Odds and Ends

A few minor thoughts, feelings, observations and reactions on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend:

• Funny how some embarrassing situations make one group of people feel terrible, while another group thinks it’s hilarious.  And yes, I am talking about the debacle Kansas State University finds itself in after the revelation that their last athletic director made a secret deal to pay out millions of dollars of severance to the football coach they just fired, mostly through a dummy corporation that has the priceless name, “In Pursuit of Perfection, LLC”.  K-State fans are oozing anger and lamentations at the moment, while KU fans are chuckling openly.  That wheel will come around and bite us KU fans on the fanny eventually, when our school does something equally stupid.  That’s just the nature of college sports at the moment.  But for now it is awfully fun to point fingers and laugh.
• There is a certain woman in our office who has a tendency to strike up conversations with people in the hallways.  That, in and of itself, is no big deal.  Unfortunately, one of her favorite places to do this is directly across from the door to the men’s room.  She’ll be parked there, chatting away with someone, when you enter the restroom and she will still be there when you emerge.  Isn’t there some kind of etiquette involved here?  I know I wouldn’t be terribly comfortable conducting a conversation in front of the ladies room, and I’m sure the ladies entering and leaving the restroom wouldn’t be too thrilled with it either if some dude regularly hung out there.  I think I’d be given the stink eye quite often, and would likely be considered some kind of pervert.  On top of that, there are sounds and odors emanating from the men’s room that I wouldn’t have anything to do with if I didn’t have to go in there to take care of business, so I’m not sure why anyone would want to linger in that area if they didn’t have to.  The whole situation strikes me as strange.
• The laptop computer I’ve been using at work for the past 18 months or so is an absolute lemon.  It’s never been dropped or had anything spilled on it or abused in any other way that I’m aware of, yet it continues to give me fits periodically.  Some days it locks up my email and calendar with no warning, but only when I’m checking to see if someone has accepted a meeting invitation.  The lower third of the screen just stopped working one day and had to be replaced.  About every fourth or fifth start up I get a message saying the sound card won’t install.  If I try to attach a projector cable to it so I can display my screen in a conference room, the entire machine will sometimes lock up and force me to reboot.  Today was may favorite one yet.  I logged in this morning and the mouse was reversed.  Moving the mouse right caused the cursor to move left, and so on, forcing another reboot to get it corrected.  (A reboot which, sadly, resulted in yet another supposedly uninstalled sound card message.)  For anyone wondering,  my laptop is an IBM-branded T61 made by Lenovo.  I highly recommend looking elsewhere if you’re currently in the market for a laptop.
• Terrible news; Jay-Z has decided to leave Def Jam Recordings.  I know, I was shocked and saddened, too.  Fo rizzle.
• Specialist Zachary Boyd, you are clearly very, VERY, secure in your masculinity.  Pink boxers in battle?  Dude, I wouldn’t wear those if I was home, alone, in a room with no light.
• I am a touch confused by Fox News’ “Obama Change Index” on their website, for several reasons.  First, I don’t see anything that explains the rating scale.  It looks like all of the overall scores listed are nothing more than the simple average of the individual scores the pundits provided, but there’s nothing that says how those pundits arrived at their scores.  Second,  there’s no mention of anything that would tell me why these people are qualified to be offering ratings in the first place.  Third, I don’t see anything that provides the baseline against which change is being compared.  I mean, it’s the “Change Index”, right?  So, changed from what?  From the situation in place when Obama took office?  From last week?  Please amplify, Fox News.  Fourth, how were the categories determined?  They have one for Homeland Security but a different one for Foreign/Military Affairs, which seems screwy to me, because not all Military Affairs are Foreign (otherwise, there wouldn’t be need for a Homeland Security category) and not all Foreign Affairs are Military.  Why not just a “Security” category and a “Foreign Policy” category?  Why split “Budget” and “Stimulus” into two categories, instead of having just one “Economy” category?  Whatever the methods involved, I gleaned two things from the information.  First, Obama is doing well in whatever scale this thing uses.  He scored a 462 out of 700 possible points, which is 66%.  If you can get 66% of the opinion points in your favor as a politician, you’re doing pretty well.  Second, the portion of the public that frequents Fox News online is wildly out of step with the “pundits” who rated Obama.  The “public” scores Obama received totaled just 90 of the 700 possible points, less than 13%.  Even the Republican experts in the poll rated Obama at three times that rate, with 275 total points.  I’m not sure what that means, other than offering some quantifiable rate of just how far to the right the people who frequent Fox News are.  I mean, if you’re only giving Obama one-third of the points that a group of people described as “Republican Strategist” or “Republican Political Commentator” are giving him, then you’re way out on the right-hand fringe, you know?

