11.3 - Revisiting information overload

For a week, I was out of the country and had no Internet or phone access. Despite early separation anxiety, I truly learned to enjoy the feeling. As I sat on the plane... I dreaded the avalanche of email I would return to. Sure enough, my voicemail box was full and it took me about 3 hours just to sort through my emails for just one week.

After reading about information overload for quite a while, I decided to curtail my email usage as much as possible. It took me a while to wean myself away from tv and caffeine... and I haven't been successful staying away from those, so I'm dubious about my efforts to be strong when it comes to email. So far, I've restricted myself to checking email only twice a day and it's been nice. At the very least, it should help me organize my time better...

Wish me luck!

11.2 - Rants & Raves, pt.2

Another random rant.

the next chapter of my last blog...

The year following my bad performance review, I had low motivation at work. Think Office Space, when he starts cleaning fish at his desk... but instead, I would bring fishing reels to work, dismantle them, clean them, then reassemble them. My manager never said anything directly about it, but seemed somewhat amused by my little assembly line. I got my job done, but did the bare minimum necessary. I made sure never to sign up for projects if I could avoid them. One day towards the end of the year, we had our last meeting before our performance review. He asked how I felt about the year so far and for reasons I don't understand, I told him...
"my job is boring. xxxxx is an idiot, I've had to fix her work several times. I don't trust working with xxxxx, he's a backstabber. I don't like coming to work. the customer whines too much. I take long lunches and sometimes sneak 9holes of golf in. I don't like it here. I think the processes we do are completely asinine and a waste of time."

He thanked me for my imput and didn't really address anything, asking what I'd prefer to do. I told him I rather be working on an external account to have some other human interaction and get out of my rut. A month later, I got a great review saying that I showed initiative and was assigned to an external account. I was as surprised as anyone... I had busted my butt the year before and received a sub-par rating. This year, I slacked off and told him I had no motivation... and he gave me a good rating.

I think the whole rating and evaluation system is a farce. It seems so subjective and not based on any solid criteria. I can work on a dozen projects, fail 1, and get a bad rating... or I can work on 4 projects all year and finish them leisurely and get a good rating. I'm not sure what kind of behavior they're trying to reinforce...

Rant off.

11.1 - Rants & Raves

Random rant.

Growing up in Hawaii, I always thought it would be cool to move to the mainland and work in a large corporation. Unfortunately, my experiences have soured my perceptions of what it was really like. Most notably, the companies I've been a part of have had horrible communication practices. The following is one example:

Every year in IBM, we have annual evaluations. Since our bonuses, promotions, and raises are based off these evaluations, they are understandably quite important. One year, I had an active year, receiving a few performance awards and completing several high profile projects. During annual review, I received a rating below what I expected. My manager knew I was upset and suggested that I may talk to my second level manager. As part of our checks and measures, IBM has an open door policy for these situations. It turned out to be a waste of time. After bringing a list of my year's accomplishments... my second line manager told me "I can't do anything... I have to trust my first line managers since they're the ones in the field." My second line manager refused to even review my documentation. My manager refused to talk to me about the issue once it was handed out... and I had no recourse to appeal the matter. Frustrating.

9.5 - Change is good?

p.328 talks about "What makes organizational change efforts successful?"
The section identifies 3 main criteria - how widely change was accepted by stakeholders, how pursuant the results were to goals, and how the change may have unintended consequences.

These three are so tied to each other, it's hard to separate them into mutually exclusive entities. When I first started working, I thought that goals were the ultimate criteria. It didn't matter how the change occurred and who liked it... the bottom line was, did it accomplish the intended goals? I quickly learned that is not the case. If the change is not widely accepted, I witnessed that the results often reverted quickly. Change is easy to push through for short term goals, but acceptance was needed for long-term change goals.

Likewise, I've experienced so many cases of unintended consequences. Whether this entails poor planning or diagnosis, some of these consequences were very obvious. Short-sightedness and tunnel vision is prevalent in some groups I've been in - "eye on the prize, focus on task at hand." An outside perspective often helps shake things up and lend a shred of common sense to some change projects.

9.4 - Change... as long as you do it my way

Chapter 11 talks about change...

My first corporate job had PBC's - Personal Business Commitments. We would cite short and long term goals/commitments, then be measured against them when it came to our annual reviews.

Management often used these PBC's as a tool to try and push change through a division. Unfortunately, the way they did so was poorly executed. We were told to write what we wanted and what would motivate us. When we were done, we had a quick review with our manager... who would hand us his PBC's and make us re-write ours to match and be consistent with his goals. His goals were not necessarily his per se, but rather based off his manager's PBC's. The trend cascaded from some originating point where they thought "this is what we should focus on".

In the end, our PBC's were just a frustrating experience, ultimately just copying some loosely formed set of goals from up the chain. They never really inspired change and the PBC wording changed so greatly from year to year that the meaning was lost.

I could see the benefit of giving us a list to start with BEFORE we draft our own PBC's, stating things like "we wish to have customer satisfaction rating of 95%" By this, we could think about it and see how we could do our part in meeting this group expectation.

9.3 - Burnout... and Office Space

From the movie Office Space:
"I was sitting in my cubicle today and realized that every single day of my life has worse than the day before it, so every single day that you see me is on the worst day of my life."

It's amazing how many parallels I find between my life and Office Space...

P. 299 begins the book's discussion of burnout. Working in a large corporation, I've experienced bad burnout. Having worked in smaller companies, I always thought that working for a large international corporation was a glamorous endeavor... boy was I wrong.

Working for my first large corporation excited me. I learned about my important role in internal affairs and how I fit into this huge machine. I played my role of a cog very well, diligently doing my job. Unfortunately, this excitement was short-lived. My role became tedious and redundant. I began to notice how little my job was appreciated and how management eschewed feedback. Soon, I was a victim of burnout. I literally dreaded coming to work. I considered taking a year off and being a rice farmer... it sounded more fun than my job.

I eventually got out of this rut by transferring to an external team. Working with individual customers allowed new experiences and new challenges. I was able to see my work making a real difference.

9.2 - Managing Conflict

P. 290 has a chart showing relationships between cooperativeness and assertiveness. When there is low cooperativeness and high assertiveness, competition is the prevalent style.

I had a project lead once that was deep into the competitive corner of the style chart. It was his way or the highway... while not competitive, he did exhibit dominance in the form of power trips. As the project was very time critical, he acted as a dictator. There are times when having a "take charge" kind of leader is helpful and the most efficient. Unfortunately, his leadership was dominant to a fault. Most notable of his shortcomings was the inability to take feedback from team members. This turned out to be a considerable defect. Our team was assembled from site representatives for a rollout plan... and there were certain locations in which the plan would not work due to hardware limitations. Instead of taking feedback, our project lead said that those sites would just have to figure it out. As a result, the project ended in failure.

There's an old saying "when you point a finger at someone, there are four fingers pointing back at you." Upon failure, our project lead pointed fingers at those problematic sites, saying that they did not handle their part of the equation. Several team members quickly responded with documentation of the many times the issues have been brought up...


In a situation like this, it is hard to ascertain how to address this conflict. The immediate response would be to talk to a superior. This was attempted by a team member, but the upper level manager said "I'm not familiar with the project, so I have to trust my people to do the right job." Perhaps going even a level higher was warranted, but with much internal turmoil, making enemies was a risky proposition...