologist from another planet and you were studying humans, how would you describe teamwork in your field notes? What does teamwork look like to an outsider?”

Again, every semester, every class would struggle with this question. And, again, as the instructor I would offer a prompt: “I think people who work in a hospital emergency room are a great example of teamwork.” Then the proverbial lightbulb would go on. Then the class members would start saying things like: Emergency rooms are made up of people who are

well-trained
execute distinct roles
help each other as needed
communicate using well-understood terms and procedures

Members of an emergency room team also share some very deep values about saving lives, treating the injured and sick, and “covering” for a co-worker who might be overwhelmed.

Then, I would add: “Emergency room teams even practice how to handle situations before they occur. Can you imagine working for a company where teams actually practiced how to do a better job together?” After that, we’d have a good discussion about how to foster genuine teamwork in the workplace.

Also, in class, we’d have to circle back to the comments about “friendliness” or, as psychologists like to call it “cohesion.” One of the things that has been well-researched is that cohesion does not by itself improve productivity. “Let’s go bowling!” “Let’s do a group activity off-site!” “Let’s get t-shirts printed up!” These are almost a cliché in organizations, but they do nothing to improve productivity in and of itself. When a group has a high level of cohesion, they are more likely to achieve the group’s goals — regardless of how well the group aligns with the organization’s goals.

In other words, increasing affinity and cohesion can actually hurt productivity when the group is unhappy, misaligned with an organization’s goals, or the front-line manager “bad mouths” upper management.

Perhaps a simpler way of looking at it is this: Teaching a group to play together well doesn’t usually help them work together well. Any manager who has a lack-luster team should strongly consider these other ways of improving morale and productivity:

Clarifying roles (who does what)
Training in job skills (how can we do it better)
Uplifting and rewarding values such as customer satisfaction and service (aligning the group’s goals with the organization’s goals)

It should almost go without saying that any front-line leader who finds the above daunting has exactly the kind of challenge that a bowling event cannot help.

A final satirical comment: Sometimes managers will ask the team to propose a “team building” event. While indoor “skydiving” in a wind tunnel is fun, few teams are ready to try the following:

Research notes: C.R. Evans and K.L. Dion, “Group Cohesion and Performance” as published in the journal Small Group Research. B. Mullen and C. Copper, “The Relationship between Group Cohesiveness and Performance” as published in Psychological Bulletin. And, P. M. Podsakoff, S. B. MacKenzie, and M. Ahearne, “Moderating the Effects of Goal Acceptance on the Relationship between Group Cohesiveness bad Productivity” as published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.