February 20 was National Mean Mommy Day -- I heard it on the radio. Pro or Con? I wondered. Well, Pro, obviously -- aren't we all better people because our mommies were a little bit mean now and then? Actually, it's when my kid mutters about how mean I am that I am most confident that I am dispensing "deluxe" parenting. I was all for Mean Mommy Day because we don't seem to understand the benefits of crankiness.

Isn't crankiness the inevitable by-product of high standards? When your high standards aren't met, what are you supposed to do? Be sympathetic? Offer chocolate? Cry? Certainly not -- any response other than crankiness would be a betrayal of those high standards.

There's a real up-tick in the crankiness factor at our company lately. When you communicate with your team and colleagues, keep this in mind. I think we're all anxious to display our high standards. And this is a good thing, but it certainly changes the atmosphere of communication. More of us are wearing cranky pants and we expect our standards to be taken seriously.

There is a track to success in some large companies that consists of floating along, staying invisible, putting the time in. When I first came here, I seemed to stumble over these floaters on a regular basis. I came from a career track that required a need for speed, a built-in urgency, as do so many of our new hires. I still remember my reaction to finding that the proper response to the smallest barrier to meeting a deadline was a rueful shrug, a bland acceptance of delay, and a uninterruptable flow towards the car, the freeway, and home.

Well, I remember thinking, as I sank cozily into this comfy view of things, this is something beyond family friendly -- this is downright leisurely, and I tried on a new, slow pace gratefully. Everyone seemed so nice. If someone on a team didn't deliver, we didn't confront, but we carefully, sensitively, found a way around this person's limitations. How very nice.

But after a few weeks of relaxation, I began to chafe at this slo-mo mode. My work is me, not some chore to be evaded, but part of my life-affirming journey. I really did expect other people on my team to do their work -- I was getting fed up with being sensitive instead of successful.

I was in yet another meeting when I heard an employee whose work I admired mutter "GPS" with a disappointed shake of her head. GPS turns out to mean "Glacial Pace Syndrome," and I learned that others among us are cranky about our more leisurely colleagues' casual view of their work.

It was then that I realized that there is a cranky movement afoot. There are people who really want to do something meaningful with that enormous chunk of time we have sold to our employer. So here's my idea: If you are uncomfortable with GPS, identify yourself to the people you work with so we'll know who we are.

Let's all get cranky about the barriers we encounter. Let's wince in meetings when something stupid and obstructionist comes up. An then let's speak with one voice and vote the stupidity down.

It's honest. And it's irritability that produces the oyster's pearl, after all.

Enough already! I am flooded with requests to write about irritations, rudeness, ridiculous timewasters. Everyone has his or her own rules about proper communications and is busy getting huffy about violators. As you know if you've ever been in marriage counseling, the prime cause of sour relationships is thoughtlessness, and the same is true here. The real problem is the absence of Clear Thinking, guys.

Tangled Strings

The highest volume sinner against clear thinking is e-mail. As we plow through our red inboxes we are vulnerable to the sort of thoughtlessness that is caused by a fear of becoming a bottleneck. Rush, rush with the response -- move it along. But really, if you look over your own e-mail inbox, you'll see that what is needed here is often not more hustle, but more deliberation.
I enjoy a good, juicy e-mail string the way other people like a soap opera. Here is drama, power, suspense! I've started collecting them.

I was privileged recently to review a lovely e-mail string that perfectly illustrates this problem. It started as a simple request by an employee for permission to revise an obsolete brochure posted on our intranet. The employee sent her request by e-mail to the person she was told to. The request was denied, the reason having to do with a "new policy." The employee wondered if there's a new policy to support the posting of obsolete information. So she wrote back, very politely, clarifying her request. She got the same answer back, but now the recipient's fairly rude response was copied to others, above and sideways.

Well, from then on, the whole thing ballooned. By the time the dust settled, two months later, the message passed through 18 mailboxes, scaled five organization levels, confused a vice president and two directors, and crossed and re-crossed into five different units.

