Monday I wrote about Joel Spolsky’s wonderful demo of Fog Creek’s new products. Joel did one other thing at his presentation that I found very interesting. He didn’t introduce himself (nor was he introduced by anyone else).

Pretty much everyone in the [...]]]> I’ve been writing this week on demos and presentations.

Monday I wrote about Joel Spolsky’s wonderful demo of Fog Creek’s new products. Joel did one other thing at his presentation that I found very interesting. He didn’t introduce himself (nor was he introduced by anyone else).

Pretty much everyone in the audience knew who “Joel Spolsky” was, but few would recognize him by sight. It didn’t matter; from the context, it was quickly clear that the speaker — and bug reporter — was Joel. (Just in case someone was still unsure, when he filed the bug report his name was on the onscreen form.) I’m pretty sure that if you went to that invitation-only demo, you know about Joel.

I wonder in my own presentations how much to say about myself, assuming I haven’t been introduced. One school of thought says, “What you’re selling is your credibility, so you need to establish your bona fides up front.” I don’t buy that, in most cases. If I’m part of a panel discussion, that’s one thing, but in most of my presentations people are coming to hear me. Over time, I’ve eliminated any self-introduction entirely, other than my name on the title or walk-in slide. I may start by saying, “Hi, I’m Steven Levy,” but then I jump into the initial content.

I’ve learned that people are there for the content. When I say they’re coming to hear me, what I mean is not that they’re looking to me to deliver the word from the mountaintop, but rather they’re coming because the topic interests them and they have some idea who I am, rather than walking into a room where the topic is known but the presenter is an unknown factor. I may weave occasional “bona fides” facts into my talk — e.g., “I saw in my decade and a half at Microsoft that….”

I sat through a demo Wednesday where the speaker spent the first ten minutes telling us about his life — and was proud of presenting himself in this manner. I found it profoundly uninteresting — and worse, a waste of my time. I am determined not to inflict that upon others.

So I appreciated Joel simply getting up and starting to speak. We knew who he was, even if we couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. We’re ready to listen; now give us something worth listening to.

I wrote Monday about Joel Spolsky demoing his product “in passing,” without overtly appearing to demo it. It was a terrific idea, brilliantly carried off.

However, few of us demo products whose use can be woven into the presentation itself. (Think of demoing PowerPoint itself for the [...]]]> I’m writing this week about presentations and demos.

I wrote Monday about Joel Spolsky demoing his product “in passing,” without overtly appearing to demo it. It was a terrific idea, brilliantly carried off.

However, few of us demo products whose use can be woven into the presentation itself. (Think of demoing PowerPoint itself for the ultimate you-can-demo-it-without-appearing-to-demo-it product.)

I designed one of the early Microsoft demos for Internet Explorer. Version 3.0 was the first version that was really a usable browser. The demo didn’t sell Internet Explorer per se; rather, it told a story about how we’d be using the web in the future to shop. Internet Explorer was simply there as demoers walked potential customers through buying a shirt — a welcome-back video, personalized pages, a rotating image so you could see the shirt from all sides, a checkout cart that remembered your information, etc.

These are all things we take for granted today, but nobody was doing them in 1995 because the technology wasn’t ready. People expected we’d get to something such as we showed, but they were amazed to see it working. As a byproduct, they took away two important messages that we delivered subliminally (and then probably pounded into them in what we said afterward): Internet Explorer was now Netscape’s equal, and you should look to Microsoft technology if you wanted to ride the next wave on the web.

I loved giving the demo (and teaching others how to give it), because I wasn’t demoing technology; rather, I was walking through a scenario that had everyone fascinated — it was 1995, after all.

I hated traveling somewhere to give the demo, because it required carrying two 15-pound portable computers, a network mini-hub, and other gear, in addition to schlepping my luggage (I hadn’t heard of wheels on luggage yet) and wearing my suit jacket so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. But in the end it was worthwhile.

