In order to solve society's greatest challenges we need a workforce that is more diverse in life experiences, has overcome adversity, and is more broadly skilled rather than overspecialized. 


Embrace Diversity
One of the things that impressed me the most in the new Star Wars movie, besides the quality of the acting, was the diversity of the cast and the roles they play in the success of their mission. Rey, the main protagonist of the movie, is a scavenger with a diverse set of skills, a pilot, a mechanic, a fighter with the force of the Jedi, unbeknownst to her, but all of these elements are critical to her defeating the First Order. Finn, also known as Stormtrooper FN-2187, is another protagonist who uses his background to help Han Solo and Chewbacca destroy the Starkiller Base. If Finn had been just a Rebel fighter, he would never been able to rescue Rey or destroy the First Order base. It's the diverse background and experience of Rey and Finn that ensure their success.
 
Last month I sat in on inspiring chat on diversity and inclusion between two great technology leaders, Cisco's CEO Chuck Robbins and Xerox' CEO Ursula Burns. Ursula shared a great perspective that when we exclude others we end up with a small group of people with limited points of view, where there are just too few of these people to solve all of the massive problems facing the world. Or to put it another way, as Albert Einstein once said: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
 
We need diverse opinions around us, because as humans we are stuck with our own confirmation biases. Even the best business programs fall victim to this if they have the same types of elite individuals teaching, sharing the same background and experience with the same consulting firms or same business roles. It is not just business where this is an issue. Junot Diaz, one of the best modern writers has described the pitfalls of an elite creative writing graduate experience in the New Yorker. I earned my MFA at the University of San Francisco and while we still had a mostly Caucasian male faculty and student body there was significant representation from all genders and sexual orientations. Most importantly, we had a diverse reading list that included a high number of books from writers of underrepresented backgrounds. USF students were widely encouraged to embrace diversity and share their unique experiences, something that Junot Diaz had clearly not experienced in his elite writing program.
 
Great education is not limited to a small number of elite institutions, nor is the Caucasian male group the only one to contribute great minds or workers. I have worked with a very diverse contingent throughout my career and have volunteered and mentored children and adults of all backgrounds, and from my experience all one needs to succeed is to be encouraged and inspired.

 
Embrace Adversity
People who have faced and overcome adversity are resilient. When unexpected difficulties occur they are the ones we should count on, not those born with a silver spoon.
 
Imagine choosing between two candidates. The first candidate has worked for the best tech companies, moving into higher positions every few years. When you interview the candidate they tell you that these companies came to them and sought them out for their talent. Sounds great, doesn't it? Now, let's look at the second candidate. They have had to take time off from work to take care of sick family members or kids, perhaps they had been laid off, maybe struggled for year or more and have had to reinvent themselves in order to reenter the workforce. Which candidate would you choose?
 
Our minds trick us into thinking the first candidate is a proven winner and is the only choice. Perhaps they are, perhaps they are so vastly talented that companies have fought over them their entire careers. Chances are, if the candidate changes companies so often, they aren't investing in their teams and wouldn't stick around for long at our company. The only thing we know for certain is that the first candidate had not faced adversity, had not overcome difficult problems, everything came to them. The second one did overcome challenges. They might not be as qualified, but I bet they would appreciate the opportunity more and be more of a team player. Not to mention, if your company faces tough times the second candidate would be the good go-to-person, while the first one would surely jump the ship as soon as the going gets tough.

Embrace Polymaths
The world we inhabit is incredibly complex and interrelated, and solutions to our problems require people who can understand more than a single layer. We keep trying to file everyone under a single specialist title, as if being good at one thing eliminates someone from being good at something else. As Abraham Maslow's attributed saying goes—"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." We can look at the recent wars in Asia and Africa and the refugee crisis as caused by the lack of diverse opinions and polymaths. We've used war as our only option and ignored other solutions that should have supplemented or replaced military action.
 
We don't live in a vacuum. The products that we make touch people's lives in a number of different ways. With most software solutions moving to the Cloud and the world's fascination with the Internet of Things, where so many different devices and applications will be connected and integrated with each other, it makes even more sense to hire and train people skilled in different areas. A salesperson needs to be more than just good at sales, they need to understand technical capabilities of the products they are selling and how they better meet customer needs over their competitors. A marketing professional needs to not only understand the target market and what the customers want in order to craft messages to reach the right audience, but must also understand the solutions being proposed and their complexity and user experience in order to gauge how their future customers might react. And when it comes to engineers and managers of technical projects and programs, we need to understand as many different components of software and hardware systems we are building as we can, at least on a high level. No matter what small piece of software we may be developing it will need to work with many other pieces of code, applications, or hardware. If we are only really good at our own piece of the pie, our product will never work well, as it won't play nice with others. We already have very successful companies embracing polymaths, such as Google hiring people with non-technical degrees and training them for more technical roles, and Tesla hiring people who are really good at what they do no matter what their education or experience.
 
