The importance of small things

As I walked onto the beach today, I noticed how far out the ocean happened to be. It was also apparent that the slope of the beach had changed slightly since I last visited a couple weeks ago.

Just as I was about to descend to the beach, I looked behind the beach grass line and saw three or four fairly new sprouts of grass advancing into some sand on the backside of the dune.

It dawned on me how important those new sprouts might be some day. If the waves are driven over the dunes, and there is no grass there, it will be easy to lose that sand. If grass is anchoring it, then it will be much more likely to stay.

On a beach it is pretty easy to get overwhelmed by the big picture of sky and water and forget about the small things.

Often in dealing with a group of people it is far too easy to forget the individuals. We used to have some "friends' who we would run into back in the day when we were members of the local country club. We had joined so our kids and I could have a place to swim. These friends would often strike up a conversation with you, but if someone walked by whom they viewed as more important, you would be dropped like a hot potato. It was not exactly a great way to build a friendship. I have had managers who would be talking to you, and completely stop in mid sentence if an executive wandered nearby. I had to wonder where their heads were.

We had our real estate sales group holiday brunch this morning. Real estate as most people know is a tough business right now, so our last two parties have been potluck events which is fine with me since the group has some great cooks.

I have worked with a number of different companies, a very big one, Apple, and some at the other end of the spectrum. Apple was a place where there was very little effort expended making people feel welcome. The general idea was that you were lucky to be working at Apple so don't count on any warm and fuzzies. While I had some great friends and wonderful moments with the team that worked for me at Apple, beyond my immediate manager that I had for several years, there were few who made you feel really welcome.

Apple is stark contrast to the group of people I work with today. There are some very talented individuals in today's group, and some people that I value as friends. As I walked into the room for our party this morning, I saw an area associate that I had briefly worked with in another office. We talked for a moment, and then each of us wandered off talking to some others. Our group is heavily weighted toward the ladies. I think there were six of us guys there today and about eighteen ladies.

I have been with some of the people in the group for three years, and I can say without a doubt that I feel welcome and a part of the group. A lot of faces have changed over the years, and no one is having it particularly easy. The president of the company sat down beside me for a few minutes before he had to leave. There was no bitterness in his assessment of the state of the market or the company. He could have blamed his real estate agents for not bringing in enough business, but he has the business intelligence to know that we are not the ones at fault.

In fact I got the feeling that he was proud of those of us who were making personal sacrifices to hang on through a tough market. None of us have made very much money, and in fact most of us have never worked harder for so little money.

There are some little things in this whole scenario that are worth mentioning. First of all at Apple, area associates, were never considered part of the sales team. In spite of much lobbying from their managers, the corporation thought they had little value in the sales process.

In our world of real estate, it is completely different. The administrative people are considered the first people to touch the customer and as such are valued greatly for their ability to engage the customer and quickly direct the customer to the right person. It might seem like a small thing, but its importance is huge. We do not hide behind impersonal telephone trees.

Another small thing is some balance when evaluating performance. At Apple and some places I have worked. Market conditions did not matter. Whatever performance goal was thrown at you was expected to be met even if it was impossible. In fact you could be doing exceptionally well in growing your business far over the industry or company average and still lose your job.

At Apple, you could miss your number because the company could not deliver product in time, and it was still your fault.

Both Apple and one of the other companies where I worked really cared more that you did not rock the boat than they did about how good you were at doing your job. If you could stand back and look at both companies, you would wonder why management and sales were at odds with each other. I actually had one high level executive tell me that the only way to get anything out of sales people was to threaten to take something from them.

While the idea that management and sales are in the same boat might seem like a small thing, it also turns out to be a hugely important thing if you want to build companies where people enjoy working and give it their best over time. I remember when times got tough at Apple, they had to start throwing bonuses at people to keep them from leaving. Given the current management style at Apple, I wonder how many people would hang around if things were no so rosy in Cupertino. Loyalty might be an outdated concept in most of the business world, but I have to wonder what we have lost in jettisoning it?

