Category: Work

This is an autobiographical essay in response to the ever so frequent question: what do you do at work?

The warehouse, plain and bland, stands just off the road like a giant fortress. Like all good fortresses, it is not the outside that attracts visitors. Rather, it is the treasure that lies inside it. Outside, the warehouse looks drab with its towering light brown walls and black trimmings, the office door doesn’t help much: “Employees Only” the small placard warns those who would open the foreboding black door.

On the other side of the door things change little. The interior walls are a lighter shade of brown, almost taupe, and while there is no decorative trim, the walls are mostly empty. In the office, the workers are chatting; sometimes on the phone, sometimes to each other. Such is the humble work place of Daniel. Although he often works from any of the company’s other four locations, this is his chosen sanctuary to work his wonders.

Although the outside is bleak, the inside office is obviously better suited to his creative thinking. The chatter of the customer service representatives provide a gentle background noise and people to occasionally socialize with and bounce ideas off of. But it is the massive twenty foot white board that makes the office ideal. “This,” Daniel says referring to the white board, “this is the only white board we have that is big enough to unload my brain onto.” Currently the white board is covered with scribbles, notes and a mass of lines and boxes. He uses the white board to stage his “stories”.

Isabel, the Customer Service Manager, refers to him as an “Information God”, a title that makes Daniel laugh—he prefers the title of “Storyteller”. Isabel tells of when he first set up the company’s Customer Service surveys. The Customer Service Office had been hoping, at best, for a spreadsheet that tallied the results and were worried mostly about the ease of gathering the data. Instead of the basic spreadsheet they requested, Daniel delivered what he calls “a beautifully matriculated masterpiece of storytelling.” The survey system provides a friendly entry system for collecting the survey information and a full set of graphs and charts to explain the results, none of which require any technical expertise. “Like any good story, the mechanics are there, but they’re hidden,” Daniel explains.

This is how most of his “stories” work: they feature quick and easy access to the data through charts, graphs, buttons to automatically retrieve up-to-date data , and “smart, dumb” text—complex formulas that output different texts based on the data in the spreadsheet so the responses look smart, but really aren’t.

The ease with which people can use his spreadsheets has made them popular in the company, but he says that people should thank his boss for that, not him. “I like a good graph or chart, but the real data is where the best stories are found,” he says, “it was my boss who insisted that I make the stories in the data easier to see.”

He sits hunched over his meticulously clean desk. The wood surface has on it a grand total of five objects: his phone and keys, lying side by side on the left side on the desk, a laptop, a second monitor and a wireless mouse. While his physical desk is nearly empty, his two screens are not. The laptop is cluttered with his email and various informational pages and the second monitor, hooked up as an extension of the laptop, is filled with a massive spreadsheet. It is this very spreadsheet that he often thinks of when people ask him if he knows Microsoft Excel. “Know it,” he says, “I live in it.”

While he might joke about his knowledge of Excel, compared to most people, he does live in it. And like a monk left to himself to delve into the depths of sacred works, he knows Excel extremely well. “I often laugh when people ask if Excel can do certain things,” he laughs at this thought. “I usually tell them, ‘just tell me what you want and I’ll make Excel do it for you’.”

This particular day he is working on one of his most complex “stories”: the company payroll. The numerous windows displayed across his screens are all critical story elements. They are part of a massive revision that he recently released. He explains that each screen has a function and purpose, and while they all together may seem overwhelming, no one else ever sees them all together.

While some might think it an incredible feat, to him it is little more than a documentary. “No one does all the work,” he explains. Some poor soul digs to find random statistics that will be quoted in the voice overs. Another poor soul does the preliminary location and people research. The lucky host goes out and shoots footage with the camera crew. Then yet another host of people come in to cut the footage together and scale the production to the correct level.

Payroll, for him, is no different. The new version—called Blackfin after ocean tuna—has simple, little spreadsheets and databases that different departments enter in little bits of information. At payroll time a single, bright green button, labeled “Extract All”, is pressed and through Excel’s magic all the little spreadsheets and databases are rounded up and processed to the familiar, but ever changing, story of payroll.

Later, after he is done patching the payroll file, he walks to the back of the warehouse and rummages through a mess of old parts. The parts were recently purchased as a lump-sum from a business that was closing. He’s not looking for anything in particular, but more just wants to get away. His excursions into the warehouse are usually fruitless themselves, but they allow Daniel to refocus his mind. “I never know what I’ll find back here,” he says. Moments later he coos, “Ooh, these belong in the IT room,” he says with an elevated pitch as he wraps a bundle of network cables around his neck. Obviously, he’s done this before.

