KarinGottschalk.com

In This Page:

• It Matters More Than Some Think
• Snapshot Case Studies
• A Family Tale
• Photos
• External Links

It Matters More Than Some Might Think

I have worked with four companies that provided everything their employees needed to get the job done well, and four that did not.

The first four continue to thrive, and are full of happy, productive employees who help them reap record profits. Three of the latter four employers have gone under, one spectacularly. Enough said.

At each of the four near or complete failures, management had a myriad of reasons for why they refused to invest in productivity. All of those reasons might have seemed like good ones at the time, but those very same reasons were why they crashed and burned.

Snapshot Case Studies

Here are some quick case studies of places where I or close associates have worked, and where employee productivity was neglected, with employees, clients and the company itself suffering as a result.

I have also included some successful employers that looked after their employees, and where everyone benefited accordingly. I have avoided using names, to protect the innocent and keep you guessing at the identities of the guilty.

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• Government Department – The mega-department that resulted from merging many departments into one was the single biggest revenue earner of them all, yet its most essential money-earning services were run on a shoestring. Despite processing billions of dollars worth of revenue ever year, the department’s budget was small, and so were its staff numbers. Due to the way they were treated and underpaid compared to all other departments, staff turnovers were high, productivity was variable, and hard-won expert knowledge was constantly being lost.
  
  To the new contractor, the clear and obvious solution was a Knowledge Management program, to record each worker’s expert knowledge – their daily procedures were often complex and difficult to remember – then to archive it and make it easily accessible to their inevitable replacements. Her goal was to turn the whole department into a learning organization by stealth while boosting its productivity and her colleagues’ quality of life within the place.
  
  Treating employees better, paying them better, would also have been an obvious thing to do, but radically transforming a whole super-department’s people management culture is no small task. Turning it on to learning as a core activity was a huge task too, but one that could be done under the radar, she believed.
  
  The new contractor researched the problem in depth, formulated a strategy and, because she was working with almost zero budget, hand built a rough prototype in static form, simulating typical screens of a dynamic KM system with just enough interactivity that viewers would get the message. She presented it to upper management, to great success, and then to all workers in a series of department-wide presentations. Everyone bought in to the idea with enthusiasm.
  
  Just one glitch – the department’s processes always turned molehills into mountains that it took more than Muhammed to move. A typical example was the department’s all-singing, all-dancing custom mega software project for record-keeping and payments in and out. It had gobbled up millions on millions of dollars without producing a particularly workable product, and it just kept getting bigger and more complex at each revision. Each time a worker requested software to carry out a new task, the request was added to the mega-software’s list of requirements instead of being considered as a separate project to be catered for with existing commercial, or better yet, open source software.
  
  The same fate befell the contractor’s KM/Learning Organisation project. It was merged into another existing mega-software project, was found incompatible with it, and was killed off for being impossible to implement within said software. End of story.

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• Relaunched Print Magazine – It was one of those regionally-based magazines that promised so much but delivered too little to sustain a steady readership and a solid advertising base. Despite that, the people of the city had high hopes and a certain fondness for it, as a trier that might do well one day.
  
  During its first five years’ existence it had been through a couple of relaunches already, under entirely new teams each time, and this was to be the latest. This time, the publisher swore, it would be funded properly – he’d found a hands-off financial partner who was filthy rich.
  
  The promises she extracted and arrangements she’d made with the publisher seemed trustworthy enough. She took the job. Come her first day, though, and it was a different story. She arrived at the office to find it was still packed full of furniture and equipment belonging to the previous occupants. And where were the crucial computers, printers, phones and network?
  
  “I’ve got them – they’re coming,” said the publisher. And what followed were the most bizarre few weeks of her working life. The necessary means of production, the ones much promised and that were always coming the “very next day,” never actually turned up, at least not in the form she had been told about so often.
  
  Each day she came in to the office, she would never know whether it would be hers for the day or if the publisher had descended from on high and taken it over for a long series of meetings with friends and admirers. If the office was hers to use in her own work for that day, then there was no guarantee the publisher had not spirited the computer off to his own private office in another suburb, for a week or more at a time.
  
  That was particularly galling – the only way she had managed to obtain any essential hardware at all was by convincing the financier to provide it himself, and it was only enough for her and the art director. Other staff members soon to come were to be left without the means of production for the forseeable future – publisher and financier had come to blows, so staff and the magazine itself had become the meat in the sandwich. Her computer was another slice of meat in the sandwich – a way for the publisher to hit out at the financier by taking it away whenever he could.
  
  The art director had managed to spirit his own computer away to location unknown, and worked from there, only appearing at company premises for meetings and presentations. Against all the odds the relaunch issue finally appeared, and was hailed as a success citywide. By then she had moved on to another project carried out under less stressful circumstances, as had other contractors and contributors.
  
  Eventually a former editor contacted her to share war stories about the publisher. It turned out he had an obsession with computers, although he wasn’t a user himself. He also had a dislike for paying contributors and staff – he was in the habit of giving leased office equipment away to those he failed to pay, and then sooled the leasing company on to them to collect the payments or take away the equipment.

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• Web Design Consultancy – The firm’s principal was one of the iconoclastic album cover designers of the punk and post-punk explosion, who’d then gone full bore into multimedia at the height of the CD-ROM revolution. When that era drew to a close he was already poised to divert all his efforts into Web design, after establishing his digital chops with titles and effects for movies, games and kiosks.
  
