This weeks column talks about jobs, politics and human relationships and this guy is an IT consultant.

Misdirected anger

By Bob Lewis | July 19, 2010
Topics: Business Ethics, Industry Commentary, Leadership | 3 Comments »

Why is everyone shouting at each other these days?

I think I know why: It’s nothing more than pent up resentment over how bad managers have treated people for decades. We can’t get back at the managers, so we’re redirecting the anger.

For example:

Assigning blame

Ever have a boss who, when something went wrong, mostly cared whose fault it was?

Say it was a server crash that caused an hour-long outage. It crashed because the power supply shorted out. The recovery took that long because the troubleshooters needed 10 minutes to figure out that the problem was, in fact, the power supply, 5 minutes to replace it, and 45 minutes to boot the server and verify it was operating properly.

The server wasn’t part of a fail-over cluster because the business couldn’t afford a fail-over cluster.

Your boss’s response? “Why don’t you and your team take responsibility when something goes wrong? Somebody screwed up. I want to know who it was.”

Here’s a widely reported fact: American business is sitting on $1.8 trillion of cash. If they invested just half of it in employment, America’s execs could fund three million jobs, each lasting three years and paying $100 grand a year including benefits.

Think that might get the economy moving again? It’s their fault unemployment is still high.

Ask the execs who are sitting on top of the money and what do you get? “The regulatory environment is uncertain.” It is, of course, a nonsensical argument. The future is always uncertain in some way, shape or form.

We’re blaming the execs; they’re blame-shifting to the politicians; but the problem is structural — it’s nobody’s fault.

Businesses don’t hire employees because they can afford them. They hire employees so they have enough capacity to satisfy demand (the reason business tax cuts wouldn’t create jobs, by the way). No demand, no hiring. The way to generate demand? Other companies have to hire people.

If everyone hired at the same time they’d all be fine. But nobody is going to be first, and so everyone sits on their cash.

We want it to be somebody’s fault, but it isn’t. It’s how we’ve structured our whole economy.

Insistence on oversimplification

Go back to the last time you tried to explain why some project, assignment, or what-have-you was much bigger and more difficult that it looked, and your boss asked, in an irritated tone, “Why do you IT people have to make everything so complicated?”

Your answer, “It is complicated. I didn’t make it that way — I’m just trying to explain it,” fell on even-more-irritated ears. You resented it, didn’t you?

When the healthcare bill was making its way through the Senate and House of Representatives, one criticism was that it was so long.

Healthcare represents about 16% of the U.S. economy and is an incredibly complicated subject — probably even more complicated than running IT (at IT Catalysts we’ve identified 150 moving parts in IT organizations, so were I to write just 5 pages about each, the result would be a 450 page book … just to give you a point of comparison).

We wanted healthcare to be simple, and got angry when someone tried to explain how complicated it really is.

Doing more with less

It’s budget season. You know what you have to get done and what it will cost. Your boss assumes you’ve padded your budget, and also assumes you aren’t running your operation very well. What you get is a 5% budget cut, and more to get done than you had on your plate last year.

Your boss then delivers the coup de grace: “It’s your job to find ways to streamline, and if you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

How many of us know, with complete certainty, that government at all levels collects plenty of tax money to get everything done — the problem is all the waste. Do you have any evidence of this? I sure don’t, but I sure do hear plenty of certainty on the subject.

I’ve known plenty of managers who, having had to deal with bad bosses, needed an outlet for their frustration. Their bad karma flowed downhill to their staff. That’s the point this week: If you have a bad boss, don’t let that turn you into a bad boss.

You’d be better off going to a Tea Party confab to vent.

And by the way, shouldn’t progressives start a Coffee Klatch movement, just for parity?

Starbucks, spend some of your cash. I see a business opportunity for you …