Action Figure Daniel

Category: Work

  • …And thus the plan was fulfilled

    A little over a year ago I wrote about being in “search of Friends, Advocates and Colleagues” at our sister company. At the same time I was also searching Work. I had already established all friends, advocates and colleagues and they were quite solid. Instead I was looking to drive technological progression throughout the company. It has been easy to apply technology in areas that had a pressing need, but it was much harder gain acceptance of systems that didn’t have a perceived problem but could still benefit from technology backings. This past Friday I heard the magic words, “Daniel, I think you’ve opened Pandora’s Box. Now that we have seen what can be done we have all sorts of ideas.” And thus the plan was fulfilled, years of work has been solidified into a single breaking point that has finally burst.

    You may think it a little selfish of me to propagate my department into every venue possible. It is only mildly selfish though. When done correctly, technological progression helps the company to run more efficiently and thus saves money while improving performance. In my mind, paper forms are generally one of the more ineffective ways to handle business. For example, we have a form for resolving customer issues. Sometimes the resolutions require multiple managers to approve the resolution and then other people to complete the resolution. Let us follow the paper form through its life. It starts out as a PDF on our intranet site. A salesperson locates, prints and completes the form before giving it to the manager. The manager works with the form until an acceptable resolution has been reached. They then approve the form then and send it to the appropriate party who then process the resolution. In this system there are at least four places where the paper form can be lost and no one would know about it (with the salesperson, the manager, in the mail and with the processor). Converting the form to digital avoids the problem of the form getting lost. The form also travels quicker, especially by avoiding the mail. What used to take days to move can now be done in hours.

    Selfish or not, I feel that propagating technological progress throughout the company is a benefit not only to my department, but to the company as a whole.

  • The Secret Tenets of IT/IS

    Through time I have developed a triplet of tenets to guide my projects and efforts at work. These tenets are in fact the rock solid foundation that my IT/IS Department has been based upon. Thus far they have worked really well. As they have been so vital to me I thought I would share them.

    The Three Secret Tenets of IT/IS

    Secret One:
    Imagine for a moment that you are traveling down the highway. You’re going a good 90 miles per hour, which wouldn’t be a problem except you are on a highway, not a freeway, and the speed limit is 65 miles per hour. You’re not really in a hurry, you’re just excited for the lunch date you’re on your way to.

    You hear the siren first. It is a blaring siren, yet it seems distant and remote. You tap the brakes and look in the rear-view mirror hoping that you will see a police car racing down the other side of the highway. The lights are close enough you don’t need the mirror. Your dashboard lights up in brilliant but short bursts of red and blue, the police car is behind you.

    That tap on the brakes turns into a full push, the car decelerates and you pull to the side. You don’t even hope he passes you by, you know he is out for you. He gets out of his car and walks to your windows which you roll down. Your heart is racing, your blood boiling, your pants soiled (not really but you wonder if it would be easier if they were). You’re not just in trouble, you are practically dead.

    “Why are you in such a hurry son?” the Officer asks.

    You consider all the good excuses you can think of but you find your mouth speaking before any of the excuses can be loaded. “Just a lunch date, sir.”

    “Must be a big date,” he replies sternly, “to not care if you arrive there or not.”

    “No sir.” Again you speak without the proper language module loaded, “just a couple of friends.”

    “Why were you going so fast then?” the sternness still strong in his voice.

    “Just got excited and lost track of the speed,” you have given up on the whole good reasoning thing, obviously your mouth doesn’t think you need it.

    The Officer walks back to his car to check your credentials. An eternity passes before he returns.

    “Son,” he starts, “I just want to make sure you stay alive. If you promise you won’t go speeding around again I won’t ticket you.”

    “Honestly, sir, I was so scared when I saw your lights that I committed to never speed again,” you say.

    It wasn’t a lie, though it would turn out to not be the truth. But for now, you believed it and that is what matters. Later you will find the statement an error, but you cannot expect a man to change his whole life in a moment that will be remembered well for some time before time passes and the memory becomes distant and then not a memory at all but a legend until finally it dies as a faint myth. It has been said that ‘almost dying changes nothing. Dying changes everything’ (Dr. Gregory House) and it is true here as well.

