employment, stupidity

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Should You Stay At Your Cushy Job? | MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

So I asked him why he changed jobs. After all, he has a wife and child at home whom he loves spending time with. His former job was a 9-5 type job that lent him plenty of time at night to hang out with his family. In addition, he never had to work weekends and the job itself was pretty low stress. Why did he give all of that up for a new job where he?ll have to work many more hours and re-establish himself? Why did he sacrifice the additional family time for a new job that is more demanding?

Here, Steve from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com tells why the best thing to do may be to stick with your boring job that pays your bills and gives you sufficient non-work time to work on your own business venture. Why? Go read the article.

In the end, though, it is your time. You are free to use it to build up someone else's business. You are free to use it to launch and hopefully build up your own business. You are free to use it to help out at one of the many non-profit groups in your area. You are free to use it playing the newest first-person shooter. Just don't complain when you are still working for someone else's company when you are 75.

small business startup

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AP IMPACT: Weak security enables credit card hacks - Yahoo! News

Security experts say there are several steps the payment industry could take to make sure customer information doesn't leak out of networks.

Banks could scramble the data that travels over payment networks, so it would be meaningless to anyone not authorized to see it.

For example, TJX Cos., the chain that owns T.J. Maxx and Marshalls and was victimized by a breach that exposed as many as 100 million accounts, the most on record, has tightened its security but says many banks won't accept data in encrypted form.

This highlights the problem with the current security process. If someone steals your information, you can be on the hook for a portion of the costs unless you can prove that one of the companies along the chain made an error.

The article has one glaring error: it claims that most data loss occurs during transmission. The truth is, online vandals routinely penetrate supposedly secure systems such as those used by banks and even the military. The number one way to prevent the loss of information is to not store that information in the first place. If the info is out there, it will eventually be compromised.

If we want to turn the tide of "identity theft" and other criminal misuses of another person's information, there are two simple changes in the law that would make it happen. The first is that an individual's personal information is their sole personal property and may not be stored or utilized by any company any longer than is necessary. Make that enforceable with prison time, and suddenly a lot of the information that is accumulated will be wiped clean. The second is even more important: Make the bank responsible for 100% of costs related to consumer data losses (except where it is proven that the consumer was at fault)--including the costs of re-establishing one's credit after suffering identity theft. Believe me, they would become a lot more stringent about securing individuals' data.

In other words, the present situation with data losses increasing exponentially each year (surely you don't believe that the ones we hear about are the only ones that happen), is solely caused by having the wrong incentives. Banks have an incentive to look like they are combating data losses and theft, but they choose minimal-cost, minimal-protection solutions because there is no penalty for doing less than they can do to protect consumers.

This, of course, is partly a consequence of allowing LOOACs and big financial companies to have inordinate influence in the legislative process. It can take a decade or more for a consumer to recover from the effects of a single data loss (or even a stolen wallet or purse). That pain is not borne by the banks, so of course they don't care to expend any extra energy to prevent it. If our government ever changes the incentives, it won't take six months to bring fraud down to unheard of levels.

As always, our focus is on small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs). It goes without saying that there will be costs for SLOBs to comply with such standards. But the upside is that there will be a big reduction in charge-backs. And, once consumers know that their financial information is safe, they will be willing to use their plastic at John's Local Market just as they do at Bigg's Nationwide Supermarket.

The current system benefits only the large financial companies who take a fraction of every payment that is transferred through the system. Neither individuals nor small businesses benefit as much as they could, simply because of the risk of fraud and data loss that is built into the system. No, it is not possible to prevent all risks or to reduce them to zero. What is possible is to motivate those with the power to reduce those risks to actually do so.

IceRocket:credit card fraud

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AIG Balks at Claims From Jet Ditching In Hudson

When a homeowner has a burglary or a driver has a crash, all it normally takes is a call to the insurance company and a description of the loss to activate the policy. But aviation liability insurance is different. It is activated by a finding of negligence on the part of an airline. If there is no negligence, then arguably there is no liability, and no obligation to pay claims.