I like to think living here on the Crystal Coast gives us a chance to be a little different since we live in place where the scenery often soothes your soul. Perhaps it is harder for people in pressure cooker metro areas to see these small things, but they certainly can make a huge difference in people's lives.

Reinventing yourself

As I look back to the summer of 2004 when I left Apple Computer, I have no doubt that I have learned more in the four years since Apple than I did in the nearly twenty years there.

While I learned a tremendous amount as I worked at Apple, the nature of the company perhaps limits your growth in ways that are hard to see until you leave.

Perhaps the biggest challenge at Apple is the overwhelming pressure for the company to present an image which has no blemishes.

I have learned more from my mistakes since I left Apple than I did from my successes at Apple.

You certainly did not want many mistakes at Apple because that was the quickest way out of the company.

Measured in awards and sales results, my last years at Apple were my most successful.

Other teams flocked to learn what we had done in order to be held up as an example. When you are asked to present to other groups on how to be successful, it might be a warning that you have become a little too successful for your own good.

Success at Apple has to have a sponsor. You can be very successful at Apple and labor in anonymity. However, if your success helps move an agenda forward, you can easily be held up for others to admire. If your success looks like it might overshadow your sponsor, you might see it evaporate.

Success can be turned into a failure with just the right negative words whispered into the appropriate vice president's ear.

In my last four years at Apple, I led a sales team that more than tripled Apple's federal business.

Yet when it was decided that an inside sales team needed to look better than my team, our success got repositioned as failure.

All corporations have similar messes when one executive wants to leap ahead of another. Maybe at Apple it is a little worse, but that is pretty hard to measure. The point is that what you learn from those situations does not help you grow a lot in your skills.

If success at Apple comes not from what and how you have accomplished something, but from what others want to showcase in order to advance their agendas, then it is hard to pull many valuable lessons from the experience.

Since leaving Apple and being on my own for the last couple of years, I have found that the only way to learn whether something works is to try it. If it fails, you try to evaluate why and try something else. You can make a lot of progress that way.

You quickly realize that perfect does not exist in the real world. You can get close, but you soon come to realize that being a lot better than the competition is much more achievable when being realistic and flexible than when agonizing over the perfect words to include in a mailing.

I once watched Apple spend over a year trying to decide what they wanted to say in a security document describing an operating system which had already been released. In effect Apple's programmers managed to get an operating system out the door before Apple's marketing could figure out the perfect words to describe it.

The interesting thing about security and OS X is that Apple missed a huge opportunity to market to many customers who were very troubled about computer security. Apple did not miss the opportunity because they did not have a good product, they missed it because they were afraid to talk about it.

While there is financial security in a place like Apple if you are in favor with the right folks or if you have found away to hide, you will never learn the skills to actually make intelligent decisions.

Significant decision making ability at Apple is restricted to the very few.

If you want to be nimble and ready for this new economy, Apple is not the place to prepare. Try creating your own business, you will learn a lot more.

Having to reinvent myself every six months is an amazing experience, but it gives you a lot of confidence in your own abilities. It is much better than figuring how to cover your rear or whom you have to sacrifice in order to save your own skin.

I would rather have the successes and failures that have taught me much since leaving Apple than the always suspect favor of an Apple vp.

Do you feel good at work?

There are times when you go into work with a great attitude only to have it smashed by the people around you.

Mostly this happens from managers who allow a negative attitude to penetrate their organizations.

Many corporations feel that they need to find and correct what employees are doing wrong. They spend many resources trying to make this happen.

What they should be doing is encouraging good behavior. I have seen employees disappointed when expected bad news turned out to be good news. Those kind of employees need to be out of any organization

The tone of an office is almost always set by the manager. The choice is pretty obvious, build a team where you focus on the positive or let a negative cloud hang over your team.

People respond by either wanting to be in the office or trying to avoid the office.

While you sometimes hear the theory that sales people need to be out of the office all of the time, they also need to be in the office enough to absorb the company's objectives and culture.