So while it’s rare that you’re demonstrating something where the setting itself can provide context for your product or offering, take advantage of it when and if you can.

More importantly, consider the lesson here — people care about scenarios, not products. And more than just scenarios, people care about scenarios that match what they do in their life — work life, home life, commute life, whatever. Don’t demonstrate features. Don’t demo your product. Solve a problem. The trick is to pose the problem with as little setup as you can get away with.

Demoing an app for tracking software bugs? What setup could be better than a bug that shows itself to your audience.

Demoing a browser? I showed the “Internet lifestyle” in living color and real-live-before-your-eyes bits, and let the audience make their own connections between an experience they wanted and the technology I was showing.

You’ve all seen the cartoons about the door-to-door carpet cleaner salesman who dumps mud on your carpet. You don’t have to go that far… but if you want to sell me a vacuum cleaner, show me how it cleans up a mess with no fuss and no work. (I hate vacuuming, and I have to vacuum the house when I get done writing this article.)

————

Friday I’ll talk about one other aspect of presentations that came up in Joel Spolsky’s demo.

It was delivered by Joel Spolsky, the brains behind Fog Creek Software and a brilliant thinker about various computer issues.

To set the scene, he and his team were doing a roadshow tour of Fog Creek’s new releases, the unfortunately [...]]]> I’ll write this week about demos and presentations, based on a terrific software demo I saw Thursday.

It was delivered by Joel Spolsky, the brains behind Fog Creek Software and a brilliant thinker about various computer issues.

To set the scene, he and his team were doing a roadshow tour of Fog Creek’s new releases, the unfortunately named FogBugz 8.0 and Kiln. FogBugz is a terrific software-project-management tool, and Kiln is geekware beyond what I want to write about here. (It looks like pretty good geekware; if you develop software for a large team, you might want to check it out.)

For the 30 minutes preceding the scheduled start of Joel’s presentation, the screen showed a cartoonish countdown timer with a Fog Creek logo. Right on time, Joel heads up to the rostrum, the timer goes to zero… and it crashes/bluescreens!

Joel looks at it as the crash result fills the screen with white-text-on-blue-background gobbledygook. He says something to the effect of “Sorry, it shouldn’t do that. I’ve seen this before. Let me just enter a bug to make sure it gets fixed.” He does, and starts his presentation.

A minute later, he gets a popup EMail “toast” — that blue ghost-thing that Outlook pops up at the lower right of your screen until you get smart and turn it off — saying it’s already fixed. We all can read it, and he too gets distracted by it. He looks at us and says, “I don’t think it’s fixed. At least the developer’s on line and working today. Sorry, let me just see what he’s talking about.” He goes into FogBugz, pulls up the referenced “fixed” code, and says — to an audience made up mostly of programmers — “That doesn’t look fixed to me. Sometimes, you just have to do this stuff yourself.” Now totally distracted — but with the programmers all staring at the buggy code, of course — he changes a line of code and says, “That’ll probably work now.”

Anyway, as you’ve probably figured out, it’s all staged. He keeps interrupting his talk to look at the bug, fix it, check his fix with another programmer, and so on. Meanwhile, he’s demonstrating key features of his product in a context that couldn’t have been attained in a straight demo, the audience rapt with attention. (Every programmer has had the experience of his or her code crashing during an important demo.)

He pulled it off superbly. He never winked at the “joke,” nor did he ever acknowledge that it was staged; rather, he trusted his audience to figure it out and go for the ride along with him.

Wednesday, the idea of demoing-without-demoing… which isn’t some Zen concept, but an occasional opportunity from which we can take away lessons for more quotidian demos.

Morgan Ensberg is a former slightly-above-average infielder for the Houston Astros and a few other teams. But he’s also a keen observer of the game.

(Related question: Why do great players rarely make great managers? There are exceptions [...]]]> The off-topic part is that it involves baseball. The “semi-” part is that it’s about leadership, an all-too-rare quality.

