Avoid the Complexity Creep
April 14, 2009
What You Will Learn
|
One of the most interesting things that happen as organizations grow, and as people grow, is that something I call “complexity creep” moves into the process of how things are being done. What ends up happening is that everything gets more and more complex, and it ends up getting so complex that we literally end up doing much worse that we would be doing were there no complexity to begin with. As everything gets more and more complex the person, business, or organization begins to experience more and more problems, and less and less rewards from the actions they are doing quite often. In many cases, it is complexity I believe that ends up killing many businesses. In addition, it is complexity that makes many people literally lose their minds and go crazy. It is complexity that holds many of us back in our careers and prevents us from reaching our full potential and being everything we possibly can be. It is complexity that destroys many careers.
An example of complexity creep is seen in General Motors. As a May 9, 2005 article about General Motors discussed:
Normally a company in such straits contracts until it reaches equilibrium. What would a healthy GM look like? It might have five fewer assembly plants, building around 4 millions vehicles in North America instead of 5.1 million. That would slash U.S. market share by around 20 percent, but factories would hum with real demand, stoked less by rebate giveaways and cheapo rental-car sales. Workers would have a cost-competitive health care plan, but could fall back on government unemployment benefits when hard times demanded layoffs. Profitable auto sales and finance operations would fuel a richer research budget, tightly focused on four or five divisions instead of eight.
But for GM, shrinkage is not much of an option. Because of its union agreements, the automaker can’t close plants or lay off workers without paying a stiff penalty, no matter how far its sales or profits fall. It must run plants at 80 percent capacity, minimum, whether they make money or not. Even if it halts assembly lines, GM must pay laid off workers, and foot their extraordinarily generous health care and pension costs. Unless GM scores major givebacks from the union, those costs are fixed, at least until the next round of contract talks in two years.
GM’s payroll pumps $8.7 billion a year into its assembly workers’ pockets. Directly or indirectly, it supports nearly 900,000 jobs—everyone from auto-parts workers to advertising writers, car sales people, and office-supply vendors. When GM shut down for 54 days during a 1998 labor action, it knocked a full percentage point off the U.S. economic growth rate that quarter. So what’s bad for General Motors is still, undeniably, bad for America.
What is so powerful and compelling to me about this particular statement is the way that an incredible amount of complexity crept into this system, and creeps into most systems. The more complex things get, and the more that is going on in the system, the more difficult it is for good results to come out of the system. The reason is that none of the variables that are contained in the system are “optimized” and instead there are numerous variables going in numerous, numerous directions that are going in way too many directions at the same time.
For example, in the case of General Motors, instead of just making cars they have to
- make a certain number of cars
- have a certain number of auto plants operating
- have a certain number of divisions making cars
- pay a certain number of workers, regardless of what is going on in the market
- honor union agreements
- pay health care costs
- pay pension costs
Instead of just manufacturing cars, GM finds itself in the business of doing multiple different things and being responsible for all sorts of agreements and other matters that are indirectly connected with making automobiles. It is due to this “complexity creep” that GM finds itself paralyzed and unable to earn money. The more things that GM finds itself dealing with, the less of an expert is it in anything. The less of an expert is in its most important task of making cars, the more problems GM ends up having, because this is its core business. If GM’s efforts is not concentrated on making cars, then the quality of the cars goes down. If the quality of the cars goes down, the entire business suffers. The entire process keeps building on itself over and over again.
What does this have to do with your life and career? This has just about everything to do with your life and career. In fact, learning to keep complexity out of what you do, and concentrate on doing just one thing can make a gigantic difference in everything you do. However, no where is it more important to keep complexity at bay than in your job. You need to do everything you can to keep complexity at bay in your job so you can do your work as well as possible.
One example of complexity is making friends and/or having romantic relationships at work. While there is nothing wrong with having friends at work per se, when your co-workers start knowing the pluses and minuses of your personal life, making judgments about your personal life and having judgments made by you about their personal lives (which will upset them), your work life gets more complicated, and it does so quickly. At work you should be known for the quality of the work you do, not things you may have done and said outside of work. However, this is a huge mistake that many people make. What ends up happening is that when you go to work your job ends up being more defined by what you were doing when you were outside of work, than when you were at work.