Standing outside the issue, you can see where the simple attempt to communicate broke down: worries about "policy" expanded the distribution list beyond what was necessary because the recipient read the e-mail too fast and responded thoughtlessly. There are rules that help avoid time-wasters like this one:

• Don't extend an e-mail string beyond three responses
• Summarize the issue
• Seek to resolve the issue, not just pass it along
• Consider the distribution list carefully
• Pick up the phone when you don't understand someone's e-mail

None of these rules of thumb, however, will protect our company against your failure to think clearly about what is going on right in front of you. Read and respond to e-mail with clear thinking firmly engaged.

Maybe it's a sign of our times -- the victim mentality and all. What's wrong with communications at our company (I hear) isn't our ability to talk -- it's everyone else's ability to listen! Hmmm. Does it seem like you are writing memos to the void? Are your requests for support and assistance falling on deaf ears? Are your most heartfelt comments routinely ignored? Well, certainly, we are not as good at listening as we might be. In the press of business, we forget, lose sight of, and sometimes ignore what we've been told.

But the answer is not to complain about the quality of the listening around here; it's to learn how to communicate so that your words are heeded. People listen differently to different kinds of messages. So if you're being ignored, it says something about the way that you are communicating, and it's not good.

Here's an easy and effective tip: when you ask a person to do something, include the word "because" somewhere in your request. Stanford University invested a lot of time and money in an experiment that proved that people are far more likely to do what they are asked when they are told why. Even if the reason given is silly, circular or meaningless, it makes a big difference.

Stanford tested the response rates of people paying their bills when the bill had "Please pay your bill promptly" printed at the bottom. Then it compared this to response rates for bills that had "Please pay your bill promptly because it is due" printed at the bottom. People paid their bills promptly seven times more often when the word "because" was added to the statement. Seven times! Now that's an effective communications strategy!

And here's some extra logic: if you're asking for help, explaining why you need the help ("because") will engage your listener's intelligence and participation. Our last Pulse survey told us that our employees value collaboration, and want us all to do a better job of it. Well, that begins with the simple act of adding "because" to your requests for assistance.

So your e-mail dings at you and you go look at what your net has caught, and there you see it: an invitation. It's nice to be invited: It means someone is thinking about you, doesn't it? But do you want to go to yet another meeting? Who is it this time, you wonder, and open it up. And there's nothing there, no purpose, no agenda, only a time and place and a list of your fellow sufferers: the hapless invitees. Or else there's only a trace of a comment, a scrap of justification for this person's casually ripping an hour out of your life.

Here's my pay-back fantasy: first, reserve a large conference room. Then write an invitation to a large group of random people -- just an invitation with a time and a location, nothing else. Then send it.

The day of the meeting arrives. You stand at the door and watch everyone file in. When everyone is settled, announce that this is a training class on "How to Attend Meetings." It a very short training: don't go to meetings unless you know why you're there.

Yes, I know, the fault is with the meeting inviters, not the meeting attendees. Yes, I know that the person who calls the meeting should set an agenda make it clear to you how you will be contributing, maybe even describe the goal of the meeting. All these things are true. However, one way to improve our meeting culture from the ground up is for you, the meeting attendees, to insist on these marks of courtesy. And to vote with your feet (or the "decline" button) if you don't get them.

And this is what you are responsible for: your use of your limited time. Professionally minded people keep an eye on the value that they are producing for the Company. Whenever you attend a meeting without first thinking about why you should be going, you are risking the Company's money.

And how much money is at stake here? Say you're at a one-hour meeting. Take an hour of salary for each attendee, then double that to account for benefits, desks, light and heat. That's a lot already, but there's an even more important cost: The lost opportunity to be working on other tasks that contribute to the company's goals. You can't do other work when you are sitting in a meeting. It's this lost productivity that is the highest cost of casually accepting meeting invitations. And you know how frustrating that is for you personally, as well.

Part of our ongoing commitment to employees is to encourage them to take responsibility for identifying and removing barriers to their most important work. Too many meetings form a very common barrier, so stand firm! Protect your precious time!

Excuse the twirling eyeballs -- I've just come from a small windowless room where twelve earnest people were all discussing our EVA under GAAP as a function of our NPW in AY vs. CY with a side dish of PEs for ECs, UW discipline, and the CID/PID SSCs' SP framework. Then we talked about ETS, LBMS, and the new IT SAS. "No wait, isn't SAS a kind of software?" one person asked, "Yes, so they changed the name to IT SA to avoid confusion," another person replied.

