Making a decision

One of the things that I love about doing business with Americans is that they aren’t afraid to make a decision. It always strikes me as extraordinary that decision-makers are often pretty horrible at actually making decisions. I’m not referring to the process of analyzing the issues at hand – they are generally great at that, rather they are really bad at actually getting out of the analysis and making the call.

I have long believed that this, more than any other single characteristic, is what differentiates the US (and makes them so successful) in business. Their business leaders aren’t afraid to make a decision, largely because they aren’t afraid of the consequences if they get it wrong. What the conservative people don’t realize is that by not making a decision they are guaranteeing that they will miss the opportunity – those that make the call are giving themselves a chance of success.

That isn’t to say one should rush around making haphazard calls on things but I think that we place far too much emphasis on knowing everything before making a decision. If you wait until you know 100% of the information available you have waited too long – this may have been fine 100 years ago but it just doesn’t fly today.

Knowing there are unknowns

For the past couple of years I have been looking at buying a new house. Well, to be more accurate I was looking at houses built for rabbits, plots of land that look good for vertical face rock climbing, and land-fill sites (that I’m assured by the agent will be much sought after once pigs have flown past it – I’m told that this will happen in the next 12 months or so).

Aside from you having a good chuckle at my foolishness, how is this interesting to anyone? Well it struck me how similar the process is to software development – yes, I find value in the strangest of places.

I (more correctly my wife and I) have some needs and some wishes. Some of the needs are realistic – a few bedrooms, a living room (one would think that these are realistic until you see some houses on the market) - and some not so much. In general most houses are able to tick most, if not all these boxes. The problem comes around to the wishes part. Again, some are realistic – architecturally interesting – and some not so much –affordability often seems to fall into this category. The challenge is that while we think that we have a pretty good idea of what we want, when someone shows us something that they think meets all the criteria, it is only at that point we realize that there may have been a few things that we omitted to detail as deal-breakers. Sound familiar to anyone yet?

The bottom line is that people don’t know what they want, and even if they think they do, it is very likely that they will change their minds. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to understand requirements (and confirm this understanding) before starting the project/build, rather it is to point out that if you don’t build flexibility into your thinking, you’re going to get pretty miserable pretty quickly.

The myth of the 13th cheque (check)

Having recently spent a lot of time going through year-end and with it profit distribution calculations, I thought that I’d share some thoughts on one of the biggest myths that surround “bonus” payments – the so-called 13^th check (sorry, I’m using American English from here on).

I stand ready to be corrected but I believe that this is a uniquely South African phenomenon. In other countries they may give a Christmas bonus or shopping vouchers but no other country tries to pass the idea of a 13^th check as a bonus. There is probably a good reason for it as it is largely a con (by my definition, which is something that is mis-sold) as I’ll explain.

Many people are lead to believe that it is a bonus of some sort. That you receive your salary each month and then are paid an “extra” salary (importantly with it being described as a bonus) in December, hence the name 13^th cheque. This perception is perpetuated by not only those companies that sell it as such, but also those that accept it.

What these employees don’t realize is that their total cost to company is being calculated by adding all the 13 checks together. Thus instead of being paid a larger amount each month, they are being paid a smaller amount each month and then receiving the balance at the end of the calendar year.

Example: cost to company = R240,000 per year. 13^th check method = R18,461 for 11 months and R36,923 on the 12^th month, OR you could get 20,000 for 12 months.

We offer to distribute their salary over 13 payments to everyone that joins Open Box (note the way in which we describe it). Not surprisingly, we haven’t had a single person go for this “13^th check” concept – it just doesn’t make sense. We don’t “sell” as some sort of perk. While I’ll admit it is tempting to do so when so many companies around us do, it just doesn’t seem right to me. What do you think?

Servant Leadership

I’m reading a really interesting book that I got given recently (thanks Peter!) called Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. I’m only part way through but I thought that I’d share a part of the introduction that really touched a cord and put in words what I have felt for a long time. The concept is servant leadership which was raised by Robert Greenleaf in his book of the same name.

The idea is that the “first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is profoundly limited”. The focus is on the relationship between the leader and the led and that “only when the choice to serve undergirds the moral formation of the leaders does the hierarchical power that separates the leader and those led not corrupt”.

This is a far cry from the, I will lead and you shall follow “leadership” that many whom aspire to (and even more scary, are often already in) leadership positions assume. As a wonderfully graphic expression that a good friend of mine loves using says, being a leader is not about being above someone so you can pooh on them (and they in turn can pooh on the next person). It is rather looking to do what you can to uplift those you are leading, helping them be better at what they are doing (and hopefully also better people in the process).

It means that, as a leader, you often look to do the dirty or undesirable work, not hoard the nice work and delegate to others the work you would rather not do (note this is entirely different to delegating work that you are not good at doing to those that are). In doing so you are able to build real relationships between members of the team that transcend the everyday into something really special – something worth working at.