La Moretta

Grownups have to do things they don't like

One of the things about escaping the corporate life is that I vowed to do what I want, for whomever I chose, and not to do what I really don't want to do. This was because I spent so much time doing things that were soul-insulting or pointless. To illustrate, I wore flip-flops every day for the first year, even in winter.

Meetings and presentations were one of these things -- time-consuming, tiring, awkward. I dodged a bullet last time and avoided going to a meeting to present my research results. This time, though, they want me there. And I need to be there.

I could whine about it to myself, but instead I'm just going to prepare and go and not try to worm my way out of it. I think the big thing is looking at what I dread and addressing each issue.

1. Getting there in the morning -- I am not a morning person.

Solution: Maybe spend the night. Plan out route in advance. Go on auto-pilot in AM.

2. Getting fluffed up -- I am the queen of spilling things, accidentally ending up with lipstick on my nose, etc.

Solution: Get manicure and blow-out. Make a checklist, make sure there are no loose threads, etc. Drink coffee carefully -- maybe through a straw?

3. Making small talk. Yuck.

Solution: Let others do more of that. Comment on the area they are located in. Weather. Look into local sports teams (they are in Connecticut). 

4. Remembering names.

Solution: Remember that you are dealing with human beings who deserve your acknowledgment. There is no such thing as a suit, or even a silverback, in real life. Do that thing with the business cards where you put them so you can remember who is sitting where.

You'll notice that one thing is distinctly not there -- fear of public speaking. That's because, irony of ironies, I am a very good public speaker on my areas of expertise -- authoritative and clear. And a long time ago I realized that all of this is meaningless -- it's just a game, and I simply don't care if I win it. I also see my role as educating (helping), not baring my soul (which I understand is the root of the fear of public speaking). It's very strange, but I am more afraid of the little girl in The Ring than I am of public speaking.

Adopting means no more being a big baby about some things. I must strike a balance between feeling compelled to do things and choosing to do them. So to this meeting I shall go, like a grown-up.

I feel better already.

The way the world works

About six months ago I abruptly lost a steady client and couldn't figure out exactly why. Well, I've finally figured it out -- they were in major, major trouble, and their company legal people probably advised against working with certain kinds of consulting firms.

Here are the reasons I thought I lost the account:

• I wasn't doing a good enough job and my client lost their account.
• My client wasn't doing a good enough job and lost the account.
• The economy was going to hell, and my services were less important/not a priority.
• The client had decided to take the report in-house and figured that this would be better than telling me the truth.
• I didn't get along with my primary client contact -- she was highly disorganized and tended to be a blamer. She had decided to switch to a different vendor.
• I had provided misleading insight and had committed "malpractice." 

Don't get me wrong, I didn't lose any sleep over this, but the timing seemed really odd. Now I know why. However, it surprised me to see how many of these fleeting thoughts involved me assuming that my work product had something to do with it (those are the ones marked in red). That's rarely the case. 

I learned the hard way in the corporate world not to take things personally, even things I probably should have. However, as a one-person business, it gets a little trickier.

But now I know.  

So if you are a one-person shop and you have some reversals, repeat after me:

It's not me, it's them.

Then switch it to:

It's not my business, it's their business.

And finally:

It's not Moretta Hat Blocking, it's Cogswell Cogs.

Our, to paraphrase and reverse Julius Caesar, 

"The fault, dear Moretta, lies not in our selves, but in our clients."

A strange New Year's resolution: Get serious about work

This isn't really a NYR per se, it just so happens to coincide with the beginning of 2009, so I figured why fight it?

I realized that this is the year I need to take my business more seriously. I have always taken it seriously in terms of the "product" and the recommendations that I make, but after being so engrossed in my corporate career, I have just been enjoying not being anything. When people ask me what I do, I'll explain briefly, but I never waste more than a few seconds on the subject. So it was hard for me to admit that I have to start treating Moretta Hat Blocking (that's my company) like an honest-to-goodness business. So as I am halfway to completing my fifth year (I started in August 2004), I have to market, set standard prices and come up with a five-year strategic plan. (My previous five-year strategic plan had two items: "Don't work at Egghead Millinery anymore" and "Regain soul through painful fire ritual.")

After all, it's something I spend my time on, and I earn my living with it. My salary is not just for mad money so I can buy bonnets and ribbons. And just because I bought into the whole corporate bippity bop before doesn't mean that I shouldn't respect my own work in the same field. So it's time to go to work and act like a grownup.

Lest you think I'm taking it too far, I'm keeping the Hello Kitty water cooler my nephews got me when I started working for myself. Grownups need water too.