There will likely be no updates here over the holiday weekend, though I may post something if anything interesting happens.  Otherwise, I’m taking it easy for a few days.

Everyone have a safe Memorial Day weekend, and try to give thanks in some way for the sacrifices our military have made to allow to have the freedoms we enjoy.  Like holiday barbeques or ballgames.

Or wildly wandering blog posts.

Taking Stock (Update)

Remember when I posted a couple of months ago about how disturbing it was to see my company’s stock performing even worse than GE’s?  Well, the last few weeks have changed that picture a good deal.  Here’s a snapshot of how the Dow Jones Industrial Average, General Electric, and my company have performed in the last three months.  My company’s stock is represented by the blue line (actually, it sort of looks black in the image):

Yippee!!

Meet the New Boss

For those of you who have never worked in a large corporation, let me explain a couple of things about personnel moves.

First, they happen a lot.  At the lower levels there’s always a fair amount of turnover, as kids fresh from college are either still figuring out what they want to do or are eager to move around a lot and see the world, so they flit in and out of roles pretty quickly. People in the middle-level jobs disappear frequently, too, but for different reasons.  They’re the prime targets for layoffs, headcount reductions, downsizing, “synergy opportunities”, or whatever other euphemism you care to use for telling people they’re not wanted anymore.  They’re targeted because they’re generally too old to be cheap labor anymore, but they’re still too young to be potential age discrimination lawsuits waiting to happen.  The higher-level jobs are generally filled by corporate climbers who are never satisfied with their existing job and are always looking for the next big thing.  They’ll take over an area for a couple of years, make their mark, and then move on to the next opportunity, sometimes within the same company, sometimes not.

So there’s a lot of churn in Corporate America.  This has led to the other thing I wanted to make clear; companies do this so much that they’ve gotten really good at communicating it.  It’s rare anymore that you hear about people having no inkling whatsoever that their job was in jeopardy before the axe finally fell.  Not many people are stunned at the news.  When it’s a corporate bigwig who’s moving on, it’s always phrased perfectly to avoid the slightest hint of controversy. I don’t recall ever getting an internal memo or email that said, “So and so left the company because he really wasn’t all that good at his job”.  No matter what the circumstances, leaders who leave are always publicly thanked for their valuable contributions, even when the company stock was trading at $115 when they took over and $12 when they left.  Telling the unvarnished truth, even in a professional way (“We’ve decided to make a change at the top of Department X because we were not satisfied with the results obtained to date.”), is simply not done.  Entire departments in large corporations are dedicated to nothing but the crafting and distribution of internal communications.

With all of this as background, imagine my surprise this morning when I crack open my email and found a  company-wide memo telling me that my boss is no longer my boss.  This memo was the first notice I received.  We found out with the rest of the company that our current boss had moved to a new role in the company.

That’s really not the way this is supposed to work.  When announcements like this happen – one internal leader taking over a different internal department – the company-wide announcement is always delayed until the leader in question has had the opportunity to give his old team a heads up.  It’s all timed so that he or she announces the changes to his team, THEN the corporate communications teams sends out the formal announcement.  It happens this way because it was determined long ago that it’s bad form for people to hear this news from anyone but their departing boss.  It’s considered unprofessional to do it any other way, a violation of common courtesy and professionalism to have the first communication handed down so impersonally.

So it was a bit surprising to get this email this morning.  It leaves me, and no doubt a slew of my colleagues as well, with a bunch of questions for my boss that he’ll now have to address individually, sucking up a lot of time in the process.  That’s the price he’ll have to pay for not making a crafted, blanket announcement to all of us in advance.

And it makes me wonder how someone who didn’t have the foresight to make such an announcement could have been tabbed for such a large promotion in the first place.

Nice People Rock

Nothing will put a smile on your faster, or get your day off to a better start, than running into a couple of nice people early in the morning.