Morgan Ensberg is a former slightly-above-average infielder for the Houston Astros and a few other teams. But he’s also a keen observer of the game.

(Related question: Why do great players rarely make great managers? There are exceptions — Joe Torre in baseball and Phil Jackson in basketball were above average though not great players — but by and large, the most successful managers or coaches were mediocre as players. And yes, this is a relevant question, your honor.)

He describes a baseball problem in part 1 of this two-parter. If you’re into baseball, read it because it’s a really good problem. If you think baseball is a simple game where the sole tactical issue is figuring when to bring in a relief pitcher, read it because it offers a good look into how complex tactically the game really is when played at this level.

He offers the answer — at least, his answer — in part 2. If you’re curious about the tactical problem he posed in part 1, read it all. If you want a great insight into leadership, skip down to the heading “What I Really Just Did….”

The manager’s real job in this situation is to instill confidence, to remind the players to believe in themselves and their abilities, to move quickly and surely and not second-guess themselves. Having a manager watch over your shoulder, ready to pounce on any mistake, is the surest way to make mistakes — maybe not the particular mistakes the manager is watching for, but the mistake of withdrawing, the mistake of trying-not-to-fail rather than striving-to-succeed-and-risking-failure.

The prosecutor who brags about never having lost a case in court makes sure that only slam-dunk cases go to trial; how many miscreants go free or plead to minor crimes because this prosecutor is unwilling to place the mission of determining facts in the hands of the jurors? The manager who claims never to have made a bad hire may never had made a great hire, either, because great hires are often risks. (That said, good managers will have more success with all of their hires, and good prosecutors will win cases that bad prosecutors lose.)

Why Don’t Great Players Make Great Managers (Coaches)?

Ensberg was never a great player. There are two ways to make it at the big league level. One way, the one everyone sees, is to have enormous talent. The other is to be of average talent but become a student of the game, taking advantage of situational knowledge and small mistakes. (Exhibit A, 47-year-old pitcher Jamie Moyer still getting folks out with a fastball that is “fast” only in that it’s not as slow as his other pitches.) One of those situations, incidentally, is getting along with other players, especially those more talented than you.

Come time to manage, and your athletic skills don’t matter. What does matter is your knowledge of the game, the ability to apply and transmit that knowledge, and your ability to get along with and motivate highly talented — and highly paid — athletes. Who’s more likely to be a successful manager, a superstar like Alex Rodriguez or a player like Morgan Ensberg?

The same is true in business. Many people who are enormously effective as managers weren’t necessarily the best salesperson, the best programmer, the best attorney. People management is a skill, and an art, that is not necessarily correlated with the manager’s skill in the area being managed.

To get the worst of both worlds, take your most productive individual contributor and make her a manager, simply because she’s so productive. All of a sudden she won’t be as productive because she now spends time managing rather than producing, and there’s not certainty she’ll be able to teach or inspire others to produce at a higher level.

It’s hard for many organizations to recognize that leadership is a special skill, not something you simply glue onto a top producer. Both managerial and leadership skills can be taught, and learned, but they don’t necessarily come with the original package; they’re extras.

They’re extras well worth paying for, however.

As Ensberg’s “manager” says, “Alright guys.  No problem here.”

They’re sold the same way to the same types of consumers.

Luckily, the wine and iPhones haven’t hit the spam-bucket the way watches have recently. Watch spam is probably running a close third to 419 spam (“Esteemed sir, I am requesting for urgent business relationship….”) and [...]]]> What do fake Rolexes, overpriced wine, and iPhones have in common?

They’re sold the same way to the same types of consumers.

Luckily, the wine and iPhones haven’t hit the spam-bucket the way watches have recently. Watch spam is probably running a close third to 419 spam (“Esteemed sir, I am requesting for urgent business relationship….”) and fake ED drugs. That said, the subject or opening lines of Rolex spam are instructive:

Cheap watches that still elevate your social status.
Tired of being jealous of your friend who owns a Submariner SS model?
Your friend will recognize the Rolex on your wrist.
Watches for people who want to live a luxury life but spend less.

