I Hate People...But It's Nothing Personal

Hating E-Mail

Words, words, words. Cleaning out old files yesterday I tossed a lot of paper and kept drafts of stories and scripts, birthday cards from my wife and kids, and intriguing letters including one from an inmate who enjoyed one of my books. The sense of nostalgia was reinforced the next morning as I listened to an NPR radio show about an auction for a collection of letters from the 19th century romantic poet, Lord Byron.

Then I heard about John Freeman’s new book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox. We applaud Freeman for his eloquent and well-researched tome on one of the greatest drains to our productivity and soul — the cluttered e-mail inbox. Freeman advocates many of the same techniques we believe in: Send fewer, shorter e-mails, check infrequently, and don’t be in a rush to reply. His book and Lord Byron’s letters has put me in a reflective mood, a large part of what we lose in e-mail.

E-mails lack context and form. You send a serious note and get what we call in our book: The Non-response — either no-reply or a meaningless “got it” or “thanks” or “that’s great.” Even between colleagues, friends, or partners misunderstandings are the rule. I think a lot of this fractured quality has to do with place and time. One person may be reading an e-mail while driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, and another while sitting down sipping coffee. One might be composing a thoughtful note at the office, another dashing one off on their iPhone before jumping on the red-eye to New York.

Freeman’s book is a valuable step toward sanity, one that may give a lot of companies pause about their investment in e-mail. What’s interesting is that Freeman advocates our Soloist mantra, putting your work and individualism first.  That ends up putting the company first, but it takes courage to break from routines.

But I wonder about the deeper question: How do we find a way out of this mess?

Yes, we all need to send fewer e-mails, but what will be next?  How do we crack through all the electronic babble and find a way to send a thoughtful note to a coworker or associate that isn’t viewed as more digital trash to be quickly shoved off our plate?

Here’s my simple request: Will some genius please reinvent the personal note for the digital age? Find a brilliant way to mark or dignify a message so it isn’t viewed as one more jumble of bits and bytes cluttering our day?

That’s a question I hope the smart minds at Apple, IBM or Google are being given ample freedom and time to solve. You know who I mean? Those special men and women who don’t have to answer a lot of damn e-mails.

— Jonathan Littman

Wayward Pilots: Off Target While On Schedule

Business fliers know the drill: The obligatory FAA order to shut off your cellphone, PDA and laptop. Perhaps it’s time for flight attendants to add another:

“Captain, please take a short break from Grand Theft Auto.”

Ridiculous as it sounds, last Wednesday two veteran airline pilots appeared to forget they were hurtling across the heavens in a jet with 144 passengers. The pilots stunning explanation for overshooting Minneapolis by 150 miles, and nearly setting off a national security incident? They denied rumors they were arguing – or napping. They told federal investigators they were simply going over their schedules on their laptops.

 That revelation is sure to make business fliers everywhere feel much safer on their next flight.  Just think from now on once the pilot’s door locks, you’ll wonder if the men and women responsible for your safety are flying or catching up on paperwork.

O.K. everybody texts and drives now and then…but what I don’t get is why they turned off the radio for an hour? Does it really take an hour to check your schedule on your laptop? Is that something pilots generally do when nearing the end of a cross-country flight from San Diego?

The official story is that the near disaster was really the fault of the Delta takeover of Northwest. The Captain, Timothy Cheney, couldn’t figure out his new schedule. The first officer, Richard Cole, graciously tutored him in how it all works — at 37,000 feet. Fortunately, a flight attendant asked if they were planning to land.

While we believe a little multi-tasking now and then is good for productivity, remembering what you get paid to do doesn’t hurt either. Besides, there may be limits to how many balls you can keep in the air.

As they say, beginnings and endings count. At least, when you’re flying a jet.

— Jonathan Littman

Eight Soloist Secrets To Getting Your Work Done

In our book I Hate People!, we maintain that people can be more productive by becoming a Soloist. The Soloist isn't a loner but instead is that adventuresome, creative spirit that tends to get crushed by too many meetings, interruptions and annoying co-workers. To help you to discover (or re-discover) the Soloist within you, yearning to escape, here are eight secrets that will help you to kick loose from the daily grind for a little while.

1. Let Your Calls Go To Voicemail
Unless you're expecting an important call, stop jumping to answer every time the phone rings.

2. Turn Off Your E-mail Arrival Alert
We've become worse than Pavlov's dog. Check your e-mail when you want to, not every time that chime goes off.

3. Get In Five Minutes Early
Before the madness starts, just a few leisurely minutes at your desk -- reading the news, sports or celebrity gossip -- can start the day off right.

