In that time I have seen vast sums of money spent on bad ideas, watched enormous quantities of shareholder value dissipate and participated in more than a few Whacking Days. (No, not this kind.) I know the ups and downs that come with working for a technology company. You wear your experiences like badges of honor. When you start at a new company, you and your new co-workers share your histories.

“You were with Synegistix? I worked for Ingeniko Corp before they acquired them.”
“No kidding. I was a part of the transition team on that.”
“Really? Yeah, I took the package right after.”
“Yeah, I got laid off during the next round.”

You start a job knowing that your tenure will likely end one of two ways: move on or get whacked. Retirement is not a part of the picture. The people I know who have been with a job longer than 10 years is very short indeed. The people I know intending to stay with a company longer than 10 years is even shorter. It’s not that anyone wants to leave a company, but no one believes that to be possible. No one.

To the grizzled IT veteran, a layoff isn’t the end of the world. It comes with the territory. But there’s something a little different to me about the recent economic troubles and the rise in unemployment numbers. This time, it isn’t just us (or is that “we?”). When Internet companies began to implode around 2000, technology companies contributed mightily to the rolls of the unemployed. Then the recession following 9/11 hit sending more companies into “restructurement.” It happened so frequently that even when times began to get better, tech companies still shed jobs on a regular basis. Again, to those of us who had been through it a few times, we never considered that the companies we worked for wouldn’t have layoffs. (There’s a post in there somewhere that I’ll have to tease out sometime. Something along the lines of technology companies and the poor managers who ran them using the Q4 layoff as a means to fill a budget gap.) You pack up your necessities, leave the company t-shirts, tchotchkes and awards (MARKETING EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH) in your cube and drive to the after-layoff party. It’s the way it’s done.

On this go-round, even though there are people from tech companies being kicked to the curb, for the first time in my career they are being joined at the curb by a lot of people with surprised looks on their faces. There are some layoff newbies who are coming from companies and departments that have been relatively untouched in past cycles; people who seemed to think that they were untouchable.

To those poor folks I say this: Welcome!

Welcome to the world of the newly unemployed. You’ll have a couple of weeks of telling everyone you’re fine and that you’re actually glad to have been let go. It was a good thing, you’ll say. The company was on its way out, you’ll contend. Then you’ll tell yourself how glad you are that you were let go while there was still some money for a package. Then you’ll begin the process of rewriting your resume a couple hundred times trying to make the last few years of your life sound like you were curing cancer. (“Hmmm….Did I ‘interface’ or ‘liaise’ with the project budget operating unit? And was I ‘crucial’ or ‘imperative’ to the success of the Q4 Logistical Re-engineering Process?”) Oh, and just wait until you see the typo you missed before you sent it out to 200 prospective employers. Sometime after the third or fourth week you’ll discover that one of your cable channels in the upper 150’s (Is there an 80’s Channel?) runs Magnum P.I. marathons on Thursdays. At that point, you’re nearing the bottom.

But don’t worry…

Just like that “friendly” break-up you once had after college that sent you into a tailspin where you gained 25 pounds and became addicted to the original Duke Nukem, you will survive. After all, if nothing else there’s still 75% of the stimulus package still waiting to be spent putting you to work on our nation’s infrastructure.

Good luck, my friend!

I wrote the following post after a particularly frustrating conversation with a fellow co-worker who had recently moved into the marketing department from an HR/training role. She was pretty certain that she knew more about marketing than anyone in the marketing department and wasn’t shy about telling us. When asked to provide some justification for her wisdom she made some mention of metrics that smelled a little fishy. It got me thinking about how often the topic of metrics comes up when I speak with other marketing people, especially the hardened ones who have been through it all.

There are a lot of people in “marketing.” There are also a lot of those people who have never once been held accountable for the failure of their ideas because they are “creatives” of some kind. That usually means they are designers or copywriters by training who have ascended to some leadership or management role. They have kitschy stuff in their offices, framed samples of their “graphic artwork” and a lexicon of “brand” words that sound vaguely important and/or meaningful. Lucky for them, they have usually been far upstream from the actual effort of getting a project off the ground on time and on budget. You know: work. Work requires adherence to certain fundamental rules, like “Don’t spend more than your budget” or “Don’t miss a deadline.” Of course, those rules are more difficult to follow when the people far upstream from the delivery, i.e. creatives, have wasted time and/or money at the beginning of a project. That puts the project managers in the bind of making things work by any means necessary.

The punchline is that project managers must show much more creativity in getting a job done than any creative person did in designing a piece that adheres rigidly to a brand architecture they probably didn’t design in the first place. (“Let’s put the corporate logo IN REVERSE TYPE! Wow!”) Sadly, such creative folk ascend to leadership roles specifically because they never have the stink of failure on them. This isn’t because they and their ideas have never failed, it’s because they are removed from the actual results of their ideas. That lot falls to the operations person trying to figure out how to get the logo made completely out of chocolate and mailed First Class…in August. When promotions are decided, management has a choice between the person who “thought outside the box” and designed the chocolate logo campaign or the operations person who failed to execute. Guess who wins.

