Mr. Popular

It is amazing how popular becomes a mediocre, laid back guy in a fast paced, talented and hard-working team, after he tended his resignation. Suddenly the under-skilled, non-productive, quiet and cool (from fear of saying stupid things) underachiever becomes Mr. Popular: everyone stops him on the hallway to say “hi”, invites him out for lunch, asks about his vacation plans (his favourite subject by far), wants to get his private contact info, and while the list of reasons goes on and on, the communication is imbued with un-dissimulated admiration. The most emphatic admirers are those who suffered, like Mr. Popular, the constant pressure of a crazy boss who wants results, involvement, out of box thinking, dedication and modesty, a cocktail that doesn’t sell anymore nowadays, including in those as flashy as lame tv sitcoms with lawyers and stock brokers who lose their sleep over their work more than Albert Einstein in those lengthy days and longer nights when he was close to write down e=mc2, but not quite on it.

Mr. Popular enjoys the fame that landed on him with the unavoidability of a bird poop. He suddenly discovers himself being placed in everyone’s centre of attention. He is the delight of the masses. The constant preoccupation of the fools (more like a royal family, wouldn’t you agree?) People who never exchanged more than a few formal words with him throughout the year ("Hey, how are you? Good!") stop him on the hallway to have an ample discussion about his new job: “Wow, really? Is that so? What about your wife, how is she coping with the change? Is that so? Wow! That is cool, man. I'm really happy for you! Congratulations!” And when they say "congratulations" they use the same sneer as when they say "f... you."

And on top of everything everyone is asking him out for lunch. Could be the fact that Mr. Popular had decided to move his lusterless career to a big institution, where an insider, a good friend of his, put a few good words to another guy, who’s been in cahoots with another insider, who put a few good words to the director of whatever, and so on the story goes. It seems that that’s the kind of institution where people carry insiders instead of shadows. And the things turn eerie, when the insiders-shadows retire (oh, yeah, that's the kind of company where nobody in his right mind leaves, buddy), or move out (sure, there’s always Florida!) or simply die. And then try to imagine a guy without a shadow, to have in mind a bit of the image I’m picturing right now in my mind. I can bet that whomever invites Mr. Popular out for lunch (still at modest restaurants, as he is not a big shot, after all, and he may never become one, based on what he showed so far, so why waste the money?) thinks that someday in a not such a distant future, Mr. Popular could be the insider who will pull him up on the steady ship of guaranteed retirement, sailing the still waters of business with tax payers’ money. You guessed, of course: Mr. Popular will be another one of those guys in the maze-like government offices.

Which guy would not feel his level of testosterone going up when almost everybody in the office would be taking delight in his mere presence? Or wouldn’t smirk or even scoff when questions he finds silly were addressed to him. Or smiling superior, and fully content with himself, when the people would start involving him in deep, subtle and sometimes intricate debates on topics that Mr. Popular had, has, and will have no clue about, ever. Like those challenging debates (they call them design sessions), where basic analytical skills and a time proof technological background are required and the problem solving desire is the main thing. Mr. Popular would listen carefully to all those questions addressed to him (he rehearsed this thing so many times with his workaholic boss), then for a few good seconds would plop his eyes high up in the ceiling, and with a deep, but barely noticeable sigh (oh, the thinker’s challenges!) would conclude: “Good approach… I will have to think about that. Can I get back to you… hmm, in a week?” And when he says that clearly introspective “hmm” Mr. Popular would stick his eyes like two sharp pieces of shrapnel in the eyes of the guy who asked for his advice. The sky is the limit when it comes to show his confidence now, when there’s no danger in being admonished for his poor knowledge and skills, or even remonstrated and, why not, punished (or even kicked out, eh?)

Only if he knew the deep secret I will carry with me in my grave, and cannot share with him or his close ones. I wonder what he’d do if he knew what I’m about to share with you, how would that change his behaviour, his confidence, his “look at me, learn from me” victorious stance? Would that erase the perpetual smile on his face? Would that change his affronting look, or his gay strut? And here’s how the story goes. A couple of weeks before the date, Mr. Popular confided in me that he had accepted the offer from a big company, running on governmental funds, and he even offered me details how strings have been pulled in his favour  to skip a technical interview, to be met by his future manager in a coffee shop and have a relaxed chat about life and universe, to fool around with HR about his leadership skills (“what would you do if you faced a cat fight?”), all these fancy stories being told with his carved up angelic smile… And one or two days after he told me that, our boss called me in his office to confide in me his thoughts (he’s been doing that many times, lately), sharing with me his concerns about Mr. Popular and the decision he came to: “I will let him go. I believe he’s a total f… up. Plus he has no technical background. He fooled me all these years…” My boss was innerved with rage, and when he’s in that particular mood he starts swearing. A while back he used to apologize after bad mouthing people, but after I told him that swearing is good, because it brings the human touch into the workplace, he stopped justifying himself. Now he just swears. And I felt like Mr. Duplicity himself, because my lips were sealed: I couldn’t tell him that Mr. Popular had already decided to quit. In the same time I realized that the number of gods cheering for Mr. Popular from their white, puffy thrones among cloudy columns in the blue temples was quite high. It’s not only here on hard ground that the people work diligently for Mr. Popular’s happiness, it is also high up in the skies where he has close friends and trustful allies.

