‘In 1 Powerful Sentence, Mark Cuban Just Gave Every
Company in America a Harsh Wake-up Call’
It’s
a simple statement, with profound implications.”
Mark Cuban – GETTY IMAGES
Goes on with:
“Mark Cuban, Shark Tank investor and outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, recently took to his personal blog to comment on a major issue facing the NBA — and every employer in America.
There’s been a lot of talk regarding how NBA players have really
taken control of their league, with the most talented players teaming up behind
the scenes to play together or asking to be traded to a different team if
they’re not happy with their situation.”
Quotes Cuban saying:
“Some feel that the player movement we have seen … is a problem, I don’t. I think it is exactly what we should expect, and it reflects what is happening in the job market across industries in our country.“
…
“This reality has changed what it is like to be an employer.
In the past, the default was that the best employees would want a long
career with their employers, because that is what you did. You kept your job as
long as you could. No longer.”
And then, the ‘1 Powerful Sentence’:
“Now the onus is on employers to keep their best employees
happy.”
Don’t we guys in software industry of 1980-2010 vintage know? Talk to us and we’ll tell you horror stories to fill many tomes. With attrition soaring amok, further aggravated by shortage of talent pool, it wasn’t about keeping ‘best employees’ happy. One had to amuse whoever walked by within six feet of the front gates to lure…
Welcome to the Party, America – you’re a few decades late
though. Invite us to talks – we can tell a thing or two – on how we coped up,
kept the show going, our customers served without disruption!
To be fair, it’s not new to them either – I recall from many years ago a senior executive from HP, wise to our predicament, mentioning it was no different in those early years in California. May be long forgotten with its learnings.
The article goes on to talk about the How’s of the sentence, covering all bases: coaching, empowerment, inclusivity, communication, career development…besides remuneration.
Coming back to the real subject of this post, ‘1 Powerful Sentence’:
“Now the onus is on employers to keep their best employees
happy.”
You thought happiness is more for pets given to by their
masters?
Sorry, am being irreverent and flippant.
Years of working with colleagues at all levels and of all hues in good and bad times has taught us one thing that I share with you here – a perspective adding to (and not in any way invalidating) the professed sentence and its How’s:
Make it
a journey with them – feasible, authentic, involved, worthwhile,
interesting and enjoyable for them, for you and the organization. Happiness
ensues and a lot more…
To cite a parallel, of relevance – Just as caring for community’s safety and earning their respect and the adrenal rush of running towards (and not away from) danger to save life and property are identified as the two pure and strong turn-on’s in the lives of fire-fighters who in many surveys end up high to very high in job satisfaction.
Each of those words feasible…is purposeful, non-overlapping and worthy of deliberation.
Well, I can tell you – and my colleagues out there would also vouch – it has been shown to work for its practitioners.
Weeks ago,
my daughter visiting from US brought a small device.
It was a
night lamp. With a motion sensor!
Peel off the
cover on its back and stick it to the wall and you’re on. As simple as that.
So when it
finds someone walking, it lights up the way.
And
thoughtfully it comes in pairs.
Useful to
help the old, for example, when they get up in the night sleepy-eyed to go to toilet.
One device for the way up and another for return, especially when there is a
bend.
Costs some $25
to $30.
Here’s a simple device that makes tending a wee bit easier and life safer for the old. Am sure there must be other uses too.
But it’ll
be years before it’s made in this country, if at all.
It’s
nothing new – the concept and the opportunity of putting electronics and
miniaturization to help in daily life for some strange reason never captured
the fancy of young engineers and entrepreneurs in this country. And with it a
huge potential for employment for self and others.
What happened years ago comes to mind. I had a long daily commute from Chembur to workplace in Seepz. At one point in Ghatkopar, our vehicle would tee off into the road through Asalpha. After plodding through heavy traffic for a few kilometers unsuspectingly, we would find the road blocked – merrily dug up by the authorities or some utility company. What else but to trace back to the point and take a long detour losing precious time in the busy morning hours. Why couldn’t they tell us about it in time? A communication problem amenable to some simple solution with electronics. Of course, in absence of anything else, a placard with an announcement would have served the purpose.
The arrival of and the revolution brought in by pagers and later mobile devices elsewhere in the world failed miserably to ignite any kind of similar innovation in this land.