    Secret Two:
    Have you seen a phone recently? They’re not phones anymore, they are Phones. Sure there are still some that just perform the basic calling functions, but most phones today do a whole lot more. In addition to calling they send and receive text messages, take relatively high quality pictures and video, surf the internet, come loaded with all sorts of applications and tell you where you are (though they are still lacking on to help me figure out what I want to be when I grow up, but I’m sure an app is coming to do that too). What we had once prided ourselves on being the thinnest fit possible we now pride on being able to do anything.

    “Being able to get my email anywhere, at any time,” Devin said, “I couldn’t live without be able to get my email anywhere.”

    I thought about that comment and concluded that on my personal email account I don’t get any messages that are so important they can’t wait until I can get home. I get those on my work email account, but let’s face it: I don’t want to be answering work email when I’m hiking a mountain, out riding a bike or even curled up reading a book. But then I thought that about my cell phone and how I feel naked and bare when I leave home without it. I can only imagine that the sensation of needing my phone, and all the features that come with it, every moment of every day would get stronger the more useful my phone was.

    Secret Three:
    In you were to go swimming in more tropical waters than what we get in Oregon and were to go exploring a coral reef, you may perchance encounter a glorious Manta Ray. Unlike the common rays and skates, manta ray is huge, measuring in at about 25 feet from wing tip to wing tip. As awesome and impressive as the Manta is, it has little to do with IT or IS. Rather, I would draw your attention to the much, much smaller remora (they are one to three feet long). The remoras attach themselves to the manta (and whales, sharks and other large oceanic bodies) with a small suction cup. As the large manta swims the little remoras go along too. When it is eating time all the remora has to do is reach its lower lip up past its upper lip (which nature designed it to do) and gently scrap all manner of goodness off the manta ray. This coexistence is welcomed by the manta ray because though the remora’s ride hitching means a little more effort to swim, the remora’s eating keeps it clean and parasite free. Both parties win.

    There they are, the Three Secret Tenets of IT/IS. I know it isn’t fair that they are encased within heavily coded analogies, but it wasn’t fair to make those who know the real secrets follow me around for weeks on end doing relatively menial tasks either. I figure equal unfairness balances out into total fairness. Besides, you didn’t honestly expect me to fully disclose one of my most closely guarded secrets, did you?

    As a side note, each point is as true as I can find, so at least you learned something. If you want to know the real tenets you’ll have to become part of my posterity.

    Oh, I currently have no openings in my posterity. I’ll keep you apprised though.

  • Error: Circular Reference

    In 2007 Oregon amended its wage laws to peg minimum wage increases to the Consumer Product Index (read the Press Release). This was and remains a bad idea. To start with most people on minimum wage are single and many still live at home. According to a Joint Economic Committee Report issued in 1996 more than half of workers earning minimum wage were single and a third were still living with their parents, thus not requiring as much money to live. More specifically the report states: “Minimum wage workers are not parents struggling to feed their children. Rather, they are high school or college students living at home.” While this report is a little old, it is not yet too old to be completely irrelevant. My real problem with having minimum wage tied to an inflation index is what Excel would call a ‘circular reference’ error. These are nasty errors that loop back on themselves and have to be used with caution. (In all my Excel experience I have never purposely used a circular reference in a spreadsheet, and I can barely imagine why they would be helpful.)

    The Cascading Effect

    A circular reference is a set of equations that reference each other in a loop. The looping causes the formulas to repeat infinitely and are thus difficult to use. For example, I calculate the cost of my widgets (a generic and fictitious product that economists often use in their models) by adding together my labor, facilities and materials costs times 1.5 so I can make some profit (the formula would be (l+f+m)*1.5). Let us say that each widget takes an hour to make and so they cost: $8.40 for an hour at minimum wage, $5.00 for the facility (building and utility costs), and $10.00 for the materials. At my 50% markup the finished product would cost $35.10 each. Next year, because the CPI increased, minimum wage increased to $9.00 an hour. My widgets now cost $36.00 each, a 3% increase. The next year minimum wage increases by 3% because I charge 3% more for my widgets and the new minimum wage is $9.27 an hour, my widgets now cost $36.41 each. These calculations do not take into account the increased expense of materials (labor increase affect the cost of raw materials as well) and so each year’s minimum wage increase adds to the next year’s inflation rate and thus the minimum wage endlessly increases except in a reccesion. In the Oregon law, minimum wage remains the same if the CPI is negative and so even in a recession or when a market is flooded with cheaper product the minimum wage remains the same.