Think of the different products with good functionality but terrible design where the engineers seemed to have designed the products for their own use, and not the actual customers, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and Blackberry phones. Compare these to the ease of the iPhone… From a security point of view, understanding different systems and how they connect to each other is an absolute must. Most of our security issues stem from developers being unaware of how their code will be integrated with other systems, such as not checking for proper input or designing a product with full access to the whole world instead of permissions to do its own little job. Think of it as developer of the Internet of Things home solution allowing a toaster to control the front door alarm instead of its own toasting.
 
If you still have doubts over increasing diversity in your company and rewarding polymaths, I have one word for you. INNOVATION. Technology is evolving at light speed. Companies need to have versatile workforces that can master new skills quickly. Companies need to innovate all the time to stay relevant (consider AOL, MySpace, or HP).
 
Can you innovate by doing the same thing over and over, even if you get really good at it? We need creative people who think outside the box, who have had diverse life experiences, who constantly challenge the status quo. I am not dismissing specialists, they have their place. We need specialists to push technical and scientific boundaries forward, but I would wager a guess than even the specialized individuals are closeted polymaths with passion for multiple things.
 
Now get your polymath geek out and rock this world!
Val

Warning: this review contains spoilers and direct excerpts from the book that may not be suitable for immature audience.


Valencia is Michelle Tea's unfiltered intense experience of life in San Francisco in the late 90s. She finds the courage to share her most intimate and painful memories, from working as a prostitute, to getting her heart crushed again and again, to filming an indie porn flick. Valencia is as direct and colloquial as Junot Diaz' Drown but somehow even more expressive. We are so used to seeing only the success stories, always the good side of people's lives. It is refreshing to read about Michelle Tea's dark days, to see how those experiences shaped her as a person and as a writer. If she can be proud of her past, no matter how difficult, then so can we.
 
The novel is driven by Michelle's raw voice from the opening scene when she beats the crap out of boys on the dance floor, kicking them "in their asses," kneecaps, and balls. She then shows us how real her story will be with the graphic depiction of rough sex with gorgeous Petra in passages like "I started punching Petra, her insides, the part I couldn't see. Thump, thump, thump. My clingy latex fist hit up against some strong, female part of her. She writhed and played with her tits, punched the bed beneath her, howled." Writing sex scenes is difficult and Michelle pulls it off with ease. We also see more of Michelle's personality and what intimacy means to her in the way she physically describes sexual acts in her love affairs, but never as a prostitute.

The action and emotions of Valencia run non-stop with the help of its unique writing style. Dialogue is not represented in quotes or line breaks but is rather contained within the paragraph, which makes us feel as if we're embodying Michelle's mind ourselves. To get around confusion, Michelle's own dialogue is written with capitalized letters while everyone else's is in italics. This way we can differentiate between the narrator's thoughts and words and of those around her. In one case, she mixes things up to include a third character's voice so that we get three people all screaming at each other at once. In this example, Michelle's voice has First Letters Capitalized, the police officer's dialogue is in italics, and the injured prostitute's dialogue is in ALL CAPS.

• "Come on, I whispered, and to the cops, She's fine, She's Not Hurt Bad, We're Going To Take Her Home. She may need medical--GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! We'll Take Her To The Hospital If She Needs To Go. Really. Come on, I think you should come with us. GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!"
  

 
Michelle connects with her readers, who might not be familiar or comfortable with the turbulent moments of her lesbian life, through universal themes of love and heartbreak that anyone can relate to. She finds ways to share her pain with the readers without making it overbearing.

• She leaves much of her own sadness off the page by focusing on the pain of other characters: "Gwynn is difficult to impossible to inspire. She was just so sad, her whole face hung with it, like sadness was her personal gravity." 
  
• We see Michelle's troubled state of mind and the intensity of her feelings through her actions such as when she describes her relationship with Iris: "We would just stare at each other, run home to have sex at her bar, run to the bar for last call and just gaze at each other. It was very meaningful, we shivered with it." 
  
• When Michelle does describe her own pain she finds poetic visual ways to express it: "The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you're happy is a sham. I didn't even want to be happy anymore because I'd rather live in honest misery than fake bliss."
  
• Michelle's perspective on life is often humorous that helps offset the sadness such as when she first meets Iris: "I kissed her hand, my seduction technique is best filed under Obvious."
  

The beauty of Valencia is not only in the action and the dialogue but in the setting of the city. Michelle makes me nostalgic for the San Francisco I had never known, before it became crowded with hipsters and techies. She is able to relate the expressive freedom of love that has somehow diminished these days. The story follows Michelle and her three major love attractions with Petra, Willa, and Iris, but finds room to make even the minor characters memorable such as Robin Hood teaching Michelle to pee like a man and Ashley living in a house with remains of ducks and pigs in the backyard from its Chinese restaurant days.