That poses a problem for the passengers of US Airways Flight 1549. They suffered real losses and injuries, but they are widely perceived as having been saved from sudden, violent death by their heroic and quick-thinking flight crew, led by Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger.

"Insurance companies try to protect their assets, obviously," said Bruce D. Chadbourne, a co-author of the book, "Introduction to Aviation Insurance and Risk Management," and a professor in the business school at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. With the airline wearing a halo, A.I.G. "is going to play hardball."

This is not being shared to accuse AIG or other insurance companies of some nefarious agenda. There are plenty of other incidents to support that view. It is here merely to support an observation: As one should expect, insurance companies are not your "friends". Instead, they are self-focused businesses that strive to make as much money as they can.

In all your dealings with them, keep that in mind and you should be okay.

Employed see tough times, too - USATODAY.com

People who still have jobs are faring worse than at any time since the Great Depression, a USA TODAY analysis of employment data found. Furloughs, pay cuts and reduced hours are taking a toll on workers who so far have escaped job cuts.

The employed worked fewer hours in May ? an average of just 33.1 hours a week ? than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting in 1964. Part-time work is at a record high. Overtime is at a record low.

The magnitude of job losses ? 6 million jobs gone, a 9.4% unemployment rate ? has overshadowed the groundbreaking nature of the nation's employment troubles, especially the financial decline of those still working.

Sometimes, we have to wonder what planet our elite economists and politicians live on. The tone of this USA Today article reflects the complete surprise that these leaders are experiencing. Yes, that is correct--these people are surprised that this is hurting those who haven't lost their jobs almost as much as it hurts those who did lose their jobs. In some cases, employers are reclaiming hard-won benefits and pay scales, all without trimming their bizarrely bloated executive compensation.

If you have ever had a job anywhere, you know that there is no single person in any organization whose output is worth more than twenty times as much as any other organizational member. There is plenty of room to debate multiples, but hardly anyone would say that a multiple in excess of 20 is accurate.

All content copyright © 2009, WebConnect Consulting, a division of Open Technology Pros, LLC. Licensed under Creative Commons Non-commercial license. If your site has paid subscribers or is ad-supported, you need permission to republish four paragraphs or more of our content.

I think that employees understand that there is pain throughout the economy, just as employers do. If lower-level employees feel that they are made to bear a disproportionate share of this pain, they will be harder to work with in the future. It always surprises me when LOOAC management believes that their employees will not remember. This is what doomed Circuit City, I believe. The company fired their best, highest-paid employees, telling them they could re-apply for their jobs, but the pay would be lower than before.

When this passes, which may be a while, corporate America (LOOACs) will not want to restore pay and benefits that were cut during the recession, except where those cuts affected top management. I believe that more people that are (or were) employees need to be taking the reins of their own lives and finances by establishing and building their own small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs), owner-managed businesses (OMBs), and family-owned businesses (FOBs).

But this also requires some changes in the way Americans spend their money. If you work fairly near where you live, you need to start seeking out businesses that are local to your area, companies that employ local residents, pay local taxes, support the local Little League and Junior All-American teams, and actively contribute to the local area's well-being. If you travel, you need the generic national brand stores, because at least you know what you're getting.

Also look for products and services that are produced in your area. If not in your area, at least look for in-country production, rather than out-of-country. Decide on a figure, such as 50%, and make an effort to place that much of your purchase dollars with locally-owned businesses. On top of that, try to spend that much of your money on products that are made in-country, rather than outside of the country.

I'm trying to reach 75% local purchases and 75% in-nation production. It is a hard target to reach, because much of what is available is foreign-made, carried in chain stores that don't even have local purchasing operations. But if most Americans made similar efforts, it would launch an economic and social transformation even more far-reaching than the current recession. For one thing, Main Street would gain the upper hand over Wall Street: a small business-driven Main Street is a decentralized Main Street, while Wall Street is all about centralization. With SLOBs seeking to build relationships with locally-owned banks, the era of corporate dinosaurs will end without a catastrophic meteorite strike.

