Middle Management Blues

For some reason I was drawn to the recent headlines from various financial rags about the cash “hoarding” going on among American companies .  You might recall similar headlines prior to the US presidential elections, which one side blamed on the other, and we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.  The amount of money is staggering.  One writer compared it to the GDP of Germany (Deutschland uber alles except Cisco and Microsoft, so there). The last time I looked at my local credit union I was getting about 0.11% on my savings, and I’m old enough to remember 5% was a common rate.  I’m not so naïve to believe these companies are getting the same return, but they can’t be getting that much more.  Why the heck save your money for virtually nothing?  I’m not any kind of a macroeconomist, but if you are barely beating inflation, why not invest it in something that will make money?  Like rebuilding your assets?  Or some promising little start-up? ...

I don’t watch much TV anymore.  I’ve subscribed to Sports Illustrated since I was 19, but I don’t pick it up until it’s been lying on the coffee table for a week.  Even my favorite radio show, Gone Phishing on SiriusXM , isn’t a must-listen anymore.  Everything is so contrived.  Everything is hyped far beyond my ability to tolerate.  The DJ on Gone Phishing, a guy named Jonathan Schwartz (who I actually enjoy), starts or ends the show with how “awesome” that night’s set was.  [BTW Gone Phishing is a replay of a set of a Phish show going back to when they played random small (read: never heard of them) colleges in Vermont and going forward to shows played only weeks ago.]  I like Phish, but life is a bell curve.  Not all the shows are “awesome”.  Some of them suck.  A show broadcast recently featured the keyboardist, Page McConnell , doing a cover of Elton John’s Rocket Man, which Jonathan breathlessly previewed by saying Page “knocked i...

In the last post I wrote a little bit about how I see one of my roles as the middleman in communication between upper management and everybody else.  The honchos tend to speak differently.  A skilled communicator (and you don’t get to the upper echelons without people believing that you are one) realizes that the language and sometimes even the cadence are totally different than that of, say, regular guys in middle management.  They obviously love buzzwords , and buzzwords convey little to the techs and operators.  At the gulag they loved EBITDA , you know, earnings before interest, taxes, blah blah blah.  I never ever heard a tech say the acronym.  Never.  They could not possibly care less.  But, if I wanted to communicate with an upper manager and have them understand it I would use lots of buzzwords (and lots of very short words to fill in).  In a way it’s a sellout, because buzzwords are a crutch and I’m not a crutch kind of guy.  T...

I have somehow become the father confessor in my office.  Co-workers amble into my office, slouch in one of my too-comfortable chairs, and confess.  “Bless me father, for I have come to complain.”  From the operations superintendent: “Why doesn’t the plant manager like me?  I’m working my butt off but all I hear from him are complaints about housekeeping.” From the lead tech: “The contractors are lazy.  Get rid of them.  We’re better off hiring more people.” From the lead operator: “The engineers don’t listen to me.  They think they know everything.” From the plant manager: “Why don’t the operators take initiative?  They should have known better than to do what they did.” Taken as a group, it seems like I work with a bunch of whiners.  But we all whine.  If you’ve read many of these posts you might come away with the thought that Manager X should really be Manager W, because all I ever do is snivel.  Your saving grace is that you c...