    The Soaking Effect

    Remember the Joint Economic Committee Report said the employees getting paid minimum wage are: high school and college students working part-time, not people with families working full-time. Allow me to summarize what students spend money on in order of cost: school, toys and fun. Schooling, like most markets, is subject to the laws of supply and demand and most students can’t dream of paying for school by themselves and so it should not be part of the discussion. That leaves us with: fun and toys. This means that most of the minimum wage increase goes to pay for non-essential items that, while providing a higher quality of life, are really luxury items (e.g. iPods, cell phones, text messaging plans, music downloads, etc.). While money spent in these industries does reenter the economy, they are industries with incredibly high margins that reflect the level of demand rather than the cost of manufacturing. For example, no matter how many times a song is downloaded there will be another copy available for download for the next customer. The producers’ only worry is making sure they meet the original investment costs; everything past this amount is profit. Another example, the price of the highly popular iPhone isn’t a markup based simply of original developments and continued production costs but instead is based on the most the company can charge for the phone while increasing market share at an acceptable rate. Consumers pay the added expense for the “coolness” factor.

    Basically, these markets are much more flexible at soaking up disposable income than normal consumable products.

    The Squishing Affect

    Minimum wage increases affect more than just those on minimum wage; they affect everyone paid more than minimum wage. Imagine an employee getting paid $9.50 an hour instead of the $8.40 minimum wage. In theory this employee makes 13% more than the average cost to live, not bad for an entry level job. The next year, because my widgets increased the CPI, minimum wage increased to $9.00 an hour. Now the employee only makes 6% more than the average cost to live, in essence the State has issued pay cuts to all non-minimum wage employees. Continue to the next year when minimum wage increases again to $9.27 an hour and the employee only makes 2% above the average cost of living.

    A job that used to give an employee about $216 a month ($2,588 a year) as disposable income (money beyond the cost of food, transportation, residence, etc.) changed to $91 a month ($1,098 a year) then to $41 a month ($490 a year). While increasing the wages of part-time students (the ones the Joint Economic Report says is making minimum wage) the State is decreasing the wages of full-time working families (the ones who make more than minimum wage). The State has pushed the lower class towards to upper class and in the process squished the middle class and lower class together.

    The Triple Jeopardy Affect

    As minimum wage continues to increase each year, employers have to make a choice: increase wages, decrease wages or fire employees. This is a triple no-win situation for employers.

    The employer may not want to increase employee wages for two reasons. The first is that consistently increasing a worker’s wage gives the worker the impression that they are entitled to raises, which is often not the case. The second reason is that in most cases the worker is not worth any more year to year. Except in cases involving unions and minimum wage, the going wage for any job is determined by supply and demand. For example, a chain store may pay more for cashiers in a metropolitan store than in a suburban store because it is harder to find qualified workers in the larger market than the smaller market. Another example, doctors and lawyers don’t get paid a lot of money because their jobs are particularly hard but because there are not a lot of them to do the job. Job markets obey the laws of supply and demand for everything more than minimum wage.

    If the employer chooses to not increase employee wages, they have in essences chosen to decrease them. In theory the minimum wage increase is due to an increase in the cost of living and if the employee makes the same this year as they did last year then the employee has less disposable income. This effect may not be noticed the first year, but will be noticed before too many years. Upon noticing this trend employees are likely to work less and become less loyal, demand a raise or search for other employment. Of course the employer may decide that with the spiraling increases in minimum wage the position is no longer worth the added expense and therefore the worker is expendable. Expendable employees don’t often last long.

    Minimum wage always makes showing the value of a job more difficult. If an employer wants to get an entry level worker that is above average they often offer to pay the position a little above minimum wage, say $9.00 an hour instead of $8.40 an hour. Being a little higher than minimum wage becomes increasingly more expensive as minimum wage increases.

    The Market Correction Effect

    I hate going through great lengths to identify problems in a system without suggesting possible fixes, so here is my suggestion: get rid of minimum wage.

    “But Daniel, if there is no minimum wage capitalist pigs will take over and the economy will be destroyed.” No, no my weak believer. I argue that if minimum wage were to be abolished that the job market might tank and but would then correct itself. Every free market (free from government intervention) always, always corrects itself. If wages plummeted so would income and costs. As income dropped margins would increase, making capitalists happy for a while but a lack of income would force prices down until local job markets balanced out paying employees what they should be paid. Getting rid of minimum wage might also take a significant dent out of unemployment because companies could afford to hire workers for things that don’t justify the expense of current minimum wages.

