You’re More than Just Your Major

You’re More than Just Your Major
By Jonathan Lewis '11

Choosing a major was easily the most stressful part of my years at Stony Brook. Thinking pragmatically, I knew that studying engineering would set me up for a lucrative career. But I found myself much more engaged in my history and political science courses. Ultimately, I decided to make the switch from STEM to humanities in my sophomore year.

Once I changed to liberal arts, I found that I loved going to my new classes every day - but I secretly dreaded the thought of one day graduating and having to find work. What I had lost sight of was the fact that classes are just one part of the university experience. Today, I work as a supply-chain engineer for a major food distributor. In a blog article for the American Historical Association, I detailed how my major helped me develop useful skills for my job; but this time, I want to speak more to how my hobbies and extra-curricular activities during college helped me stand out among applicants during my job hunt.

Back when I was going on interviews, I was often asked by hiring managers about what I was doing outside of class. I told them how during my junior year, some friends and I started doing an annual online charity telethon to raise money to help buy games and toys for children’s hospitals. Running a 24/7 live event involves a substantial amount of data analytics. For the event, I was tasked with determining peak times for viewership to maximize the potential donor draw when scheduling on-camera special events. As it turns out, my current position also requires a lot of manipulating data and drawing conclusions useful to developing business strategies. The hiring managers at my company were impressed that I’d not only used real-world data to implement decisions, but had done so on a project of my own initiative.

Even if your major is going to feed directly into a dream career, you can use your extra-curricular experiences to stand out among a crowded field of applicants. The interview process is not just about screening for job skills, but also determining if an applicant is a good fit for the office culture. My extracurricular experiences helped in this area, too. I did two study abroad programs: one to Shanghai through Stony Brook University, and another to Southern France as a non-traditional student. I found out during my interview with my current boss that he was a non-traditional student for a semester in Sweden. Making that small personal connection changed the whole tone of the interview. The conversation was more relaxed, and I felt more confident when discussing my job-specific skills because the person interviewing me was no longer a stranger.

Applying for jobs as a freshly minted graduate can be difficult, especially when many companies are looking for applicants who are experienced with applying skills to real-world situations. When building your resume, remember that you have been developing skills not only through class, but through your extra-curricular activities as well!

Solving Modern Management Ills: How Simple!

Solving Modern Management Ills: How Simple!
By John Cona '87

“Personal Service Level Agreements”

Herein is the Right Way, a simple program for rectifying awful, nonsensical, failure-ridden corporate cultures. 

It can start with one disciplined individual or a small group, as long as they have common sense and don’t mind giving some tough love to their workplace neighbors…

Personal Service Level Agreements.  As of this post, you have no excuses.

Summary

In a previous essay, I presented a checklist of typical, bad practices in corporate executive and project management.  So as not to be accused of being an ineffectual whiner, I herein present the astonishingly simple solution. 

Buddhism has the Middle Way; Taylorism the One Best Way; Middle-Earth the Straight Way.  Among successful managers, we have The Right Way….

The RIGHT WAY – Personal Service Level Agreements

Introduction

At a recent client meeting, one of the Senior Program Managers laughed, mentioning that he had four meetings booked for that very time. Imagine?

At the same firm, one senior technical architect had an email rule that accepted every meeting request AUTOMATICALLY!

Over and over again, I see the symptoms – increasingly, unabashedly, as the above example shows – of bad management. Yet even as corporate personnel admit these obvious issues, I am continually told, “but that is the company, the culture, you can’t change it.”

So I say: watch me.  If I insist on doing things right, then I can have those in my group do likewise.  We can have simple rules of engagement for our interactions. 

Because these principles start with YOU, the individual, I call them Personal Service Level Agreements – analogous to what service companies or internal departments put in their contracts.  I list their clauses below.

From there, we can force other groups to follow the rules if they want to interact with us.  And it grows from there; we as courteous pebbles start the avalanche of a productivity revolution.

But of course, it cuts both ways. We stand by our own Personal Service Level Agreements so that our neat idea of binding each other to correct, polite, considerate behavior in the aggregate causes projects and tasks to move along more efficiently. As Robert Plant never sang, “does anybody remember successful projects?” - on time and within budget.