When I first started practicing law I was out at a nightclub one evening and ran into a movie star who at the time was pretty well known, Judd Nelson. I was with a good friend of mine who also worked in the same law firm I was in. I am not sure what the argument was about, but I was standing next to him at a bar and he had cut in front of me in line and then said something extremely rude that upset me and the two of us started arguing. I think I may have told him just because he was famous he did not have the right to be an asshole or something along those lines.
The entire situation was really bizarre because we were both standing there at a bar exchanging one insult after another. I was in the nightclub for a few hours, and during the course of the evening, the two of us bumped into each other, threatened to kick one another’s asses and so forth. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens when I go out; however, we both made a decision very early on that we disliked each other. The situation was compounded by the fact that he had a small entourage around him and was “backed up” by them, and I was basically on my own. My friend was a really nice guy, but he was not the sort of guy who was interested in taking on 5 bodyguards with me.
Later that evening as I was leaving the nightclub, he made a crude remark to me in front of my friend (something about being a chicken and leaving the club out of fear of him) and I let it slide. I then went to my car and started driving away. Then, I stopped my car and decided that I needed to respond to the remark. I went back into the club and a small altercation ensued that I will not get into now, but it was not that big of a deal. I just felt it was important that I stick up for myself because this guy seemed to think he was one of the more important people in the world, which I found really strange.
The next day at work I became known as the guy who beat up Judd Nelson in a bar. In fact, I became somewhat of a celebrity, and all sorts of attorneys kept stopping by my office to hear one story or another about the altercation. People loved it, and everyone wanted to hear about it. However, this was something I simply refused to talk about. The last thing I wanted to be known for was beating up someone in a bar–despite the fact that the story was exaggerated beyond my wildest expectations. Instead, what I wanted to be known for was someone who did really good legal work, was a hard worker and so forth. Incredibly, the law firm I was in thought the entire story that my friend spread around about it was very humorous and a good thing. But this had certainly complicated my life in terms of how I wanted to be seen.
Over the years I have heard innumerable stories from people about personal lives becoming impossibly tangled with work lives and the problems this can cause. Your professional persona in most instances is different and needs to be different from your personal persona. It is very important that you do not complicate the two of them. If you start being judged in a negative way for things you have done outside of work, this can do you and your career long-term damage, and it is something that can complicate everything. Instead of being a place where you go to work, your job becomes to intertwined with who you are outside of work.
Another thing that people do to complicate their work lives is allowing themselves to concern themselves with what they want to be doing when they are not working. Many people spend most of their time at work thinking about what they want to do when they are not working. This could involve a hobby, it could involve a sport, or it could involve socializing. People complicate their work lives by being somewhere else emotionally when they are working. This is extremely common.
Other methods of complexity creep include being involved in office politics, being involved in gossip, taking sides against the management, being concerned about the economy and not work, and in general worrying about things that are not going to make you as efficient as possible during your time in the office. You need to be as focused as possible when you are in the office; allowing yourself to be sidetracked by stuff that has nothing to do with the work in front of you is something that is extremely dangerous. However, it is also something that most of us do. Most of us needlessly complicate our jobs and our lives by allowing too many things to creep into our daily work lives. By allowing ourselves to be obsessively involved with things that have nothing to do with our jobs, we complicate our jobs and never get anything done.
Many people cannot choose careers. They are confused about what they want to do and what they believe they should be doing. This confusion makes their lives needlessly complicated and their careers needlessly unfocused. They stay unfocused throughout their careers, and never choose what they are doing. This allows their minds to become and remain needlessly complicated with a choice about what they believe they should be doing, instead of what they are doing.
You need to understand and make sense of complexity, and make efforts to reduce complexity. If you do not control complexity and reduce it, complexity will control you, and you are going to be at a huge disadvantage compared to those who have learned to make sense of complexity.