(I read spam so you don’t have to!)

It’s easy to see that these fakes are aspirational goods.

Actually, a real Rolex is an aspirational good too. It keeps time no better than a $15 Casio, though it’s a tad more elegant… and considerably heavier. But the price is so out there — $8,000 and up, I think — that even the biggest poseurs recognize it’s an aspirational good. They’re not fooling themselves.

Fake Rolexes, overpriced wine, and iPhones are little marketing marvels of self-deception.

A friend who’s a high-end wine distributor, and who knows good wine, recently attended a tasting of “mid-price” wines, bottles that might sell for $100 in a restaurant. My friend wrote about the various wines (ellipses omitted)

Dull, a bit thick. Their Chablis was tasteless…also dull. Horrible. Are they kidding? Many of the wines were not sound, going through a secondary fermentation. Many were oxidized. The guy next to me was raving about a chardonnay that was oxidized and [expletive deleted]. The emperor has no clothes.

That’s the way of the world sometimes. The Emperor’s clothiers did rather well, as I recall.

The shop in question is in effect selling iPods and iPhones. Both of those devices are glosses on stuff that had been done before, wrapped in nicer packaging and sold as aspirational goods. People want them — and pay a premium for them — because of the cachet that attaches to them. It’s market positioning that Steve Jobs is brilliant at. I may knock the products as overpriced, but I’m truly in awe of Jobs’ marketing savvy and sense of what consumers desire… or can be convinced to desire.

To most people, wine is an aspirational good, like iPhones, like (fake) Rolexes. People aspire to possessing and using (consuming) it, not just as a visible signal to friends, acquaintances, and random observers, but as a symbol to themselves that they have achieved a certain level of fulfillment and status. For many people buying wine, as long as the liquid is not actually vinegar, the label is what they’re consuming; the product in the bottle is secondary.

No one buys the cheapest thing on the menu, as my friend has reminded me a few times. Pick a price point for an evening out. “I would pay $80 for a bottle of wine at this restaurant.” It’s the aspirational thing, not a particular $80 wine. Show the purchaser the menu, and many who think $80 will buy the $90 or $100 bottle. They’re celebrating something — themselves, basically — and they don’t want to buy the cheapest celebration.

The wine shop figured this out. I’m sure the owner knows the wines are overpriced for their quality level. He also knows that it’s a small number of people who understand that quality level, people such as my friend (I sure don’t when it comes to wine).

He’s selling them a vision of their level and status as reflected through some fermented grapes. The skill with which the grapes have been fermented is only a small part of what he’s selling. Think of it as a different version of love-him-or-hate-him wine guru Robert Parker’s rating scale,where wines he likes score 90+ on a 50-100 scale. In the aspirational wine scale, 90% of the score is aspiration and 10% is actual wine goodness. If a wine hits 100% on the aspirational scale and 20% on the taste scale, it gets a score of (90% x 100) + (10% x 20) = 90 + 2 = 92, which Mr. Parker would consider a fairly good wine.

That, I think, is the kind of rating scale people use in evaluating any non-necessary good; the functional aspects are only part of the score, sometimes a small part. Otherwise a Casio and a Rolex would score about the same… or maybe the Casio would score higher, since it doesn’t drag your wrist down. (On the other hand, I recall a James Bond story where Bond, James Bond wrapped his Rolex around his knuckles to punch someone out; maybe for those in a certain line of work the Rolex would get some points as a weapon. I hear Robert Ludlum’s next book is called The Bourne Chronograph.)

A fake Rolex, an iPhone, and a $100-at-a-restaurant bottle of mediocre wine represent three different colors across the spectrum of aspirational goods. The fake Rolex is just that, a fake; the intent to deceive is outward only, the aspiration naked. The mediocre wine contains both self-deception and outward deception; the buyer pays for something where price (a/k/a reputation) is pretty much the only indicator of quality the buyer understands. The iPhone is a quality device that works rather well; the buyer is overpaying a bit for the cachet, and often self-deception (“I’m cool, I have an iPhone”) is greater than outward deception (“there goes another iPhone geek”).