Personal Service Level Agreement Clauses

• I will answer all emails within 48 hours, even if only to state that I need more time.
• I will not accept a meeting invitation (where I am a required attendee) unless I can definitely attend.
• I will prepare for meetings beforehand so as not to waste everyone else’s time.  If the meeting is mine, I will distribute materials beforehand so that others can prepare.
• I will come to meetings on time, and I will leave when the time is over.
• For any given endeavor, I will only involve those who need to be involved.
• When I am given a task, I will give a completion date that I will take seriously and that I can realistically achieve.
• If I am GIVEN a completion date, I will only accept it if I can realistically achieve it.
• I will make clear all resources I need, etc., to achieve my task goals.
• When I give tasks to others, I will require that they act similarly - to only accept what they can achieve.
• I will allow others to push back on me; I will deal in the truth.
• If a request comes in that interrupts my personal planning, I will reject it, even if it is from my boss and even if his boss just read a new article about Hadoop.  I will not act stupid just because my superiors like it.
• I will accept the consequences of missed deadlines even if it affects my performance review and career and compensation prospects at the firm.
• I will not laugh at or ignore failure, whether in myself or in others.
• I will have a plan and stick to it. I will define “emergency” in terms of lives at risk, legal pause-giving, or moral issues ONLY.
• I will be disciplined, and insist that others allow me to operate under this PSLA.

In short:  I will act responsibly, considerately, and not blow smoke up highly personal orifices.

Conclusion

In a follow up essay, I will discuss this topic further. But can you already see how easy it might be to remedy common management vices, with a little common sense?

Again, please remember: it can start with just one individual.  From there, others within the group will be forced to interact more efficiently.  And from there, other groups will have to adopt associate “rules of engagement” to coordinate and communicate across boundaries more effectively.

Have fun!

As background, note that I have broad experience in Information Technology, having started as a software developer directly out of college – I was a mathematics major, and my first industry positions were in actuarial departments (within large, complex insurance companies) as a student-actuary and programmer.  From there my career proceeded along a typical arc:  technical leadership, architecture, enterprise architecture – and in parallel I also followed an analogous path through management:  project management, program management, executive management.

That described, and though I am hired usually for executive IT, custom software development, analytics management, most of my work now boils down to solving generic management issues.  And, further, most of the problems have simple solutions found by everyday reasoning and using good, old-fashioned common sense.

Email me with your questions, comments, tales of management horror, and commiseration.  Thank you.

Modern Management Ills: A Checklist of Symptoms

Modern Management Ills: A Checklist of Symptoms 
By John Cona '87

How to spot poor management and understand its supporting, perpetuating cultures. A checklist of warning signs for the wary as observed at one man's real life clients...

Summary

Healthy job seekers beware!  Poorly-run corporations make their presence known through easily recognizable symptoms.  In this essay, I present the etiology of ineffectual company management; in a follow-on piece, I will prescribe some simple home remedies. Hopefully, this knowledge will empower those new to the white-collar workforce to be agents of change. New workers do not have to sit powerless against the abject silliness and non-common-sensical goings-on at most corporations. There is hope.

Introduction

As a Stony Brook alum (1987) and long-time independent Management Advisor and consultant, I was asked to write a series of blog-essays giving career development advice to new graduates. 

I thought it best to write a warning.

Corporate bungling is rampant, especially in management. There are many things to be managed in a large business, and they all falter where basic management skills are lacking.

Why?

The common cause...The common cure...  

My core  observation - having directly helped over 70 firms and indirectly advised literally hundreds - is that there is simply a lack of discipline.

Common causes include:

• Ready acceptance of excuses to go off-plan
• A dearth of management skill to begin with
• Plain old incompetent, silly or unsettling behavior
• Accedence to a superior's own causes
• Surrender to short term thinking, or lack of its recognition and ramifications

And running like a bright vein of fool's gold through all of these sources is a lack of common sense.

The Checklist: Easily Recognizable Signs of Poor Management 

I expand on and discuss these items in the following section:

Those instantly recognizable:

1. Email Inboxes Containing Thousands Of (Usually Unread) Messages
2. Consultant Dependency (which is just silly)
3. PowerPoint Heck (which is just unsettling)

Those noticeable within a normal work week:

1. Reliance (Even a Little Bit!) On Instant Messaging and Texting
2. New Directions Every Day or Week. Hour?
3. Requiring Face-to-Face Time Every Day. Hour?
4. "Hallway Management"
5. Crowds of People in a "Working Meeting"
6. Addressing Actionable Emails to More than One Person
7. Giving Multiple Resources the Same Job To Do.

Those that may take time to see:

1. Lack of Quality, Lack of Productivity, and Heroic Efforts
2. Operating Continually in Reactive Mode
3. ~60% Cancellation Rate on Scheduled Meetings - Or Anything Over 10%
4. People Late or Absent From Meetings

Exposition on the Signs of Poor Management

Those instantly recognizable:

1. Email Inboxes Containing Thousands Of (Usually Unread) MessagesThis may indicate:

• Lack of ability - or lack of willingness - to delegate. A manager who is involved in every conversation that his subordinates undertake does not trust them, or is not aware that he/she can/should trust them.
• A management style that does not scale. Simply put: once a person's plate is full, there is no more that they can do.
• Poor performance. Being spread too thin brings about a lack of quality output in anyone.
• Lack of an organizational model that matches the workload. If a single person is receiving too many emails, this means that too many recipients are addressed to, or copied on, emails inappropriately.
  