Remember this: big corporations (that is, LOOACs) equals concentration of wealth, mass disenfranchisement, and large-scale corruption on the federal level and possibly state and local levels. Smaller businesses (that is, SLOBs, OMBs, and FOBs) equals wide dispersion of wealth, active participation by large segments of the population, and locally-controlled resources (unable to bribe federal and state officials). Choose current comfort (that is, LOOACs) or long-term benefit (SLOBs). I'm firmly on the side of SLOBs.

Unfortunately, the economic rescue efforts to date have mostly focused on saving the LOOACs that caused the crisis in the first place. Even the new energy plan is expected to promote large and centralized "alternative energy" production, which is both expensive and unreliable, instead of focusing on equipping every home with its own energy-production and energy-storage facilities. Overall, home-focused energy is more expensive. But its advantage is that there probably isn't going to be a region-wide or state-wide blackout due to clouds or lack of winds. Taking a drive through certain areas of California, one regularly sees windmill farms where the windmills aren't turning because the wind speed is too high or too low to be useful.

Rather than bailing out corrupt and incompetent bankers, we could have used those trillions to help smaller businesses invest in equipment, buildings, and inventory necessary to soak up many of the workers that are being spilled by corporate America. It would still have been painful, but it would also have resulted in much faster absorption of stimulus money into the economy. And best of all, we would not be fighting the natural trend of the economy to rid itself of uncompetitive enterprises such as the large financial companies.

This is not just another business cycle. This is a deep restructuring. If we ignore the needed changes (or if the government's continuing effort to oppose them succeeds), we will face a much larger calamity down the road, only it will be condensed into a much shorter, much deeper downswing and a long pause before any upswing begins. Like most Americans, I've grown fat. I don't want to face the potential of starvation when our interconnected economy breaks down. I'd much rather fix it now and avoid hunger.

econolypse

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GM to sell Hummer to Chinese company - Yahoo! News

General Motors Corp. took a key step toward its downsizing on Tuesday, striking a tentative deal to sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese manufacturer, while also revealing that it has potential buyers for its Saturn and Saab brands.

I am actually surprised by this. Unlike the rest of GM, where the financial collapse is the immediate problem, Hummer's biggest problem is its ultra-size vehicles. Just before the financial crisis, there was an oil price spike that really squeezed the large-vehicles market. Then came the financial crisis, and soon will come tough limits on fuel consumption, pollution, and plant nutrient emissions (otherwise known as CO₂).

"GM is close to a sale of its Hummer brand, which is good news for the 3,000 Americans who will be able to keep their jobs, the two American plants that will remain open and the more than 100 Hummer dealers that should be able to stay in business all around the country," White House spokesman Bill Burton said earlier in the day.

A buyer for Hummer is buying all the disadvantages that GM itself had, including potential labor unrest should GM renounce its pension plans during bankruptcy. What is the buyer getting in return? A demoralized workforce that is still expensive in comparison to its competitors. A product emphasis that may well be in a deceased segment of the market. A name that is the butt of late night comedians' jokes. Impending pressure from the EPA and the state of California to make Hummer become something it is not.

For about a year, Hummer's products will continue to be made by GM and other contractors. This, of course, is a necessary transition period. But it also exposes a weakness. In chipmaking parlance, Hummer will be nearly "fabless" for a while, and thus will be dependent upon its manufacturing partners and their stability. If this bankruptcy proves unsuccessful and GM closes later this year, Hummer's supplies dry up and they close shortly afterward.

Saturn Corp., on the other hand, was moderately successful, until they came out with some vehicles that were said to be siblings of other GM brands' products. They have their no-haggle policy, which I think is really a great idea. How many times have you bought a vehicle over the weekend, then came to work on Monday and found that a co-worker got a better deal? I think Saturn needed to advertise and emphasize their "no regrets" purchasing. What's more, I think that Saturn needed full control of its design and production processes, without any thought of comingling with GM's other brands.

Take a look at history. GM closed its plant in Fremont, California, then reopened it in a partnership with Toyota (New United Motor Mfg, Inc.--NUMMI). Eventually, Toyota took full control of the successful NUMMI plant, but GM believed they had learned some things that made a Toyota-run plant successful when a GM-run plant was not. Those lessons were put into practice in a new company, Saturn, that was going to lead GM forward into the future.