Indeed for some the iPhone is the new Rolex, a fashion accessory as well as a utility device. The difference is that the spread between utility cost and actual price is thousands of dollars for the Rolex and a few bucks for the iPhone.

If you’re on the marketing side, positioning your product as an aspirational good, if applicable, is a great way to increase profit margins, though it may or may not maximize total profit.

If you’re the buyer, it never hurts to consider explicitly how much extra you’re willing to pay for cachet rather than pay for play.

=============

For the record:

• I don’t have an iPhone, but I do have a wool-and-cashmere sport jacket I wear on some client visits that is priced above utility cost.
• I know very little about wine, though I can tell the difference between Two-Buck Chuck and an extraordinary 1988 Chateauneuf-du-Pape my friend shared with me last month; I rarely buy a bottle in a restaurant, but if I do I’ll keep it under $40 because I simply don’t know enough to warrant spending above that point. I’m content with the quality of most wines at that price point, even when I can tell the difference.
• I do not have a Rolex, real or fake, but I do have a Citizen watch that cost $129 fifteen years ago; I bought it because part of the money went to support Dennis Connor’s America’s Cup team. Yup, that’s why I bought it. Really.

So I certainly fall into the aspirational-good trap myself. As I get older, though, I try to be more aware of it, more cognizant of how people are marketing to me.

And if I see one more newspaper article that confuses cachet (ka-SHAY, positive reputation) with cache (kash, a store or stockpile), I’ll scream.

People get fired. People have setbacks in their life. It’s not always their fault or within their control.

What matters is what you [...]]]> Nah, this isn’t about how to screw up at work. Rather, former pro baseball player Morgan Ensberg has written a terrific story about the day he got fired (they call it “released” in baseball).

People get fired. People have setbacks in their life. It’s not always their fault or within their control.

What matters is what you do when it happens.

Sunday, I was at the airport waiting for my flight and found myself watching the finish of the Masters tournament with a bunch of other folks outside an airport bar. With about two hours to go in the tournament, the [...]]]> As most of the world knows, Tiger Woods was back playing golf for money this weekend.

Sunday, I was at the airport waiting for my flight and found myself watching the finish of the Masters tournament with a bunch of other folks outside an airport bar. With about two hours to go in the tournament, the best players were playing the last nine holes in various groups. Tiger Woods was among them, and the cameras were focused on him rather heavily.

(I find golf on TV rather weird these days. They jump cut from shot to shot, Tiger swings on one hole and then Phil swings on a second and someone else putts on a third and then there’s a commercial, and there’s no context to any of this. TV is no better at showing the thinking and strategic parts of the game than it is with baseball.)

Anyway, Woods was not hitting his driver very well, even by his standards. Tiger Woods isn’t terribly accurate with his driver, the big club, but he’s extremely creative about getting out of the trouble he gets himself into. But that’s a story for another day.

So Woods winds up and smashes a ball off the tee… deep into the piney woods. Woods in the woods, I guess. I don’t know whether he hit any of the spectators or had to have his caddie search for his ball; TV was off showing some other random shots. But when they finally get back to him, they’ve managed to get the camera behind his ball looking toward the green. It’s obvious he has an impossible shot through the trees; you can see a little bit of daylight through an opening perhaps 15 feet above the ground, but his chances of hitting it through there are small — even as good as he is at what’s called scrambling, or getting out of trouble.

At this point, he’s trailing the leaders by a few shots. And he has two choices:

1. Try and punch the ball through the opening in the trees — possible, certainly, but likely to have bad results if he fails.
2. Knock the ball out onto the fairway, basically at right angles to the direction he really needs to go — but a safe shot for a competent golfer, which he certainly is.