This is not limited only to the field of communication. Consider this simple but dire need: Until recently we did not have a reliable and inexpensive way of timely switching on and off of pumps drawing water from the municipal mains to storage tanks atop apartments. The guy on duty would turn on the pump, go goofing about and return ‘aaraamse’ from his chai and gossip and switch it off but not before the floors and adjacent parts of the road had been washed clean by the overflowing water. Even today in times when water is scarce, installing these devices are not mandated by corporations to plug wastage!! A small opportunity to create a market place for electronics and its supply chain missed 😦
Areas like entertainment electronics, avionics, computers…are ‘to dhoor ki bhat’.
With a huge population, increased urbanization, improved standard of living and the burgeoning need for a range of services, possibilities of tapping into electronics are mind-boggling.
But we won’t – it’ll all come from China or Taiwan while our youth bitch and moan, blame the government for the ills or in some parts of the country turn into professional protesters available to politicians for hire! Or, turn into programmers!
To heck with sensors, devices, prime-movers, iot…as long as we have those dumb guys in China churning them out…
Is it because tinkering with things is essentially not part of our dna? We make poor engineers with hardware? Of course we always made pots and beads, as archaeological digs reveal. No questions.
So much for leadership in education, enterprise and nation building:-(
End
PS: Have no idea how ISRO and a few organizations in defense and private sectors pull along amidst such a dismal ecosystem. Just as it’s a wonder how those magnificent temple edifices in the south and elsewhere were constructed – did China supply them too? Kidding 🙂
This time I’m not kidding. At the risk of appearing quixotic, may I suggest for every software professional of ours US employs directly or indirectly, we employ/import a technician, engineer or an entrepreneur from that country to the extent BOP allows. This will give us a kick-start in real engineering capabilities with hardware and establishing a nourishing ecosystem we are unable to set up on our own.
“…that pernicious nonsense about being a leader and not a manager. Your challenge is to help the team and team members succeed. The only way to succeed at that is to do all three kinds of work. Lead. Manage. Supervise. Do them all well. “
Read this short post from Wally Bock to know what each entails.
The article ‘Wisdom at Work: Why the Modern Elder Is Relevant’ appeared in Wharton’s Knowledge publication (Jan 24, 2019) here. It’s a transcript of an interview wherein Airbnb executive Chip Conley discusses the benefits of having an inter-generational workforce (He argues his case in detail in his eponymous where everyone brings something to the table).
This
post is almost entirely extracted from the interview transcript, lightly edited
and heavily re-sequenced for clarity and easy reading.
Here we
go:
**
A new challenge for the org:
The
fact that almost 40% of workers have a boss younger than them — that number is
going to be the majority by 2025. In
fact, some studies show that power is 10 years younger today than it was 20
years ago. But we’re all living 10 years older. So, if power is moving 10 years
younger and we’re living 10 years older, society has created a new 20-year
irrelevancy gap for people in mid-life and beyond.
It
means that we need to start asking ourselves, how do we create an
‘intergenerational potluck’ so that people bring what they know best? And what do they now best?
A challenge for the elders:
The
three-stage life of the past — you learn until you’re 25, you earn until you’re
65, and then you retire until you die — that model is evaporating. Also, as the
pace of technology innovation increases, companies promote more tech-savvy
younger workers into supervisory jobs. Meanwhile, older workers are staying
employed longer due to such things as the disappearance of early retirement
schemes, recession, etc.
With
the power shifting to the young and the irrelevancy gap threatening to widen, there
is this period of life, bewildering and anxiety-producing, unless people constantly
remake, reinvent and repurpose themselves in ways to make themselves relevant
for the second half of their life. It’s not easy because it requires you to
shift out of some of your habits and mindsets that you’ve held onto for a long
time.
Conley’s proof of his own continued employment
and what he brought to the table:
“For 24
years, I was the founder and CEO of a company called Joie de Vivre based in San
Francisco that created 52 boutique hotels. We were the second-largest boutique
hotelier. In the Great Recession, I decided to sell the company. I had been
doing it for a long time. I was ready to move on. Then I spent a couple years
thinking about what was next [for me].
There
is a great Robert De Niro quote from the movie The
Intern [about a senior citizen who became an intern at a
shopping startup], which is, “Musicians don’t retire; they quit when there’s no
more music left inside of them.” I knew I had music inside of me; I just wasn’t
sure whom to share it with. I was lucky enough that Brian Chesky, the CEO of
Airbnb, asked me to be his in-house mentor and then come in as the head of
global hospitality and strategy, which was supposed to be a part-time job but
quickly became full time.”