Michelle makes interesting choices by starting her novel with chapters about her earlier loves (Petra and Willa) before getting to the meat of the story with Iris. The ending is dragged out a bit while we follow Michelle's struggles of recovering from losing Iris. I would have ended the novel sooner, but it is worthwhile to see Michelle bond with the other girls who were heartbroken by Iris and all the beautiful ways how Michelle retells their doomed ending.

• "It's something that can only happen once. You will cry a thousand times but they'll only be echoes."
  

Read Valencia, get inspired, and expel your own demons!

While we have plenty to celebrate in averting the possible end of the world with the Iran nuclear agreement and the Sun giving us a few cold decades to slow down climate change, one deadly scenario, driverless cars, continues to creep up on human society. Taking away control of the road from humans should make it safer for everyone. For most people it is easy to imagine a world where there is no road rage (since presumably computers will never get mad at each other), no drunk, drugged, or fatigued drivers, a world where cars politely let each other merge and use less fuel as an automated traffic control system lets them weave in and out at constant speed without needing to brake or accelerate. Anyone who has ever driven in parts of Europe where staying on the proper side of the road and crossing on green are considered optional would appreciate this concept of driverless traffic. Even here in the San Francisco Bay Area where people are much more polite than in DC area or New England, we still get plenty of drivers who change lanes without looking. In theory, driverless cars would make this a safer world if not for that big elephant in the room, car security. We keep touting our technological achievements and connecting every type of device to the Internet without pausing to consider the sinister aspects.

Here is why enabling driverless cars is a catastrophe waiting to happen:

• Offensive security is easier to implement than defensive
  
• Software bugs
  
• Human error/laziness
  

As much as people want to believe in the safety of our electronic devices we can never be 100% protected. There is no solution out there that will protect you, no firewall, no intrusion detection/prevention system, no anti-virus/anti-malware program. All we can do as security professionals is to try to make it harder for the attacker by combining different layers, but our protection can never be full-proof. Defenders have to be right every single time while an attacker has to succeed only once. Our network devices are built upon thousands of other programs and every single one of them has to be designed and implemented with security in mind to be full-proof and even then there could be workarounds the original designers had never anticipated. "A former NSA deputy director recently said that if we were to score cyber the way we score soccer, the tally would be 462–456 twenty minutes into the game. In other words, it’s all offense and no defense." We may be able to infiltrate impossible networks and bring down nuclear reactors with the Stuxnet virus, but we cannot protect ourselves, as seen with the recent OPM hack.

For cars to be secure we must assume car manufacturers will test all their systems and eliminate all bugs from their design and code. If you think successful companies do this well, just look at the Apple Maps launch disaster or even the occasional Google Maps and Waze bugs. We have already seen plenty of security issues with cars and they are not even driverless yet, from a virus that affected a Formula One sports car, to Tesla Model S security issues, to the biggest of them all, the complete security blunder of the Fiat Chrysler fleet where hackers could take full control of their 1.4M vehicles. The more technology is added to cars the more chances of something not working correctly and then that something will get exploited by for-profit hacking companies like the Hacking Team, who could then offer such zero-day exploits to the highest bidder, like Al-Qaeda or Islamic State.

Even if car companies patch such security holes right away, it would still require drivers to bring vehicles to their dealerships to get patched, and this is where human carelessness comes in. We are all lazy. No one wants to take time off of work or play time with kids to sit in a dealership for some software bug upgrade. Of the 1.4 million people, whose Jeeps got hacked, how many do you think have gotten this fixed already? If previous security incidents are any indication, less than half would bother with the fix as the biggest security vulnerability to date has shown us, where close to half of Heartbleed-vulnerable servers remained unpatched for months. This would leave us with 700,000 remotely controlled killing machines waiting for the right hacker to strike.

So what can we do? 
We can learn how to drive stick shift and switch to older car models without all those techie bells and whistles in hopes that simpler cars like simpler phones can make a comeback. We can also ask for federal mandates to good design practices for car manufacturers so that critical systems are never connected to Internet-facing components like entertainment systems and on-board Wi-Fi. If there are different layers of control and no direct communication between them it will be harder for attackers to breach them just like having separate houses that share no common walls as opposed to one big house with a shared walkway to all rooms. Unfortunately, driverless cars will always need to connect to the Internet for directions so they will always be susceptible. Which leaves us with the last option, taking manual control of the vehicle the way Arnold does in Total Recall...

p.s. If you think we'll be safe with manual driving, there is still a good chance someone will hack our traffic control systems and wreak havoc with traffic lights...