Only if he gets the ball through the opening in the trees can he win the tournament. Doing so doesn’t put him in the lead — he still has a lot of work to do — but he almost surely cannot win if he takes the safe route, which will cost him a stroke.

Now keep in mind that everyone who finishes in the top ten of a tournament like this makes a lot of money. The winner takes the biggest piece, but most people could live quite well for a year on what, say, the fifth-place finisher receives. And Woods was staring at the difference between, say, eighth and second-with-a-possibility-of-first:

1. Hits through the trees successfully, has a good shot at second or even first if he plays the remaining few holes well.
2. Safely pitches the ball sideways back onto the fairway, probably ends up fourth — where in fact he did finish.
3. Tries to hit it through the trees and fails. Best case, he gets a good bounce off a tree and winds up in the fairway pretty much the same as if he’d pitched it out to begin with, finishing fourth. Or it could bounce back toward him and give him a repeat of this situation, except now it’s cost him a stroke to get there; maybe he finishes sixth. Or, worst case, it could bounce off a tree the wrong way and go out of bounds or be unplayable, costing him three strokes (the one he took plus a penalty plus having to play again from a bad lie) and he’s eighth.

Which would you choose?

You’re a leader in a tough situation. You can take a big risk and — if everything comes out right — make a huge score, but create a mess if things don’t go well. Or you can play it safe, assuring a comfortable profit but not a dramatic victory.

Woods, of course, went for it. And missed, though he got a good break when his errant ball smacked a tree at exactly the right angle and bounced out onto the fairway. But that’s the Tiger in him — nothing matters except victory.

But was it the right choice? The best choice? Would you have done it?

As it happens, eventual winner Phil Mickelson found himself facing a slightly easier version of the same type of shot a few minutes later, deep in the pines after an errant drive, but with a somewhat bigger window in the branches to hit through. He went for it and wound up about six feet from the hole with a terrific shot. On the other hand, former champion and still-among-the-leaders Fred Couples took one of these dangerous shots trying to get into the lead and put it in the water; it doesn’t always work out.

Three leaders, three very difficult risk/reward shots, all went for it. One nailed it, one missed but got a lucky break, and one fell short (literally, as Couples’ shot hit just short of the green and rolled back into the water).

That’s the way it goes. None of them took the safe route. It cost Couples and Woods money, made Mickelson a winner.

You’re the boss. You’re facing a tough shot, high risk, high reward. What do you do?

Is this the right time to be a Tiger?

Do all the managers scramble in the six weeks ahead of the survey to provide “morale” or “motivation”? (And do half of them spell it “moral”?)

Does it work?

The same goes for employee feedback [...]]]> Does your company “take the pulse” of employee satisfaction once a year, or perhaps twice? Does it do so at regular, scheduled times?

Do all the managers scramble in the six weeks ahead of the survey to provide “morale” or “motivation”? (And do half of them spell it “moral”?)

Does it work?

The same goes for employee feedback about their managers. Is it solicited only around performance reviews?

Does that change behavior for the long term?

What if no one* in the company knew when these surveys or feedback forms were going to be sent out?

If you’re a manager and that thought has you even the slightest bit uneasy, then you need to examine what you’re doing and try to fix it. Right now, it’s hard for employees to vote with their feet, but times will get better — and the very best, the ones you most need to retain, can always find new positions. And even if they’re not leaving because there’s nowhere else to go, morale and motivation affect performance, which in turn affects your own review — to say nothing of the lives of everyone involved, from your team to the other teams that interact with yours to the customers who might purchase your output.

There is no “time” for morale and motivation except the present time, every time. It’s not about events, or presentations, or gifts, or pithy and overworked sayings. It’s about how you relate to them, the level to which you extend trust, the extent to which you help when needed and avoid over- and micromanagement. It’s about having their backs, about recognizing that your job is to eliminate the roadblocks that make it hard for them to do their jobs.

Succeed here, and you won’t have to worry about “surprise inspections.”