“Younger
people who are digital natives have a digital fluency that may be greater than
someone 25 or 30 years older than them — that is true. But to think that
someone’s acuity and fluency in one particular scope of work means that they
can apply that to anything else is forgetting about all of the human element of
business, which requires a certain amount of collaboration and emotional
intelligence and leadership skills. Brian Chesky is an amazing CEO. But
when I joined, he was 31 and I was 52, and I was his mentor and he was my boss.
That was a fascinating relationship — to be mentoring my boss. But five and a
half years later, I’m still here.”
“When I
joined Airbnb, I think I had been brought in because I was a seasoned expert in
my field, which was boutique hotels, hospitality and the travel industry. When
I joined five and a half years ago, Airbnb was a very small company, and there
was not one person in the company who had a travel or hospitality industry
background. I was brought in initially because of that knowledge. That was
helpful, and a lot of my networking of people I knew helped. But ultimately,
what I think I was able to offer them was this sense of emotional intelligence…”
On Wisdom:
“There
have been a number of studies on this, and they’ve shown very little
correlation between age and wisdom. As a guy who’s 58, it’s hard to hear that,
but there is some evidence that shows that it is not necessarily a correlation.
What is correlated is that people actually make sense of their life and their
mistakes and their experiences along the way. If you have a process for doing
that, then age is correlated with wisdom
because you create a pattern recognition.
Wisdom is about being
able to see the patterns in things faster than when you’re younger because
you’ve seen a lot of patterns and you’ve seen the implications or results of
certain things. I think wisdom can be correlated [with age], but it isn’t
necessarily correlated. So, just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re an
elder.”
“I
think knowledge worker is a term to retire now because knowledge is in the
computer, it’s in the cloud. You can get out there and find knowledge. In
fact, we’re sort of awash in knowledge. But what we could use a little more of
is wisdom.
Wisdom is not a plus,
plus, plus equation like knowledge is. Wisdom is more of a division equation.
You distill the essence of something into what’s important, and that’s what is
valuable. I really think that we should change the term knowledge worker and
replace it with wisdom worker, because wisdom includes a certain amount of
intuitive and human quality that you don’t necessarily get from AI or from your
computer. The idea of wisdom making a comeback at a time when we’re so
technologically advanced is not that surprising.”
On cognitive diversity:
“And there’s no doubt
that cognitive diversity is hugely valuable on teams. If you just have a bunch
of 25-year-old guys on a team together, they’re going to compete with each
other and try to one-up each other to see who’s the smartest. Put a couple of women
in that group, people of color or some older people [and the dynamic changes].
When we think of diversity, we often think almost exclusively of gender, race,
and maybe sexual orientation. We don’t think about age very often, even
though age is one of the most obvious demographic changes we see.”
On
collaboration:
“People
go, “Oh, it’s a tech company. It’s just all engineers and individual people in
their cubicles doing their work.” No, actually it’s full of teams. And to
operate well, teams need to collaborate. Google did a famous study two or three
years ago called Project Aristotle and found that the No. 1 common factor among
successful and effective teams was psychological safety — people feeling like
they could collaborate well without any kind of retribution.
So those collaborative
skills are a really important thing that someone in midlife or later can bring
to the table – because we have more emotional intelligence is pretty well
empirically proven and emotional intelligence is something that can grow with
time.”
His message:
* To his generation: “Listen, you can mine your mastery. And while you may not be
running the company, you certainly can be an ally to a younger person, as long
as we figure out how to create a fluency where we can learn from each other.”
“The hierarchy of the
past that says the physics of wisdom only flows from old to young doesn’t make
sense anymore. The physics of wisdom moves in both directions; it just depends
on the subject matter.”
“The modern elder is
appreciated for their relevance, not their reverence, because they’re as much
of an intern as they are a mentor.”
* And to the organization: “I started to realize that there are some things they could
teach me, like digital intelligence, and there are things that I could teach
them, which is emotional intelligence, leadership skills, strategic
thinking, etc…”
I recall a story narrated to me some time ago by a young man working in SF based software company offering sales-force automation solution. It was review time with his boss. He expressed he wasn’t too happy in his current position, role…desired a change to more interesting positions he saw opening up in other parts of the operation. Discussion ensued, the boss tried his best to retain the talented young man. When he (the boss) saw latter standing firm on his move, he ended the discussion and gave a good letter of reference helping him find quickly a new position of his liking in the organization. Which he did before long. As he was settling down in his new role, he got his review results – a promotion, coming from a boss to a youngster who no longer worked with him! And quite predictably the young man till date is doing very well working for the same organization.