    “But Daniel, workers were abused before there was minimum wage.” Not so my young believer, well not because of a lack of minimum wage. Workers were abused because they had no right to safe working conditions but now we have things like the Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) to enforce wage payments to employees and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to make sure employees are working in safe conditions. The problem of employee abuse was more of a problem of no enforcement of wage contracts and abuse of human rights than a problem of not paying them enough.

    Free markets always, always correct themselves.

    Notes

    A compilation of Joint Economic Committee reports about minimum wage can be found here.

    Disclaimer: I fully understand that there are exceptions in every case, especially in statistics. I fully understand the words of Doug: “You can’t manage to the exception.” They’re exceptions, not the rule and even if all our time is dedicated to handling exception we still would not be able to address them all. It is best to manage to the rule, especially when talking about a state full of people, and let the exceptions be handled on a case by case basis.

  • The Snowy Trip

    It was a cold and wintery morning when I was headed home from school. The semester had just ended and I was excited to be done. That morning I had woken up twice, once to take a roommate to the bus stop so he could fly home and the second time was my time to go home. Between the two waking up times several inches had fallen, but we headed out anyway. The going was slow and one of the mountain passes was closed for an hour, but we got out of the mountains safely. The storm we had been driving in front of finally caught up to us as night set in.

    The winds were blowing hard and the snow was pouring down and the trucks were going very slow. During the trip I was stuck behind three trucks in a row (caravan style). I was tired and it was getting late. I decided that I could pass the trucks and go at least a little bit faster than the trucks so I made the daring move into the left lane. The car was immediately hit by a blast of wind and snow. I couldn’t see anything and had to slow down more than I was already going. Not being able to pass the trucks I moved back into right lane, behind the trucks. Not wanting to go so slow I again tried to pass the trucks and was again met with a blast of snow and wind and again retreated behind the trucks. I then realized that the trucks were blocking me from the harsh winds and snow. Because of this shielding I couldn’t see, didn’t see, the true intensity of the storm.

    This experience has been played out many time, not on the road but in relation to our leaders. Let me illustrate:

    I have a friend who was recently promoted to be the manager of her department, replacing her previous boss. Before she got the new position she and I had talked about the slowness of progress that her managers made. After she got the new position we talked about how hard it was to lead the department in excellence. To fit with the story, she had been stuck behind the trucks and was waiting for an opportunity to pass them. She finally got her chance and realized that it was hard to lead in the face of the storm. Now her subordinates have a similar frustration that she had with the slowness of progress. (To prevent insubordination she shares with her subordinates the constraints of the process and allows them to try to pass up the organization and thus help bring innovation and change. This allows frustrated people to try their ideas; if they succeed then the organization becomes more efficient, if they fail then at least they better understand the difficulty of weathering the storm.)

  • Quorum Sensing (or Natural Leadership Vetting)

    Quorum sensing is the component of swarm intelligence that allows a swarm (or group) to settle on a decision and begin acting on that decision. It is used in a large variety of natural and artificial systems. I’ll use a rock dwelling ant colony to illustrate the concept of quorum sensing:

    A colony of ants happily dwells in their rocky home until the rocks shift causing extensive damage to their colony. The shifted rocks are no longer a suitable habitation for the colony and worker ants venture out looking for a new home. Every possible nook and cranny is explored until one large enough is found. The individual worker ant inspects the crevice and assesses its suitability for the colony including lighting, water flow and air ways. After the inspection the ant heads back to the colony and waits.

    The waiting period is inversely tied to the quality of the new site. The poorer quality the site is the longer the ant waits, the better the site the less it waits. Once the waiting time is over the initial worker ant solicits other ants to follow him to inspect the new site. After the second inspection is complete the ants return and again wait, the same waiting rules apply, before soliciting yet another group of ants to inspect. At a critical point, the worker ants that remained in the colony realize that enough ants have approved a site and they pack up to follow them to the new site and the whole colony is relocated.

    The timing of the waiting period is critical. The worker ant is basically waiting to see if another worker returns bursting into the colony with a ‘must have’ site. If no other ant solicits before they do then the ant can assume their selected site is the best site currently available. If a better site is located the returning worker ant would also start soliciting ants and the cascading effect ensues but at a faster rate because of the superior site.