To avoid confusion. What a lovely goal. As I was leaving the meeting, one person noticed that I was looking disoriented and suggested that I call HR's EAP. ("EEP!" I thought.) But before I called for a therapist, I decided to sit down in a nearby cube for a moment. I saw a small plaque on the wall: "ACRONYM-FREE ZONE" -- and I relaxed.

We do it without thinking. We fall into the habit of this alphabet shorthand for common things. The problem is, when we do it without thinking, these mysterious codes can doom our attempt to communicate efficiently -- our listeners haven't a clue what we're talking about. And when we fail to think clearly in this way, we force our long-suffering listeners to ask, "What does SSEB (or PIR, or BRM, or EE, or ASA) mean?" And that may require more courage or energy (or interest) than they have.

Acronyms are okay if you think before you use them: graceless, ugly, hard to remember, but okay. If you aren't thinking about your audience when you use them, they drive a stake through the heart of communication. And they can intimidate, create resentment, make you look pompous and condescending, and cause tooth decay. Well, they won't really cause tooth decay. But the arrogant disregard for your listener's ability to understand what you are saying is a kind of relationship rot that you should keep an eye on.

And besides, what are you doing with all this efficiency? It's the time you take to speak your words that gives your listener the time to think about what you are saying. What are you aiming at here: less thought?

Oh, and acronyms on the page! Is there anything less inviting than a paragraph chock-a-block with sterile symbols rather than actual language? An invitation to turn the page!

So, here's a call to clear thinking! Eschew obscure codes! Walk in the sunlight!

QED*

*QED stands for "Quod erat demonstrandum." These three letters (meaning "so it is proven") appear at the end of Euclid's mathematical proofs. This has to be one of the oldest acronyms still in use.

I have a very earnest friend who has advised me to avoid a certain brand of pet food because she's heard "they're doing animal testing." Hmmm. But that may be a good thing, I think, looking at my stubborn cats. I wouldn't mention it to her, though, because she's full of passion about it -- I just hide the cans when she visits.

Here's the thing: My friend may be a crackpot, but she's doing her best to lead the charge.

This got me thinking -- how do we lead at our company? How do we draw other people into our visions?It is an article of faith that anyone can lead. In my early days here, I expressed frustration to a manager. I was told that I should "lead from below." (Pause for interesting mental picture...) Well, okay.

I've overheard a seminar leader, discussing this "anyone-can-lead" concept: "Yes, she said, "anyone can lead, but will they? Do they know how?"

That's the question, of course. Leadership, especially when it's outside the org. chart's line of sight, requires heaping portions of courage. Yes, you're pretty exposed when you decide to lead the charge. Naked, it feels, if you're not an org. chart-approved "leader."

Someone might think you're an animal-testing fanatic, after all.

But add some clear thinking, action, teamwork and another heaping serving of courage, and you too could find yourself in front of a parade of committed people, marching towards a common goal! Of course, you've got to have a vision to lead. But even that isn't enough.

People who have visions in isolation are not leaders. Even saints (not noticeably practical people) only achieve results when they start to talk about their solitary visions. Leadership is, to paraphrase Edison, "One percent vision, 99 percent evangelism."Here's one common path people take to avoid asking for help: I'll do it myself! See me lift this big rock all by myself.

Good job! But it's not leadership. You can lift a rock, but we can build an empire -- by collaborating.

Collaboration is a big topic right now, but it's getting confused with "consensus." Everyone in the room thinks they get to make the decision (that's our consensus bias), but actually, they don't. It's the leader who makes the decision, communicates it, smoothes over the ruffled feathers, and then has the gall to ask the dissenters for help in executing it! And that's where collaboration comes in. It takes courage to make the unpopular decision and to ask for collaboration to support it -- but without this little step, we are all paralyzed in our consensus stew.