Yesterday was Take Your Kids to Work Day here, and it was the first year my daughter was old enough to attend.  (My son, who attended last year, found the reinsurance business boring enough that he decided to pass.)  The organizers decided on a “Kids University” theme, and did a great job telling the kids about what we do here and keeping them interested and entertained.  Katie really enjoyed it, and loved the goody bag/backpack that each kid received.

Unfortunately, we went straight from the final event to the cafeteria for lunch, and I told Katie to hang the goody bag on the back of her chair while we ate.  Even as I said it, I half-knew there was a good chance that we would forget to take it with us when we left, but I told her to do it anyway.  Sure enough, we forgot it, and didn’t remember until we got home.  She took it well, but was still a bit disappointed, so I told her I’d try to find it this morning.

So I got here at my normal time (6:45) and went straight to my desk, hoping someone had found it, seen her name in it and dropped it off.  No luck.  So I went down to the cafeteria, which wasn’t even open for business yet, hoping it was still hanging on the back of that chair.  Again, no luck.  Then I went up to the security desk to ask if anyone had turned it in, which looked like my last resort.

There I encountered my first nice person of the day.  I don’t know his name, because he’s pretty new to the job and works the night shift.  He was only at the desk because the day shift hadn’t relieved him yet, but he was helpful anyway.  Being a bit new, and not having much lost and found experience since he usually works the desk at a time when no one else is here, he had no clue where our lost and found items may be.  Still, that didn’t stop him from trying to help.  He offered to take down my extension and pass along my request to his replacement, Melissa, one of our regular day-shift security people.  He could have just said, “call back at 8:00” and passed the buck, but he didn’t.

I went back to my desk to start my work day, log into my computer and whatnot, then and a few minutes later I went back down to the cafeteria, this time to get my breakfast.  There, our fabulous cashier, Millie, asked me how Katie liked her visit to the office yesterday.  Realize that Millie has never met Katie before breakfast yesterday morning, that over 500 people work in this building, and that about 75 kids were roaming around the place yesterday, yet Millie not only remembered that I brought Katie but also remembered her name.  How cool is that?

So I told Millie that Katie really had a good time, and I mentioned that the only problem was that we left her goody bag here, sort of hoping that maybe someone on the cafeteria crew had found it and set it aside.  They hadn’t, but Millie said she’d look around anyway, and then also offered the great idea that the planning committee probably had some extra goody bags that were never distributed, and could likely give one to Katie as a replacement.  A fabulous thought, one I never considered.  I still hadn’t heard back from the security desk, so I told Millie I’d wait until I heard from them, then I’d try to track down a replacement.

Back to my desk I went with my morning bagel and tea, and about fifteen minutes later one of the ladies who organized the event, Marilyn, stopped at my desk.  “I just came up from the cafeteria.  Millie said your daughter lost her goody bag yesterday.  Is that right?”  I confirmed that was the case, and she immediately told me that it was no problem getting her a replacement.  They had planned for about 100 kids and only 75 showed up, so there were plenty of leftovers.  Again, really, really nice of her to go out of her way to let me know I could stop hunting for one, and incredibly nice of Millie to pass along my problem to someone who could take care of it for me.

As sort of icing on the cake, my phone rang two minutes later and it was Melissa from the front desk, who had not only gotten the message from the night shift guy, but had immediately called me to ask how she could help as soon as she started her shift.

The replacement goody bag, packed with just the kind of stuff Katie loves – markers, crayons, erasers, pencils, small toys, some candy, etc. – is now tucked away in my own backpack for the trip home later today.  I’m sure she’ll be happy, but she won’t come close to being as happy as I am to have encountered a string of such really nice, helpful people this morning.

Infuriating…

There is really nothing else I can say about this article.

As an employee of a company that has a largely bonus-based compensation system, I understand that sometimes bonuses are necessary, no matter what the circumstances are in the business at that moment.  For instance, my employer’s horrible results in 2008 were almost exclusively the fault of their investment team, which somehow managed to fritter away over $5 billion in profits for the year, plus an extra billion to boot, resulting in just about a $1 billion annual loss for the company as a whole.  That’s bad, but it also had virtually nothing to do with roughly 95% of the company’s employees, who would have been responsible for an exceptional year if the investment people hadn’t been morons.

