Making Good Kills - Not Just Instructions for Hitmen!

The Financial Times today reported "Gloom Deepens as 75,000 Global Jobs Go"

Of course, NPR this morning reported that massage therapists, cigarette manufacturers and of course, bankruptcy lawyers are doing better than ever. So as always, bad news is always good news for someone!

I wrote this article initially in 2000, but it's probably more appropriate now than then. Making Good Kills is not just instructions for hitmen. It's about Stopping Projects, Quitting Jobs, Firing Employees, and Other Necessary Endings

If every project and every product your company turns out is a raging success; every person you hire is perfectly suited, and if your every career move turns out to be golden, you don't need to read this article.

For the rest of us, there is the occasional "kill" that has to be made - by ending a project, quitting a job, terminating an employee, dissolving a department or a company, or discontinuing a product or service.

Taking a risk is, at least, a passing nod to the possibility that something may go wrong. Although most of us were raised with a "never give up" attitude and feel it's a failure of sorts to admit a mistake or the need for a change, sometimes knowing when to quit (and redirect your energies to other things) is the key to future successes.

When learning a martial art, (or many other risky sports) a good coach will first teach a student "how to fall." Being able to fall gracefully without hurting yourself is the best foundation on which to begin to take risks. The greatest martial artists performances often involve several falls before an eventual spectacular victory.

The CPA Journal Online indicates that more than 300 U.S. firms go out of business every week. It would be naïve to think you (or your company) are immune to failure. It doesn't have to be a poor decision or mistake on your part- a change in market conditions, the actions of a competitor or inactions of a supplier, the behavior (or lack thereof) by an employee, or any number of factors outside of your control can set up a failure situation.

Businesses, or business people, who can "fall gracefully" learn and adapt quickly, and redeploy their resources in endeavors that have greater chances of success.

Keep reading . . .

Rising Above Negativity - Coming Back Up The Downward Spiral

Your company has been through a tough time. A merger, an acquisition, a spate of layoffs, a cut in the training budget, or anything that has caused less-than positive attitudes to prevail. You’re hearing grumblings around the water cooler. People are surfing the Web classifieds for job openings. Needless to say, you’re not getting 8 hours of creative, inspired, top-quality work out of every one of your people.

There is a cost to negativity. It’s not just the turnover and the chiseling at the productive time. It also saps the amount of energy people put into making sure their jobs are done right, and the amount of effort spent making sure decisions are made in the best interests of the company.

It is hard for an individual person to break out of a negative pattern, even with years of therapy. It is even harder for a corporate culture to turn from cynical and negative to forward-thinking and positive. There is significantly more inertia involved.

Freight trains don’t turn on dimes. It takes time, energy and persistence to change direction. Energy applied at the beginning of a turn matters exponentially more than energy applied later.

Here are some concrete things you can do:

Welcome, President Obama!

We're hoping for more global collaboration. And of course, better ethics, etiquette and effectiveness from this administration. :-)

When Should An Employer Call Your Cell?

A reader from Asia commented on our article - Business Etiquette - More than Just Eating With the Right Fork with an excellent point.

I think Handphone Etiquette need to be share in this article as well. As managers enjoy calling employees and expected immediate reply otherwise above 3 times he cannot reach the staff, the employee is condemned.

How often and whether worker should bring handphone everywhere they go or forget about the interrupting calls and rely on schedule more. Need to address the importance of handphone in communication to different levels of staff at work.
- Y

On one hand, if an employer provides the employee with a cell phone (or requires it) and there is an agreement (as part of the job description or schedule) that the employee will answer the cell phone within 3 rings during certain hours, then that's all fair and reasonable. And as we all know, some jobs require employees to be "on call" during agreed upon timeframes.

On the other hand, if there isn't an agreement in place, an employer has no business calling an employee at home (or on his cell phone, which amounts to the same thing these days) unless it's an emergency. A business that has regularly occurring emergencies should re-evaluate its procedures. Employees need to have time "off the clock" to maintain their sanity and their family life. I also think that people should turn off their cell phones at restaurants, and avoid yakking away at the bank or the grocery store. (Or while driving, heaven forbid!) Cell phones are a great convenience, but we all need to confine them to reasonable parts of our lives and interact with live people the rest of the time.

I think it's probably time to write another article on cell phone etiquette. What questions or pet peeves do you have? What should we include in the article?

Are Business and Ethics mutually exclusive?

I was struck by a contradiction today. I believe, like Ayn Rand, that businesses that provide goods or services serve mankind. But after being run through a few phone trees, web sites and customer service mazes, I'm having a cynical day.

This image, from an ING commercial, says that "everyone has a number." And in some cases, as the actors in the image make apparent, we sometimes see and judge one another "by the numbers."

So, are business and ethics mutually exclusive concepts?

Corporation: A business corporation is a for-profit, limited liability entity that has a separate legal personality from its members. A corporation is owned by multiple shareholders and is overseen by a board of directors, which hires the business's managerial staff. - Wikipedia

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There begins impertinence: make a person a label, or a sum of money, and he becomes not an end in himself, but an instrument; and to treat anyone as such is, as Kant argued, not just the supreme discourtesy but the supreme wrong. - A.C. Grayling