www.simplephilosophy.com

My last post was in October and indicated that due to work pressures I would post only once a week. Well obviously that did not happen. Part of the abscence has been due to work conflicts; however, the actual reason for the lack of activity has been due to not being happy with the direction of my blog content. I began to feel the content was becoming contrived and somewhat preachy.

Therefore, sometime in the near future I will overhaul the simplephilosophy site to focus exclusively on how to effect a positive change in your lifestyle and your life. The posts will draw from my personal journey over the past 9 months losing over 50 pounds through a significant change in my own personal habits and lifestyle. I will also draw from books I am reading that deal with cultural boundaries to personal change, developing the slight edge that will move you forward in life, and other related resources. My belief is if I am excited and happy with the content of the site, then I will be able to offer information that will truly impact others in a positive way. My true desire has always been to offer quality content that others will find beneficial in being successful in all aspects of life.

Watch for the changes and see you soon! Remember prior actions determine future options! Make today’s actions count so you can live the life you want tomorrow.

Steve

Just a quick note to let my readers know that my posting frequency is not due to a lack of interest or topics, but to a lack of time. As my last post notes, I have been fighting to keep my head above water, work wise. It is my desire to post more than once a week, and I will do that when I can, but for now I will make a post at least once a week.

Thank you for being loyal readers. Remember…Keep it Simple!

Regards, Steve

The past 10 days have been very hectic. I took both Gregg and Glenn back to school (a week apart) and sandwiched in between was a business trip to Denver. In fact my last post was written on the plane on the 11th, but posted about 2 am on the 12th when I finally got to my hotel room. Needless to say, with getting the kids ready to move, trying to tie up loose ends and then busy days in meetings, the “Perfect Day Schedule” went right out the window. Along with it was the time to keep up with the blog.

What has been on my mind the past 10 days is what a huge role our environment plays in a person’s ability to navigate life and possess positive self-esteem.

My sons were raised in an upper middle class family with college-educated parents. They were taught the value of a dollar and that dreams are achievable if you believe and act on them. My travel partner to Denver, on the other hand, was born into a disadvantaged family with poor adult role models. My companion was gangbanging at a young age and spent most of his teen and early adult years in youth camps and jail. When his daughter was born he resolved to change his life, and for the most part he has. He learned a trade and is quite skilled at what he does. He is the foreman of our best joint caulking and concrete polishing crew (I am part owner of a construction company that stains and polishes concrete floors).

This Isn’t Denny’s
While he has learned a skill (he is gifted with a keen eye), traveling with the poor guy is like traveling with a 10-year old. First he shows up at the airport with no cash…. at all. Then it’s “Can I have $1.25 for a coke?”, “Will you buy me a beer?”. I kept waiting for him to ask if I would buy him a souvenir shirt at the airport! Initially I was quite short with him. I even remember asking him if he thought I was his father. But it all kind of clicked with me when we went to a fairly nice dinner restaurant with a brewery (every restaurant in downtown Denver is attached to a brewery) and he tried to order a Bud Light (isn’t Coors the local commercial brew?) that the guy just did not know any better. Then when the bill came, before I could tuck my credit card into the folio with the bill, he asked (sincerely) if we weren’t supposed to take it up front to pay. My first thought was “This isn’t a Denny’s!”.

You Have to Change What You Do to Get Something New

What a contrast to traveling with my kids…even my 16 year old daughter knows how to pay the bill in a nice restaurant. I discovered I was living in a sociology experiment. In my friend’s life money was meant to be spent on things (trucks, bling, etc) that makes a person look outwardly successful, while they do not have two nickels to rub together. He showed up without any money, because his ex-wife (yet he hasn’t filed papers and he keeps drifting back to her) had cleaned him out.

His life revolves around a lack of abundance and he is completely incapable of figuring out how to break the cycle of poverty he was born into. While he intellectually knows things have to change, he still runs around with his hat on backwards (he really got pissed when I told him it looked ghetto), the long (below the knee long) shorts and all the trappings of a gangster. If I met him on the street at night, I would move to the other side. I told him that if he was serious about changing his circumstances he needed to make a clean break. That means quit hanging around with his “friends” (the same ones that couldn’t find the airport), completely cut ties with his ex-wife (she will continue to drag him back into the life), minimizing contact with his family and quit calling everyone “Bro”. He needed to quit hanging out with the element he was trying move away from and concentrate on educating himself on how to save money, pay down debts and learn that “things” do not define the person.

Surroundings Do Influence Behavior

Time will tell if my friend will in fact begin to make the changes we discussed. But one thing is abundantly clear…your background and living environment do in fact frame a person’s personality and behavior. The last 10 days really brought this into focus for me and has caused me to be a little more understanding when I encounter those who do not seem to have a clue.

An increasingly pervasive attitude with today’s managers and business owners is that employees are nothing more than tools or pieces of equipment that exist to create and enhance the entity’s bottom line. If the equipment’s cost of maintenance begins to rise or if the fixed cost of the employee (ie from pay raises or increases in benefits due to time in grade) increases and it begins to degrade the bottom line, then it is time to replace it with a cheaper model.

Why Engineers Make Lousy Managers

Being an engineer and having worked for a wide variety of organizations over the past 27 years, I have come to believe that as a rule engineers make lousy managers. It is not because the engineers that get promoted to management are not smart people or they do not care about the health and welfare of the company, it is because usually the ones that get promoted are highly productive and have a very high utilization rate. As a result, they are more concerned about billability and production than they are about nurturing relationships. It takes time to build tight client relationships and usually much of that time is not billable or accounted for in project budgets. As a result, employees are told to stay off the phone, stay on task and bill, bill, bill.