4. Mini-Brainstorm With Your Ensemble
A Soloist's Ensemble is his trusted group. His gang. His posse. Just by firing off a single question to your Ensemble about something that's got you stumped can bring back a handful of useful answers in minutes.

5. Slow To A Stroll
Unless you're racing to make a flight at the airport, everything else can wait until you get there. Any time you catch yourself in that frantic speedwalking pace between meetings, tap the brakes a bit and slow it down.

6. Cut The Caff
Coffee is not a substitute for rest, so get rid of the caffeine and wean yourself off the "liquid nap". Switch to green tea, starting cutting your regular joe with decaf or go for a glass of water until your heartbeat starts to approach normal (under 90 beats a minute) for a change.

7. NanoNap
Practice turning your back to the door in your cube or office then shutting your eyes for a few minutes at a time. If anyone catches you, tell them you're meditating or imitating Winston Churchill (a famous napper.)

8. Take The Stairs
A little exercise never hurt anyone, which is the excuse you need to take the stairs instead of the elevator. What you're really getting are a few floors of peace and quiet at whatever pace you want to go.

Positive Hate, Italian-style

The Fall is the season of hate in Italy. After you come back relaxed and refreshed from your summer vacation, you can’t help clashing with everybody at work.

You loathe office politics more than ever, and you positively hate your colleagues.

Perhaps that’s why the book Io Odio La Gente is enjoying great success in Italy right now. It was prominently displayed in every single bookstore I walked into while visiting Milan this week.

Italians love and hate in equal measure. They wear their emotions on their sleeves, and passion — whether positive or negative — is considered healthy.  We never drank the Kool-Aid of being respectful and keeping our emotions under check in the office. Controlling your emotions is considered the hallmark of a robot — not a real person. Arguing is a national sport.

When visiting Italy, most Americans tend to think that people are arguing when they are actually just talking. They simply air their differences and defend their positions with a certain degree of passion. The expression “we agreed to disagree” has no equivalent translation here.

This attitude translates into a work environment that is viewed as “high-conflict” by outsiders. In some ways it’s true. Lots of shouting and taking things personally. The question is: is that bad for business?

Many people think it’s actually good for business — it allows you to be nice when you really mean it, while enabling you to be nasty (and honest) when you have to. You don’t need to pretend to be nice when you feel like screaming at your colleague.

Take the case of a good friend of mine who, during a heated argument at work, smashed his espresso cup on the table in a fit of rage. Coffee splattered all over the mahogany table as he stormed out the door. “Did you get fired?”  I asked him. “No, I made my point and the next day we sat down to resolve our differences.”

An acquaintance of mine who behaved in a similar way in San Francisco was reprimanded, suspended, and eventually terminated. The difference is not just a better tasting coffee. It’s culture.

A culture where showing your emotions — including hate — leads to more authentic interpersonal relations, especially at work. A culture of positive hate.

— Elisabetta Ghisini

Our guest blogger, Elisabetta Ghisini, is a native of Milan with a background in publishing and public relations. Elisabetta currently teaches at USF’s business school and specializes in international business communications. She coaches global executives on everything from keynote speeches to handling the media. Check out her website, Verba International.

Ensembles By Design

We are not fans of bloated teamwork. Studies and business history have proven it doesn't work. Creativity and productivity suffer. That's not to say we don't embrace the idea that two or three or even four heads can't be better than one.

Ensembles are our view of how to get a project off the ground — tight knit groups of 2 to 4 individuals with the inspiration and drive to break ahead of the pack.

For two of my previous books I tapped into this power. Tom Kelley and I collaborated on the Art of Innovation and Ten Faces of Innovation, books that explored many of proven methods of the celebrated design strategy firm IDEO.

 Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, has a new book out, Change by Design. I've just started reading it, and I couldn't help noticing that Brown challenges the myth of teamwork in chapter 1. "Though it is not uncommon to see large creative teams at work, it is nearly always in the implementation phase of the project; the inspiration phase, by contrast, requires a small, focused group whose job is to establish the overall framework," he writes. "Look at the credits on your next movie rental, and check out the preproduction phase. There will invariably be a small team consisting of a director, writer, producer, and production desginer who have developed the basic concept. Only later do the "armies" arrive."

Brown has hit upon a useful insight for anyone starting a project. While it may be tempting to increase your people power early on, you may find as Brown notes, "a dramatic reduction in speed and efficiency as communications with the team begin to take up more time than the creative process itself."

Start by doing. With an Ensemble.

