Dilbert visits the park. Photo by Ol.v!er [H2vPk].Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, is a weird dude. No surprise to anyone familiar with the comic strip. I just finished reading Adams’ autobiographical self-help bookHow to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I don’t agree with all of his advice — do I really need to state that caveat? — but some of Adams’ concepts are interesting and even spot-on.
For instance, Adams asserts that systems are superior to goals. What he means is that it’s smarter, for example, to always be looking for a better job instead of following a five-year plan to attain a certain position. He lays out a bunch of principles along these lines that in his view should lead to success. His through-line is the idea that you should optimize yourself to take advantage of luck when it strikes.
The book is certainly interesting, and I think particularly useful to people starting their professional lives. Here are the two quotes I liked enough to write down:
“Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. [After realizing that] I concentrated on ideas I could execute.”
“Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.”
I particularly agree with the second suggestion, that you should shape your paradigm to be productive rather than accurate. (This is basically what my therapist wants me to do.) If I dwell on the rottenness and chaos of the world, my realistic perception harms me; I become miserable and can’t get anything done. Far more effective to be an optimist without justification than a pessimist with plenty of proof.
(I like to call myself a cynical optimist. Is that annoying? It’s such a good phrase, and a decent representation of my personality.)
Are you afraid to talk about your salary? Serious question. Imagine telling the person who sits next to you at work how much you make. Comparing your stock options and benefits packages. Does the idea of that conversation make you nervous?
Women pressers on strike for higher wages. Best sign: “We have been Santa Claus long enough.” Photo via the Kheel Center.
American culture stigmatizes open discussions of compensation, in the workplace as well as social settings. This harms laborers. Just look at Erica Baker’s experiment with salary transparency at Google. The company’s reaction was almost certainly illegal, but the only repercussion was moderately bad press. On the other hand, the employees who were discouraged from evaluating whether their salaries were equitable will be impacted for decades, if not for the rest of their careers. (I recommend Kara Swisher’s interview of Baker.)
“The fact is, companies are doing everything they can to increase their bottom line, and as such, they are actively trying to pay you as little as possible, with the understanding that if they underpay you too much, they will lose talent.” — Lauren Voswinkel in Model View Culture
People get uncomfortable when you choose to disclose the actual number of your salary. Those who share are judged as rude or feckless. I believe this is because salary disparities reveal unspoken power disparities — employees who get paid more are generally quite market-competitive, often because they have scarce skills. That means they have more power — they’re more valuable to the company in a very literal way, and they have more professional options outside of the organization. Having their place in the hierarchy revealed can make people squirm.
I have broadly decided to be transparent about my pay and financial situation because I don’t believe in keeping secrets for their own sake. Because having access to more information gives people more power, and redistributing information helps to redistribute power. I don’t believe that anyone is obligated to reveal these personal details if they don’t want to, but I do want to, and the information is mine to disclose.
Here’s an example of how salary-sharing can be useful: If you know that coworkers with comparable duties are being paid more (or less), you can go to your boss to find out why. You have more evidentiary material should you decide to advocate for changes, whether personal or systemic. It is illegal for employers to discourage this — either explicitly or implicitly. They often do it anyway because the consequence is a slap on the wrist.
“No employer may do any of the following:
(a) Require, as a condition of employment, that an employee refrain from disclosing the amount of his or her wages.
(b) Require an employee to sign a waiver or other document that purports to deny the employee the right to disclose the amount of his or her wages.
(c) Discharge, formally discipline, or otherwise discriminate against an employee who discloses the amount of his or her wages.”
Like most labor rights, these can’t be waived by signing a contract or an NDA. (Similarly, you can’t forgo overtime if you’re a non-exempt employee.) The National Labor Relations Act extends anti-pay-secrecy rights federally [PDF] to all non-supervisory employees who wish to discuss compensation information with their colleagues.
