The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff [...]]]> I was floored this morning when I came across this post about project sponsors. Some choice excerpts:

The problem with project sponsors is that they have got to where they are by climbing a very dirty greasy pole. They now have a privileged aerial view of the executive landscape…. The slightest hint or whiff of them being on the wrong side of an issue, especially if it is your project that is the issue, then it is odds on that you will lose your project patronage…. If we do report the real project status now, it will only lead to investigation and recrimination which will ultimately delay the project anyway. [emphasis added]

In my decades in the corporate world, I have certainly seen my share of execs who fit this description. I’ve also seen at least as many who try their hardest to do the right thing by their teams, their projects, and their company.

Here are a handful of guidelines for project managers dealing with execs:

• If you bring a problem, also bring a suggested solution and some options to go with it.
• Be prepared for deep probing on any issue, not all of which may make sense to you at the time. (As a leader/manager, I would often pull hard on one particular thread of what I was presented, both for my own edification and to see if you knew your stuff. If that thread held, I was likely to accept the rest of your arguments and cut to the request-for-action section. If it didn’t hold, I deeply discounted everything you were offering.)
• Be prepared for the exec to ignore certain areas you think are important; she may know they’re not important, she may already understand them, or she may know that they’re outside her level of competence and is looking to you for an answer, not a dissertation.
• Take responsibility. Don’t point fingers.
• Execs have less do-this-now power that you think they do. If you must ask for something, ask wisely. The best (and easiest) help an exec may offer is an introduction to someone in a different group with whom you want to make contact.
• Virtually all execs believe they got to the executive suite by being smarter and “better” at their job than most everyone else — which is true more often than you may be willing to admit, though it certainly isn’t always true. (Being smarter than 90% of the other folks may or may not make the exec smarter than you… but don’t assume either way.)
• Don’t ever bring to a scheduled meeting a spreadsheet you haven’t triple-checked or a document (or PPT) with grammatical or spelling errors. (For an on-the-fly review, more leeway is given.) The exec wants to be sure you prepared — and cared enough to do your very best — before he contributes his constrained time.
• Half of what managers do isn’t visible to their direct reports; three-quarters isn’t visible at levels beyond that. Just because you can’t see what they’re busy with doesn’t mean they aren’t buried in work. More often that you might suspect, part of that work is providing “air cover” for their teams and your project, if for no other reason than you looking bad makes them look bad.

Finally, one quick clue for spotting an exec who does fit the description in the quote with which I began this article: An exec willing to burn his team by name to his peers or in public. It’s one thing to share, “The Acme Project is late,” or even “The Acme Project team’s been telling me the project will be late.” It’s quite another to say, “The Acme Project team has screwed up,” or –worst of all — “Joe has screwed up” or “The leader of the team has screwed up.” That’s departmental politics in the extreme, avoiding responsibility.Even for an exec new to a department, there’s a big difference between “I know the Acme Project has been late, and I’m going to find out what’s wrong and fix it” and “My predecessor screwed up the Acme Project.”

Exec, grunt, or in between, take responsibility. That’s leadership.

If you [...]]]> When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on.

If you think spam has been increasing… well, you’re right. This report in Baseline Magazine notes that 97.5% — 97.5%!! — of email in December and January was spam. [Note: Unfortunately, it's another one of those annoying built-in-Flash-because-the-developer-thinks-it's-cool slide shows.]

The latest trick is manipulating the sent time so that if you keep stuff in your inbox sorted by date, the spam winds up spread throughout the folder; you can’t just pick off the newest stuff on top.

Almost 10% of the spam came from the US. As a US citizen, I find that both embarrassing and infuriating; how is it we can’t catch the folks within our own borders?

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The worst part is that about eight years ago Microsoft proposed what still looks like an elegant way to kill spam: make the spammers “pay” for their emails. [The link is to a generally readable page; it then has links to highly technical research papers with more detail.] Microsoft didn’t originate the idea, which has been around since at least 1992, but they actively promoted it for a time.

There was considerable discussion about the idea in the early part of the decade — but there was a lot of “oh, it’s Microsoft, so I don’t like it” and “this isn’t absolutely perfect, so let’s not do it.” That’s the stuff that kills projects, and we’re paying for it today.

Or as Monty Python notes, on the menu “there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam; that’s not got much spam in it.” Well, now we’re up to spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,  spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. (Yes, that’s the proportion.) As far as I’m concerned, that’s got too much spam in it.

Those are the questions posed by the place where I’ve been getting my hair cut.

Background: There are at least four places to get my hair cut down at the [...]]]> If you have been giving something away and you stop, do you really make more money? What about raising prices only for your best customers?

Those are the questions posed by the place where I’ve been getting my hair cut.

Background: There are at least four places to get my hair cut down at the bottom of our hill, a one-mile walk away. I chose this particular “salon” (what happened to “barbershop”?) when they opened some years ago because they had an introductory low price and a buy-eight-get-the-ninth-free policy.

Now cutting my hair is in effect a commodity. As you may note from the pictures that sometimes appear atop the page, my hair thickly curled, unstyled, extremely easy to cut. There’s also less of it than there used to be, but that doesn’t seem to affect the price. In other words, I can go to any semi-competent hair cutter and get a similar satisfactory result. I’ve noted that most of the folks who patronize these places also have commodity-type straightforward, simple haircuts. You don’t get to choose your “stylist,” many of whom are relatively transient at these places anyway.

So I differentiate on price, convenience, and inertia. I believe most other patrons of this chain do the same, based on my observations.

The nine-for-eight deal represents inertia. Convenience is the same for all the shops in the area, and I suspect price will be similar, too, for my simple cut. And there’s a 2x multiple, since my son also has easy-to-cut, unstyled hair, and we often patronize this shop together.

I went in to get my hair cut yesterday and found a small sign noting that at the end of the month they were eliminating the nine-for-eight deal “because of the recession.”

In effect, they’ve implemented a 12.5% price increase.

Specifically, they’ve increased prices 12.5% only for their regular patrons. If you didn’t use the place often enough to take advantage of the nine-for-eight deal, your price remained the same.

Now what kind of a business raises its prices only for its best customers?

Enter the law of unintended consequences. I now have reason to consider their competitors that I didn’t have before.

Granted, they were making less margin on good customers than on casual customers. So if some of their good customers leave, their margin per haircut will indeed go up. However, their overhead remains the same, and their total revenue will decline with even a smallish loss of clientele. It’s not like they’re so busy that people see the lines and walk out; they have an enormous amount of excess capacity at most times on most days. In addition, some customers buy the very-high-margin hair-care products on display, meaning that even these “free” ninth haircuts can generate profit.

They likely look at the economics of their situation thus: If they lose one-eighth of their regular clientele, their average margin per haircut will improve while their revenue (and profit) remains the same.

It remains to be seen what percentage of their good customers will explore other options. Inertia is a powerful force even without incentives, and perhaps they will indeed lose less than 12.5% of the business from their erstwhile regulars.

They will, however, lose mine.