One week after that, my boss invited Mr. Popular to have lunch with him into a sleek Italian restaurant, close to downtown. He treated Mr. Popular with lobster on rice, and they chatted about vacation plans. Next day Mr. Popular was my guest for lunch (I had to insist to have his pre-planned lunch with the asshole managing the Ops Team moved to the following day.) That’s how I found out about the lobster and vacation plans.

Techie in the Businessland

A week ago, at the official beginning of the Fall season, I had the chance to attend a managers' meeting called by our VP, a charming and funny individual with a strong business acumen, a deep sense of humour and a ton of ideas that do not let him sleep well. After he presented us the quarterly results (which, as usual, are good but could be better), asked us to be part of a team exercise. 

To be more precise, he split us in four working groups, business and IT managers mingled together, and asked us to do a bit of brainstorming and accommodate a simple request: Provide three ideas to make the business grow in this highly competitive market of media and advertisement.

The group exercise that followed offered me the chance to witness first-hand how the business managers think, i.e. measure and cut. Sometimes in the IT world , we are bound to forget that our fancy state of the art tools and apps are totally useless without people to sell them and people to buy or simply consume them. Deep down in the engines’ room you tend to ignore what it takes for the people on the deck to keep the boat afloat and on the right direction.

I personally had a humbling experience during the group exercise: I realized that it is not an easy task to come up with bright, unique, progressive ideas that could make our business soar. And I'm not even near to accomplish that. It takes a different thinking, special abilities, knowledge of the market behaviours, training, experience, and last but not least, a committed team to become a successful organization and stay the course. 

The Smarts and the Fools

In my workplace, as well as in your workplace, there are two kinds of workers: those who love what they do and the others who love the small fonts of their paycheques. Or, in other terms, and respecting the same sequence, the fools and the smarts. In any company from any country from any system, the percentage of fools is way lower than the percentage of smarts. Is this good, is this bad? No clue at this point, but remains to see what could transpire from this (pseudo)analysis.

First off, let’s see what makes a fool a fool. Being passionate about what you do, and this is not applicable to the workplace only. A passionate man is a passionate man. You can see his mark on everything he or she touches. And if there’s something he hates he’s going to tell you right there, right from the get go. This frankness qualifies him as an outspoken person, and that’s the end of any pretenses that he or she could be political creatures. These people are not politically correct. They love what they do and they are convinced that everybody else loves what they do. Moreover, they would bet their yearly incomes on the rule that one loves what one does. In their minds the world is built on principia, the most logical and most fair of the premises. And if something goes wrong, there’s always a 3-step fix: 1) recognize the wrong; 2) discuss and agree on the solution of extirpate the wrong; 3) apply the solution. That’s it. That never works, of course.

What else is there about the fools in my workplace, and in your workplace? They do not care too much about the paycheque. It’s good to have it, of course, because paycheque means entertainment in all its modern aspects (from HDTV to cruises in Patagonia), and entertainment is just a way to recharge the batteries of their creativity. Creativity that will be applied back into the workplace, like a recycled investment. With potentially good results, I’d say, that would always materialize with one condition: if the smarts would all fall asleep, missing to watch the fools, failing to dart from their starting blocks to stop them from accomplishing anything good. But this never happens. The smarts are always alert and watching and also good athletes.

What makes a smart a smart? First off, a combo of missed ingredients: imagination, spontaneity, innovation. The plain truth is that all smart people are intelligent, without any trace of doubt (some of them very intelligent), but, with rare exceptions, the intelligence doesn’t go usually hand in hand with the creativity. For a simple reason: intelligence means preparedness to face any situation with a set of pragmatic, common skills, acquired during an eventless infancy. Well spread skills equipping most of the people who paid close attention to their parents when they were teaching them to play safe, aim low and be successful. Creativity is a wild run in the unknown, and the best partner you can get is brazenness. When it gets combined with  a touch of recklessness it gets sold as a deluxe package, highly productive, highly unsuccessful among common people leaving common lives.