During the summer between my third and fourth year of college I worked ever single day for at least 12 to 14 hours per day. It was one of the most incredible exercises in work you can imagine, and I exhausted myself beyond measure. In addition, I had hoards of people I was working with in the business and many, many people who were assisting me in my venture of doing asphalt work. In addition, I had people in the field selling asphalt work for me, an accounting firm helping me make sense of the money coming in and multiple trucks running around Detroit doing all of this asphalt work. The entire operation was crazy and had numerous moving pieces. The asphalt business had grown larger than I could ever have imagined. At one point it had at least 30 people working for it and the business had multiplied itself with multiple trucks and equipment. In addition, the business did a great deal of work, and there was so much work going on in the asphalt business it was difficult to believe. Every day we started the jobs before 7:00 am, and often, the work went on until late in the night and often through the entire evening.
At the end of the summer, after operating this business I was actually in debt and had less money than I had at the beginning of the summer. The reason was that the business had gotten too complex, and in this complexity I had been unable to even reap a profit because too many things were going on, and in all of this activity I could not keep track of what was occurring.
You need to watch complexity in your life and career. Eliminate complexity as much as you can, and concentrate on the job and work in front of you. When you learn to concentrate on the work in front of you, and eliminate distraction, everything goes much easier. Businesses are better served by avoiding the complexity creep. Careers are better served by avoiding the complexity creep. Avoid the complexity creep.
My Lesson From the Missionaries
January 7, 2009
What You Will Learn
|
Several years ago I was working at a law firm and virtually from the moment I arrived a woman I’ll call “Linda” used to come into my office for a few hours a day to talk. Her topic? How bad things were at the law firm.
She would share one rumor after the other about how many bad things were going on at the law firm. I was treated to information about allegedly corrupt activities, affairs, who did not like who, incredible insights into who was about to be fired, what different people had said to her, and more. Most of these conversations would occur behind closed doors, and after she left I often wondered to myself what I was doing at such a horrible law firm.
Her visits would always leave me a little depressed. I wondered what I was doing with my life, associating with and being involved with such a horrible group of people. I had actually joined the law firm thinking it was a great place and in many respects, it was. I was able to push aside what Linda was talking about generally about 45 minutes after she left and continue to enthusiastically pursue my job the best I could.
When I would get back to work not more than an hour or two later the phone would ring and it was Linda.
“Guess what?” she would say. She would then proceed to relay to me another rumor of some sort.
I even made pretty good friends with Linda, and these meetings eventually turned into conversations where she started telling me about men in the office she was interested in, antidepressants she was taking, and who she had previously been involved with. On the weekends she would call me, and my fiánce at the time would hand me the phone as Linda related yet another rumor about the law firm she learned about over the weekend. I have no idea how Linda managed to get any work done at the law firm. I also had no idea why she had chosen to come to work there. She was literally spending every spare moment gossiping about how bad the law firm was.
Then Linda started going on interviews with various employers. She was very well-spoken, had gone to the #1 ranked law school in the country at the time, and was quite attractive. She very quickly got numerous job offers. She then gave notice at the law firm and if I recall correctly she “let the law firm have it” in terms of telling them everything she thought was wrong with them. Her “vent” was pretty epic and involved all sorts of observations as well as deep psychological-type analyses of her supervisors and others, which left the powers that be in the law firm stunned. After this incredible episode she still wanted me to pal around the law firm with her by sitting with her in the law firm library and walking past the offices of the same partners in the law firm she had bitterly put down when she resigned. This was all too much for me. She had really upset a lot of people.
“Linda,” I told her. “This place is not really that bad. I think you have just been making it bad by looking for all of the bad stuff. Everyone is really upset with you right now. I am trying to have a career here. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t hang out with me all the time at work. I need to hold on to my job. I’m getting married soon and will have a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and other responsibilities. I really cannot afford to be associated with this.”
I had reached this decision because I knew my association with Linda was really hurting me. I knew her attitude was casting a negative light on me to some extent. Looking around me at the law firm, I could see numerous people who had been there for decades. Could the place be so bad if there were people who had managed to work at the same place for so long? I knew the answer to this particular question was “no” and that much of what was being seen was simply through Linda’s eyes.
How do you think it makes you feel about your job if someone is coming in a couple of times a day and telling you how awful your workplace is? What if your phone were ringing off the hook with gossip about your co-workers? Even if these things were true, do you think this does you any good?