— Jonathan Littman

Exit Strategy Made Easy

On those days when it seems the entire rest of the office is focused on sawing away at the last frayed nerve you have left, the best thing to do is just bail for awhile. Get out. Go for a walk. Grab a cup of coffee. Take a nap in a park. Or just take your work with you and do it somewhere away from where you can be easily found. The hard part is reminding yourself to do it.

That's why we've created the Cubicle Evacuation Plan.

Modeled after those emergency evacuation maps in hotel hallways, the Plan consists of a simple diagram of a cubicle and an arrow pointing the way out — just in case you forgot. Below the diagram are three simple steps to follow should annoyance strike (and it will):

1. Get up from your desk at the first sign of annoyance from your cubemates.

2. Quickly and quietly move toward the exit.

3. Get your work done elsewhere and do not return until the annoyance has stopped.

Just by hanging the Cubicle Evacuation Plan in your cube, some of those who share your space may get the message. Or at least a laugh, which can help to disrupt annoyance patterns almost as much as ditching the office itself.

I Hate People! is happy to offer you a free copy of the Cubicle Evacuation Plan, in the form of a downloadable PDF file. Just scroll to the FREE STUFF! button on the right-hand side of the blog, click on it and follow instructions to grab yourself a copy. Pin it to your cube wall and refer to it whenever things start to get a little bit nuts.

If your office is anything like most, that means you'll barely get the pin pushed in before you're heading for safety.

To Love Your Work, Hate Your Colleagues

"Conflict in Italy is natural. People interrupt, argue and fight," Elisabetta Ghisini, my new Italian friend recently explained to me over pizza. " It's considered natural -- in business and family life."

She was explaining why her fellow Italians may be keen about a book called I Hate People!  Why they don't have the same fear as Americans who must disguise our honest feelings about our less than perfect workmates.

This week Grazia, a top Italian fashion magazine, published a wonderful spread on the Italian language edition of our book, Io Odio La Gente.

(Click here to see larger images of  these pages on the Io Odio La Gente Facebook Fan page!)

I love the pictures and the way they found such attractive and well dressed people in the workplace who can't stand one another. That makes the hate so much more beautiful!

They also coined a great title: Per Amare Il Tuo Lavoro, Odia I Tuoi Colleghi, which at first I thought had something to do with the office lavatory but now I realize means more or less "To Love Your Work, Hate Your Colleagues".

Grazia also captured the heart of our book in a way most American publications don't dare,  with some introductory language that Elisabetta tells me says: "They interrupt, sabotage, gossip. You can't stand your next-desk neighbor? You are right. That's the message of a book that shreds the teamwork myth to pieces." We couldn't say it better — in any language.

By the way, Elisabetta is headed today to Milan — to teach a workshop on business plans for Italians courting venture capitalists. We're hoping she continues her work as our foreign hate correspondent from the business capital of Italy.

Ciao!

— Jonathan Littman

Carnivore Wake Up Call

Lunchtime was a welcome respite from the craziness at the office but now it's 2:30 and you're in the grip of that afternoon crash. The day won't stop coming at you, but you can barely keep your eyes open. And dumping another cup of coffee down your gullet just isn't appealing. There must be another way to get your jolt on.

There is...if you're a meat eater.

Gimmicky as all get out, Perky Jerky is the kind of combo you might expect to only find at a trucker's rest stop. It's beef jerky laced with guarana, an energy booster that has about twice the amount of caffeine as a coffee bean. The herky jerky comes in 2 oz. bags, boasting that there are 150 milligrams of caff in every pack. That's equal to your average cup of coffee.

Benefits: You can keep it in your desk. No one will ever bother you to make a fresh pot of jerky. And if you spill it on your keyboard, you can just pick it up again and eat it.

Drawbacks: Coffee doesn't get caught in your teeth.

Perky Jerky is still finding its way into stores but you can order it through their website. If you can't wait for that order to arrive, just marinate a pack of Oberto's peppered beef jerky in a can of Red Bull overnight and you'll be good to go.

 

The End of Phony Optimism

A lot of people have embraced the idea in the past year that phony thoughts and emotions are bad for business. We began writing I Hate People! a year before the world economy collapsed and many Wall Street firms, major banks and financial titans were revealed to be frauds. Events have pretty much proved that pretending things are O.K. when they are truly horrible does no one any good.

Reality — and honesty — is good for business, and that’s why we’re happy to see that Barbara Ehrenreich, a highly respected bestselling author, has just published a major book that takes aim at all that is phony. It’s called Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Ehrenreich advocates a more honest appraisal of the workplace. We couldn’t agree more.

