Chariots of Fire

In the pursuit of beating a metaphor horse while it's dead, I'm going back to the "running in place" idea.

The quote from Amanda Cooper's Entrepreneur Magazine article of November 2004 has been said ad nauseum in the hallowed halls of ePrize: "Some day, a company will come along and put us out of business, so it might as well be us."

Of course, some at ePrize are so full of themselves that they feel they are completely alone in their field; alone without competition. To that end they made up a fake company to motivate employees (as if the constant fear of firing and sweatshop mentality isn't enough).

Says CEO Josh Linkner in Leigh Buchanan's Inc magazine article of September 2006: I decided if a nemesis doesn't exist, let's create one. I made up a company called Slither. Slither is our head-to-head arch-evil enemy; its CEO is Gordon Gekko. They never have a down quarter. They have better clients and margins and employee retention than we do. They're more efficient and are growing faster.

Lame Wall Street reference aside (at least it wasn't Severus Snape), it wouldn't take a Slither to ePrize out of business -- that is, to shed the old skin of a promotions company (where "eSweeps are made Easy") where the latest innovation is a rehashed idea for the early days of the company (SweepsXpress) and branch out into new, cutting edge technologies.

In a company that touts ideas as being their most important asset, a sometimes a great notion gets tossed out on its ear in favor of sticking to the safer ground. Every time I see a commercial, promotional spot, print ad, or even supermarket standee that says "Enter for a chance to win... Text ______ to ______ and..." I think of one of the Project Managers at ePrize who tried to champion TXT/SMS/WAP as the next great frontier of interactive promotions.

He was poo-pooed for months. After he put together a terrific presentation of the presence of TXT in the U.S. (don't forget that TXT is far more popular in Europe where ePrize struggles to make a splash) and the potential of TXT in the industry... not a lot happened. There were and are a few odd promotions that tie into TXT but if there are more... I'm not seeing them.

Personally, I always felt that it was silly to outsource or utilize vendors for some of the simpler tasks that could be internalized. And, here again we could provide more services and more customized solutions to clients.

"The NEXTEL promotion generated over 2 million SMS messages generated in a 10-week period." Oddly, this fact was removed from "The ePrize Factor" page of ePrize.com

Who knows how many other ideas died on the vine or went unnoticed despite the alleged desire for feedback (see Project Gold Medal post). These are the ideas that could "put ePrize out of business." Undoubtedly, these are the kind of things that Slither can offer to its clients.

After the first press release from the fictional Slither company, there were reactions like: "Who are these guys? I checked out their website and couldn't find it.". What Linkner may not realize is that he did too good of a job selling Slither. The report I got from several employees (most of them ex-employees now) was that they started looking for Slither's website to see if they were hiring!

I'm surprised that there wasn't a fake website with a fake "employment" section in order to entrap disgruntled employees. Knowing that putting one's resume on Monster.com is a "red flag" to an employee's loyalty, the lack of this refined shiftiness shocks me.

Project Ostrich

Of all the lunch meetings I had -- and these were anywhere between four and five a week -- one of the two that I actually looked forward to was the gathering of all the discipline leads. Once a month this would also include upper management. When upper management wasn't around the leads managed to hash out some differences and create processes that made work life a bit smoother. This was also the time to openly bitch and see if anyone else was having the same issues or problems.

It was theraputic and productive.

However, when upper management was in the room I was surprised that there wasn't a folding card table set up for the leads to sit at like Thanksgiving at Grandma's. "You team leads sit over at the Kids' Table."

---

When the grown ups were around the discussion became rather one sided. We were being told what to do, not asked. Odd things would come up, usually around the "dis-employment" of an employee.

In one meeting it was kind of halfheartedly tossed out that the company would be firing one of its PMs who "just wasn't working out."

Rather than placidly taking this comment in stride, there was a tension immediately introduced to the table. I was first to break the silence. "Wait... I thought we were moving him to another position rather than getting rid of them." (The whole "putting the right person in the right seat on 'The Bus' being a key idea to the person proposing the firing).

Another person spoke up, "Right, if we were firing him, why did I go to all the trouble to test out his skills for my department?"

A general murmer of discontent rounded the table. It was made more ironic that the person proposing this firing had just been chiding "the kids" for not being clear in their communication and here he was with a completely different message than any of us had gleaned in previous conversations -- and assignments.

Believe it or no, but we went around the table to get the general concensus of the group. "Did you think that we were firing him or moving him?" All but our intrepid upper management representative was under the (mistaken, of course) impression that we were moving this employee to another position in hopes that his skillset would mesh better and that he would be able to bloom in a new role.