Lazy, listless, lame and now, lunemployed

As you might have gathered from the posts in my blog, I work for myself and hire the occasional freelancer. Right now it's the end of the year and my clients are trying to spend budget like it is going out of style. This means a lot of work that needs to be completed by the end of the year. 

I've been working with about half a dozen freelancers, with various skill sets. I recently contacted a woman with a library science background via a professional organization of independent researchers. I asked her if she could do a complicated database search for a series of names and create a PDF (AKA an Acrobat file) for the results for each name. Well, she got back to me with, "Well, I don't know how to make an Acrobat file. Can you show me?" I said I would see if I could find someone among my freelancers who could teach her and that I'd get back in touch the next morning. 

The next morning, I realized, "What the hell was I thinking?" and I sent her an email saying, "Lucretia, I simply don't have the time to teach you myself, or the budget to pay someone to teach you how to make a PDF file. I'm going to go with someone else. Thanks and I'll be in touch with you when I have a project that doesn't require this skill set." She didn't reply.

Folks, making a PDF is the easiest F'ing thing in the world. If you go to Google and type in "How to make a PDF file" you get more than 3,000 pages with instructions on how to do this, plus software and videos. This woman, who ostensibly does ALL of her research work on the computer, didn't have the get-up-and-go to figure out how to do something incredibly easy. 

Well, I can't risk my reputation on someone who cares so little, so I won't be contacting her about anything in the future, whether PDFs are involved or not. It's clear to me that although she belongs to a professional association, her "job" is not that important to her, and certainly not her clients.

I vented to another business-owning friend (very well-respected in the field, has been doing this for 20 years) and she says she sees it in our field -- people who just don't take it seriously. That's great for them -- that they don't NEED the work. But it's an insult to those of us who do when they don't take our requests seriously.

Just curious -- are there lazy, listless, lame people like this hanging on in the workplace? I imagine there must be.

Let's just admit the truth about Nike

For a lot of reasons, Nike is not one of my favorite companies. A decade ago, I was appalled at their cynical response to the sweatshop controversy, which was to spend a mint on a report showing that the wages they paid workers were actually quite decent in the countries where the sweatshops were located. (Yes, I'm oversimplifying, but not by much IMHO.)

A recent issue of Fortune touched on what I have been muttering to myself for a long time -- Nike has continued to use sweatshops and has been aware that sweatshop conditions are still the norm in many of its suppliers' factories. (It isn't alone in this situation by any means.)

 

According to the Fortune article, Nike has studied the problem and is trying to figure out how it can put less pressure on its suppliers:

Jones and her team are also looking at how decisions made back in Beaverton, like last-minute design adjustments or changes to orders, add to the strain that can lead to forced overtime or other violations on the factory floor. By measuring the impact of its own design or sourcing practices on production schedules, Nike hopes to retrain those divisions to think about labor in much the way that the Considered Index has focused designers on sustainability. 

In other words, Nike has chosen to try not to agitate its suppliers so that their employees won't be abused? How dysfunctional is that logic?

 

Here are the three elements of this issue, as I see them:

 

1. Nike has manufacturing partners that abuse their employees.

2. Nike doesn't want to end the outsourcing process.

3. Current monitoring doesn't work and will never work.

 

Here are some possible and genuine solutions:

 

1. Nike could keep many of the cost benefits of the outsourcing process by purchasing some of these factories and making them officially part of Nike.
2. Nike could hire full-time, on-site supervisors for each partner site.
3. Nike could stop outsourcing.

But none of those are going to happen, because that would mean that Nike's profits would decrease. So instead it says it is looking at the production process with the goal of not forcing its suppliers to exploit its workers. And it points to its green design successes as proof that it is committed to being an innovative corporate good guy. Eventually they'll crack the sweatshop problem, but it's really, really difficult and everyone else is dealing with it, too, so for the moment they'll just do their darndest.

 

Nike had its consciousness raised TEN YEARS ago about the sweatshop issue. The problem isn't solved yet. So what does that say about the people at Nike?

 

1. They are not resourceful or innovative enough to solve the problem, or

2. They don't really care about solving the problem.

 

Let's face it: Nike has chosen money over human decency.

The office drama king/queen

There is a certain type of employee who creates drama in order to look good by dramatically saving the day, causing one academic to call it Munchausen at work (after the psychological condition in which people make themselves sick in order to gain attention).

I had one employee like this and totally didn't recognize it until things started going terribly, terribly wrong. What I thought were characteristics of a problem-solver at the interview turned out to be signs of something else entirely. I spent hours working with human resources trying to find out what happened to my formerly harmonious department. (It was around this time that I vowed NEVER to supervise anyone again.) 