There are generally people in all organizations who seem dedicated to walking around spreading rumors of doom and gloom. I have witnessed it throughout my career–even in organizations that were doing well. I wonder how these people get any work done. It seems more like these people are involved in a soap opera than anything else. They are constantly doing everything within their power to spread fear among their co-workers. I certainly witnessed this sort of thing when I was working. It is going on everywhere.
Several years ago I was attending a wedding in rural Utah about 90 minutes outside of Provo. My cousin was marrying a lovely woman from this area who had moved to New York City to become an on-air news anchor at a local television station. The videographer walked up to me and started talking to me.
“I’ve done only a few weddings for 12 year-old girls, about twice as many for 13 year-old girls,” he told me. “I’ve done many 14 year-old weddings. I just did one last week,” he told me gruffly and matter-of-factly. He was referring to the fact that older men were marrying women at that age. (I would learn later in the evening that some of the men getting married to these 14 year old girls not only often had 5+ other wives, but also that many of them were in their 50s.) Videotaping the weddings of young girls to older men was a very normal thing to him. I could not believe it. You hear about this sort of stuff on television and in the movies but I did not realize how prevalent this actually was. I was mesmerized by this particular conversation and others that led me to question if I was really part of the United States. You can learn so much by talking to people, especially in rural Utah.
As the man and I continued to speak he told me that he was very involved with the county and the workforce services part of the county. In fact, he was in charge of recruiting employers from out-of-state to come to his county to hire people. He explained to me many people chose to live in this part of the country because of their Mormon faith. He said many of them actually go away to schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) then come back because family is so important in their religion. He then explained there were incredibly talented people in the county who were interested in working for sophisticated companies. This was music to my ears. I really liked the people I was meeting because they were much more wholesome than the people I was accustomed to dealing with in Los Angeles.
I had also had an experience several years ago with some Mormon missionaries that made me decide I would do whatever I could to help Mormons in the future.
I had been living in Bay City, Michigan, working for a federal judge and one Saturday while I was watching a football game and immersed in a bowl of Doritos with a bunch of empty Diet Cokes in front of me, I heard the doorbell ring. I did not have a lot of friends in Bay City and was eager for any company I could get.
Into my apartment walked two of the nicest guys I had ever met. They had name tags on, white starched shirts, and little black bicycles. I let them in and they gave me a Bible and some literature. At the time my fiance was out of town, and I was pretty bored and enjoyed the company. They told me they would stop back in a couple of days to talk to me some more.
After a couple more visits during which they related to me fascinating information about their religion, they gave me an ultimatum. I really liked these guys and Mormonism sounded great. I grew up Episcopalian and at the time I was not too happy with the religion. My uncle is actually a pretty famous Episcopal Priest and had agreed to officiate my wedding which was scheduled to happen in about six months. Then he’d told me he didn’t want to because he disliked my father. This was really a bit too much for me. I thought religions were supposed to be about peace and love. These Mormon guys were very likable. What I liked best about their religion was they promised me if I converted, after I died I would get my own planet with my wife and children. Listening to stuff like this really fascinated me. It was like playing Dungeons and Dragons–only it was real. I also liked their values, the structure, and felt it was an all-in-all great religion. I still like Mormonism to this day and feel a strong connection with it.
“We’d like to have you down to our church. However, before we can go any further with you we are going to have to ask you to have your fiance move out of the house. You are living in sin and this is impeding your spiritual development.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
My fiance and I had been together for years and she moved to Bay City with me from Chartlottesville, Virginia, and we were engaged. There was no way this was happening. I looked at these guys and realized they were quite serious. A week previously they had requested I not eat or drink anything (even water!) for a day–I obliged. They were also hinting that I should never drink coffee or my beloved Diet Coke any longer. They also told me I should be prepared to give them 10% of all the money I made. Finally, they told me I should never drink alcohol. These guys were beginning to get annoying.
I told those nice 18 year-old guys I appreciated their spiritual lessons but did not think they should continue. There was no way I was asking my fiance to move out.
About three months later the guys stopped by again. It was spring at this point, and I had brought out from storage a 550 gallon tanker I towed behind my Suburban that I filled with asphalt sealant each year. To the horror of my neighbors it was sitting directly in front of my apartment looking mean and ugly.