So where did the wheels come off? Well, the original Saturn SL-1 was visibly different from other vehicles of its vintage. It wasn't quite DeLorean cool, but it stood out. Saturn advertising focused on telling potential car-buyers why a Saturn was different. But then, GM decided that Saturn needed a minivan, so they cloned one for it.

One of the big issues with GM over the years has been the way that most of its vehicles were clones of one another, with slightly different sheet metal or trim. This may have partly been a reaction to government antitrust efforts. Instead of allowing Chevrolet to completely run its design and production operations, Chevy and other "nameplates" were turned into marketing labels, sharing a common production and distribution apparatus. This meant that DOJ could not simply pry Chevy out of GM, without having to unmix the eggs at the assembly and subassembly levels and tear apart the design group in order to have a viable company.

Once that practice was carried over to Saturn, much of that brand's distinctiveness was lost. In fact, the desire to sell doesn't seem to include the Saturn plant in Tennessee. So it seems that GM is also leaving Saturn "fabless".

GM will sell or get rid of Saab, Hummer, Saturn and Pontiac as it tries to shrink into a leaner, stronger company through its bankruptcy protection filing.

The struggling automaker, which has received $19.4 billion in U.S. government loans and will get a total of $50 billion in aid, hopes to emerge from Chapter 11 in 60-90 days.

GM would like to sell the money-losing Saturn brand's dealership network, contracting with the new buyer to make some of its cars while the buyer gets other vehicles from different manufacturers.

Why not include the original Saturn plant in the deal? Is it because that is probably one of the most productive plants GM has? Because it seems to me that GM has a lot better chance of coming out alive if each of its current brands own their design and production processes completely, with no more "GM look" vehicles with minor trim and metal-bending changes for each brand. Divesting brands would be a lot more effective if the buyers of those brands took a share of the labor-relations headaches, pension obligations, and supply-chain pain along with the name and dealer network. It would also free the buyers from the after-effects should GM collapse anyway.

More to the point, GM isn't losing money because of its dealer networks. GM is losing money because it is a massive monolithic organization, run using Theory X management techniques. As is normal in such an organization, there is a lot of tension between labor and management. Management tends to richly reward themselves whenever the company's revenue or profit increases, which tends to encourage unionized employees to likewise seek rewards that are not tied to the reality in which the company operates.

GM (and to some lesser degree, its competitors Ford and Chrysler) takes a very Tayloristic approach, one which minimizes worker skillsets and maximizes task specificity. This, then, made it into their union contracts, so that the company found it very difficult to simplify workflows by reorganizing job tasks. I've been saying for a decade that the automakers could make a big move toward solving their problems by getting capping management compensation at 10 times the lowest-paid full-time equivalent employee's compensation and getting rid of such perks as executive dining rooms and the free use of vehicles. This would have showed the UAW and its Canadian equivalent that it wasn't about fattening the executives' paychecks.

A friend and co-worker recently said that Ford appears to be going in the right direction and has a bright future. I would really like to see Ford dealing with the Theory X garbage and embracing a much-less top-down and much-more employee-influenced design and production environment. I'd like to see the kind of open-book and employee-involved management pioneered by companies like Springfield Remanufacturing Company taking root in Ford, but otherwise, I agree fully: Ford is on an upswing.

Unfortunately for GM, I sincerely doubt that it can make these kinds of changes while it is undergoing a wrenching bankruptcy restructuring, especially now that the government is its chief stockholder. The feds may keep the money spigot going for a couple of years, but it looks like GM is doomed. I just hope that they turn off the spigot before Ford needs to raise cash again. With GM's new federalized-entity status, their cost of capital should be down near that of such government-sponsored entities as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Sallie Mae. This could easily enable them to underprice Ford, maybe even enough to bring Ford down into the same mudhole as GM and Chrysler. (My opinion of Chrysler: I do not believe that Fiat is financially-strong enough, nor does it have the management sophistication, to manage the empire it is building. I expect to see a severely-shrunken Dodge-Jeep entity limping out of this collision, with the rest of Chrysler becoming mere wreckage to be towed off for recycling. Look to the AMC-Renault pairing of the 1980s for a script. Only this time, there won't be an American-owned company to buy the wreckage and keep it going.)