This person moved to the new role and was summarily fired six months later -- no discussion that time.

---

These leads meetings eventually were kiboshed altogether. This happened after one lead -- who had been bucking to get into upper management -- decided to pick a fight during this meeting with the wrong person; me. He started ragging on my team and talking about how inefficient they were. Likewise, he wanted to offload some of his teams' responsibilities onto the shoulders of my team members. I wasn't having any of this. I kept asking that if job task X, Y, and Z were being done by my team, what the F would that leave his team to do?

Apparently, though this was a lively discussion, it wasn't deemed to be "productive" enough and, thus, five minutes after the end of this meeting a cancellation notice went out. We never had another leads meeting again.

Oh, and four months later this person that was bucking for an upper-management position got it. He demoted me and heaped those aforementioned tasks onto myself and my team.

Company by Max Barry

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program [...] I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. -- Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) from The Matrix.

What if the creators of The Matrix had started their own company rather than designing the ultimate virtual reality? In Company, author Max Barry describes the too-typical American company, Zephyr. A holdings company with no clear purpose or source of profitability, Zephyr is a behemoth of mismanagement and corporate dogma. We witness the lunacy of Zephyr through the eyes of Jones (first names promote unnecessary fraternization), a new employee who dares to ask difficult questions such as, "What does Zephyr actually do?" The answer he gets most often is to not rock the boat.

Barry does a great job capturing the idiosyncratic quirks of all the expected archetypes, Catch-22 logic, and overused buzzwords (“You want me to de-prioritize my current reports until you advise of a status upgrade?”). In long screeds, Barry describes – among other things -- the psychology of upper-management, the self-loathing of employees, and the desire to outsource (“The truly flexible company [...] doesn't employ people at all. This is the siren song of outsourcing. The seductiveness of the signed contract. Just try out the words: no employees. Feels good, doesn't it? Let the workers suck up a little competitive pressure. Let them get a taste of the free market.”)

Highly recommended.

Not to sound like Mr. Pink...

I'm a consumer whore. I admit it. I'm a sucker for drive-through service and overly processed foodgoods. But there's got to be a place where I draw the line. I'm not sure how much the baristas at Star Bucks make but I just can't bring myself to tip them more than the change from my order, especially as the ones taking my drink order are usually surly.

But I just can't bring myself to tip when I use the drive thru at Star Bucks. I'm already paying upwards of six dollars (!) for a damn cup of coffee and a muffin. And they want a tip on top of that? Worse yet, I couldn't reach the tip jar unless I was Reed Richards.

"I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them something a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doing their job."

A Fun Game

Here's a fun game. How many employees in this picture from July 26, 2006 are still employed at ePrize?


Note the Kaizen poster in the background (back, left)

RUNNING TH3 NUMB3R5

I've never one for stating the obvious. Moreover, I've never been one to write a report to state the obvious. But I've done it. Oh, yes, I've done it.

Before the well-publicized hiring frenzy at ePrize it was pulling teeth to get new bodies into the Production Department. There were arguments, there were justifications, there were pleads, and there were reports.

I was told by my boss that, according to one weekly report that our comptroller provided, my department should be running at 75% efficiency. As it was, the overworked and underpaid group was running at 110% on average. That means that more than every hour of their days were billable (lunch isn't billable, remember). So, I broke out my abacus to cypher the correct number of employees to put people down to 75%. I was so proud of myself, I even figured in vacation time for the current amount of employees plus the time allotted for any new folks (though piddly it be).

I gussied it up, threw in some charts, and all that jazz and presented it formally to my boss.

Again with the punchline: "We reconsidered that number last week. We actually think that people should be working at 85%."

Okay, so even at that amount, we need more employees. "Write it out and submit it. We'll think about it."

Worldflukes

Two things always stuck in my craw when it came to data integration. Certainly there's always security concerns but why would I, as a user, want to put in my information when registering for a Yahoo or NWA promotion when they already have my info? If I have a Worldperks number, that means that NWA has my name, address, et cetera. At most they should want to ask me to opt-in for more information or reminder emails if the promotion has multiple chances to win. Alas, each time a user registers for an NWA promotion, they have to enter in all of that info time and time again.

The real shame, I suppose, is that we managed to get buy in from Yahoo that a user can enter in their Yahoo ID and, if it validates, their registration form will be pre-populated. None of that re-registering malarky. The sad part is that we invested so much time and money making this happen only to apparently never do another Yahoo promotion!