Satisfied with today’s find he heads back towards the office. He doesn’t get far before he stops again, this time to pick up a rolling office chair. “The guys keep stealing chairs from the office for their lunchroom,” he explains. Instead of pushing the chair to the office, he sits in it, grabs the arm rests, carefully aims the chair and then, with cables still dangling from his neck, gives a swift kick and sends himself hurtling down the aisle between dining chairs and bedroom mirrors. The noise of the rolling chair can be heard throughout the whole warehouse, just one example of his creative eccentric nature.

Back in the office, after dropping off the cables and the chair, Daniel examines his white board. He crosses some items off the board, and then taps his marker against the board. The next item on his list is to put up a reminder about upcoming network changes. He sits back down at his desk and brings up the company intranet site; he considers the site to be one of his greatest stories. “Everyone in the company uses it every day,” he says with pride in his voice. He starts to tell the story of making the site such a success, and then pauses as he looks around the office. “I’ve never told them the secret of my success.” After a few seconds of typing, he reviews the reminder and with a satisfactory nod posts it online.

Those secrets are some of his rarest stories. In fact, he boasts, no one person has heard them all, and he intends to keep it that way. “If anyone knew that all I do every day is tell stories,” Daniel says with a smile, “well, they might find a way to live without me.” With that, he goes back to work: reviewing data, looking for connections and recording the stories he finds.

I have a particularly fond memory of my younger brother (though, I must admit that my memories are not the clearest on this topic and I might have embellished parts). It was back when we were all younger. The family, all except my brother, was all gathered in the living room to watch a movie or some such. As we were enjoying our peace my brother came suddenly bursting into the room yelling, “I got it, I got it!” His entrance made such a shock that we all shifted our attached to him and the “it” he had “got”. My mother, in a caring tone, congratulated him and asked if she could see “it”. He was so proud he popped open his hand and showed her. To her great horror, and the family’s astonishment, there, lying in his tiny palm was my mother’s beta fish. It was beyond all help as my younger brother had, in his great excitement, neglected to handle the fish with care and it had been crushed to death while in transit from the upstairs bedroom (where the fish had no doubt been sleeping) down to the living room.

Though there are many humorous spins and analogies that I could make with this story, there is one in particular that I wish to make: there can be grave danger in assumed common goals. My mother’s goal was to keep the fish alive while my brother thought the goal was to catch the pesky fish. In this case, the assumed common goal (that really was not common) led to the death of a fish, but in many cases the assumed common goals can lead to much greater problems.

On some level we all know and understand this, but even in the most basic of assumptions we all too quickly dismiss this truth. Instead of soliciting our goals, we assume that everyone, or at least the people in the immediate vicinity of our lives, have the same basic beliefs. Then we are faced with shock, dismay or disappointment when we find out that what we thought was a universal goal was really only a personal goal.

This curse of assumed common goals is pervasively around us in our daily endeavors and projects. Think of the last time you were driving with a young child in the car. Your primary goal was likely to travel safely and you likely assumed that everyone else on the road had the same goal. This was probably not the case. Instead, most people probably had a primary goal of getting to their destination quickly, or to find out where their friends are before they pass them.

While driving safely on the road might not be every driver’s primary goal (though it should be) it is still a high goal for most drivers. A better illustration might be a work place venue: collaborating to reduce costs across the company. There are many ways to go about the process of reducing cost, but I will focus on two: by eliminating jobs and rearranging the company accordingly; and by streamlining processes and eliminating positions that are no longer needed. Both methods will result in the end reduction of overall costs for the company, but they each have very different focuses.

The process of eliminating positions is one that is likely to have a primary goal of seeing what the company can live without. Do we need someone special to clean up, or can we convince other employees to do the work? Do we need someone to oversee these workers, or can we assign them to a different manager and expect less supervision? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like dieting with a very definite list of things that you can and cannot do without.

Consider working under the assumption that the other departments in the company were also operating under this same paradigm. Imagine the shock and horror you would experience when you found out that another department was in fact binging instead of dieting. They have been spending money on projects that, in the dieting mind set, should have been cut. This horror is likely to come because the offending department is operating under a different way of reducing costs.

The process of streamlining is one that is likely to have a primary goal of automating as much as possible. Is there any way to digitize this data without manually inputting it? Can we make this paperwork flow smoother so it takes less time? Can we create self-help forums for employees to handle basic issues by themselves? With this goal in mind, reducing costs is much like exercising with a list of practices that will allow you to stay trim without foregoing all of the good stuff.