Val

 

 
Images for this blog were borrowed from:
http://bangshift.com
http://www.laurameyers.com
http://www.modelwerkes.com

In the first part of the recruiting post you learned how a company can help improve its chances for finding good candidates. This post is on the most important part of the recruiting process: the interview. I will skip the common sense intermediate steps, just remember to act professional and maintain regular communication with candidates.

The in-person interview is where you find out how well the candidate fits into your organizational culture and, if you haven't vetted them yet, whether they match the skills needed for the job. Please keep in mind that you should be hiring candidates based on attitude and aptitude, not focusing on every specific skill set. The idea is to hire for the long term, hire employees who will grow on the job and help your company grow, not passionless robots who are satisfied with doing only what they know for the rest of their lives. After all, if someone has no desire to learn a new skill, chances are they are not willing to improve their current skills either.

Here are 4 points to consider, and a few interview outtakes for bonus.


1. Interviewing is like dating, make it fun and uncover the authentic candidate
Going on an interview is a lot like going on a first date. Both parties are excited and cautious and generally know little about what the other one is really like. As an organization it is in your best interest to make the candidate experience great, not just figure out who the candidate really is. You may need the same candidate for another job in the future and you don't want the candidate to share his negative experience with his colleagues or you may lose out on other great employees. 

All you're looking for is a culture fit and you're not going to get it with a script or algorithm. Think about a formal first date over dinner where people follow expected protocols and discuss their life stories. It is a painfully boring experience where both parties hide behind masks. You do not want candidates' pre-canned elevator speeches and memorized answers to stale interview questions. You want to find the authentic person inside every candidate and you won't accomplish that from inside the office. The office comes with its own expectations and formalities.

Just like dating, make interviewing more fun and spontaneous. Go for a hike, a walk on the beach, or play some team sport. At least meet in a cafe or at the very least chat over lunch. Try to get out of your comfort zone and help the candidate get out of theirs. You can learn all you need to know about a potential employee just by watching them play soccer, how much they value their teammates, how individualistic they are with the ball, how much winning means to them and whether they blame losing on their teammates. Simply listening to candidate's passions would work. What they love about a certain book, game, movie, or any kind of experience will show you their values. It is impossible to fake passion. This way you will always see the real candidate. 

We are not hiring robots to perform automated tasks. We are hiring humans. Even for manual labor jobs human qualities are still important. And remember, candidates can have off-nights as well. Do not seek perfection. You will never find it. 

Success of every company depends on the quality of its employees. You may be familiar with some of my earlier posts on building a caring work environment to increase productivity, which would also help you grow and retain best employees. In order to retain good employees, you first have to find them and convince them that your company is the best match for their skills and passions. This can be quite challenging, even more so in Silicon Valley where companies outcompete one another for best talent. You may remember the recent lawsuit where some of the best tech companies allegedly colluded to abstain from recruiting each other's engineers. You could say this is an indication of the changing workforce where many employees feel little loyalty to their current companies. You could also say this shows how challenging it can be to establish a work culture where employees are excited to be building something worthwhile and would not dream of leaving.  

No matter how elaborate your hiring process is (and I will describe some bizarre examples in future posts), for most companies hiring is worse than flipping a coin. Yes, you heard that right. Simply pick out two resumes out of the submission pile, then flip a coin to decide which one to hire. You won't be any worse off than going through the extensive phone and in-person interviews.

The first place to fix when it comes to hiring is the candidate application process. See if you can spot problems with examples at the top (answers provided at the very end).

Here 5 basic guidelines to follow when it comes to attracting candidates online:

1. Create an engaging and easy to navigate website. 
Think of your company's website as the face of your company. Would you build a maze for an entrance to your office or force each employee to scan their retina, say the daily password, and donate blood to gain entry to the office? Note: if your office happens to be the NSA, please continue as is.

Do not cause the potential candidates pain. Your website may be the first exposure a candidate has to your organization, so make it a good one. Your current employees will thank you as well. They want to feel proud of their company, not embarrassed.


2. Make job searching easy. 
Your career section should follow the same UX/UI principles you would use for your products, simple and intuitive. The job search should work in most browsers and mobile devices and allow candidates to customize their search and open posting links in multiple tabs. Applicants should be able to filter and sort by whichever attribute is available to them. Don't depend on simple job titles as many companies use different titles to describe similar responsibilities. A Project Manager in one company could be titled a Program Manager in another, or even a Product Manager in a startup. An engineer in one place could be called a developer in a second, or a hacker in a third.


3. Make applicants fill out as little information as possible. 
Candidates should be able to apply with a resume or a LinkedIn profile and basic contact info (name, email, phone number). Your hiring manager/recruiter will be able to judge candidates' initial potential by their resume and have a way of contacting them if interested. What more do you need?

Think about it this way: what is the goal of your applicant tracking system? Is it to make things easier for your HR department or for the candidates? Yes, APS should work for your human resources, but HR's ultimate goal is to make your employees' experience awesome. If you don't have employees, you have no HR.