Every Business is a Relationship Driven

During my orientation with a prominent water resources engineering firm for whom I managed an office, the senior VP who was my direct supervisor made a point of telling me to never forget that ours was a relationship business. The company had been built on strong client relationships that had stood for over 35 years. This group really GOT IT! It was a result of this philosophy that during my recruitment the top brass had seemed concerned over the number of jobs that I had on my resume. The majority of the decision makers had been with the firm for 25 plus years. They wanted someone who would be committed to building and maintaining long-term relationships. This company really understood that close client relationships meant they saved money on marketing. When an existing client called with a possible project, virtually all of the time spent with the client was billable from hour one. The only instance when the time was written off to marketing was when the project did not proceed further.

What Precipitated This Post

Today I just found out that one of my neighbors was laid off. But they were not laid off in what I would consider an honorable fashion. My neighbor was a regional manager for a company that operated in several states. The premise was he was going to be elevated to a more regional level and his company hired a lesser paid person to take over his territory. My neighbor even trained this guy! My friend was being asked to move his family to Washington so he could concentrate on the states of Oregon and Washington…areas that were weak for this company.

After submitting his weekly reports after an extended business trip to the Northwest, my neighbor’s boss asked if they could get together to discuss some things. The meeting happened on Monday in Gilroy, California (about 3 hours from Bakersfield). At the meeting, my friend was given a severance package and told he was laid off.

Management did not have the balls to give this loyal employee an inkling that something was up. They let him train his successor, put his home on the market (in a depressed real estate market, no less), and then summarily discharged him like a piece of equipment that had outlived its useful life in order to save a few bucks. The company was arrogant enough to think my neighbor’s contacts and his client relationships belonged to them. What they will find out is that once a trusting relationship has been created, it will survive almost any circumstance. The bottom line will temporarily improve, but over the long haul his old company will be the big loser.

Relationships are a company’s most valuable asset and the people who create them are indispensable.

Is it just me or does it seem like effective listening is becoming a lost art? Just plain listening to what someone says has gone by the wayside. While my family seldom eats in a restaurant, at least once a week we get take out from a local establishment. I have completely given up trying to call in an order and arrive just in time to pick it up. The reason is the operator or serving taking the order over the phone either cannot hear you over the kitchen or bar noise, or they just absolutely lack the mental capacity to listen and write at the same time. Just getting the name on the order correct has become a crapshoot. My name is Steve….not exactly an uncommon or difficult name! However, at a local steak house, two times in a row, I clearly said my name was Steve (I had to repeat it several times too) and yet both times my order was in the name of Dave!

In my darker moments I swear the whole world is “blonde” and I am speaking German. However, I think the real problem is that today’s society has become so fast paced that people do not take the time to listen. They are too busy trying to think of the next thing to say than to listen to what is being said. It’s not like people have become non-conversational, it seems to me that due to the bombardment of noisy information 24/7 from TV, Radio, ipods, etc. most folks cannot allow a moment of quiet contemplation in a conversation. It’s like if there is a moment of silence, then someone is not keeping up their end of the conversation.

I once took a history class in summer school that focused on the period in US history from World War II to the present time. The teacher used some interesting tactics to make the material interesting. The most memorable was he had developed a montage of television commercials beginning from the 50’s through the late 70’s (I took the class in 1976). In the 50’s the commercials were live, were a full one-minute in length, and were geared to providing meaningful information about the product being advertised. As time went on, the commercials got shorter, the pace of speech increased, and the information was being delivered at the staccato pace of a machine gun. By the end of the class that evening everyone in the room was visibly agitated, just from the pace of the ads we watched.

Today TV ads are approximately 20 seconds long and they cram anywhere from 4-6 into a commercial break. The ad content now consists of just sound bites. Advertisers understand that the purchasing decision makers of today (people in their 20’s to mid 30’s) don’t think in complete sentences. Next time you talk to your son or daughter (or your friends, if you are young and reading this) pay attention to how many sentences just trail off with the phrase “…uh and yeah, ya know”. Most young people do not finish a complete thought, because the greatest influence in their lives growing up, television, presents information in sound bites or incomplete sentences.

Gen X and Gen Y (and whatever my kid’s generation is called) have been raised in this frenetic environment. So it is no wonder my twins cannot have a conversation where one waits until the other is finished to share his thought. They continually talk over one another until someone shouts “shut the f**k up and let me finish”. My sons are 20 and it is their peer group that are taking our orders at restaurants and fast food outlets. I am a firm believer that this current generation is so unused to listening that they are functionally incapable to take a simple dinner order. Their mind wanders because of the lack of auditory stimulation.

If anyone who reads this think I’m nuts, I challenge you to go to a Starbuck’s and sit within earshot of a group of young people having coffee. What I think you will find is they can sit there for hours, talking over one another and NOT SAY A DAMN THING WORTH REMEMBERING! They will gripe about their boyfriends, their lives, whatever, (which youth of all generations have done when hanging out) but most of the time they just make noise so there is not a void in the chatter.

Maybe this is just the rant of a middle aged man whose has become as intolerant as I used to accuse my father of being, but I don’t think so. Let me know what you think.