While both of these methods can produce the same desired results, reduced costs, they have very different methods of achieving those results along with different operational positions (the basis for which decision are made) and the end results that each gains. It is while considering these minor differences that the real differences between the common goals becomes pronounced and, as they continue, begin to clash.

The elimination of positions (dieting) is operating from a position of retreat or withdrawal. It says, “We have overreached and done too much to possibly be able to maintain our position so we must cut back even if that means that we give up some good stuff.” It is a defensive reaction to the environment and sends a clear signal that the only way to survive is to cut back.

The irony of these two styles is that both are equally valid expressions of the same goal, it is entirely possible for managers in both departments to do extensive work (even while working together) to reduce costs and only towards the end of the process realize that the other has been going about the process entirely differently than they have. The incorrect assumption of a common goal is not likely to bother the streamlining manager, but is likely to cause quite a stir for the eliminating manager because he has been sacrificing and “going without” for the benefit of the company only to find out that others have been enjoying themselves and still saving money simply by “exercising” a little.

The two styles will clash dramatically when the cost savings proposals are put forth. The elimination position will present a plan that requires cut equal to the savings. It will present no long term incentive for taking action but will instead focus on how the cuts will benefit the company now. As operations improve, this position will insist that the eliminated workers are restored in order to keep up with the new demand.

The streamlining position will present a radically different plan that requires upfront investment in order to improve systems. Upon the completion of the system improvements, efficiencies will be realized such that positions can be eliminated or reallocated. There is no short term incentive for taking action (in fact, spending money to make money is often considered a disincentive) but the plan will instead focus on bringing savings to the company in the long run. As operations improve, this position will not insist on a directly proportional increase of workers because the improved systems can handle more throughput with less workers.

In the end, both managers will have put forth effort to reduce costs, both managers will have action plans that will save money for the company and both managers will be in alignment with the overarching company goal of reducing costs. They will, however, have plans that look nothing alike and the end results will be dramatically different all because they did not share the same common goal.

In case you missed it: When Mac OS X was released in March 2001, Apple caused a major stir amongst computer programmers. OS X was the first major operating system to severely break backward compatibility. Most other systems (namely Microsoft Windows) typically took great pains to remain reverse compatible while adding new features. But Apple, in a very “Steve Jobsish” way, suddenly said, “Um, world, we are going to change our core programming language in our next release (later that year) so start rewriting your programs because your old programs won’t work as well.” This threw everyone for a loop and the computer world was full of a lot of grumbling, mostly over the incredible expense of rewriting an application in a new language and on such short notice. Because of this last minute switch, there were few applications ready for OS X when it was released. Most of the programs that were available were from Apple itself. Adobe, creators of the extremely popular Photoshop software (and in many ways a competitor with Apple’s popular Final Cut Pro and Garage Band software) rolled their eyes and released a compatible version of Photoshop a year later. Fast forward several years to October 2007 when, concurrent with the release of a new version of OS X, Apple announced that once again, they were changing the foundational programming of the operating system, this time they would end support for 32-bit programs. Microsoft made similar announcements concerning Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Adobe was ready with an updated version of Photoshop that moved in Microsoft’s desired direction shortly after the launch of Windows Vista and 7 (Windows 8 has yet to be launched or even finalized, but is supposed to be the first version of Windows that only support 64-bit, this means that Microsoft gave the world more than 5 years advanced notice for what Apple gave a few month’s notice). Does Adobe love Microsoft so much more than Apple? Maybe. Does Adobe love Windows users so much more than Mac users? Not really, especially considering that Adobe has a strong Mac customer base and the Windows customer base just recently caught up. Why then was Adobe ready for Microsoft’s changes and not Apple’s? The difference is in the subtleties of the timings. Apple announced their dramatic change months ahead of the release of the new OS (mid-2007), giving the company little time to do anything but sneeze. Microsoft announced their dramatic change in 2003 and 2005 for Windows Vista, 2005 and 2007 for Windows 7 and 2007 and 2009 for Windows 8. The difference is that Apple has a history of surprising everyone with big changes that are happening right away while Microsoft (and most other large companies like IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Google) tend to give other companies a lot of notice for big changes. By the way, Adobe didn’t release an updated version of Photoshop until April 2010, two and a half years later. The lengthy delay and the “nasty-gram” sent just after Apple’s announcement were meant to say, “knock it off or we will stop playing nice.” Apple responded by not supporting Flash on the iPhone and then banned applications made using Adobe Flash tools (until the government started eying them for anti-trust law violations).