You may think that pulling in applicants' education and work experience details will allow you to mine your candidate database to find employees for future positions. Think again. Has anyone ever got a call about a different role in the company simply because of their candidate profile? The only reason companies would follow up with past candidates is when those candidates had made a great impression interviewing, but were either not deemed fit for exact role, or turned down the job. Candidates' experience and interests continue to change. Why would you want to follow up on an outdated profile?

Let me reiterate. Do NOT force an applicant to fill out a profile. You will only get the most desperate candidates that have time to spend filling out profiles or the ones who will do anything to work for your company, which does not mean they are qualified or would be a good fit. Why would a candidate go through the hassle on your site when your competitor needs only a resume?



4. Do not force candidates to use plain-text resumes. 
Would you like them typed on a typewriter as well? Humans are visual creatures. If candidates go through the trouble of making their resumes/LinkedIn profiles easy to read, don't force them back to the Dark Ages. Your hiring managers and recruiters are human too. Let them have an easier time reading through and understanding candidates' resumes. Think about it this way. Allowing a candidate to represent themselves visually gives you an idea of the kind of person that candidate is.

What could be the reason to use a plain-text resume? To evaluate everyone on the same level? In that case, ask them to answer a long list of questions and watch them leave for your competitor. One possible reason could be a security concern. It is possible for hackers to embed malicious scripts in vulnerable versions of Adobe PDF files and Microsoft Office products. However, you can always use sandboxed machines to open up these documents first.


5. No cover letters. 
Ever. Not even for a communications or government or non-profit position. All they do is waste candidates' time. Unless the candidates' job is to write cover letters every day, you will not be learning anything about their writing skills other that they can put together a cover letter. Ask for a writing sample or a short essay that relates to their specific job duties AFTER you found the candidates' resume adequate.

If you don't follow these steps you may end up with PopCopy employees:

I'd love to hear your stories of good and bad hiring practices,
Val


p.s. 
Answers to puzzle:
- Accenture: candidates forced to fill out a profile to apply.
- Google: search limited to only 2 filters: Relevance and Date.
- LinkedIn: not allowed to sort by Job Title, Location, Distance, or Company Name.
- Symantec: search cannot be expanded to fill entire screen, limited to less than half of webpage.

If you've been following Dr. David Paul's research on Employee Productivity you already know that Caring for Others Boosts Work Performance and that there are simple Steps to Caring about Employees. A caring environment helps employees become engaged in their jobs. Why is engagement important? 

Think about a task that you recently worked on which you found engaging. Did you enjoy working on the task? How much did you accomplish? Now compare your engaged productivity to a task which you did not find stimulating. 

Without engagement we have little enjoyment and limited productivity. This applies to all tasks, from the simplest to the most complex and challenging. Let's use working out as a sample of one of the most basic tasks. Was your disengaged workout ever better than the one where you were fully engaged? You don't need to be Michael Phelps or Michael Jordan to feel the difference.

I can give you an even simpler example - washing dishes. To say that I don't like washing dishes would be an understatement. If I think about how much I hate washing dishes I can never be engaged. The washing takes forever, is distressing, and results in poorly cleaned dishes. However, if I simply start washing the dishes, watch the water pour over my hands, the sponge rub the soap into the plate, the grease rinse off into the sink, the process turns meditative. I enter a state of Zen and end up with a stack of perfectly clean dishes and a happy demeanor.

I am sure we've all experienced mundane tasks at work or ones we found pointless that took us forever to complete. Whether you're designing an algorithm or building a user interface, engagement is the key to success. Why is it that only 13% of employees are engaged at their work? Because employers don't seek to bring out their enthusiasm, but take employee engagement for granted.

Dr. Paul's research identifies three pillars of a productive and caring work environment: Regard, Respect, and Reward. In a similar article by ISE Partners three main ingredients to employee engagement are presented as trust, communication, and reward.

1.Trust
"Micromanagement is something of a workplace plague. It erodes employees’ feelings of being trusted team members, which prevents them from taking full ownership of their work. If you loosen your grip on the reins there may be a few mishaps, but a strong team can weather those. What’s more, team members’ increased engagement and feeling of control over their work will more than make up for the losses."

2. Communication
"As a manager, you’re not only responsible for offering advice and information to employees, you also need to listen. While you have an unparalleled view of the big picture, those at lower levels of the company are seeing a side of your business that is often invisible to you. While the board might have facts and figures regarding customer satisfaction, that can’t replace the intuitive understanding of those who engage with customers every day. Building effective channels for this kind of communication ensures that the unique expertise of low-level staff members is recognized and utilized, enhancing their feeling that they are valued contributors."