I do think that the days of manufacturer-controlled dealer networks are likely to go away. Simply by getting out of the business of financing dealer inventories, a big chunk of the automakers' capital requirements will go away, and they'll also be able to get rid of some of their dealer-oversight staff. This should result in elimination of separate "sales floors" for each brand a dealer carries. This can also eliminate the cost of dealer-based sales incentives. Suddenly, it won't be about who is a Chevy dealer or who is a Ford dealer. It will be about which dealers have open space and access to credit and to customers that will enable them to take vehicles. Dealers will benefit, once they establish independent lines of credit, because they will no longer need to maintain separate sales areas for each brand they carry, and because automakers' captive finance units can then assist more car buyers.

All in all, it looks like two years from now, the only American-owned car company will be Ford.

GM, Hummer, Saturn

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Without Knowing History, Your Actions Won't Help

As a small business person, you are likely to have employees. Having employees brings some issues, but each particular employee brings his or her own specific set of issues. It is tempting to try to fix things for the employee, so that he or she will be punctual, hard-working, and willing to do whatever the business needs at that moment in time.

The truth is, textbooks advise us to place a strict separation between home life and work life. There is limited merit to this. We do need to try to keep the two areas relatively separate, but we have to realize that the two areas tend to intersect.

Let's take the example of the low-wage counter person at the local Gree-C Burger. He leaves work and heads to college classes, where he's told that he needs to come up with hundreds of dollars to pay for books, due next Tuesday. Then he goes to his girlfriend's place, where she grumbles because he never has the time or money to take her "someplace nice". The next day, he asks his manager for a raise. "Why should I give you a raise," the manager asks, "when I've got a whole stack of applications from people who are willing to take your job for the least money I can legally pay them?"

Did you see it? Home events and relationships, work events and relationships, and the events and situations in the world around us are all relevant to what happens at work. For that reason, a small business owner needs to be willing to tackle some of the issues in an employee's life that are affecting work. Now we have to be very careful. I saw a company's policy that carefully prescribed how their employees are allowed to behave online, including when they are not at work. That's a company that is likely to get sued some day.

You usually cannot dictate what an employee does away from work, not even requiring that the employee obeys the laws of the land. So in that sense, it is far better not to interfere with someone's non-work life. When you should consider some kind of involvement is when events and relationships at home become a problem at work. There are all sorts of legal pitfalls, and I am not a lawyer, so consult one before you act.

Here's where it helps if you've chosen to value your employees for more than just the economic output they produce. If you've taken the time to sign up with an "employee assistance plan", your employees may be able to get free or low-cost counseling or addiction treatment. If they know that you won't hold it against them--that is, their jobs will still be waiting, with the same pay, benefits and schedule hours they were used to having--some employees will voluntarily get the help they need.

It is very important, in a small business, that you learn more than just rèsumè information about the employee. Take an interest in him or her as a person. That is, interests, hobbies, dreams & aspirations, family & friends, and history. History is very important. You cannot effectively deal with someone's lateness without understanding how far back it goes. Is it culturally-based? (Obviously, we are not talking about being late once or twice.)

Neither can you deal effectively with issues like lateness without understanding your own attitude toward time and where that attitude comes from. Perhaps you are the one with the problem. Do you expect your employees to be in place, ready to go, before you pay them to be there? Do they have to do some preparation tasks (e.g., heat the grill, count money in the safe or in a cash drawer, stock cups and napkins behind the counter) before they are ready to start, but are not paid to do these tasks?

I was working at one place where start time was so early that none of the employees had a chance to eat before work. So the first twenty minutes or so was spent drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, and other such "get ready for work" tasks. There was a lot to do, but that was not the way to get it done. It would have been more productive to have ten-hour days, shaving some time off the beginning and end of the workday, when people were not productive anyway.

You've got to start, however, by getting to know people better, and that includes their histories, especially their non-work histories. It may sound paternalistic, but part of your job as an employer is to make sure your employees' lives are improved. That was the case in biblical times, and it hasn't changed today. Your responsibilities have not changed just because corporate America and the politicians they own disagree. Start by getting to know them as people and not just as production units.