I had been doing asphalt work since the age of 18 and was excited to get back in business during the weekends while working for the judge. The thing about this tank is that you can never get all of the sealer out of it at the end of the season. Because it snows in Michigan you cannot apply the sealer to asphalt then. The asphalt sealer in the tank hardens up and turns into a clay-like material. You have to climb inside the tank and scrape all of the material out. There are agitators and other things inside the tank that do no work unless you do this. It typically took me about15 hours to do this each year.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” they asked after we exchanged some pleasantries.
“Yeah, you can scrape that stuff out of the tank sitting there,” I told them. “Other than that I do not have any problems I am concerned about at the moment.” I was kidding of course.
The next day I came home and apparently all the missionaries from miles around had come and climbed in the tank and cleaned it out. They did not leave me a note or anything. I never saw the missionaries again. I promised myself from that day forward if I ever had a chance to do anything for Mormons in my life I would. This was an incredible gesture of kindness and I appreciated it. They had done this expecting nothing in return.
As the videographer at the party talked I told him I was in a position to hire people. I remembered the kindness the missionaries had shown me and wanted to give back. The videographer told me how high the unemployment rate was, and I told him I would do everything I could to hire people in the town. A few weeks later I showed up with several of my managers and made arrangements to come to the unemployment office and start interviewing people. We found office space and made preparations to shift a substantial majority of our operations to this rural Utah area.
A few weeks later, we proceeded to hire at least 10-15 people from the unemployment office. We rented a truck and went to Sam’s Club in Provo and purchased computers, desks, chairs and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for our new office. All of the new employees helped us set up the office. Metaphorically, it was almost as if my experience with these wonderfully nice people years ago had caused this religion to create this office sitting there.
A few weeks into the process I started realizing there were problems. Most of the people whom we had hired had been unemployed for months, and in some cases years, before they were hired. The small staff I had hired on a mission of goodwill started talking like they should be unionized. An incredible number of destructive rumors started going around the office that made it back to our headquarters in Pasadena, California. The people we had hired often started disappearing for hours during the day. Absenteeism was extremely high. Errors were high. The office was sitting in the shadow of one of the largest and most significant temples in the Mormon religion. In fact, with the exception of one employee in the office, the work was the worst I have ever seen. There were other issues there going on as well. We even had an issue where a married couple was sexually harassing a young employee in our call center because they wanted her to be part of a polygamous relationship with them. When I heard about this, it was the last straw. The fact that such people were producing negative news and negative energy in addition to the sexual harassment stories was too much to handle.
I sent a couple of trucks from Pasadena and some managers to Utah and packed up everything in the office and closed the office down. The same day I decided there was one good employee there who was actually exceptional and kept her. She is still working here to this day and has risen to become one of the most exceptional managers in the company. She rebuilt the office there and it has been very, very successful. It is one of the best things I have ever done for our business.
What I learned from this, however, is that there are people who should not be hired. The people from the unemployment office were unemployed for a reason: they were cancerous to their organizations. People who spread negative energy and news are like cancers to companies and to their co-workers. One of the best hires I ever made was almost brought down by this cancer. You need to be very careful about cancerous people because they can hurt you. Stay away and keep your job. This was an important lesson I learned in Utah. Today we have a great operation there and it is filled with great people who have good attitudes. The company has learned it’s important to keep only happy and enthusiastic people around.
Most of us are put in positions where people are planting negative thoughts and ideas in our mind. You cannot afford to be associated with this at work. Negative information, rumors and so forth are like a cancer. They will spread to you and take you down as well. Positive energy is the opposite. Positive energy creates good and makes things better. The positive energy of the Mormon missionaries created the office we currently have in Utah. The spirit of giving they emphasized is something that has created millions of dollars in payroll for a community that is probably 99% Mormon. This would not have happened without their positive energy. The negative energy of the chronically unemployed I hired almost took all of that away. The rumors, innuendo and scheming could have seriously damaged the company. While good always wins out in the end, you want to be on the side that is growing and productive – not on the side that is bringing things down. If you follow this advice you will have much fewer bumps in your career.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.