The city by the lake and technology

I live and work in the Chicago metropolitan area. It comprises the northern counties of Illinois and, like much of the Midwest, has challenging weather. Often, you can experience all four seasons in March. The climate creates a flintyness toward nature and forces us to be kind to one another because if nature is not pleasant, then at least we can be good to our fellow humans. It explains why Los Angeles and New York people call the Midwest friendly. The stereotype of the Midwest conceals a strong work ethic and a judgemental streak, which many of us, including myself, exhibit. Today, I want to discuss what that means in the Midwest technology business.

I joined the technology business in the mid-1990s. The main intellectual centers of technology are Silicon Valley in Northern California and New York City. New York's concentration of media company headquarters gives it a powerful grip on media-related technology. Silicon Valley became a land of myth and legend where coders got to make billion-dollar corporations. That myth has some truth because Hewlett Packard, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook found a home in the valley and became household words.

The Midwest and Chicago represent what pundits dismissively call "fly-over" country. We are land you bypass to go from east to west. To many, the Midwest is about corn, hogs, and transportation to move those goods to the remainder of the country. Truthfully, the Chicago metropolitan area fulfills a vital role in the technology ecosystem, and it is the integration and interoperability of systems. Since its founding as a city, Chicago has been a hub of communications and a link between the eastern seaboard and the western frontier. As technology begins to eat the world, the city and metropolitan areas have specialized in the less glamorous aspects of technology, which keeps the global economy chugging.

Computer systems in banking, insurance, and business span fifty years, and they must communicate, or all forms of commerce will come to a grinding halt. Computer languages span functional programming languages, object-oriented development, and large learning models. Often, these disparate systems cannot speak to each other directly, so something called middleware is written to facilitate communication. Finally, businesses, cloud companies, and purveyors of Artificial intelligence need warehouse-sized facilities to house their servers and infrastructure. The Midwest and the Chicago metropolitan area excel at these activities.

People give more thought to those things once they break, which becomes a crisis. Midwestern technology professionals take pride in running these systems at peak efficiency with no downtime. Instead of splashy conference demonstrations, we prefer working software that others can test and experience for themselves. Reliable working systems are proof of skill instead of social media credibility.

This pragmatic streak defines most technology professionals in the Chicago area. In general, we do not want to change the world but instead want to make it better, faster, more reliable, and work with other systems. It takes an engineer's mind with an illustrator's creative sensibilities. It is long nights working on knotty problems and early mornings with off-shore teams on conference calls. Hard work and innovation combine to make technology work invisible, and Chicago plays a critical part.

During the days of the first Dot-Com bubble, The Chicago Tribune published a special technical classified page called "The Digital Prairie." Sadly, the Tribune became a victim of the digital economy, but I liked their portrayal of technology as a service and infrastructure that needs maintenance. So, the story of Midwest technology is getting desperate systems to work correctly and with little fuss. To Midwesterners, everything should be plug-and-play, behaving like magic. The reality is more complex, but the goal is what makes the digital prairie so fertile.

Until next time.

Leadership Techniques to Build Trust

The business world is like a merry-go-round, moving at unsafe speeds. Everyone is holding on for deal life, hoping they do not get thrown off and injured terribly. Instead of listening to concerns about the ride's speed, people stare blankly and condescendingly at those who raise the issue, refusing to believe them. No one understands why the ride turns so quickly, but to suggest otherwise seems like madness. I am in the middle of a career transition, which has given me time to reflect on what matters as a professional. 

The business press and popular culture spend plenty of time discussing leadership and vision in the business world. Many organizations need help putting people with leadership skills in the correct roles. Often, we promote people who need help to do the leadership job. The Peter Principle explains why many leadership roles in companies contain mediocre leaders. It is a principle that, when combined with the pressure to deliver revenue and profits to shareholders, further pushes people to extremes in behavior. Employees trapped in a cycle of abuse are forced to endure mistreatment from customers, often finding themselves under the leadership of managers who perpetuate the same behavior.

It paints a picture of incapable people with psychological trauma under unreasonable pressure, inflicting emotional harm on others to provide better customer service. It is a glum and ugly tapestry of alienation. It explains why strikes have increased since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and trends like quiet quitting have impacted offices worldwide. Something is broken in the work culture, hurting businesses, employees, customers, and society. 

In her book, "The Experience Mindset," Tiffani Bova points to three main issues that provide a roadmap to fixing broken work culture. Employees want to support doing their jobs. Short staffing, lack of supplies, and being penny-wise but pound-foolish undermine employee efforts to deliver the goods and services they provide. It is incumbent for organizations to provide that support. Next, employees want to be trained in the skills they need to succeed in their jobs today and in the future. It is a particular problem in technology as skills become obsolete in months instead of years. Finally, there needs to be trust between the people doing the work and the organizations they work for because, as Bova says, "Trust is the bedrock of any business."