And, to go back to NWA, I found a lot of broken pages when doing research for my blog entry from the other night. Apparently, I missed NWA's "BIG 2-0" promotion. But the fine folks at FlyerTalk (great info for ways to score upgrades and mileage for NWA and other Frequent Flyer programs) definitely had some problems. For more info click here.

Project Gold Medal

It's funny to think that there's an intiative at ePrize to 'reduce the suckiness'. I was just thinking back to the times when upper management would occasionally ask for suggestions via email. During one of those times I was lucky enough to snag a copy of everyone's emails. I went through with a fistful of highlighters, picking out common threads and putting them in the same color.

There was one overwhelming suggestion -- Project Teams. That is, grab one PM, one SE, one IE, and maybe even one QA (a common designer would be used) and utilize these cross-discipline folks for a pre-determined set of clients. There were variations on this theme -- breaking the PM group into smaller, bite sized pieces and assigning a team of Production workers to them so they'd always know who was assigned to their projects and bruilding a rapor not only between PMs and Production but also between PMs and their clients. There had been a precident set with the Engagement Managers and clients so why not carry that mindset throughout the production cycle.

Page after page I saw this. My yellow highlighter was just about dry by the time I made it through the sixty-odd pages of ePrizer constructive criticism and outright bitching.

The funny part? While discussing the employee feedback with my boss I remarked, "Wow, I sure saw a lot of people wanting Project Teams!"

His response: "Really? I hadn't noticed that." Unfortunately, he wasn't joking around.

When something like Project Gold Medal comes about, then, it makes me wonder what's making it through the haze. When 80% of the company says basically the same thing and the message neither gets through nor gets adopted, will something like Project Gold Medal -- a "project" with the goal of company improvement -- be effective at all?

Happy Yom Kippur!

I know that smart ePrizers will not be looking at this blog from work today as I'm sure that it's being monitored (like Monster, Career Builder, your jabber conversations, your email, et cetera) and I know that all folks working Production jobs are in today. Regardless, sometimes it's nice to work on Yom Kippur as there are a lot fewer requests and people to be in the way as 90% of the management team out of the office (OOTO) today. Try to enjoy it!

One step forward, two steps back, run in place.

I helped to implement quite a bit of change at ePrize, including pushing us from HTML 1.0 “table based” layouts to fully standards-compliant extensible HTML (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) driven websites. This was done via consensus building (rather than mandate setting as done by the former “leader” of the team). We proved out that our web audience was finally to a point that would support this technology and showed that adopting it would save us a considerable amount of build time while making invariable client changes far easier and faster to do. In a business where every minute counts, any kind of time-saving is appreciated.

Before I was left ePrize, it looked as if my team were on their way out. In a bold move, one of my coworkers seized power of his group by promoting the idea that the entire company would move from HTML-based promotions to Flash-based promotions. This plan included an entirely new technology to build architecture for these promotions utilizing some “bleeding edge” uses for Flash, PERL, and XML. Luckily, he and his team had just the right guy to do this; one of those almost scary computer geniuses.

The irony here is that after my departure it was deemed necessary to utilize several outsourcers in an attempt to replace me. I’m not sure how many people it finally shook out to equal one of me but I do know that these folks were unable (or unwilling) to use the XHTML+CSS. Thus, they were allowed to take two steps back and go old school with HTML tables (or they’d overcode their XHTML+CSS leaving a mess of <div> tags peppering their work).

Exampls:

• Sara Lee -Tailgate at Home and Win
• Copenhagen-Click, Spin, Win*
• Caspian List & Data Management LTD
• Unilever - Essentials of Life Instant Win
• TESSCO's Match and Win Game - not in tables but the text is in graphics.

* No "Enter for a chance to", just "Win".

Meanwhile, there were a handful of Flash-based promotions and the idea of this quickly went the way of the dinosaur. There just weren’t enough developers who could handle the new technology (and they eventually migrated to other companies). Eventually, this technology was hacked apart and put to nefarious ends by making a “one stop shop” application for sweepstakes. Some of the new folks working there don’t know that this is simply a resurrection of an older, contentious idea that lived a short life and died a painful, lingering death like a cancer victim.

They’re running in place while I’m the one fearing change.

Hand on a Hot Stove

If I could have snuck a peek at my personnel record from ePrize, I’m sure that everything could have been encapsulated with two simple words, “Fears Change.”