Take time out to identify those who are crushing your ideas and snuffing out  your time. It pays to figure out if some of your colleagues are among the Ten Least Wanted -- whether they be incessant Smiley Faces or dangerous Switchblades or simply time-sucking Minute Men.

Smart workers today develop the skills of a Soloist. We’re not talking about loners. The Soloist is someone who can clear the time and the space to get stuff done on their own or with a few other like-minded folks within the company in that anti-team we call the nimble, smaller Ensemble.

When we say we hate people, what we really hate is peoples’ bad behavior — managers who fudge sales forecasts and cover up ballooning debts and pretend things are great when they suck.  It may sound strange but we actually see reason for optimism down the road. Why? Phony is finally getting the bad rep it deserves. Individuals are recognizing some of the reasons we got into this mess, not the least of which was putting on a general Smiley Face that everything was going to be just fine.

“I have traced how positive thinking became the corporate culture in America. It was mandatory to be positive,” Ehrenreich told AlterNet.com. “So you had companies who would literally fire people for being negative, negative in the sense of maybe raising too many questions, maybe expressing a doubt.”

The Globe and Mail wrote that her book “focuses on the tyranny of the positive-thinking ideology in the modern workplace.”

Bright-Sided — which features a Smiley Face Balloon on it’s friendly yellow cover — is getting a lot of attention. We’re behind Ehrenrich 100%. “What we need here is some realism, or the simple admission that, to paraphrase a bumper sticker, "stuff happens," including sometimes very, very bad stuff,” she wrote in Time Magazine this past week. “The threats that we face, individually and collectively, won't be solved by wishful thinking, but by a clear-eyed commitment to taking action in the world.”

This is a woman who understands what business needs today. Take individual action. Buy her courageous book. Make it visible in your office or cube. It may be the most positive thing you do all week.

Foreign Professionals Who Just Don’t Want to Be Hated

Foreign professionals have a love-hate relationship with Silicon Valley. They dream of coming here to work, but then they often find themselves at the center of some serious workplace tensions.

Whether they stay for a while or forever, they take along models of leadership and communication that may work at home, but simply don’t work in the American workplace. And they often end up with misunderstandings, bruised egos, and ruined career prospects.

Take Carlo, a young Italian executive who works in Silicon Valley on a temporary assignment with a global consulting firm. He wants to make a good impression during client meetings, so he comes prepared with lots of analyses and data – all synthesized in a long, elaborate report.

During a key meeting, he dominates the conversation, interrupts frequently, and has an answer for everything. His accent makes it hard for his teammates and clients to understand all he says, but what is unmistakable is his assumption to be right on everything.

He has a point. He is actually right on a number of items, but his hierarchical attitude doesn’t win him any friends in America. He does what any manager would be expected to do in Italy: lead the meeting towards some kind of result, however brusquely.

In his mind, no one seems in charge.

He forgets to listen actively. He doesn’t give his teammates a decent chance to speak their mind. But from his point of view, since it’s clear who is going to make the decisions in the end, why bother listening to everybody’s point of view?

And what’s wrong with quoting Dante and expecting to be called “Dottore,” (Doctor) he wonders; and why isn’t anybody laughing at my jokes.

Teamwork in the US corporate world is just a drag – and a waste of time, he concludes.

He may have a point. But he misses the bigger picture.

In Silicon Valley it doesn’t matter what your title is – everybody has one. Carlo’s attitude is perceived as arrogant and overbearing.

It takes some time, but sensing the different atmosphere, he makes some adjustments.

Now, he learned to listen and to wait for his turn without interrupting; he tries to garner consensus instead of taking pride in introducing controversial ideas (as he would have done at home). He openly gives credit to his teammates, and has accepted the unspoken rules of the team.

Does he like it? No, he still thinks that by working alone or with one trusted colleague he would get more done. He still would like to be able to say exactly what he thinks without trying to be diplomatic.

The conventions of teamwork still seem like a time sink to him, but in the end Carlo decided that while here -- he’ll need to play by Silicon Valley’s rules.

— Elisabetta Ghisini

Our guest blogger, Elisabetta Ghisini, is a native of Milan with a background in publishing and public relations. Elisabetta currently teaches at USF’s business school and specializes in international business communications. She coaches global executives on everything from keynote speeches to handling the media. We met her at an event at USF’s business school and instantly liked her. Elisabetta laughed at the title of our book and as far as we know is the first person in America to read — and enjoy — our new Italian edition, Io Odio La Gente.