This is an essential labor protection, whether or not you want to unionize. The fact that management so often opposes pay transparency demonstrates that it gives employees an advantage — otherwise, why would bosses bother trying to squash those conversations? Cultural arguments fall flat; I have friends who definitely make more money than me, and it’s not an obstacle.
“A company’s secret information about its ‘pricing, profit margins, costs of production, pricing concessions, promotional discounts, advertising allowances, volume rebates, marketing concessions, payment terms and rebate incentives … has independent economic value because [it] would be valuable to a competitor to set prices which meet or undercut’ their own.”1
Further reading for those who are interested: articles on NPR and The Atlantic.
“Somebody talked!” Poster by Canada’s Wartime Information Board circa 1940s. Image via the Toronto Public Library.
1 Page 14 of the PDF. In the quote I pulled, Exeter and Park are citing Whyte v. Schlage Lock Co., 101 Cal.App.4th 1443, 1455 (2002). The white paper is distributed and copyrighted circa 2003 by Farella Braun + Martel LLP and Vaughan & Fleming LLP. Douglas Exeter is associated with the former firm and Valerie Park with the latter.
In my experience as a reader, there are two main types of book. These types span all genres and topics. The first is steady going. I read a few pages every night, maybe a chapter — I plod through. The second type is gripping. I tear through the book. I pick it up (or open the Kindle file) and can’t put it down.
The quality of the book isn’t the distinguishing factor. For instance, I’m working on The Design of Everything Things at the moment. It’s an excellent read in terms of intellectual content, and the writing is accessible. But it’s not a rip-roarer. Who knows why? Probably my reaction is determined by something very idiosyncratic about my personal tastes. And yet, when reviewing a book, I must hope that others share my proclivities, at least a little.
As an opposite example, Boss Life pulled me through quickly. So did Managing to Change the World. The latter is a primer on how to be an effective manager at a nonprofit company, written by Alison Green of the invaluable Ask a Manager blog and Jerry Hauser, who used to be second-in-command at Teach For America. Together they work at The Management Center.
“Fundamentally, a great manager is someone who cares passionately about getting results. And that can’t be faked. If you are truly determined to get results, it becomes the fire that fuels everything you do[.]”
I’m such a fan of Green that I felt confident enough about the book’s probable quality to write this post’s intro before I finished reading it. I was right — Managing to Save the World is very good, and the advice is applicable to professionals outside of the nonprofit world.
In essence, Green and Hauser organize common sense into principles and processes. They are straightforward, presenting various concrete examples and tools. Managing to Save the World is a textbook for professional adults, complete with a summary of key concepts at the end of every chapter.
Here are some of Green and Hauser’s suggestions for managers:
Use time efficiently and effectively to get results. How? Well…
Guide rather than do. Your time should be devoted to tasks that only you can complete.
Learn to delegate and create a culture of accountability…
By supervising and following up throughout every project.
An acronym mentioned in one of the chapters represents the book’s overarching ethos quite well: “SMART goals are strategic, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound. Goals should measure outcomes rather than activities whenever possible.” Managing to Save the World is definitely a recommended read!
Tech-culture podcast Exponent came back from its summer hiatus on the 6th. In the most recent episode, hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed Amazon’s work culture in reaction to that now-infamous New York Times article. Their conversation touched on the necessity of soft skills even in creative environments where solid ideas take precedence over everything else.
Successful companies set high standards and enforce them. They must! There is no other way to ensure excellence. Trade-offs are inherent to this arrangement — you can’t care profoundly about your professional results, work devastatingly hard to build something amazing, and still spend plenty of quality time with your wife and kids. The laws of physics forbid it — you can only be in one place at a time. If you’re at the office, then you’re not tossing a frisbee around in the backyard.
More crucially, competitive companies develop and cherish workplace cultures that demand people to identify and demolish subpar ideas. When you prop up bad suggestions to make their progenitors feel good, you guarantee a future of low-quality initiatives. Next stop, loss of market share! It makes sense that brilliant executives want to stamp out the impulse to be nice. Except wait, no, it only makes sense superficially.