So to lead you need help from others to achieve your vision. Better take a deep breath and get ready to immerse yourself in other people. You'll need to talk to them, write to them, present to them, beg for help, nag for budget, jump through hoops, unblushingly show your passion to impassive strangers, beat the stragglers with a stick, shrug over the lost lambs. Just do whatever it takes to get this ragtag-and-bobtail group to head in the same direction.

It's all about communicating your excitement. Create a contagion of passion, and stop worrying about getting your hair mussed.

Or, if you are lucky enough to work in the orbit of someone with the vision and energy and courage to lead, then grab the brass ring and enjoy the ride. Just be glad it's not about pet food.

It is eighteen months down the turnaround road and we are hitting some walls. A recent employee poll pointed to 'inefficient processes' as the primary barrier to employees' success. But few have the courage to step forward and say out loud, "This is an inefficient process!" We're really worried about what would happen if we did.

Let's talk about how we talk about conflict, which is the dark side of collaboration, of course. Sometimes we get to agree to disagree - but that's really a luxury, isn't it? Most of the time, when two people disagree about something important, guess what? Someone's gonna get their way, and the other one isn't. Employee, sibling, parent, manager, friend -- Everyone has experienced the pain of I'm right and you're wrong and someone pays and someone gets paid. Someone walks away feeling burned, but everyone lives on.

It's the great wheel of life: sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down, but it always moves forward.

Why then is it so hard for us to find useful ways to disagree with each other? In his first big corporate meeting, our CEO directed us to "Consult with all the qualified smart people, get their opinions, make the decision, and then move on." Oh, what a lovely vision! Let's talk about the habits we need to break to get to that point.

Saints on the Payroll

First, no one is getting paid to be perfect and universally loved. We get paid to solve problems. Sometimes we have a good day and the problem gets solved in a tidy way. Sometimes, it gets messy. Now, 'messy' is a subjective quality. For many of our employees, the mere possibility of conflict or controversy is enough for them to break a sweat. No actual communication needs to take place to create the intolerable worry. They analyze their audience: "They'll hate this. They'll disagree. They'll create barriers. Those unreasonable villains, they will sabotage all our good work."

Hmm. I haven't met anyone whose job it is to prevent me from being successful. Perhaps it's time to worry about this a little less. Hey, instead of worrying about out positioning, I say: Let's get back to work.

Any psychologist can tell you that the best way to get used to the discomfort of conflict is to expose yourself to more of it. Don't fear it, go to it - talk about it. If you can, make a joke about it. Think of it as useful tension, a signpost that something needs to be resolved. We need to get less tender about conflict in order to get the "qualified smart people" into the room.

Finding the Smart People

And here we are, back at collaboration. Schedule a meeting as soon as you know it's inevitable, and make sure you invite all the people who have a qualified opinion, or whose work you will be depending on to sew up the solution, so they understand the whole context of the decision. Make the meeting work for all involved - even if you disagree with their point of view. Prepare an agenda and send out any pertinent background material.

Go ahead and embarrass any participants who haven't read the background material. They won't neglect to read it next time.

You see, all that pre-made communications advice about "always have an agenda," is just so much blah, blah, blah, unless you want the meeting to get to a real destination. If you do, the agenda, the pre-work, all these tricks and devices, will help keep your meeting participants on track. But the key ingredient is your personal commitment to run the meeting so you really do get all the smart points of view on your problem.

If you do, you'll start the meeting on time, you'll interrupt the boring anecdote, you'll quash the nay-sayer, you'll do what it takes to get to the decision you need.

Find the smart people, get them to talk, make sure they all agree that you get to make this decision, and then thank them for their input.

I've participated in many meetings where all my smart participants agreed absolutely on the right thing to do and then asserted that such a result would never come about.

Agreement from all qualified stakeholders is critical to produce needed change. We need to take more confidence from these agreements - include the stakeholders in next-stage communications so they can add their endorsements - in public. It's time we all had as much courage in public as we do among ourselves in the wind-down of our meetings with other smart people.

The Killing Fields

With agreement all that is left to do is to make the decision. Well, it's yours to make, isn't it? The word "decide" comes from a Latin root that means, "to kill the alternatives." I see many decisions made here that are rendered null and void by a small slip: the communicator forgets to be clear about the doors that this decision closes. A decision is something that happens when you are presented with alternatives: in choosing one, you are eliminating the others.