===================

*When I say no one, I mean no one, including HR. It’s not hard to have these surveys and mails prepared to go out at any time. Let’s say a company wants to “take the temperature” twice a year. It’s trivial to design a program — I could write it in Excel in under five minutes — that you’d run once every two weeks, with a random factor that will come up “Yes” only, on average, twice a year. You send the surveys and such within minutes of the program coming up “Yes,” so everyone, including your own manager, has no advance warning. Of course, you’d suspend running it for eight weeks or so after it comes up “Yes” and you send the survey. (And the programmers out there recognize that you’d have to account for those eight weeks — and the two weeks at the end of the year when you can’t send anything useful — in calculating the odds for the random-number generator.)

(The island in the San Juans where we have a place [...]]]> My kids are watching The Blind Side as I write this. I’m sort-of watching and writing, but I saw it some months ago when I took my nine-year-old son to see it in a tiny (75-seat) theater in Friday Harbor in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

(The island in the San Juans where we have a place has no movie theater. It does have three espresso stands, four real restaurants and a few other places to eat, perhaps a dozen stop signs on an island twice the size of Manhattan, no chain stores, more sheep and cows than people, a plethora of eagles, ravens, and turkey buzzards, a nine-hole golf course where I actually managed to shoot a 46 last week, and an almost unlimited amount of peace and quiet. But I digress.)

In brief, the “blind side” is a quarterback’s back. A right-handed quarterback stands with his body facing right as he prepares to throw; anyone coming from his left arrives unseen, occasionally delivering a devastating hit. The film opens with the horrifying sack of Joe Theisman in 1985. I’m not a big football fan, but I was still in NYC at the time and happened to be watching the Giants game that Monday night. I will never forget the sight of Theisman’s leg bent in a Z shape from the compound fracture, and the moment the film started in Friday Harbor I knew what was coming and had to avert my eyes. I didn’t watch that hit in the film today, either.

But over the years, I’ve thought about that moment often. It happens all too often in the business world, where a team member fails to protect a colleague’s blind side. It’s even worse when it’s the employee’s manager delivering the hit that puts the employee out of the game, so to speak. Some managers appear to get a kick out of it, but most, like Lawrence Taylor (who delivered the hit with no intention of doing that kind of damage), inflict career-ending damage without meaning to. In fact, like Taylor, they’re often surprised and horrified by the result.

The difference is that in football, players play with the knowledge that they are at severe risk, that their careers could end at any moment. In the business world, that self-knowledge is largely absent.

If you’re a manager, it’s up to you to protect your employees’ blind side. You need to keep the blitzing executive linebackers away, even if you incur a penalty in doing so.

Do you do so?

How well do you protect your team’s blind side?

If you’ve never thought about it, watch what happens to Joe Theisman. You may want to avert your eyes 52 seconds into this (not very clear) clip. But whether you want to watch a closeup of his leg shattering or not, think about Joe Theisman and your team.

And protect their blind side.

As a manager, that’s your job.

(And in the spirit of full disclosure, while I shot a 46 on the second round of nine, I shot a miserable 56 on the first nine. I love the game, even though I’m pretty terrible at it.)

Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a [...]]]> There has long been academic debate as to who wrote the work attributed to William Shakespeare.  (The word “academic” is important; see below.)

Most recent attention has focused on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to these so-called Oxfordians. I won’t go into all their arguments, but here’s a summary:

• How could some rude glover’s son from Stratford know all about the English court, Italian mores, and so on?
• Nothing survives in Shakespeare’s hand… perhaps because he wrote nothing.
• de Vere had a long-term relationship with Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Southampton, prime movers in  the Globe Theater in one way or another.
• de Vere was an established poet.
• de Vere traveled extensively in France and Italy, scenes of many Shakespearean plays.
• There are parallels between de Vere’s life and some Shakespearean plots, particularly Hamlet.
• de Vere was very cultured, educated, and sophisticated.