    The quorum part is the large number of ants going to the same prospective site. The sensing part is realizing that the quorum has reached a critical mass and thus a decision has been made. Quorum sensing is used in nearly every type of swarm including ants and bees, fireflies, light emitting bacteria, fish that swim in schools, even mobs and businesses. Each organization using quorum sensing differently, but the principles remain the same. Fireflies use quorums to determine where they should gather, light emitting bacteria to know when there are enough of them to make their light noticeable. Ants and bees use it to determine the most suitable location for the swarm without the time or danger of each member inspecting each site. Mobs use quorum sensing to determine why they are mobbing and what or whom they are going to mob.

    Often in society we like to think that we are above such a fundamental practice of quorum sensing, but in reality we are steeped in it. No change can ever be effected unless a significant group, either is quantity or quality, approves the change. This is true in the corporate boardroom where leaders are appointed and even for the president of the United States who is elected. Swarms of people wait when new technology and products are introduced for a quorum, usually a select group of famous people, to endorse them new items before they themselves begin using them. Have you ever heard the phrase “I’m waiting until the next version to buy it” or “we’ll see how well to works”? These are both cases of waiting until the quorum concludes that the change is acceptable. Another version implies that enough ‘ants’ approved the earlier version, usually by purchasing it, that the manufacturer could survive long enough to make the next version thus the quorum has been reached. Waiting for reviews of a new product is waiting for another ‘ant’ to solicit your use of the product; the early ‘ant’ is convincing you to inspect the new ‘site’ thus building the quorum.

    Quorum dynamics are the governing principles behind quorum sensing. Quorum dynamics consists of two parts as briefly mentioned earlier: quality and quantity.

    Quality is the voting power a particular member has. Some members have a lot of sway, unofficially and officially, while others do not. Some people can give a thousand word opinion and not convince another soul while others can give a single look and convince the whole quorum. In a family the mom would be expected to carry a higher quality rating than a child and an adult child more than a juvenile. Quality ratings aren’t always along predictable or constant: an adult child would carry a higher quality rating than their mom on their wedding day.

    The second attribute in quorum sensing is quantity, simply the number of agreeable members in the quorum. The total number of members is of little importance as few decisions rely on raw votes. For example, the decision over where a family will eat out likely rests with the parents not the four children. The parent’s decision may be overruled if the children orchestrated a loud protest, thus exercising their voting power and the quorum decision would have achieved critical mass.

    Every person with voting power, regardless of quality rating, is a “valid quorum member” and every “valid quorum member” has voting power. Valid quorum members can be adapted to members present and as the situation dictates. For example, when a visiting uncle arrives, though not a member of the immediate family, he becomes a valid quorum member and can affect policy decisions. On the other hand, if a grandfather dies, his grandchildren may have no voting power in funeral arrangements though they might have voting power in decisions about the family’s summer vacation. It is also possible to be part of the quorum but to have no voting power. Parents to give a lot of advice to their newly married children and thus influence the outcome of the vote, but they themselves have no voting power.

    Quorum sensing’s critical mass is a function of quality times quantity. For a decision to be made enough people with enough voting power must reach consensus. In the example of the children going out to eat, their consensus overrode the decision of a single parent, but likely would not have withstood both parents’ consensus. The threshold for each decision varies based on the importance of that decision. Children will are more likely to influence important decisions like where the family will move to but have less influence over what kind of car the dad buys for commuting to work.

    Organizations use quorum sensing to sustain leaders and managers. A president may appoint a new department head, but the new department head will still need to get his department to ‘sustain’ him as a leader. While the quorum is vetting, the employees of the department will lack both trust and confidence in the leader. The quorum is likely to consist of key department staff, key in the sense of office politics and likeability not in the sense of job level or authority. A well liked janitor may have a higher quality rating than an annoying mid-level manager. It is important to remember that only valid quorum members can vote. The bimbo mail boy’s vote won’t be counted and neither will the department head even though he is part of the quorum. The length of the vetting depends on the perceived quality of the leader, just like the ant’s delay in soliciting others to inspect the new site is determined by the perceived quality of the site. The more confident quorum members are in the new leader the more excited they will be to rally behind them, the less confident they are the less excited. Once a quorum member approves of the new leader they will solicit others to rally with them. This process will continue until a critical mass is reached, in both quality and quantity or until the vote fails by default because it takes too long.

    If a sufficient quorum consensus is never reached then the quorum will either remain divided over the perceived competence level of the new leader, probably causing the larger quorum to divide into small quorums, or the quorum members who voted in the affirmative will retract their vote, and their support, until the new leader is left without a sustainable platform.