The actual point of any communication is the slaying of the alternatives. If, on the company's behalf, you've decided on a vendor for McGuffins, it's important to be clear that no other vendor may be used. Any variance to this undermines your decision. I think we suffered through two years of this nonsense around cell phone contracts, for instance. But you could pick ten examples of the same from your own experience.

Chosen Battles

A job that puts the hard issues into cold storage gets dull pretty fast. It's frustrating, because the hard issues, the ones that generate conflict, also point the direction for the future. We're just marking time if we can't find ways to raise the questions that generate discussion, disagreement, and yes, conflict. I look at the charge before us in the next eighteen months, and I see so many tough issues that need to be resolved right away.

Here's my suggestion: don't worry about the conflict generated in the discussion. That's just noise. Dive in. Make a difference. Manage change. We will all be better for it.

Okay, okay, we've all heard there's a new way of life out there: one that involves crossing lines, building bridges across silos, sharing knowledge and information with those outside our fragment of the org. chart. But so what? Do we have time for this nonsense?

I remember when a collaborator was a bad guy: one who had dropped the struggle for freedom and sold his soul to the enemy. Now he's the good guy and rewarded for crossing boundaries. Now it's the American way.

A Cynical View

Collaboration as a concept seems very touchy-feely, very time consuming and hard to find the immediate reward -- it just seems above and beyond the commitments we make to get our own jobs done. Do we get a raise for helping "that other division" meet its targets? Well, that's management's' challenge, but I think we're reasonable in expecting that we'll be recognized and rewarded for doing this collaboration stuff.

In the meantime, I suppose there is a sort of visceral reward that we can give ourselves: collaborating across silos is more interesting and gives our work a wider impact -- I feel bigger and more powerful when my work is bigger and more powerful. I get a real charge out of it. When I've sniffed out a solution in use by that nameless group in St. Louis, I get a charge out of using it.

Perhaps efficiency is its own reward.

Or how about the pain of having your suggestion dropped like a used sweatsock because you didn't take the time to gather support beforehand -- there's a humiliation that collaboration can prevent. Suggestions from a unified group of twelve are just more likely to fly than your own precious and private visions. As painful as it may be to compromise your vision, it's a lot more rewarding to get the job done with the help of others than to be rejected all by yourself. (That's why I collaborate, by the way -- it's the cynic's justification, but it works for me.)

And then there's the candy of getting to know as many interesting and effective people around the Company as you can -- seeking opportunities for collaboration is a lovely excuse for mingling with the best people. These are the folks who give the best parties, tell the best jokes, and have the prettiest children, aren't they? Why work for a big company if you don't get to mix it up with the whole village now and then?

Sickeningly virtuous as it sounds, the real reason to collaborate is found in the person of our customer -- you know, the one who pays the bills. We offer a confusing array of products: we can save the poor guy some steps if we can help him buy it easily and all from us. Cross-sell, up-sell, fight, fight, fight!

Or, if your view of the Company is out the window of the back office, you can participate in this push by looking outside your own silo now and then: What are you doing that our brothers and sisters in other divisions can borrow from you to save a few bucks? Pride takes many forms. Be proud of sharing, rather than standing alone. (I think this is the evolution that takes place between nursery school and kindergarten, but never mind.)

Do we have time for this nonsense? What do you think?

Did you know that, according to Newsweek, the Pentagon is urging its staffers to knock it off on the PowerPoint? Hmmm. PowerPoint as a threat to our military posture? No, I wouldn't go that far. But PowerPoint has certainly changed the face of presentations at our company. I've enjoyed hearing people tell me that they're going to "send me a presentation." No, you're not -- you're going to send me a file. You make a presentation, you send a file.

Here's the essence of what makes everyone tired of PowerPoint: a graphics file is not the same as a presentation. Full communication is not achieved by sending me a collection of bullets. So, stop it. Stop it right now. It's just upsetting everyone.