There are a few problems with this theory, not the least of which was that de Vere died in 1604, which sort of leaves out some plays… like Macbeth and The Tempest, dated well after 1604. de Vere’s supporters construct an elaborate — and not entirely impossible — structure around how the plays were actually written before de Vere’s death but not published or even staged until afterward.

So what does this all have to do with management?

The First Issue: Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest solution that fits the facts is most likely to be true. That doesn’t guarantee that it is true, but the more convoluted a solution, the more unlikely.

Or, in more modern terms, never attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.

Saying that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays, epic poems, and sonnets requires a very complex construction to explain away all sorts of contradictions, from the 1604 issue to the fact that folks like his playwright contemporary — and non-friend — Ben Jonson was in on the conspiracy. It’s one thing for the players to keep a secret, since their livelihood depended on it, but it’s another for a competitor who didn’t like Master Will to play along. (On the other hand, one of Jonson’s snipes at Shakespeare can be stretched to suggest Jonson is mocking the attribution of plays to “Shakespeare.”)

Lesson: When a co-worker or someone on your team describes a complex scenario to explain why sales are down or a product is late, be very skeptical. Exhaust the simpler explanations first.

The Second Issue: Listen to the People on the Factory Floor

The people closest to the production of something generally are more knowledgeable than management about the mechanics of production. (There’s a fancy Lean Six Sigma term for this.)

If a project is late, ask the project manager and (in the case of software) the developers. Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft did a brilliant job of this in figuring out why it was taking so long to ship versions of Windows, and got the very successful Windows 7 out the door on time.

If sales are down, ask the people actually out trying to sell the product. They won’t have all the answers, and may well couch it in ways to protect their jobs, but their feet-on-the-ground insights are invaluable… and likely “spun” by their management.

If you’re trying to design something, listen to the users — and, even better, watch what they actually do. Their managers can’t tell you what they do, or even what they think they do; managers can only tell you what they think they want their employees to do.

In the Shakespeare controversy, ask the actors. Any competent actor or director experienced with playing Shakespeare will tell you that it’s clear that the author was a man of the theater, someone who understood in infinite detail how to move an audience, how to get them to laugh, cry, and see themselves in the mirror held by the playwright and the players. There’s nothing to suggest that de Vere had serious familiarity with the theater other than as an occasional playgoer.

Here’s where the “academics” thing comes in. Academics generally see Shakespeare as a poet, a word stylist; lacking a deep involvement themselves in rough-and-tumble theater, they tend to ignore that astonishing playability of Shakespeare’s work. Indeed, many of Shakespeare’s characters are what theater folks call “actor-proof,” meaning that they work on stage no matter how bad the performance. I have seen Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Romeo, Juliet, Bottom, Oberon, Polonius, and numerous other characters performed abysmally by actors who had little understanding of what they were saying… and yet these characters were still affecting — and drew huge laughs where they should have. Of course, they missed loads of subtleties and nuance, but they were still good enough to “get by” and not destroy the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Note that I’m not suggesting every Shakespearean role is actor-proof, as numerous mediocre performances of Hamlet prove.

Lesson: Pay attention to the people closest to the action.

The Third Issue: Trust Your Ears

As I noted, de Vere was a poet.

He was, in fact, a terrible poet. His verse is to Shakespeare’s as The Archies were to The Beatles.

Now perhaps he got better as he got older, but even Shakepeare’s earliest work, such as Titus Andronicus, is far beyond anything de Vere wrote under his own name before Shakespeare (or, if you must, “Shakespeare”) came on the scene.

Lesson: If you’re listening to someone and something smells fishy, it probably is.

By the way, this last item points to a significant problem in hiring at large companies these days. A manager who trusts her instinct in this regard may wind up hiring only people who look like her with regard to age, gender, ethnicity, and so on. A good interviewer has to spend most of the interview consciously trying to revise or justify the first impression. First impressions are powerful — for both good and ill. Or as de Vere Shakespeare said, this “soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good.”

But what’s in a name, anyway?