IceRocket: Small Business Management

small business management

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Former newspaper editor Alan Mutter, now an industry consultant and blogger, calls decisions during the 1990s to make most newspaper Web sites free the industry's "original sin." But gaining penance won't be easy.At this point, whether newspapers charge for their online content or not, free news is likely to remain a staple at major Web sites such as Yahoo, MSN and AOL that pay for the right to post stories from The Associated Press and other sources. Bloggers and citizen journalists are likely to keep posting their own takes on the news on free Web sites. Those free summaries may be enough for readers unwilling to pay for the original stories.

Online news fees: financial salvation or suicide? : Yahoo! Tech

Here is my own take on this: There are two or three main types of newspaper. The first kind is the local paper. It can be distinguished by a focus on gathering and publishing local news and local content. This kind of paper is likely to be good and worthwhile, but the lack of national and other out-of-area content means that readers probably need a second paper in order to make up for this deficiency.

The local paper also tends to have a very boosterish attitude toward local events, local organizations, local politicians, and the local economy. This paper is probably not going to tell you that the local banker is putting too much capital on the line financing that big housing development and the shopping mall next to it. Why? Because they are so tied into the local scene that they cannot risk upsetting things with deep investigations.

Then there is the national and world coverage newspaper. Since one paper is probably not going to have its own reporters everywhere that newsworthy events occur, this paper is going to be heavily reliant on wire services like the AP. If the parent company owns several papers over a widely-dispersed area, this paper may supplement the wire service coverage with coverage from related papers where possible.

These are the papers that are going to find that no one will pay for access--the same material is available elsewhere, so why pay? More particularly, they have nothing special about their content that will attract scarce resources from potential readers.

And then, there are the specialist papers, such as the WSJ. People who read the WSJ are not looking for general news. They are looking for news that affects their plans and investments--news that affects their wallets--and commentary that helps them determine how to react to this news. As the article mentions, WSJ never allowed free access to its content. But this is misleading, because many other papers also tried to lock up their content behind paywalls or even free login accounts. Without specialized content (or intense local coverage) that people are willing to pay for, the lock-box idea is going to accelerate the demise of the newspaper industry.

Most papers fall somewhere between the first and the second categories. Many find it difficult to retain even non-Internet-connected readers for their dead-tree editions. Most online editions use tricks to increase ad impressions. For example, taking an article and splattering it across multiple Web pages costs each reader multiple clicks (and page loading time). This is done because multiple pages equals multiple ad impressions. Even with these tactics, the ad revenue available online is much smaller than papers have traditionally received. And it is not clear at all that general interest newspapers that source heavily from wire services will be able to retain enough subscribers (online or off) to support their infrastructures and stay in business.

The truth is, long before people were reading their news on the Web, papers were losing readers, losing advertisers, and slowly dying. The Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald-Examiner closed in the 1980s, a decade before the Web was popularized. The Los Angeles Times then went through a little boomlet that saw its ad content soar so much that it alienated readers, including me.

One thing that helped knock papers out of the game is television broadcasters' news programming. I recall when KCBS-2 in Los Angeles started running a local newscast from around 4:30 PM until the network news which started around 7:00 PM. The next day, the very same material I had watched on television was captured in the Times's prose. But with channel 2, there was no "continued, page A-7" no scanning the page to find which column contained the rest of the story, no turning back to page A-1 or A-2 or A-3 to find another story's beginning. Best of all, there was the sense that the news was still "new", which was not at all the feeling I got from the paper.

Plus, with ads in the paper, you never know how many of the paper's readers even turned to the page where your ad appears. It makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of your ad, because a very effective ad could appear on a page that contains the continuations of stories that do not interest readers.

The biggest thing that is killing papers is that they used to have above-average profits. Over time, other ways to learn about news have sprung up, including broadcasts, e-mail, blogs, mobile phone text and photo messages, and microblog services such as Twitter. As the audience has splintered, advertising revenues have declined precipitously.