A presentation is a public speaking event, not the visual aids that accompany it. It's the speaker and his smiling face in from of you. It's an event dreaded by most people more than spiders or an IRS audit. It takes courage. It's the hammy joke on the wry observation. It's you with your ideas in front of me with my brain. It's my chance to ask the public question and your chance to answer me -- or not. Here's an identification tip: people generally stand up when they give a presentation. Sitting down, crawling through PowerPoint pages as we listen to you read the bullets to us doesn't really compare to the raw exposure of a presentation.

Hey, here's a sensitivity tip: I can read, buddy.

You know, you probably don't really need a hand-out. You can just say things. I will hear you and I will remember. If I don't remember, then you probably didn't make me care enough about it to remember. Maybe you should spend your time figuring out how to make me care about your ideas, rather than grooming your speaking outline for show-and tell. I don't think animation brings anything extra to the moment, aside from the fleeting thought, "Doesn't this guy have anything else to do with his time?"

It's the bullet points that have a kind of weird immortality. What is it with these PowerPoint files? It's like some electronic form of gum on your shoe.

Don't they teach verbs at school anymore? I don't know what you mean by "project schedule and business objectives" -- I need a verb! Develop? Align? Test? Discontinue? Object to? Execute? Laugh about maniacally? Get out the last PowerPoint someone sent you and open it up. Do you see any verbs? Wouldn't verbs help a lot?

Okay, okay, enough ranting. Here's a suggestion. After you make your presentation and listen to the feedback, make time to go back to your desk and create a new document. You can even use PowerPoint. Create a new document that would make sense to a reader who wasn't at the presentation. Add the verbs in, add some explanations in smaller type, or use the speaker notes (find them and use them) to flesh out your ideas, remove the animations that look horrible when printed.

Then you can send me the file and I won't complain.

I was browsing in the CareerCenter on my company's intranet the other day (never mind why) and I ran across a job listing that gave me pause. It was my own job. The one I have right now, I mean. Well, not exactly the same. I quickly looked at the "hiring manager" and exhaled in relief.

Not my manager, so I stopped worrying about that, but started wondering about something else. Why is the Company hiring someone to do what I already do? This is not good. Am I not doing it well enough? No one had talked to me about this. I get good reviews, but still...I printed out the listing and took it to my manager, and she was as puzzled as I was. She made a few calls that reassured me, "It was just a mix-up." A week later, the posting remained.

I thought about applying for it, offering to do my job and this one at a discounted rate: I'd take a pay cut on the second job (maybe 20% less). I also wondered why there had evidently been no takers -- is my job so awful? Am I the only one dumb enough to do this for a living? Mostly, I just stewed on it. It seemed so clueless, to have two jobs that did the same thing.

I got cranky.

"More politics!" I groused. "If they really wanted to cut costs...," I harrumphed.Then out of the blue, I was asked to help interview the candidates for this other, duplicate job -- "my evil twin." I said yes, of course.I imagined asking the hiring manager why we would employ my evil twin.

In my fantasy, he says, "Our people need to be tough. Our employees are battle-hardened veterans of bruising internal battles. We don't let anyone have access to the customer unless they've successfully run the gauntlet of internal politics. Only the toughest survive to make it to you, the customer."

He'd pause to wipe the blood out of his eyes.

"Yes, this development model does cause a lot of attrition, but it's worth it. Our customers tell us that they like best to work with the bitter and cynical products of mindless turf wars." I had a hard time seeing this as a deliberate policy.

I decided that most likely the whole thing was an oversight. I went to a few interviews. I still wasn't sure why I was helping interview for my own job, so I didn't have much to say. They seemed like nice people (and you all know how I feel about "nice").

In the middle of all this, our CEO gave a speech that struck a chord with me: "Let's not waste our resources, fighting among ourselves," he said. "We have no enemies here: the competition is outside. Focus your attention on the competition, not on the other employees here." This focused my thoughts remarkably.

We're like kids fighting in the backseat of the car while nuclear war rages outside. I decided to stop sulking. I was able to see that including me in the interviewing process was a wise and generous act. My evil twin was hired recently -- and at the same time our functions are being pulled together into the same unit: like a lot of people, I'm having to learn to collaborate whether I want to or not. I guess we're hard-wired for competitive behavior: the trick is to point all that energy at our competitors, not the guy in the next cubicle.