The three mileposts of better employee experience are trust, training, and support, which organizations can provide if they treat employees with the same consideration as their customers and shareholders. What it requires is a different leadership style. We need a different approach instead of being feudal or authoritarian toward the people who deliver value to the organization. 

I have discovered a few methods which drive success. The first is the notion of servant leadership. A leader should serve the people who work with them. It requires time and emotional labor because instead of giving orders, you provide guidelines, psychological security, and an environment of trust. It can transform a group of misfits into high performers if done right. 

Next, I am a colossal propoment of L. David Marquet and his intention-based leadership. Marquet is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who commanded a nuclear submarine. Suppose there was a position that fit the autocratic mold of absolute power. In that case, it is responsible for atomic weapons, two hundred lives, and a two-and-a-half billion submarine. Marquet suggests a better way, which he calls intention-based leadership. He asks people to think about their actions and deliberate about what they will accomplish. Mistakes are forecasted instead of avoided, and people have the psychological safety to make decisions even in stressful situations like combat. Finally, intentional-based leadership says that everyone in an organization is a leader, not just those given the official title. It generates a feedback loop of trust, which helps everyone perform their roles better. 

Finally, Kim Scott and her book Radical Candor color my leadership worldview. She says that leaders need to care personally and challenge people directly. She also points out that you cannot be a jerk and be radically candid. Being a jerk is a behavior that can be changed with required effort and a willingness to change. 

Radical Candor, Intention-based leadership, and servant leadership can help build better teams and improve workplace culture. The techniques build trust, help employees develop the skills to be successful at their jobs, and provide the necessary support to do those jobs. It slows down the merry-go-round of the contemporary work culture. I plan to lead the way.

Until next time. 

The Anxiety and Instability of Professional Life

The professional world is brimming with instability. Some days, you are riding high on waves of success, and then it comes crashing into the shore, providing a harsh reality. It forces you to be humble because you become careless when you feel comfortable. The global economy is in a weird place, motivated by a tremendous sense of anxiety. The sizeable centralized nature of many organizations causes part of this anxiety. Today, I want to discuss it. 

Two of the most influential trends in the business world were ideological. The first came from the University of Chicago School of Economics and Professor Milton Freedman. The professor argued that the primary purpose of any business is to generate profits for its investors. Competing interests like employees and consumers were secondary in Freedman's view. The investors who put money at risk for the company should receive the lion's share of the wealth because they face the most risk. The shareholder theory of capitalism spread like wildfire through the business community. To drive profits, business people slashed headcounts at companies, squeezed salaries, and profit to shareholders became the only thing that mattered. Any other considerations would suffer. 

The other came from executive Jack Welch, who transformed General Electric into a corporate juggernaut. Instead of growing the business with better products, Welch grew G.E. through a ruthless combination of acquisitions and job cutting. Soon, G.E. resembled a giant unregulated bank, with shareholders keeping the party rolling as long as the dividend checks kept coming. When Welch retired, G.E. was a symbolic tower of beer coasters at the end of a bar that any mischievous patron could topple at any time. It is what happened as debts came due and the economy changed. Today, G.E. is a shell of its former self, divided into three smaller companies focused on building things instead of juicing share prices. 

Friedman and Welch have one thing in common: their belief that the people who did the work were expenses to be managed instead of people who created value for the business and its investors. It made a wave of downsizing in the business world, and departments shrank. The mantra among business professionals was to create lean organizations. 

The rise of computers and photocopiers slashed the clerical staffing at an organization. A professional had to advance into management to advance a career instead of earning tenure in your position. The situation resembled the book "Lord of the Flies," where to get ahead, you had to be hypercompetitive and jerk to your peers instead of working together. Numerous business cultures get caught up in this cycle of psychological violence and dysfunction until they ignore their core business and customers. I have experienced this firsthand, and it isn't pleasant.

The trend has plenty of names, like rightsizing, flattening the organization, and downsizing, but the impact is the same: fewer people doing more work. It has created a paradox in the business world because everyone is so busy that numerous choke points now exist, and work needs to be done promptly. Doing less with more is creating longer cycle times and more frustration. It also hurts workers who sacrifice mental health and family time to meet increasingly tricky corporate goals. 

The Agile reformation addresses the bottlenecks and frustrations of the corporate world. Still, business leaders who continue to treat employees like cost centers instead of people who deliver value are the principal obstacle to helping improve business culture. I look forward to the business community giving these individuals their comeuppance. 

Until then, I will keep working to make the business community more sustainable, sane, and satisfying. I hope you are along for the ride.

Until next time.