Managing is a pain pt 2a: I hate reviews

Giving and receiving, to borrow an expression from another category altogether.

It's not that I have any objective to evaluating per se. I actually like invidious distinctions (this beautiful formulation stolen from Veblen ) in an old-fashioned way. And I've given a lot of grades in my time in my previously foreshortened career as a teacher. A fair amount of absurdity surrounds the grading experience as well in our time (another tangent: will grade inflation fall with the market? Teachers? ), but it doesn't compare in bureaucratic caginess by a long short to the ceremonial instantiation of power relations we call the "performance review. "

The trouble starts with the struggle to invent criterion of evaluation that are both broad enough to extend across the organization and soft enough not to sting too much. After all, you do want these people to work for you, not spit in your coffee. "Navigates for success" and "Exercises good judgment" are categories I've filled out in the past with some uneasiness. It's not that I can't guess what they might mean. It's that I'm guessing in the first place. Plus who qualifies? Do I navigate for success? Kind of. Do I exercise good judgment? Hmmm.

In some ways these mushy categories of success and failure emerge in all hierarchies that don't want to admit they are hierarchical. My most dramatic experience in this regard (the challenge of creating a gradient without offending those being graded) was at a tennis club I worked at where grown men and women threw tantrums when they were rated below a level they thought they deserved. Instead of A, B and C player, we ended up with color coding. Red, Green, Yellow, etc. But of course that only lasts so long before the colors become imbued with associations of superiority and inferiority which is no good, especially when you want to do a brisk business in the pro shop.

No, the bigger problem, like all intractable social problems, is rooted the structure of the relationship itself, which I guess I'll get to tomorrow. I have to go give someone an upbeat and constructive but challenging review in which I may say some things which are "hard for them to hear."

Managing is a pain pt 1: Face time

It takes up a lot of time and feels really unproductive. I suppose if you are one of those so-called "people" people it probably feels like a great use of an morning to listen to some member of your staff lament how some other person on some other staff failed to listen to them or failed to invite them to a meeting or just plain sucked, but if you like to actually get things done, well, you can end up feeling pretty tawdry and unrealized and used by the of the day.

Management guru's will tell me that the morning I spent just listening and guiding my charges was in fact highly productive and can be tied to any number of productivity oriented metrics that expensive consultants will be happy to manage for me. And I'm sure they are right. (Though I've also found--and this is a snotty tangent--that the people who think they are good managers and listeners mainly like to hold court and give advice) But there is really only one rule to being a good manager so far as I can tell, though I'm probably the wrong person to take advice on the subject. You have to fucking pay attention. Even when it's a drag, frankly and you have hard time pulling your eyes away from your friends IM or Facebook update. You have to look people in the eye and listen to them. There's some old fashioned magic in it. People like to be paid attention to. And it's worth it finally, because you make money when your people do good work for you.

But becuase it takes a lot of time and feels really unproductive to just sit and listen to someone, people are are always trying to come up with new ways to short-circuit the process. Outsource it, or substitute some form of technology. Digital social media tools seemed help of a certain sort. Surely, all that online commingling will keep people from needing to actually talk to me so much. Well, kind of.

At least if you believe one of Breakthrough Ideas of 2009 in the HBR February issue (yeah, it's been under a pile of Legos). It's this one. How Social Networks Network Best. Lots of interesting bits but here's the part that's related to the above screed:

Delving deeper into the communication networks of several organizations illuminated the links between productivity and information fl ow even more. A recent MIT study found that in one organization the employees with the most extensive personal digital networks were 7% more productive than their colleagues – so Wikis and Web 2.0 tools may indeed improve productivity. In the same organization, however, the employees with the most cohesive face-to-face networks were 30% more productive. Electronic tools may well be suited to information discovery, but face-to-face communication, an oft-neglected part of the management process, best supports information integration...

Social media is great for discovering things, but if you want get your people to do your bidding, or even just do theirs, you probably have to tell them to their face.