I had been at the company for years, seeing it grow from a typical “Internet Startup” to a booming ad agency. I had survived scads of firings and waves of hirings. Moreover, I had initiated countless programs, created processes, and actively participated in making the company a success. If I feared change, then I was at the wrong place. I would have been petrified by the daily growth and rapid transformation. So, where did I get the bad rep?

As far as I can glean, it all came from an exchange that occurred after I’d been at the company for about a year. There was an emerging discussion about redoing the company’s website. The site that online when I was interviewed was nearly enough to tell this company to shove off. It was a garish collection of concentric circles that looked decidedly broken in Netscape 4.x, my browser of choice in those days.

When it came time for the site’s refresh, one of the software engineers started rallying that the site should be redone in Dynamic HTML (DHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Meanwhile, another coworker was running Flash up the flagpole to see if anyone would salute. It became my obligation to put things in perspective for everyone.

Problems with coding DHTML technologies WILL occur as long as each browser creates its own proprietary features and technology that is not supported by other browsers. A Web page may look great in one browser and horrible in another.

For our company website – the site that our potential customers were going to peruse – we should utilize the technology that we were using for all of our current sites and not rely on technology that either needed Third Party plug-ins or that were incompatible with half of the world’s web browsers. Yes, DHTML, CSS and Flash were cool, but they were impractical for our purposes at the time.

For the next few years my semi-annual reviews all said, “Unwilling to learn new technologies.” It didn’t matter that my boss didn’t even know what DHTML was or why I didn’t want to adopt it, he only saw me not jumping feet first into a new (albeit impractical) area. From then on, I was a marked man. Whenever I would bring up a point of caution I was viewed as being some stick in the mud who was throwing up roadblocks to progress (“You may not want to put your hand on the stove burner, it’s hot.”)

The Beginning of The End

When I got back from lunch there was a smoke machine by my desk. I practically tripped over the bulky wires from the makeshift sound system and had to dodge the seven stands that were draped in green butcher paper.

The office had been decorated the night before in our garish company colors; red, green, and purple. It was time for our annual roll-out of the new catch phrase. In late 2004 our space was transformed into something resembling a Chinese whorehouse with paper lanterns, dragons, streamers, and so many fortune cookies that we were snacking on them into June of the following year. That was “The Year of the Client,” the bastard child of Jack Mitchell’s Hug Your Customer and Kenneth Blanchard’s Raving Fans. In a nutshell, YOTC (or “yutz” as it was often called) gave a phrase to the “you’ll do it and you’ll like it” mentality of bending over for our clients. Late nights, weekends, whatever it took.

I didn’t have a clue as to the new theme. It probably related to our book club again. It seemed that whenever upper management read anything, they immediately bought into it. It was the “any kind of change is a good change” mentality that threw us into some pretty precarious spots, only saved by the figurative blood and literal sweat and tears of the peons that pulled us through those poor leadership choices. The rumour had been that our fall read, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat was the clarion call of outsourcing, and judging from the rampant use of freelancers (esp. Romanians), there seemed to be a grain of truth to that proposition. But where would a smoke machine fit into all of that? Unless I was to take it that this would provide the smoke and that mirrors would be brought in later when the management team showed up.

The smoke machine belched out a putrid cloud while music bellowed from the sound system. Running into our midst, like a pack of wild idiots, came our entire management team. They were all dressed in black t-shirts, black pants, sunglasses, and purple capes. Like something out of an episode of “Batman” or my darkest nightmare, they all began posing and mock fighting for what seemed like forever.

The theme to 2006 was revealed. "No Limits." It was some kind of superhero theme with valuable corporate buzzwords associated with various caricatures of employees associated with ideals such as "Creativity" and "Kaizen". WTF is "Kaizen"? Good question.

Kaizen, it turns out, comes from Six Sigma (considered by some to be a "codification of mediocrity") that is defined as: Japanese term that means continuous improvement, taken from words 'Kai' means continuous and 'zen' means improvement. Some translate 'Kai' to mean change and 'zen' to mean good, or for the better.

After revealing the various "super heroes," our fearless leader went over the company's (rather, the leadership team's) eleven top ten goals for 2006. When one of them was moving from #3 on the "Promo 100" list to #1, the COO began chanting, "We're number one, we're number one! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!" People joined in... the room became filled with droning, almost desperate, cries of this mantra. I could only think of Homer Simpson when he chants, "U.S.A!" Eyes askew, Homer personifies mindless patriotism. "In your face!"

While they put on this display, I pulled up Monster.com and began to search for new employment.

Everybody's Working On The Weekend

Some Project Managers at ePrize would fight long and hard to avoid having people come in and work on weekends but, eventually, the fight would be taken out of them. Defanged, they knew that this was an inevitability -- something as certain as the sun rising tomorrow.