In a situation like ours, denying the investment team an annual bonus (and continued employment for that matter) is proper, but denying everyone else a bonus isn’t terribly fair, and my employers were wise enough to recognize that this year.  Bonuses were still paid.  The overall bonus pool was drastically reduced, and even people who had otherwise exceptional years saw a much smaller bonus than they would normally receive, on the order of several thousand dollars.  But at least they got something, and that was fair.

What AIG is doing is not fair, in my opinion, because they’re apparently rewarding the very people who forced that company into near-bankruptcy and necessitated a massive infusion of taxpayer dollars to keep the company a going concern. I understand that they may be contractually obligated to pay the bonuses, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable.  The contracts that guaranteed those payments were signed in 2008, before the market really tanked but long after the sub-prime mortgage debacle had become known and everyone in a position to know better was aware that AIG was horribly exposed to that mess.  In short, AIG leadership agreed in early 2008 to pay out millions of dollars in bonuses to the very executives they already knew had placed the company’s existence in jeopardy.

And now those bonuses are being funded, in part, by me.  A guy who got a smaller bonus this year because of people very much like the ones whose incompetence is now being rewarded by my tax dollars.

Infuriating.

Stat Nerds Welcome

On a March 9th podcast, Bill Simmons of ESPN.com interviewed Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets.  I had never heard of Morey until that broadcast, so I googled him as I listened.

Turns out that he had almost no sports background of any kind before getting his first job.  He wasn’t a player or a coach, he didn’t study sports management in school.  In fact, his bachelor’s degree is in Computer Science.  It’s not a typical path to being an NBA executive.

What Morey did was get himself hired at Stats, Inc. as they started up their NBA division a few years ago, crunching number along with everyone else at that company.  That gave him some exposure to the league, then he got even more when he was involved in the acquisition of the Celtics by the current ownership team.  He was noticed during those negotiations and hired to be the Celtics’ Senior Vice President of Operations and Information, basically tasked with providing statistical analysis of player performance.  By 2006 he was named assistant GM of the Rockets, and ascended to his current role a year later, when he was just 35-years old.

His primary approach is to use proprietary statistical methods for evaluating player performance objectively, giving weight to all kinds of things that have never been counted before, like setting picks, posting up a defender, and so on.  It’s a somewhat new and revolutionary approach, one that brings to the NBA the types of more modern statistical analysis we’ve seen in baseball for a couple of decades.

All of that is interesting, and makes me root for the guy.  But what I found even more appealing was this; He is actively soliciting input from the general public.  Despite being a genius (MBA from MIT), and having developed leading-edge analysis in his field, he remains open enough to new ideas and concepts that he’s willing to take that input from anywhere, even some Average Joe on the street who just happens to know a lot about basketball.  Clearly, Morey hasn’t lost touch with the fact that he was an outsider at one point, too.  He knows from personal experience that some of the best ideas about a particular subject are sometimes held be people outside the known circle of subject-matter experts.

How refreshing.  If only all executives operated this way.  Morey’s view would seem to be common sense, but, sadly, it’s a lot more uncommon than it should be.

EDIT – March 15th:  Many thanks to Andrew Lachow for sending me a link to this great article by Michael Lewis that appeared in the New York Times Magazine about a month ago.  It’s a fascinating read that I highly recommend.

Taking Stock

Let’s talk about stocks.  Boring subject, but topical in our current economic situation.

I’ve worked for three major global organizations during my career.  One was bought out by a different major global organization after I left, so I can’t track their stock anymore.  It wouldn’t matter to me anyway, because I moved all of my money out of their 401(k) program and rolled it into my second employer’s program when I moved there.

That second company was GE, as I’ve said before.  Shortly after I started working there, GE stock split three ways and life was good.  Within another six months, the stock started slipping.  Soon it was below the price that it split to, roughly $50.  Then it dropped some more, to about $30, and basically spent the next six years hanging around that number.  Since basically all of GE’s 401(k) investment options were heavily tied to the stock price, it wasn’t really great for your retirement planning, you know?

Almost three years ago, GE sold the part of the organization that I’m in to my current employer, and I couldn’t move my money out of that 401(k) fast enough.  I rolled it to a self-directed IRA instead, just in time to watch GE stock drop like a rock.  On my last day at GE, the stock was trading at $30.09.  This morning it opened at $7.41, and that’s UP about 10% from last week.  This provided me with some sense of satisfaction.