3. Reward
"Rewarding employees is about much more than occasionally sending a complimentary group email. An individual employee will become engaged if her specific talents and contributions are recognized. Instead of simply saying “I’m really glad we won this account,” say “Laura, I’m really impressed with how you read this client’s situation. It made the difference in achieving the outcome we wanted.” Based on the second statement, your employee feels that she is an integral part of the process, which will tap into her natural urge to achieve."

Stay caring, engaged, and productive.

Val

<image source = www.abc.net.au>

Now that you have had a taste of the CHALLENGEd life in executing the Driving Challenge, take your log book and notes to a new level by taking on the Second Major Challenge. These challenges are all geared to help you understand and operate in a world where you make Clear, Conscious Choices about how to behave and react—eventually leading to a cleaning out of the ‘old, reactive ways’ into the clear light of Doing What You Say You Will Do. This plain statement forms the basis for the next challenge, DWYSYWD.

The background for this challenge includes one definition of fraud: intentionally creating a false impression. You probably never did this, but I did. One night my friend Boyd and I told my Mom that we were “going by the library and then stopping by the malt shop on our way home. Be home by 11:30, Mom.” After all, in the small town we grew up in, it was a school night, and we were, by the way, almost 17. We both said, “Hi, Library” and waved as we drove by it. We arrived at Mike’s house, had a few beers, listened to some music, and at about 11:15PM got up. We drove back home passing by the Malt Shop with a "Hi, Malt Shop” and a snicker. We felt like we had really ‘put one over’ on Mom.  

“How was Mike’s?” Mom asked as she looked up from her book. Mom worked three jobs as a single wage earner, putting the four of us through school. The car I drove to Mike’s that night—a ’49 Chevy with the driver’s door held closed with a rope. The town I grew up in—very small, and my Mom knew everybody. She slowly got up from her reading chair and asked me if I knew the definition of fraud—“intentionally creating a false impression,” and then asked me how it felt.

That was a VERY LONG time ago, and it is STILL one of my key ‘touch points’ whenever I give my students the example of the importance of DWYSYWD. So, I went “By” the library, right? And we came back “by” the malt shop, right? I am so glad my Mom was so smart, gentle, firm, and found a way to help me understand that I have to be ‘in charge’ of not only my promises but also my impressions. Lying includes both broken promises as well and intentional misrepresentations.

When you make a promise–keep that promise (don't act like the car reservation agent in the above Seinfeld episode). When you create an impression of intent to do something—commit to that level of the impression. I should have asked permission to go to Mike’s or I should have gone to the library and studied until 11pm, like I tried to impress my Mom that I was going to do.

Doing a good job at DWYSYWD involves writing down in your log book the promises you make to others and the promises you make to yourself. These include the promise to work out at 0630 in the morning, as well as the implied promise to be at the meeting, prepared, and ready to go without excuses. It’s helpful in your log book to write down your excuses for not meeting your commitments as a way of seeing how silly they look in the light of day after you reread your entries.

Try to note how others view your ‘missed opportunities to meet a commitment.’ Try to note whether your relationships with others get stronger or weaker as a result of these times when you are not able to DWYSYWD. Finally, if meeting your commitments is one of the things you value, try to note what you can do to improve your batting average in DWYSYWD.

From a student:
“I’ve been in the wireless business since 2010….Sales Manager in 2012. After the DWYSYWD challenge, I cleaned up my sales act and focused on my employees. Through this challenge I stopped myself and my employees from making any promises we were not 100% sure that we could follow through with. Although we had to work harder to maintain our high sales numbers, the quality of our customer experiences improved and we got higher Customer Experience Survey scores as a location, which increased my monthly bonus. I am thankful for this challenge (and this class in general) because it has helped me improve my actions and even my paycheck!”

The above excerpt is borrowed from the upcoming book by Dr. David Paul and Val Dobrushkin: "Tapping in to the Future Want: How Caring for Your Customers, Employees, and Other Living Things Is a Strategic Imperative."

<image source = kulfoto.com>

Are you a patient and careful driver? Or are you like most people, often taking aggressive maneuvers or getting angry at other drivers? 
I thought of myself as a respectful and careful driver until I drove my girlfriend to Newport, RI one Sunday afternoon. It was the middle of summer. We had planned a romantic stroll along the beach and a nice lunch at my favorite cafe. Because I've been driving the same route to work for many years my automatic drive-like-crazy-to-get-to-work mode switched on. My girlfriend pointed out how aggressive my driving was–merging in and out of lanes to avoid waiting on traffic signals. I endangered the two of us and everyone else on the road all to get to our relaxing destination a few minutes earlier.

My aggressive driving habits improved over the years. Yet when I moved to the Bay Area I realized that I was still one of the jerks on the road. It took almost a year, but I finally left my East Coast driving habits behind. No longer will you see me react to traffic and bad drivers the "Office Space" way.