Yesterday was my first Saturday that I worked in all of 2006. In 2005 as an ePrize employee, I worked 35 weekends; many of these holidays including Labor Day and Christmas. I also worked countless evenings. I'm not talking an hour here or there. I'm referring to full shifts plus some. A typical workday at ePrize for me started at 8AM, paused at 6PM, started again at 7PM and continued on until 12AM. There were occasional bathroom breaks along the way.

While some workers recieved "bonuses" (I use that term with trepidation) for working a weekend, they were pittances. The most ever paid out for a full weekend of work was $1,000 US but that was the exception (an employee was told that his raise was greater than Human Resources was told due to a math error and this was the "make up" for that) and not the $200 US rule (that's roughly $12.50/hr when ePrize charges clients quite a bit more for man hours). Each week, leaders of various groups would have to come to their people and truckle to their team, "Hey guys, we've got some weekend work coming up... any volunteers?"

The secret shame of ePrize came from the fact that if those employees didn't step up to the plate the work was invariably done by the team leader who, due to their "lavish" position (some of them made far less than their employees by $20K a year in some cases) wouldn't receive a red cent. That's right... since they were "leadership," they were denied the bonuses (albeit tiny) that their teammates earned. Same work. Same hours.

All right, I'll be fair. Sometimes it wasn't the same work. After a while ePrize moved skilled laborers out of leadership positions in various Production teams and replaced them with "bumbling boobies." This meant that any weekend work they did was invariably re-done -- or at least patched into a limping semblance of better work -- by their "underlings." It's always a challenge to keep your mouth shut when you know more than your boss; having to fix your bosses mistakes at all times makes that silence even more difficult to maintain.

Seth Godin Say Relax

I was reading Seth Godin's Small Is The New Big this week.

The author of several books that were highly influential to ePrize (Unleashing The IdeaVirus, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, et cetera), Godin was a keynote speaker at the second ePrize "Summit" in Las Vegas, 2006. The whole permission maketing idea -- offering people a chance to win in order to gather handraisers (or opt-ins) is the crux of the ePrize business model.

The irony to this tale is that in Small Is The New Big, Godin write a condemnation of companies with the sweatshop mentality that ePrize exemplifies. In his "rift" titled "Relax," Godin decries companies that value long hours over time for one's family. He extolls the values of working "smarter, not harder" and how shallow those "war time" memories of all-nighters and emergency deadlines are in retrospect.

A buzz term that comes to mind is "managing expectations." There is little of that at ePrize. It's much more of a "promise the moon" mentality that keeps workers practically chained to their desk. The mantra there is, "This is not a nine to five job." At least there's truth in advertising here. When Godin describes those companies where employees jeopardize their health and marriages for the sake of work, he's talking about ePrize.

Let's hope that, like other books read and treated like the gospel by ePrize's upper management, that Seth Godin saying "Relax" might manage to sink in.

It's Just A Jump To The Left

It's tough to not keep up with a company when you made so many friends while working there and continue to speak to them. The lastest from the "Oh my god, you're not going to believe this" file is hearing about what could only be considered "Project Chameleon Pt Deux".

Project Chameleon was the brilliant idea to take two managers and have them switch spots in some kind of "your department is running okay while yours is fucked up so lets see if it's the manager or the department" experiment. Consider it "Project Freaky Friday" without the comedy or field hockey.

Despite the results of this, it's happening again but on a larger scale. Consider it "Project Rocky Horror" where gads of managers are taking a step to the right and taking over another department. Sales moves to Fulfillment, Fulfillment to Project Management, Strategy to Sales, and so on, and so on, and so on. Is this one of those classic "bus moves" of getting the right people in the right seats on the bus? Is it one of those pragmatic "anyone can do anyone else's job because we're so skilled and diverse"? Or is it a move of desperation; a band-aid for some broken departments?

Regardless, the shuffle (52 Pick-up?) means that that a lot of jokers (gotta keep the card metaphor) continue to rise to / stay at the top while some hard working people remain where they're at. This is nothing new, of course. There's a finite number of upper management positions and a finite number of family/friends to take these slots. The only "break" comes from unexpected firings. Though, from what I hear, at least one other member of the upper management team might be feeling the cold shoulder rather soon. A "discard" as it were. That will leave a spot open for another nanny, cousin, brother, et cetera to fill the role. So, if you're a hard worker that's in line for a potential promotion, well... don't hold you're breath.

And then a step to the right.