Those in the newspaper industry see this as a catastrophe. I see it as a transformation. To the degree that people desire news, some sustainable mechanism will arise to collect and distribute that information to the public. Rather than hand-wringing, we need to be experimenting with locally-focused, but low-cost systems to collect and verify news stories, together with various online distribution models.

Tags: newspaperbusiness

Humans need constant stimulation in order to survive. I feel that if I haven?t learned at least one thing each day, then I just haven?t been successful.

Learn something new every day.

The source is a very short blog posting, dating back to late 2007. No matter, its message is one that small business owners especially need to heed. You see, when there are ever-pressing demands upon your time, the important things tend to get buried under the 'urgent' ones. Yet, performing those urgent things without making time for the truly important things, will lead to loss of energy, loss of interest, and eventually, loss of your business.

You may be thinking that this is obvious, and everyone knows it. Yes, at some level, we do. But it tends to be overshadowed by the momentary demands of customers, suppliers, and employees. Consider the hamburger king, McDonald's. What are the keys to success in that industry?

• Quality


• Service


• Cleanliness


• Value

How often have you wandered into a fast food place near the end of the lunch period and seen someone trying to clean tables and sweep the floor? What happens? The manager sees that a customer has entered the store and tells the employee to stop cleaning and come take your order. There are five other people there who could take your order, but they almost always tell the person cleaning the dining room to stop.

You can't tell me that this is just reacting to the situation, because it isn't. It is an unconscious prioritization of back-line tasks over front-line tasks. You as a customer cannot see whether someone prepares enough fish-flavored ice cream treats for the expected demand later in the day. What you can see is that the dining room is dirty, and out of fifteen employees in the building, the only one who seems to be trying to fix that is getting ordered to stop.

So how do we figure out when we need to resist the urge to instantly satisfy a supposedly urgent request? In theory, we should classify each such request into quadrants based on its importance and urgency. (I recently took an online course that proposed just such a method.) The problem with this approach is that each person has different ideas about what is urgent and what is important. The person trying to clean the tables may think that stopping to take an order is inconvenient, that it makes her job more difficult. The person running the shift may think, "We were so busy that we'll never catch up with our preparation for tonight." The person coming in wants to order, but may also want a clean place to sit and eat his food.

Instead, I think we have to start by thinking about what is required for the business to become a long-term success, much as Ray Kroc was able to distill QSCV from the lump of ooze that is the list of things they needed to do in his business. We then prioritize those specific factors--if we can meet time-sensitive (i.e., "urgent") requests without compromising those factors, we should do so--such that those things get done.

One of the things that is required is for you and I to acknowledge that what we knew yesterday was barely enough for today. What we know today will barely enough for tomorrow. If we don't make learning new things a priority, the day after tomorrow will come and we won't know anything more than we do today. That is the start of a slow decline into mediocrity and finally to dissolution of the business. Be ever learning, never standing still.

It isn't just you that needs to be learning. Your staff, the employees and managers that work for you, need to learning as well. It isn't always necessary to learn through formal schooling, nor is it necessary to learn only things that are closely matched to your business and the person's tasks within it. Value learning for the sake of learning, and encourage your staffers to value this also. Make your work environment conducive to distilling lessons from the day's events. Make it supportive of those who do decide to enroll in formal educational programs. Value your employees, especially those to make your products or supply your services to customers. Value them when it comes time to make the schedule, when it comes time to make out paychecks, when it comes time to discipline, and when it comes time to train.

In my view, this is the mistake that companies like McDonald's make above all else. Right now, some fast food companies are prospering as the economy wobbles. But should the economy wobble even more, people will abandon eating out in droves, opting to brown-bag their way through the day. Once they find out that they don't have to deal with underpaid and mistreated employees, many of them will never be back.

Tags: smallbusiness, daily learning

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This our new copyright policy. We'll be looking to find an organization that can handle DMCA takedown notices for us. As much as I despise the DMCA, the tools that are meant to protect large media corporations can also be used to protect us against these sites that steal content and wrap it in oodles of ads.

As we put more energy into developing our Web presence, we do not desire to just provide more fodder for content thieves.