The smarts love their paycheques, and the more they show their love, the fatter the paycheques become. It’s his secret practice of the Duh Paycheque deity’s cult that makes a smart a smart. Of course,  the workweek for such people is hell, this goes without saying. Of course the best place for them to hide are the big, stale organizations where, beside the fact that their number is getting bigger by the successful financial quarter, the workdays are planned in such a way that the professional innovation and dedication are considered work related infractions and punished with maximum severity. While the fools struggle with the wide spread creativity symptom, called otherwise inadaptability to the mediocre job requirements, the smarts are quite an adaptable race of achievers. They never get sick with doubt, and its more severe form, the need to challenge the establishment. They make it through the workdays avoiding the commitment, skirting the debate and planning their vacations. There are no better vacation planners than the smarts. Go to them instead of a travel agent. They know every single trick in the book, nobody can fool a smart. A smart outsmarts everybody, even another smart. When they talk about vacation, for a few moments they grow the wide wings of the fools, and their eyes fill with passion. It’s an amazing metamorphosis which, fortunately, is short lived. And yes, the smarts are the best politicians in any organization. They don’t speak out their minds because there’s nothing to be spoken out. They are quiet and in control, they look mannish and cool, because their thoughts are simple, devoid of any thinking substance or human emotion. When you don’t talk, you don’t look smart, you don’t look dumb, you look cool. And no cool guy ever made mistakes.

The smarts are the engine of our modern economy. The fools are hunted down more and more by a weapon that the smarts invented in order to survive and multiply: the process. Any respectable, successful, highly competitive company brags about its processes. These processes are solid shelters for lethargy and lack of creativity. They are the fortresses of rampant stagnation. Every smart will use them to hide from ingenuity.

The stagnation is more of a buzzword nowadays. Dressed up in a nice attribute that gives it a stance of irrevocability, the economic stagnation is the public agora for all the smarts in this world. They take turns to tell us what we must do, in order to avoid the professional advancements. And they will always remain politically correct, no worries there.

Excellent Job, Mate!

In one of my team's meetings centred on the topic of the "manager's appreciation" (believe it or not, the software development teams take sometimes the time to discuss about other topics that just .net frameworks or best design practices), I came up with the idea, on the spur of the moment, to inquire around the table about a simple choice:

What is it more important for you: the appreciation you get from your manager, who in spite of his technical background may not be totally aware of your professional prowess, or the praise you get from the senior developer who works beside you and knows very well how valuable you are?

Of course, most of the attendance jumped immediately at the low hanging fruit: the manager's recognition matters the most (I would have thought that they did that only to please me, till one of them mentioned that there is where your bonus is coming from, so the answer was no brainer, dude!), but a few of them acknowledged that being appreciated by a colleague who is good at what he's doing matters a lot for them.

Next day, I was pleasantly surprised to have one of my senior developers, let's call him Dwight (who, by his outspoken personality and straight way to communicate the unpleasant thing that in spite of the best treatment, that piece of software so much touted about is dying, has attracted the wrath of the higher management on him, and implicitly on me) has asked me for a brief meeting to follow up on pour discussion about the "peer's appreciation" with a concrete example. He came to my office to specifically praise Irene's stellar performance in VehiclesForUs, one of our main products, which is in its final QA stage before release. Irene is now fixing bugs, some of them critical, with an enviable speed and she proves reliable, thorough, precise, sharp.

And then I read this article in Globe and Mail which talks about a new research unlocking surprising secrets about peers' recognition. And the more I read the better I felt... I knew the truth revealed by the assumingly highly paid research all along, since my early years as a professional. The sparse "thank you for your work" that you get occasionally from your grumpy, young boss is less important than the "cool, man" brief statement you are rewarded with by your guru colleague, the insufferable swe-geek (from software geek, mind you) who's building dream code with the easiness others make an omelette. His praise would make instantly my day. Of course that wouldn't bring more change into my pockets, but would make me feel really good about myself, confident in my skills built with so much effort in years of enthusiastic, although hard work.

It all comes to that new level of motivation (the experts call it Motivation 3.0, to separate it from the classic Motivation 2.0 which is an elegant way to name the old "stick and carrot" approach) where you want to do something with your life that is both meaningful and enjoyable, and also a reason for being proud and maybe leave a bit of legacy behind you. And it's not about showing the others how smart you are, to get their votes of confidence, it's about feeling you are on the way you started to pave when you were young and restless, and the only dream you had was to go in a history book as the first guy who stepped on Mars (this opportunity is still out there!) And none of these dreams ever started with any material compensation. The word "money" had no place in the workshop of dreams. And, believe it or not, still hasn't.
This is good news for the corporations, of course, where the "money savings" is the sweet lullaby, but there's definitely more attached to the notion of "work" than the bare view of a corporate tower filled to the edge with grey cubicles and politically correct people, also grey to fit in the décor. After all, the beavers are not organized in business units. And they are not grey either...