 

Anyway, if you have a coworker like this, your best approach is complete transparency and openness with everyone on the team, since this person often takes advantages of gaps in communication. If you are a boss and have an employee like this, fire him or her. That's not what The Wall Street Journal says, to do, but my experience says hustle him or her out the door somehow. The person is going to be a drain on the team for as long as s/he is there. Change isn't going to happen, because you aren't looking at a behavior, you're looking at a defect.

 

 

What's a pesky little sister for? Why, collections, that's what!

Compared to me, my younger sister has always been tougher, stronger and more able to pursue what she wanted. Well, when I realized that I was in danger of not being paid for a specific project (the invoice was 200 days late, and it was from my absolute best client so I couldn't push too hard), I asked her to act as collection agency and I'd give her 5% of the invoice. She had it paid in two days.

Amazing. 

Huzzah!

Today I had an important meeting with a client who has given me a lot of work in the past. Our work together has increased over the past year, and right now I am the only vendor who works on a specific kind of project that they are selling wildly to their clients. She had asked if we could have lunch, and a part of me worried that she was going to dump me in public and say that they were bringing someone in-house to do the projects.  

I was due there at 12:00, and was running late (surprise, surprise) -- before I knew it, it  was 11:00 and I still needed to get ready. Well, I hurtled around the house, took a shower but then realized I didn't have time to fully dry my hair. So I spent a few precious minutes drying partly it using the cold air (so I didn't look overheated when I got there) and headed out. When I got on the Beltway, all of the cars were poking along, and after I seriously considered wedging my car between two large trucks in order to dart ahead, I realized that I needed to calm down and let events transpire as they were meant to.

So I relaxed, and strangely enough, things began to change. When I got off the highway there was no traffic and only one traffic light. I found a free two-hour parking spot on the street one short, shady block from my destination. As I walked to the restaurant, people seemed to be smiling at me benignly and even approvingly (an oddity on K Street). If there had been music, it would have been jaunty whistling.

I got there early, before my client, and found that the decor was absolutely fabulous --the walls were dark rose-red with white molding (see below) -- very harmonious. They had an amazing vegetarian menu with the best gazpacho I have ever had. And the cup of coffee after lunch was -- no joke -- the best cup of coffee I have ever had - - and I drink mine black, so I live or die by the brew.

So it almost doesn't matter what the client said, right? Well, she said that she'd like me to:

• Adjust (raise) my prices to make sure that I am getting paid well enough for it to be profitable. (You might want to read that sentence again.)

• Increase my European network of vendors so we can take on more of these projects.

• Consult/Design a template/train so that the Asian offices of her PR firm can do these reports themselves (until/if I find some contacts in Asia -- something I'd rather stay away from).

We also discussed F&B and she sees how perfectly this business model fits in with those plans.

Although there is a lot to do in terms of making it manageable (notably, I need to make sure that I have enough entry-level, computer and research-savvy consultants to do the bulk of this work), I'm convinced that I can do it.

If I were a singing woman, I would probably be singing,

"Curtain up! Light the lights!
We got nothing to hit but the heights!
I can tell, wait and see.
There's the bell! Follow me!
And nothing's gonna stop us 'til we're through!
Everything's coming up roses and daffodils!
Everything's coming up sunshine and Santa Claus!
Everything's gonna be bright lights and lollipops!
Everything's coming up roses for me and for you!"

Over the top, you say? Mayhaps -- but there is a time for La Merm (Ethel Merman to you, folks), and this is one of them.

Just call me Spinderella

I've known about this for a while, but haven't really promoted it because it's not exactly a flattering listing. I am mentioned in SourceWatch, a database maintained by the Center for Media and Democracy. According to the SourceWatch Web site, a primary purpose of SourceWatch is documenting the PR and propaganda activities of PR firms and PR professionals engaged in managing and manipulating public perception, opinion and policy.

I won't tell you why or where I'm listed, except to say it was for a previous position. I guess you could say I'm a modest puppetmaster.

Starbucks: What Went Wrong?

The announcement that Starbucks was closing 600 underperforming stores has provided a great deal of fodder for industry analysts and media. Everyone has an opinion on why Starbucks has had its problems.

The International Herald Tribune ran a feature attributing the problems to poor real estate decisions. I have to assume that this was a cynical attempt to have a different take on the situation than the majority of analysts, since the problems are far more fundamental than just location.

First of all, in my opinion, you can never rule out Starbucks. Howard Schulz, the CEO, is extremely dedicated and is willing to make the tough calls. He seems to be in the process of dismantling parts of his business that are highly lucrative simply because they don't fit in to the larger brand vision. For example, he's phasing out breakfast sandwiches, which are wildly popular, but don't taste very good and whose smell overwhelms the coffee.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on what SBUX could be doing better and what you'd change. Have you switched your allegiance to another firm? If so, which one, and why?