High concept, low fidelity

I'm all for high-concept TV shows, and don't have any particular commitment to realism or verisimilitude so long as the acting is reasonably good. I continue to watch Big Love even though the characters seem to have about as much religious sensibility as the atheists in my house and I stay tuned to the increasingly absurd plot twists and emotional dynamics of Californification and Weeds because ML Parker and DDuchovny are so fun to watch, and so I tuned into The United States of Tara--about as high concept as you can get--the other night with a similar mix of high/low expectations. One can certainly see the appeal to the screenwriters: whenever the plot slows down, you simply introduce a new character. And it's a playground for a good actor, who gets to chew up the scenery in any number of broad types.

But for all the high-drama and/or low-comedy implicit in the multiple personality scenario, the shows turns on the most conventional plot dilemma imaginable: marital fidelity. Really? John Corbett (who seems doomed to play saintly/wimpy/understanding guys devoted to crazy women) is married to a certifiably insane wife, and the biggest problem they confront is whether he will fuck around with his own wife when she has entered one of her colorful alternative personalities. Really? This is the problem? Even a high-concept TV problem? What is going on? Is Hollywood, contrary to popular opinion, actually a bastion of committed monogamy, eager to retrain the wandering eyes of men across America? Or are we trying to escape from our disintegrating world by immersing ourselves in trivial domestic issues? Or more likely, is it just the strangehold of genre-convention continuing to define plots no matter how irrelevant they may have become? Perhaps the plot of the next Bond movie should revolve around whether he cheats on his latest girlfriend?

The so-called Law of the Wall Street Jungle cited

in three NYT's articles the day our new President chastised the major banks for taking 20 billion in bonuses struck me as an almost perfect expression of the long-running American delusion of rugged individualism. Here's one. They all cited "We eat what we kill" as the working credo and passionate self-justification for the bank's need to feast on the blood of taxpayer money.

I have less of a problem with the unapologetic ask-for-no-quarter-and-take-none capitalist warrior's ethos than the fact that these bankers seem totally blind to the privilege that allowed them to hunt the big game in the first place, and of course, totally incapable of living up to the consequences of the fact that their hunt has gone bad..

We eat what we kill? Are you kidding me? As if they were wandering the dense and wild jungle with nothing but a club and incisors sharpened on bone rather than being surrounded and supported by the largest and most powerful financial infrastructures since the beginning of time? The claim--advanced by a few--that they all shouldn't suffer just because of those few bad apples in the mortgage department doesn't really hold up either, especially if you are a great white hunter. If someone in my compay sinks the ship with bad deals, guess what, I go down with it, no matter how successful I was last year. If they don''t want to be saddled with the burdensome losses of a multi-national corporations, well then, why don't they take a walk on the wild side.

Investment bankers are about as self-reliant as the chronically ill.

The newly visible consequences of loss

Which of course it is, or can be, but I'm less interested in the philosophical or psychological dimensions of loss and failure than how loss now manifests on social media networks in these recessionary times in sometimes slow and sometimes sudden waves of updates on Facebook and Linkedin. The latter especially has seen seen a lot of action lately as the mass of lay-offs lead the newly unemployed to announce their availability for freelance work or, just as often, declare their promotions to President or Principal or Partner, at their newly created companies.

Is Facebook a Neurotic Medium?

Not just in the sense that it reinforces our narcissistic impulses to think that everything we say is important or interesting, a vice normally limited to professors, CEO's and constitutionally blowhard bosses, people in other words, who are used to holding court over captive audiences.

No, rather, I'm thinking about how the posts, fan clubs, groups and most of all, status updates seem to magnify and reproduce all of our fundamental and largely unflattering personality traits and tics until they become near-hysterical projections of our insecurities and limitations: my own attempts at academic wit and falsely casual allusions to literature read through repetition like one long increasingly pathetic complaint about the pointless labors I have chosen, as do others' mania for celebrity sightings and name-dropping or relentless attempts at wry and dark ironies, or complaints about their dutiful exhaustion, or even just the listing of bright new day epiphanies, day after day. It's humbling this facebook, a mirror of our frailty reflected back to us all, all the time.

Experimental Office Poetry #1

Job description

Escalating language to create
an experience of perpetual
insufficiency is one way
to describe my job;
Hype is another,
as is the deceptively
beautiful phrase: creating demand,
tethering the tidal shifts of the GNP
to a sea of opposable thumbs.
Imagine each minnow
in a desperate school
seeking personal satisfaction
beyond terror as it darts
toward a dusty cloud of microbes
in the bright shallows,
and you get some idea
of the work involved.