Let's continue on with Dr. David Paul's Caring lessons that challenge us to be VALUE-centered thinkers instead of REACTIVE, PREJUDICED, or BIASED actors. CHALLENGE NUMBER ONE is the DRIVING CHALLENGE. In this challenge, you CHALLENGE your own way of thinking to improve. In fact, your only real reaction is “needs improvement,” both to the other car/driver and to yourself. 

Take a notebook with you next time you are in the car. When somebody cuts you off, note your reaction to the situation. Was it calm, reasoned, appropriate? Or did it include gesturing, hand signaling, and even inappropriate speech?

My friend, Tom is a good driver.  He won the SCCA rally in a 427 Corvette back in 1967. Great guy, and when we go to the track, miss a shift, drive past the apex, or turn in too soon, our only comment is, “Hey, guy, needs improvement.” No blame, no fuss. Our day goes great from then on. No ‘lasting effects.’

The other day I got cut off on the freeway when a pickup truck exited from the fast lane (4 lanes over) at a high speed, right in front of me, bumping across the median between the exit ramp and the freeway. Just as I was ready to issue the standard barrage of blame and name, I thought, "What if that was my friend, Tom?” I chuckled and said to myself, “Needs improvement!” The Amazing thing about it was my day actually GOT BETTER. Even though the facts of the situation (near death experience, holocaust on the highway, drama driving, etc) did not change, the situation IN MY BRAIN completely changed my acceptance of and reaction to the incident.

My challenge to my classes now is to observe their reaction during a condition of getting cut off. Pretend that’s your best friend (you just haven’ t met them yet) and tell yourself and the other people in the car, “Needs improvement.” THIS IS ESPECIALLY TRUE AND NECESSARY WHEN YOU HAVE CHILDREN IN THE CAR.

For obvious reasons, children learn from the actions of others in an almost scary rapid way. They will learn your bad responses and repeat them. It is almost a form of child abuse to allow the “WRONG REACTION” to take place in front of children.

You can record your observations of how you felt, what you said, and how your day went. Chances are, you will “Need improvement” during the next couple of weeks as you begin training your brain to believe and promote the actions and thoughts that represent your REAL values—the ones you WANT your children to observe in you. As an ADVANCED TACTIC, you can also begin to believe that your real role in any driving situation is to “Protect the Safety of all your brothers and sisters on the highway, making sure they are protected by whatever means you have available. What makes you think you even HAVE a right of way? Some know this instinctively, but most of us don’t. So, this is the first challenge in looking inside your thought (actually there is NO THINKING going on in the reactive mode) process and seeking to upgrade it to data- and value-centric thinking in real time.

Good luck, and be sure to make notes in a safe place, off the freeway!  But, make sure you keep a little notebook of these challenges. There will be some more, interesting challenges in the weeks to come.

Stay tuned for the next 7 weeks as we take these challenges. Share your experiences with this kind blogger and keep a notebook so your children can see how important you think THEY ARE as you become a values-centered man or woman.

From a student:
“After giving it some thought, I began to realize that the driving challenge is applicable in a large variety of situations which we are part of in our daily lives. The wisdom that you have the ability to see things in the light you wish to is a positively reinforcing thought reminding us that we have the power to better ourselves simply by taking the time to take our thoughts deeper into the realm of selflessness.

In the end, this more empathetic mindset alleviated much of the stress associated with the situation and my day definitely benefited from it.”

The above excerpt is borrowed from the upcoming book by Dr. David Paul and Val Dobrushkin: "Tapping in to the Future Want: How Caring for Your Customers, Employees, and Other Living Things Is a Strategic Imperative."

Caring for employees results in a more productive work environment (see earlier post for research details). Yet not enough companies realize it is in their own interest to invest in their employees. Fortunately, we have many positive examples where a caring environment extends past the typical Silicon Valley habitat with its free food and ping pong tables at the expense of burning people out by working them 60+ hours a week.

Paul Spiegelman, the Chief Culture Officer of Stericycle and The Founder of BerylHealth describes how caring is integrated into his company's work culture:
"We care about our employees in the totality of their lives. They take Beryl home with them and they bring what's at home to Beryl. Having an ingrained culture of caring translates directly into every interaction a member of the Beryl family has."

Beryl's four step methodology for caring about their employees is a great guide for other companies to follow:
1. Create a process to know what's going on with your staff.
2. Acknowledge your people offline.
3. Be sensitive.
4. Let your employees loose.
You can read Paul Spiegelman's full blog post on Beryl's caring practices here.  

There is a "dark side" to caring for employees and creating a caring work environment. A liability.

We now know what is important to our employees, because we have listened to them, cared for them, asked them what we could do for them at the workplace to help make their lives better. Next comes the hardest part. Doing the work. If we make our employees believe that we care, that their thoughts and values matter, but we do not act on their inputs, then we may lose their trust forever. Our employees will feel even less motivated, their work will suffer as a result, and they will likely leave the company at first opportunity.