The boss had the
emotional intelligence to ensure the man got his just due and the organization
did not lose the talent.
On Tesla founder Elon Musk:
“He’s
47 years old, if I’m not mistaken. Could he use someone like that? Sure. But
he’s relatively far along in terms of his career. He’s a bit of a genius. The
thing we have to put to rest is the idea that singular geniuses do this alone. There’s
always more than one person involved. The question is, who are you surrounding
yourself with? To me, the answer is that you should be surrounding yourself
with a diverse group of people, including some people who have some seasoned
wisdom at the table.”
**
In conclusion: All is far from lost for the modern elder as long as he brings his strengths to bear on what he is doing at the workplace.
A couple of days ago, spent some time with J, the spouse of my niece, in Bengaluru. A young man in his thirties deep into music, plays drums, works with professional groups…
He’s part of an org offering music as a medium in corporate training programs. Seriously, yes.
Asked him how. What he said made sense.
Take this for instance,
In the preamble of a ‘Team Building’ program, the participants are each given a drum. The lead instructor kicks off with a beat on his drums. The group tries to follow suit. Initially it is all discordant and chaotic. After a while, the participants, one by one, fall in line. And very soon they are playing in mesmerizing unison!
And in about 45 minutes, they all learn the basics to play on the drums – a skill necessary for conducting subsequent sessions – which they knew nothing about before they had walked into the room,.
What do we get out of it?
The participants get an enormous boost to their self-confidence. In as little as 45 minutes, they have learnt something new in their life.
Well, if they could do this, what’s it to prevent them from performing/succeeding in their new roles in the organization?
So I say, team or no team, why not put all those recently-promoted employees in the organization thru this exercise?
There’s something else too at work here: a key reason for the participants to quickly align themselves as one is the avoidance of discordant and chaotic beats, an immediate and unpleasant punishment for a non-team behavior!
How do we carry this into an organization where the punishment for lack of alignment is rarely immediate and inflicting?
The HR guys would do well to think about this challenge.
Of course, not forgetting in certain contexts it might be considered as a virtue to stand out as different.
The subject of immediate punishment brings to my mind a recent personal anecdote: The cook in the house we were camping took off early one evening for justifiably personal reasons, promising to be back following morning. Come morning, no sign of the cook. Calls to her phone went unanswered. A couple of hours went by. We were left wondering – should we order food from some nearby eatery or what? The uncertainty of it was quite annoying.
Finally she walked in. We were all set to upbraid her over patently slovenly behavior. Suddenly a thought struck us: who knows, may be the same justifiably personal reasons had delayed her from coming on time. Regardless of the merit of the case, we certainly wanted to register our disapproval. So, changing our tack, we said: ‘Look dear L, is it fair to make us spend twice for a meal…?’ That’s what ordering food from outside meant, for we were already paying her for her cooking services at home. Instead of pulling her up, we played the victim. Immediate punishment effected here was to drive home the point – inconvenience caused by her behavior, without the use of harsh words to her person.
Here’s another example from the program:
Again, in a following session, the group is taught to play the violin this time.
Here a junior is teamed with a senior and they critique each other’s posture, technique…In a few rounds they are observed to get better at it, working on the feedback!
An interesting exercise that has made an all-knowing (!) senior to accept feedback from a junior. He does not feel threatened displaying his vulnerabilities during learning. Quite an uncommon scenario.
The important operating principle to be noted is: Learning a new skill is a great equalizer.
How do we take this principle into an organization? A challenge for the management and HR.
A simple approach could be: as often as possible, not risking fatigue, present a new skill to the groups making it a fun activity at the work-place. Importantly it serves to bring the seniors from their exalted stations to get closer to the juniors, constantly dismantling the hierarchical barriers brick by brick. The teams could even be cross-functional. The sheer persistence of this effort without causing ennui gives it a good chance to succeed – I’m not a great fan of those traditional n-day training programs, offsite or onsite, filled with some perfectly juvenile games offered by coaches. I’ve seen time and again there are no sustained gains after the initial euphoria – all boxes ticked ‘excellent’ – with people soon going back to their old ways. The so-called follow-up’s are weak and ineffective at best, performed more in form than in purpose. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a scam.
In summary, two powerful principles, demonstrably effective, not to be dismissed as gimmicky, that could be imaginatively and profitably employed in corporate training.
Unfortunately time did not permit learning more from J.
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