  The combination of being first major player on the CD-ROM and Web scenes, as well as his reputation from album cover days, gained him appointment as a Professor at the nation’s foremost post-graduate art and design college. All that, in turn, meant his star shone brightly amongst the world of commerce – software development firms and computer hardware companies vied for his input into their products and free samples arrived constantly.
  
  The Professor – by now also a visiting professor in the nation across the pond – capitalized on all his connections and built up a solid little firm in the east end, one of the very first to move there when most such firms were still virtual companies with two-man offices or operating out of home.
  
  There was no shortage of all the right equipment, software and networking hardware. Productivity was high, the highest of any such firm in the UK. The Professor created strategic alliances as easily as he breathed the air, and it paid off with vendors asking for their products to be used in his projects, for free if it came to that. He even bought the Internet Service Provider next door, to ensure he had the super-highspeed pipes needed to get his work distributed all over the world in a finger snap.
  
  First class students and recent graduates found their way to his door, asking to be taken on for a nominal wage so that they could gain the kind of experience other people paid for, and access to all the right hardware and software. Their cheerfulness and enthusiasm made it a pleasure to be there, and that in turn kept drawing in more top-end clients and business partners.
  
  Eventually, the Professor sold his firm to one of the biggest communications holding corporations in the world for a hefty sum, and semi-retired into the world of academia.
  

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• Webzine Start-up – It was the very height of the late 1990s digital technology boom, and silly money was everywhere. Investors were throwing cash around without even asking for paperwork or a business plan. The publishing company was going to revolutionize web advertising and editorial, and it had just taken on a key staff member who could do exactly that.
  
  She uprooted, moved interstate and began work. The place was a tad underequipped, but that was common in the heady days of the tech bubble. Major players often started up in a basement or a garage, with everyone pitching in and sharing the workload equally. The atmosphere was collegiate – little wonder many such companies took to calling their offices “campuses.”
  
  Except, that wasn’t quite how it worked out. Investment money kept arriving in big chunks, apparently with no strings attached. The publisher began showing up for work each day in fancier and fancier duds. Was that an Armani sports jacket? Has he just had a manicure? Is that the rumble of a sports car in the driveway?
  
  The magazine became a roaring success, as a result of her innovations, and she kept coming up with more. Readers demanded more too, especially interactive multimedia editorial content and advertising. Readers asking for more advertising was unheard of!
  
  She had the ideas and the skills to do it, and had built a global network of contributors and cutting-edge multimedia techies who could supply content and create ads for advertisers. She had even got her old contacts at the US software development firms onside while calling in some old favours.
  
  It was at the very moment of the webzine’s greatest success that she knew it was about to fail. A list of advertisers had signed up. The software developers had listened, and were building features we needed into their key products. Readers were asking for yet more multimedia content, each issue was getting bigger and bigger, and the publisher had to sign on for web hosting at several locations around the world to meet the demand. More silly money was knocking at the door, shouting to be let in.
  
  The workload was beyond what the webzine’s founding staff and equipment could handle. There were never enough hours in the day, and deadlines slipped. The publisher kept announcing that more staff and more and better equipment were on its way. And then, one day, it all collapsed. The promised extras had never turned up, and production ground to a halt. Burn out.
  
  Nobody could ever pinpoint where the money went. Was it the Cayman Islands or elsewhere nearby? The publisher was last heard of languishing in a jail somewhere in the USA, although it is believed that he somehow managed to find his way back to his native country where he apparently remains to this day.

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A Family Tale

My father wanted to be an artist or a plumber – both fine trades requiring good manual skills, he believed. But his family knew nothing of art, and they refused admission into the family plumbing business, so he took up a clerical vocation. He remained a frustrated manual worker, though.

One day his father – my grandfather – took pity on him and gave him a collection of old and broken hand tools. The collection was far from complete, so when my father needed a screwdriver, he’d use a blunt chisel. When he had to drive in a nail, he’d apply the flat side of a plane.

These odd substitutes worked well enough, if it didn’t matter that the results were crude – and the accidents weren’t too bad, mostly. And anyway, his improvised tool set looked vaguely like the real thing, he told himself with little conviction. Close enough is good enough, isn’t it?

Close enough was far from what he needed when he had to repair some broken furniture or build a chicken coop. He refused to buy himself new tools. He’d convinced himself that what was good enough for his dad was good enough for him. So why spend money? Make do, and if that meant being unable to do everything he wanted to, or at least do it well, then that was the role he’d been given in life, wasn’t it?

My father died an ever-frustrated man.

Blatantly Obvious Moral : Use the best tools for the job, so you’re not limited in whatever you do.

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Photos:

All images courtesy of Apple.

External Links:

• Business, at Apple.com.
• Content Management Systems (CMS) comparison list, at Wikipedia.
• Get a Mac, at Apple.com.
• Mac Pro Productivity Calculator – it only compares several models of Apple computers, but it reminds us that time lost by waiting for slow PCs to process our work eats up massive quantities of time that we will never get back.
• Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac – if you really have to run Windows-only software, and because Windows runs better on a Mac, anyway.
• Pro, at Apple.com.
• The Pfeiffer Report on productivity of Apple versus Windows PCs, at Pfeiffer Consulting.

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