Not doing what we know needs to be done is an abrogation of responsibility. It may be that we do not truly want to know what works, because then we will have to get out of our comfort zone, reject the old ideas and prejudiced ways of doing business. We will need to abandon the "extractive mentality" ('sit down, shut up, and do what I say,' or alternatively, 'you should just be glad you have a job'). We will need to work on creating a sustainable, compassionate approach to the human beings that work for and with us.

We need to understand our "baseline" approach to valuing others. Are we comfortable with creating an inclusive, regardful atmosphere at work, one that listens first, asks questions, is thoughtful, and then responds? Or do we fire first and aim later, like so many others who ignore servant leadership?  

We may have some excuse to not changing out ways. We may be hijacked by our own limbic system, which can become an embarrassment to us and a liability to our shareholders.

Our limbic system governs our motivations, addictions, and engagement with the world. It also lights up on functional MRIs when romantic love is involved. On the down side, our limbic system is also home to prejudice, bias, and preconceived notions about all people, and specific races, genders, ethnicities, etc. 

Future posts on caring will present challenges that will help replace the erroneous reactive 'we' with a thoughtful, more caring 'we' through the use of values centric, clear conscious thought.

Let us resolve to break out of the old habits together to create thoughtful, mindful, respectful, and regardful work environment.

The above excerpt is borrowed from the upcoming book by Dr. David Paul and Val Dobrushkin: "Tapping into the Future Want:  How Caring for Your Customers, Employees, and Other Living Things Is a Strategic Imperative."

Do you feel cared for in your job? Do your subordinates feel that the company cares about them? If the answer is yes, then your business is likely to thrive.

Caring is something that I believed in all my life, but I never knew there was empirical data to support those beliefs until I met Dr. David Paul. Dr. Paul has several decades of professional management experience as well as teaching undergraduate and graduate business courses where he was able to test and implement the caring principles. His Doctoral research uncovered that the feelings of being cared for correlated with a huge increase in employee productivity, up to 10 times or more.

While many think of monetary rewards as the most important driver for employee motivation, studies prove that non-monetary rewards are more valuable. Dr. Paul's research focused on identifying elements that promote feelings of care in employees and the three major motivational attributes: Regard, Respect, and Reward. Regard, the attribute closest to caring, came in as the top motivational factor for over 40% of all individuals and groups. Regard had the strongest lead in the following categories: Personal Interest and Connection; Feelings Are Taken into Consideration; and Professional Growth and Nurturing. If we make employees feel that we are actively interested in their professional growth and also their feelings, their productivity will increase.

Caring reaches far beyond the workplace. I've observed that best performance from others and myself happened in caring environments, whether they involved athletic activities, playing games, volunteering, or anything professional. I've seen plenty of successes and failures caused by caring or lack thereof. Below are a few examples from my own past.

As a child, I trained on a soccer team in Europe where I had a wonderful coach who believed in me and pushed me to excel. I was better than most boys 2-3 years older and thought I would be the next Pele. Then one day my coach quit. The new coach cared little for any of us and after three years of hard daily training I simply walked off the field. I still play pick-up soccer and watch a few games when I find the time, but I never got back to the skill level I had as a child. I don't regret keeping soccer as a hobby rather than life-long pursuit as I see how the grueling game schedule and training strains the players physically and hurts their relationships.

I did use my soccer passion to improve work dynamics. I formed a team to bridge the gap between different age groups and projects. We did not do too well in the beginning, but as I made my colleagues more aware that I cared about them and would support them no matter how many mistakes they had made, the team got better and better. I had to make tough choices and cut really talented players who disrupted our team chemistry as my goal was to increase collaboration and team building and not win the league. My proudest moment was seeing my colleagues encourage each other after bad plays and passing to teammates when they had chances to score themselves.

I've had wonderful mentors wherever I worked and attribute much of my success to their caring ways. I was an average performer on one project early in my career where I had no overly caring managers or challenging tasks until a new manager asked for support on a critical information security project. I was by no means an expert in the field, but this manager believed in me and gave me his full support. He sponsored additional training and let me take charge of key tasks. In the end, I surprised even myself with how much I achieved. It was because this manager recognized my full potential at the time when I was still unsure of my own abilities, my only accomplishments being college degrees and a few years experience.

I've used the same caring principles to grow my own teams and turn around lackluster performances of my subordinates. I had to invest more time in their development and support their learning, but it paid back quickly as I was able to delegate more tasks to them and use my time on more pressing projects. Everyone benefits from caring, no matter the age group, even Generation-Y.

Stay tuned for more of Dr. Paul's guidance on how to become more caring people in all areas of our lives, not just our jobs.

Looking forward to hearing other examples where caring or lack thereof made a difference,
Val