Until I compared them to the performance of my current company’s stock.  Here’s a really ugly chart of the past 12 months.  The gold line is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the green line is GE, and the blue line is my current company.

Looks like I’m going to be working a few years longer than planned.

Personality Quirks

I just saw this personality test posted on Joe Posnanski’s blog.  According to Joe, he was a diagonal squiggle, which supposedly makes him mad as a hatter.

Well, as I commented there, I’ve been working for one gigantic global company or another nearly 20 years now, and they have these incessant waves of tests they like to unleash on their employees to measure their personality types. I’ve probably taken a dozen of them over the years, and all the results agree.

I’m odd.

Without fail, my test results always come back differently than anyone else in my group, class, team, or company. In one case, my results were different than anyone who had ever taken the test. (At least, that’s what they told me. Frankly, I think that means they were either lying or hadn’t administered the test enough yet.)  The problem seems to be that I not only have traits that represent each of the various personality types, as most people probably do, but I apparently hold them very strongly, even the ones that seem to be diametrically opposed. My personality traits, and therefore my test answers, are always warring with each other, in effect.

Anyway, this test doesn’t really give me that option, which is nice for a change. I had to choose just one, and I had to do it without thinking, so I chose square, probably because I drew it better than the others. If this test is ever reinvented with four completely different shapes that represent the same four personality types, I’d likely choose something that doesn’t resemble a “square” personality in any way. That’s just me.

Not sure if that makes me nuttier than a diagonal squiggly, but it sure feels like it most days.

Time Terminology

I need a little help here, so please offer your insights in the comments.  Recently I was asked to re-schedule a meeting.  One of the participants had a last minute conflict at the scheduled time, so she sent me an email asking for a change.  These were her exact words:

“Can you move our meeting back an hour?”

Since the meeting was originally scheduled for 11:00 AM Eastern time, I read her comment and thought, “Wow, she wants to move the meeting to noon?  That won’t make people happy.”  You know, because meetings over the lunch hour just aren’t received all that well.  So I emailed her back and asked if that’s really what she wanted to do.  Turns out it wasn’t.  When she said “move the meeting back”, she meant “back” like “back in time”, or earlier.  She meant to have the meeting at 10:00 AM in lieu of 11:00 AM.

Now, I fully recognize the whole “Spring Forward, Fall Back” concept of time, and that “back” is often used as as a synonym for “earlier”.  I mean, Huey Lewis made a fortune off “Back in Time”, so I get it.    But in normal speech I use it exactly opposite.  If I want to move something earlier I say we should move it “up”, or “forward”.  “Back” is reserved for later.

I just ran this past my wife and she sided with the co-worker, so maybe it’s just me.  But I’d like some more feedback on this because now it’s bugging me.

A Bad Taste in My Mouth

Can someone please explain why medicine that is specifically designed for your mouth tastes terrible? 

I’ve got a wisdom tooth trying to pop through the gum, and it’s causing some discomfort (as you can imagine).  So until I can get to see my dentist later this month, my wife bought me some Anbesol to see if that would help.  To be perfectly fair, the stuff does work.  It numbs my gum for a while, it’s not messy to work with, etc.  All that is fine. 

The problem is that is tastes awful.  I mean hideously bad.  It’s what I imagine rancid egg whites would taste like.  You get even a touch of that stuff on your tongue, which is inevitable,  and you want to rinse your mouth out before it takes any effect, which, of course, would render the stuff utterly useless.  So you suck it up and leave that junk in your mouth until it finally numbs up your taste buds along with everything that’s causing your pain.

There’s got to be a better way.  If pharmaceutical companies make medicine so foul-tasting that people would rather endure whatever malady caused them to get the medicine in the first place, then maybe it’s time for them to start re-thinking their flavoring process, you know?  We live in a world where we can make wood taste like bacon, and where rubber can be made to taste like nearly anything.  Someone figured out a way to make straws that flavor your milk as you drink it.  There’s a company that sells flavored water for dogs.  Dogs!  For crying out loud, criminals have figured out a way to make fruit-flavored cocaine and candy-flavored meth. 

It seems like there are all manner of people thinking up all manner of ways to make things taste better.  But apparently none of them work for the company that makes Anbesol.  Sorry, but if some scientist was paid to figure out a way to make clarinet reeds taste like pina coladas, then, by God, there’s got to be a way to make medicine taste like something other than medicine.