Companies: the formula to be a professional bum
Companies, work environment and results: the future belongs to the lazy
Misaligned, sweating and very fast, Damian greeted me with his fist and urged me to sit down.
Without even taking a breath, he began to tell me all the quotes he sent and the time (honey, I thought) he dedicated to each one. I listened patiently and replied:
-My quotation acceptance rate is between 15 and 17 percent. When I realized that in five out of six cases I worked a lot unnecessarily, I focused on indicators that would help me estimate the probability of winning each client and, thus, dedicate time to those with the highest chances.
If you treat all your customers as if they were average, you will also be average for them.
-You because you have time, Leo. I don't give more! The collection processes of companies are all different and always designed to pay as late as possible.
The way a company pays its suppliers is a key piece of information to understand its culture.
-Yes, I believe. I always say that the receptionist or the cadet represents the culture better than what the CEO touts. And, of course, that is also seen in the area of payment to suppliers.
Culture is defined above, but it is lived below.
-You always take it to the side of culture and leadership, but I haven't seen my children for two weeks, I don't stop for a second and my results are bad. I need to hire someone to help me.
-Nooo!!!
My guttural cry startled him so much that he knocked over the coffee. In those chain reactions, which are so cute to watch on video, the hot coffee made him jump out of his chair and push her back. As it fell, it hit the umbrella of the lady at the neighboring table, which opened automatically.
-Noooo! Seven years of bad luck for opening an umbrella indoors!
The lady's scream accompanied mine. Each one is horrified by what he wants. Once everything returned to "the new normal", I felt empowered to explain myself and, incidentally, answer a loose end of "The future belongs to the lazy":
-The best way not to fire is not to hire.
As I closed the umbrella, the lady looked at me with disgust. The waiter also listened to what I said and decided that he did not deserve the chocolate brownie that he was about to serve me. Damián, who knew me, reacted differently:
-You already told me a thousand times: "Doing the impossible not to hire will take you to higher levels of efficiency." That's why I didn't hire anyone else. But everyone demands me and I can never get enough. I am suffering, my efficiency improved but not that much and I don't know what to do.
-I understand you, I've already been where you are now. First of all, a caveat: I was wrong many times when hiring. But precisely that learning forced me to look for alternatives.
We believe that the more people we have in our team, the more powerful we are and in the 21st century it is exactly the opposite.
-Yes, Leo, but if we don't hire there won't be a job!
He disturbed me a little that, from discussing his individual concern, he suddenly went on to worry about others. But I knew that's how we were trained, to believe that hiring fast and many people is the right thing to do.
-Exact. Brilliant. Employment as we know it is one of the main factors of "no change" in organizations: open-ended contracts, people "screwed" to the chair, budgets (promises) based on the past. In the future there will be much more work -later on I will count a little more- but less employment. Or it will be a different job. But let's get back to the point: you're covered with urgent things, so many that you can't do what's important.
-Yes. And it reminds me of when my boss at the multinational told me "this is for yesterday."
"Urgent" is usually just an opinion.
-We could associate the urgent in the "short term" and the important in the long term. It's the same as when I was arguing with that politician about investment in the agricultural sector and he wanted to use that money to buy food. "People don't have anything to eat," he told me. Of course, because we didn't make the investments that we should have made a long time ago.
Every short term is a long term that we arrived late.
In other words:
The urgencies and the short term, for the leader of the 21st century, are a trap for not doing what is important: looking at the long term.
Damián, tired (perhaps like the patient reader) of hearing me repeat the same thing in different ways, told me that he couldn't solve it. And I, who was in "aphorism mode", answered laconically:
-The more difficult it is to focus on the long term, the more valuable it is.
I made a bit of silence. As for him to decant. Or, perhaps, to rest. But then I couldn't stand it.
-Damián, the urgent is scheduled alone. The short term is always present. This is how animals live, this is how the Cro-Magnon was when he ate that mammoth. We have to insert what is important like a wedge, decisively and almost at any cost. If your day seems shorter than everyone else's, you'll need to find the 25th hour.
-Ok, I find that time for the long term. What do I do?
I want to be cremated tbh, but make sure I'm ded fr bc I don't like it when the weather is over 94° 😂 put my ashes… https://t.co/ticHP5DnVU
— FREEBRITNEY Thu May 14 21:42:11 +0000 2020
-Eliminate, Automate, Outsource. EAT. And again. At first it will be more obvious: what you have been postponing is probably what begins with "should" or "should". But, over time, my advice is to use the logic of this formula:
-Before you complain and tell me that it is difficult, I warn you that it is a model, a simplification. You don't have to understand it perfectly; only conceptually. And the time you are devoting to the subject is a long-term investment, so you are already richer! The bottom line of the formula: automate or delegate is an investment (the T on the left) that must be compared to your future "cash flow" (ti), or rather, your future time savings. It is just like a bond, a loan, or any other investment. The "interest rate" (i) represents how much you value your time today and in the future. If you never outsource or automate, it's very high. Something like "live in the present" of self-help. If you always do it, it tends to zero. I've heard from programmers that if something takes more than 15 minutes, they try to automate it.
"Wait, wait, wait," Damián interrupted me. If they automate, they are living in the present, having a beer, smoking something that was illegal in my day, playing a video game or entertaining themselves by buying and selling stocks. Programmers live in the present!