Allworth called this attitude “the primacy of ideas”. He pointed out that brutal honesty about the merit of any proposition favors “thinkers” over “feelers”. We INTJs and the like are able to maintain some emotional distance, to take a step back and rationally examine feedback. (Which doesn’t mean we aren’t hurt by criticism — Thompson added that this type of person also views their work as their source of human value. If the output is deemed inferior, we judge ourselves very harshly.)
Allworth explained that a workplace culture hostile to people who prioritize relationships will end up being a monoculture, alienating the voices of potentially useful employees and limiting diversity of thought. Well… yeah. It will.
I’m probably reacting emotionally (ha) and not being fair to either Thompson or Allworth, but it was frustrating to listen while they grudgingly came to the conclusion that there’s value in being nice. I can’t help but think that only men would hash this out at length before tentatively agreeing that maintaining relationships is important. I even felt bitter while listening. It seemed like a classic example of “feminine” strengths being devalued, left invisible by default. Of course, the conversation’s outcome was better than if they had decided soft skills weren’t worth anything at all — but did it really need to be debated?
I’m an intellect-first, analytical kind of person. I’m also a woman, socialized to be nice and put up with a lot of nonsense from other people. Maybe the combination of those contradictory tendencies makes it easy to realize that you need to present information in a way that people find acceptable. Intellectual merit isn’t everything — in fact, it isn’t anything without soft skills. Smart people who can’t work with other people aren’t going to get anything done. (To be clear, this is something the Exponent hosts mentioned and agreed on.)
Of course, I went through the same personal-growth phase that Allworth and Thompson also discussed, aggressively wanting to be right and constantly believing that I knew best, before I realized that a good idea you can’t get anyone to buy into has the same results as a bad idea. That’s really my whole point here:
A good idea that you can’t persuade people to believe in is functionally the same as a bad idea.
Even famously brutal tech founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos had to figure out people-friendly ways to present their plans. We know this happened in part because otherwise Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t be iconic companies.
Luckily, collaborators can give each other straightforward feedback without being cruel. Thompson and Allworth do it on the podcast all the time! (More on this in an upcoming review of Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green’s book Managing to Save the World.) I think that’s why I was so frustrated — the necessity of niceness, or at least courtesy, seems utterly obvious, even if only based on their own dynamic. I don’t think the topic shouldn’t have been mentioned — here I am mentioning it at length — but I wonder why the conclusion surprised them.
Running a small business can be brutal. With the publication of a new book, Boss Life, you don’t have to learn all the hard lessons on your own. Instead, read about the mistakes and occasional hard-won triumphs of Paul Downs, an old-school entrepreneur who describes himself thus: “I am a survivor, but not a financial success.”
This first-time author founded and manages the furniture company Paul Downs Cabinetmakers, which has been in business for twenty-nine years, since 1986. He also formerly wrote for The New York Times and happens to be my uncle.
Yes, I’m related to Paul Downs, but allow me to insist that I won’t be the only one who thinks Boss Life is great. Downs uses real numbers and anecdotes, some of which do not flatter his personal judgment, to illustrate the larger principles. His candor makes the book fascinating.
Luckily Boss Life has almost nothing to do with woodworking, though that is nominally the content of Downs’ company. The book is really about sales. It’s about marketing and customer acquisition. It’s about cash flow, accounting, and management — basically,Boss Life is about economics and human nature.
Downs brings the reader through a year in the life of his company (specifically 2012), beginning each chapter by stating his bank account balance, the value of sales to date, and whether he’s lost money overall. Then he explains the month’s events and why they had the financial repercussions they did.
Part case study and part memoir, Downs’ book is worth reading if you employ people, are employed, or work in any capacity, no matter the size of your operation. That’s my review as a reader, not a niece.
I am a member of the Amazon Associates program. If you click on an Amazon link from this site and subsequently buy something, I may receive a small commission (at no cost to you).
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