Management

Navigators of the Economy

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Life aboard ship in the age of sail was brutal, even by the standards of the day. Ordinary sailors worked in horrific conditions for months on end for little pay and often for nothing more than just a stake in the profits of the voyage.  

Easily, the cushiest   job on a ship was that of navigator. Navigators were quite often hired guns who had no other duties. A navigator often needed to work no more than four hours a day. He would come on deck two or three times a day to take sightings, then return to his cabin for an hour’s worth of calculations. Compared to the physically taxing, mindlessly repetitive and dangerous work of a sailor, navigators did nothing and risked nothing.  

Yet navigators often received as much as much as 25% share in the profits in a voyage. Even when they worked for pay, they received a wage many, many times that of sailors who did much more arduous and even critical work. Why did those who owned shares in a voyage, from the cabin boy to the landlubber investors tolerate paying the navigators so much?

The answer is obvious: if the navigator made a mistake, it didn’t matter how hard everyone else on the ship worked or how competently they did their jobs. The skill of the person doing the navigating determined the success of the voyage or even if anyone survived. People paid navigators a lot because if they didn’t, it didn’t really matter how much they paid anyone else.

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Too Many Clicks, Too Much Typing

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Compare and contrast:

Renew two software licenses

-Login at software company website. Both licenses are listed. A “renew license” link appears next to each license. There is no way to select both licenses for simultaneous renewal.

-Type name, address, etc. on online order form.

-Click link to “preferred” credit-card processor.

-Type name, address, credit card info on online form.

-Click “pay” link. Get rejected by credit card company.

-Repeat entire process starting at software company home page. Get rejected again by credit card company.

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Post-Implementation Audit Review

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yes, it smelled good

of the rendezvous, that is. PIAR Items:

Issue 1

  • Description: Overcorrected for anticipated too-early arrival time.
  • Area of Improvement: Change Management
  • Root Cause: Assumed functional highway network. Ha!
  • Mitigation: Allow 2x as much time if going anywhere on the Edens or the Kennedy.

Issue 2

  • Description: Initially parked in wrong garage.
  • Area of Improvement: Documentation
  • Root Cause: Didn’t ask hotel operator for detailed instructions.
  • Mitigation: Ask next time.

Issue 3

  • Description: Missed rendezvous with Carl.
  • Area of Improvement: Communication
  • Root Cause: Didn’t check comments on planning post after early Saturday morning.
  • Mitigation: Graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) through the blog at T-2 hours. Exchange mobile phone numbers. Buy Carl a plate of barbecue.

Issue 4

  • Description: Wore Bill out walking too far.
  • Area of Improvement: Planning
  • Root Cause: Unduly elaborate itinerary.
  • Mitigation: Traveling-salesman algorithm; taxicabs (implemented).

Issue 5

  • Description: Appeared drab and uninteresting by comparison with other attendees.
  • Area of Improvement: Work Error (1959-present)
  • Root Cause: Couldn’t keep up with Bill’s knowledge of Chicago goings-on and economy/tax issues or Tatyana’s tales of camping trips on river islands in Siberia and eye for architectural/design details.
  • Mitigation: Surround self with boring friends, or just get a lot more people to show up next time so I can revert to lurk mode.

Best Practices (I did do some things right)

* yep, swiped it from Stephen Green, who I’m pretty sure swiped it from this

Expectations… and the Productivity of the Service Economy

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Recently I needed to go to the post office in downtown Chicago for a certified letter. Yes, it would seem, the post almost writes itself… the lines were long and, in the middle of it, one of the two employees wandered off to take a break or something. The guy next to me, an older guy, was about to lose his mind with rage. He said “this must be how it is under communism” and seethed with rage. My response was that the selection of employees was essentially designed to “employ the unemployable” in the name of limiting social unrest as a thinly disguised government work program. At one point, an actual competent employee came in and took all the people in line to self-service machines and helped me personally, for which I was thankful. The entire process, which should have been simple, took over an hour.

I was in a local sandwich shop called “Corner Bakery” (which I usually call “Corner Confusion”) where you order in one place and they give you a tag to put on your table, and then you wait for your sandwich to come to you. This sort of process always scares me, because the shop is big and there is a patio outside, so they don’t know where you are sitting and it just seems like they could miss you. Well, this time they found me… a waiter who didn’t speak English very well came over and set my sandwich in front of an older guy and gave him my sandwich (one was flat bread so it should have been obvious which was which). The other guy was about to go apoplectic with rage but I had been watching the whole thing, just assuming that it would be screwed up, and I calmly got up and switched sandwiches with the guy (I was watching him, too, to make sure he didn’t take a bite out of it). He was in mid rant but I didn’t care, I just wanted lunch.

Often I go by McDonalds for coffee (I don’t like Starbucks very much, although I usually go there just because it is preferred by others and I don’t care very much overall) and it is part of the rest of my order. There are two dimensions for my coffee – “black” and “large”. I have learned through hard experience to wait until the clerk is ready to receive this complex and easily forgotten information; you’ll just have to repeat it five more times. It is beyond expectations that you could ask for your order (like a number “9” or something and AT THE SAME TIME say “large coffee, black”) without having to repeat it later. But you need to stay on it, or you never know what you’ll get.

Through myriad travels and eating out continually for years I have three expectations for the US service sector, so that I am never disappointed:

1) they know nothing
2) they do nothing
3) they annoy me

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Skagway and Project Management

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THE WHITE PASS AND YUKON RAILROAD

Recently I was in Alaska for a vacation. The trip was great. In the town of Skagway, which is a big destination for cruise ships, is a narrow gauge railway called “The White Pass and Yukon Railroad”. This railway was built in 1898 for the Klondike gold rush.

The railway carried freight for many years and was a significant component of the effort to fortify Alaska in the 1940s when it was under threat from the Japanese in WW2. After the war it was used for civilian purposes.

The rail way shut down in 1982 and was re-opened in 1989 as a tourist railway, taking passengers from Skagway (at sea level) up over the mountains and into Canada. We took the railway up and over into Canada and had a great time. The railway has restored cars that were purchased from other (now defunct) railway lines, some almost 100 years ago. They even have an original steam engine that they keep running and take out on Saturdays (I was told, didn’t see it) so the true “train buffs” can actually ride behind a narrow gauge steam engine (it is number 69 and they sell T shirts for it, probably a big seller due to the double entendre).

WPYR Train

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