  

2. Consultant Dependency
This sign indicates that management is not, on its own, producing good ideas. At many large companies, there is a tendency to forego an important decision until a consulting firm says it is OK. The approach is not completely wrongheaded; consultants can supply valuable insight where expertise is lacking. At some point, though a firm needs to recognize its own strengths and back its people when they make decisions that they should be counted on to make.

3. PowerPoint Heck
In recent years, operational and organizational management have changed so that, in many instances, they communicate solely in slide-speak. The displacement of more suitable forms of documentation and communication by PowerPoint is a sign of dependence and inefficiency.

Those Noticeable Within a Normal Work Week:

1. Reliance (Even a Little Bit!) On Instant Messaging and Texting.
This is a sign that communications have "backed up"; as mountains of unread emails accumulate, the need for attention-getting moves toward instant messaging. This replaces the managed, directed, purposeful and productive communications of email with tools marketed mostly to teenagers. To rely on texting or IM is to rely on happenstance - what if the recipient is not available at the time of the message?

2. New directions every day/week/hour
This is a clear sign that there is no proper planning.  ‘What happened to yesterday’s direction?  Is it on maternity leave?’  is an appropriate, common sense response (though perhaps should not be spoken aloud; leave it to me to express this).

3. Requiring face-to-face time every day/hour

When there is no active plan, there is no way for managers to gauge the productivity of workers without watching them type.  Common sense dictates that witnessing someone at their desk does not necessarily show that they are being productive.

4. “Hallway Management”

This is the overwhelming urge for a manager to give people things to do upon every greeting – even chance meetings in the hall or cafeteria.  The implication is that the receiver of the new request was not fully allocated at the time. Another implication is that there is no plan.

5. Crowds of People in a ‘Working Meeting'.

Optimally, everyone in a “working” meeting should contribute evenly to maximize its efficiency.  If this isn’t the case, reallocated meeting topics and attendees should be considered.  Meetings need to have clear agendas, a leader to keep the discussions on point, and a pass-the-conch-shell mentality so that contributors are not shouted down.

6. Assigning the Same Job to Multiple People.

If the same job is assigned to several people, a supervisor may forget who has been given which tasks. There is a common defense for this: that it is done purposely as a way for managers to compare workers’ reactions.  Whose solution was best?  Who responded quickest? If this were done in a management-theory experiment, it would be forgivable.  The other 99.9% of the time, it is a sign of inefficient operations.

7. Addressing Actionable Emails to More Than One Person

This is similar to the previous item but different in that this is also a communication-management problem.

Those That Take Time to See:

1. Lack of Quality, Lack of Productivity, and Heroic Efforts 
Longer-term lack of quality deliverables is a more difficult symptom to recognize immediately. More easily observed are the heroic efforts required when deliverables are finally met – one person, or a team, working extra hours as a tightly-knit group, cheerlead by management to act “as one” , with redundant efforts and inefficient grunts and groans until the project is completed, forced over the goal line in a muddy scrum. A shortcut to recognizing this symptom is to look for braggadocio or corporate pride in individuals who regularly perform 50+ hour work weeks just to keep the status quo.

2. Operating Continually in Reactive Mode

This is not only an effect of a lack of disciplined management; in many cases it is also a cause. Those who enjoy causing chaos in order to mask a lack of management skill contribute to the resulting plan-less-ness.  

3. 60% Cancellation Rate on Scheduled Meetings - Or Anything Over 10%...

When high rates of cancellations occur – especially last minute – it is a clear indicator of poor time oversight and the absence of a respected, bought-into plan – more so when a manager cancels meetings that they had called themselves.

4. People Late or Absent from Meetings.

Ditto.

Simple Steps Toward: The Right Way

In a follow-on piece, I will present some guidelines on the right way to organize and communicate in an organization - simple enough that an individual can put them into place.

To read a more complete version of this essay, click here.

As background, note that I have broad experience in Information Technology, having started as a software developer directly out of college – I was a mathematics major, and my first industry positions were in actuarial departments (within large, complex insurance companies) as a student-actuary and programmer.  From there my career proceeded along a typical arc:  technical leadership, architecture, enterprise architecture – and in parallel I also followed an analogous path through management:  project management, program management, executive management.

That described, and though I am hired usually for executive IT, custom software development, analytics management, most of my work now boils down to solving generic management issues.  And, further, most of the problems have simple solutions found by everyday reasoning and using good, old-fashioned common sense.

Email me with your questions, comments, tales of management horror, and commiseration.  Thank you.