Eventually, once those creative types do become senior management, some pesky person from Finance will ask them how they measure the success or failure of a project. That’s where they show their true creativity: They come up with something like the China Syndrome, i.e. they make it up.

I should note that I’m borrowing the phrase “China Syndrome” in this particular usage from a co-worker who told me that was the name for this particular phenomenon at IBM. It was a good name, so I’m lifting it from him. (Thanks, Aaron. There will be no remuneration.) I should also mention this has nothing to do with that terrible movie with Michael Douglas from the late ‘70′s that was instrumental in ending clean, safe nuclear power in the US. But that’s another post.

The China Syndrome is when some bright light in a marketing or sales organization looks at the total universe of potential customers and says “All we have to do is get 1% of that universe and we’ll (fill in the blank),” where the blank can be “make lots of money” or “see huge returns” or “get promoted.” It doesn’t matter what the goal is, what matters is that the universe is very large and the percentage needed is very small. That makes the goal seem so very easy to achieve. For instance, if you can capture just 1% of everyone in China, you’d have 1% of a billion people. That’s 10 million customers! (Thus, the name.) I believe that it in logic this is called a hasty generalization. (I’m no logician, so someone correct me if that is incorrect.)

This is what oftentimes passes for “metrics” or “marketing analysis.” It’s even explained away sometimes as a “back of the envelope” calculation. (I’ve never actually seen that envelope.) Unfortunately, that type of rough calculation is enough to keep a project running long enough for people to become invested in it. At that point, hopes of killing the project, even if it’s a really bad idea, become slim. It can be done, but it takes a strong person to stand tall as the snowball comes rolling inexorably downhill.

I have learned the hard way that I should be suspicious anytime someone uses a phrase like “only” in relation to a number I must achieve. I have also learned that whenever someone does a “back of the envelope” calculation, the math never shows the project is a big waste of time and money. Funny how that works.

I came across the Buttered Cat Paradox while doing some browsing on Wikipedia about the terminal velocity of cats.

I’m not making that up either. I really did need to know the terminal velocity of a cat. In order to make some bigger point about test designs and irrelevant statistics I was going to include an anecdote about a study that I read 20+ years ago about the survival rate of cats falling out of high-rises in New York. Mentioned in that article, and remembered by me two decades later, was that the terminal velocity of a cat is 60 mph. Heaven knows why or how I remember that fact lo these many years. I was concerned I had misremembered so was searching Wikipedia to verify that fact. Turns out it’s true. I also found information on the study itself.

The crux of the study was that cats falling from higher than around five stories seemed to have a higher survival rate than cats falling from lower floors as judged by 132 cats brought into veterinarian hospitals. The theory posited by the study was that once a cat hits terminal velocity, which requires five stories or so to achieve, it spreads out, relaxes and take the impact on its feet, thus minimizing, uh, cat-astrophic results. (groan) The obvious flaw in the research, of course, is that the cats used in the study were brought into animal hospitals. No one brings dead cats into animal hospitals, so those that perished from great heights likely never made it into the sample.

What does this have to do with buttered cats? The Righting Reflex. That’s the reflex cats have to always land on their feet, something I’ve always found to be pretty cool. According to the buttered cat paradox, the other thing that always seems to land the same way every time is buttered toast, i.e. it always lands buttered side down. The buttered cat paradox says that if you put a piece of buttered toast on a cats back, with the buttered side “out,” when the cat goes to right itself, the attractive force of the buttered toast will rotate it towards its back. This, in turn, will cause the cat to try to right itself again, and so on and on. Eventually, it is suspected that the cat and toast will end up in some kind of suspended animation, dangling in the air when the two forces reach equilibrium. (See comic left. It’s from Greg Williams, who does “WikiWorld.”)

In that little thought experiment is a perfect metaphor for much that takes place in marketing departments all over the tech world. It’s called “thinking outside the box,” or some such, and it leads to really terrible ideas parading as originality. Just combine a couple of features, some bells and whistles, and you can solve problems that weren’t even known to exist before the previous release or product. Mind you, it doesn’t matter that the bells and whistles were never meant to work together, or that the problem is more than a problem and more like a total failure, just pat yourself on the back for thinking “outside the box.”

Example: At one company I worked for, a bundled plan for service was slapped together to head off some customer attrition. It was thought to be a brilliant and bold strategic move, connecting two disparate needs and increasing customer “stickiness.” It turned out that for every customer saved to a longer contract, the company actually lost money. It would have been better to have let the customer churn. Ooops.

Lesson: Crazy ideas that succeed make great anecdotes, but most of the time they’re just crazy.