-We have to learn -I include myself- not to have those prejudices... But I understand what you say. Once you automate, you can let in the self-help guru who tells you I lived in the present, but not before. Because, if not, you fall into that animal behavior of running after the emergency room. It's a cycle: to live in the present: you have to think about the future and generate improvements.
-I think I understand...
Damián made visible efforts not to look at his cell phone, which kept making little noises and changing color. Don't be jealous, I thought; and I continued.
-The "V" is how much time of working life (or of that task) you estimate to have ahead.
-And what is the "P"?
-The "P" represents all the emotional factors: the cost of having something pending every day (leads you to automate), the fear that automating will bring negative consequences such as losing your job (leads you to cling to tasks), the probability that you automate wrong and have to go back, and so on...
-Ok, and the simple version of the formula?
-In case of the slightest doubt, it is always advisable to automate -he continued in an aphoristic way. And the most interesting thing is that automating is getting simpler, so that "T" will go down and the previous sentence will remain true.
-Do you do that, Leo?
-Yes, every time I have it present. In fact, you can see the tools I use. I'm still hoping someone will automate my tax payments! Or delete it...
79,999 hours automating
Let's apply this to the entire working life of Martín, our character from the first part, and to that of Osvaldo, an old acquaintance of the house, call center supervisor "of the 20th century" with more appearances than Troy McClure (those who want to review his adventures, they can do it in "No more waiting for the new normal", in "Choose your own misfortune - part 2" and in "Ten leadership lessons of this blessed 2020").
If we assume that both of them will have worked between the ages of 20 and 60, every working day (250 per year) for 8 hours on average, we arrive at a magic number: 80,000 hours of value contribution to the world. Yes, I know, also 80,000 hours of effort to have something to eat.
We can always change the point of view and choose the attitude we will have.
If the dear reader wants to see the calculations for himself or make a copy to play "Automator of the Present", he can take advantage of this simple spreadsheet.
Simplifying much more, let's assume that both will do the same thing all their lives. Something normal until the 20th century, almost impossible from now on.
Reinvention is no longer an option; It better be a habit.
What impact can automating something that saves 1% of his time have for Martin? Easy, if he does it at the beginning of his first day on the job, 800 hours of savings over his lifetime. How much is he willing to invest? From that "gain" we must subtract how much more you value the present time than the future (represented by i in the formula) and all the emotional factors of "P". Placing in the formula the 40 years (V) in which you are going to save time (yes, I know it is a simplification), the 20 annual hours (tn) that you will save, assuming a rate of 5% (i), which depends of the personality and moment of life Martin, and eliminating "P" to simplify more, we solve and arrive at that up to 343 hours of investment (T) is worth to automate this.
For his part, Osvaldo, at 59 years old, what will he plan to automate? He only has one year to "enjoy" the benefits of automation and, of his 80,000 hours, he has already worked 78,000 without automating anything. What he will be able to save if he automates is twenty hours in the year. Since the term is so short, it is not important to discount with the same interest rate because it gives us just over 19 hours. While Martín can spend two months automating (42.89 days of 8 hours), Osvaldo hardly more than two days (19 hours divided by 8 gives 2.38). Also, Osvaldo has much more to lose if he fails (would you like to fail in the last thing you tried in your career?), so "P" is surely more relevant, making automation less profitable.
What yes, I would recommend that he never lose Humility, Generosity, Tolerance and Patience. Especially with those who are out there automating.
The older we are, the less incentive we will have to automate.
Therefore, my advice is to start as soon as possible. Automation is a fact in front of which you have two options: get ahead or not.
If you are afraid of losing your job because you automate, you will lose it because someone else automated.
Why am I calm with automation?
The washing machine, did it reduce employment? Quite the contrary: it increased it. There was unpaid work (the person who washed by hand in a family, for example), which became paid employment (the engineer who designed the machine, the operator who made it, the delivery man who delivered it). At the macro level, formal employment increased. He made the world better. Nobody lost? Yes, they lost the manufacturer of those tables to rub clothes and they lost the professional laundresses, for example. This will happen again and again: we will replace some unpaid or poorly paid tasks (elevator operator, to give another example) with better paid ones.
The only challenge is getting into the habit of reinventing yourself to be able to flow with the changes. Yes, of course, it would be great if it were the State that resolved it; but, knowing the politicians, I recommend taking charge individually.
-But, Leo, the laundresses suffered, the elevator operator suffered, and all the people who don't have a job today add to that. Doesn't what you're proposing give you a guilty conscience?
Do you want to improve the world? Start by understanding that nothing can be solved today. I continued to imagine the future unchanged. And then, act to make that future better.
We are much more powerful than we think in the long term and much less so in the short term.
I once heard Jeff Bezos, future ex-CEO of Amazon, say that if someone wants to eliminate hunger in the world tomorrow, he is not going to be able to do it. But if you intend to do it in ten years, it is totally feasible. The truth is, I don't think anyone really wants to.
PS: For years I have been planning an entire article on how valuable mathematics is for business and how poorly I have been taught it. In this case, it seems important to me to present the formula (which, like any model, can be improved) because the world will continue to change a lot. For example: life expectancy increases (40 years of work only?) and the number of hours varies (8 hours a day? What if you love your job? Or if you want to spend more free time?), then the formula values tend to change.