A forum for Hawaii's
business community to discuss
current events and issues
» Respect brings productivity » Old-fashioned values still work » Ways to cut the spam » Building toys for girls
BACK TO TOP |
DAVE SWANN / DSWANN @STARBULLETIN.COM
A human plight
Trusting and respecting employees will
help your company be productive, but
you're not supposed to look at it that way
MANAGEMENT theorists have been studying human motivation for decades. The hope was that managers could draw practical conclusions from this research to enable them to 'better motivate' employees as a steppingstone to improved productivity, morale and satisfaction.
As a result of these efforts, most of today's progressive managers are familiar with such fundamental theories as Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" and Frederick Hertzberg's "Two Factor Theory of Hygiene Versus Motivation," to name two of the more popular ones. While the existing theories vary in some ways, their underlying premise is the same: by treating people well, organizations would, in turn, do well.
However, when a recent study by The Herman Group of Greensboro, N.C., indicates that "30 percent to 40 percent of the working population is unhappy in their jobs to the extent they have 'checked out mentally and emotionally,'" we must step back and ask ourselves why. The simple explanation is that with everyone being asked to do more with less in the face of today's many workforce reductions, our theories of human motivation need to be revisited and revised. The problem, in my view, lies not with our theories. Human nature, fortunately, does not shift with the whims of the machinations of the Dow Jones.
No, the problem is more basic. It has to do with our deeply felt beliefs about why it is important to treat people well. It has to do, as the following story will attest, with the reasons behind our efforts to treat people well in the first place. Our motives for efforts at motivating.
While at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology I was fortunate to have had Douglas McGregor, the father of the "Theory X versus Theory Y" of human motivation, as a colleague. During a one of the skull sessions Doug held periodically with younger faculty members, he talked of a double bind he felt in his own professional career. In order to get the attention of the CEOs with whom he consulted, in order to motivate them to treat their people well, he would cite the many research studies he and others had conducted linking these efforts to reduced turnover, increased morale and -- under certain circumstances -- increased productivity. In other words, he (and virtually everyone else like him) relied on hard logic and extrinsic linkages to make his point: treat your people well and your organization will do well
"So what's the point?" you wonder. The problem, as he admitted with considerable embarrassment and hesitancy, was that -- in his heart -- he believed that the real reason to treat people well was intrinsic. In other words, the reason why you should empower your people by treating them with respect and trust (all the "soft stuff" our theories remind us about) is because they are human beings. And that is how human beings deserve to be treated. For their intrinsic, not extrinsic worth. Period.
As a result of doing so, and if you had faith -- an unwavering belief that you were doing the right thing -- more often than not, you (the organization) will be rewarded.
When the going gets tough, people who are unconditionally cared for in this way will put out the extra effort to care in return. Why will they do their best? Because, as "Theory Y" so clearly laid out, it is their in their human nature to do so.
However, as long as our primary motivation for seeking new ways to motivate employees is for extrinsic reasons -- to gain control of them -- the best we can hope for is that such efforts will capture their minds and bodies. In order to deal with the 30 percent to 40 percent of our workforce that has checked out mentally and emotionally, we need to look for new ways to exhibit an intrinsic caring for one another.
We must capture an employee's heart and soul, the very creativity and innovation we need to survive and grow in today's competitive turbulent business environment.
Irwin Rubin is a Honolulu-based author and president of Temenos Inc., which specializes in executive leadership development and behavioral coaching, communication skill building training, and large system culture change. His column appears twice a month in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Send questions and column suggestions to temenos@lava.net or visit temenosinc.com.
BACK TO TOP |
TIMELESS TRUTHS
Avoid past mistakes
by sticking with
old-fashioned values
I love reading biographies because as I read, I can evaluate other people's experiences and self reflect at the same time. I can try to avoid mistakes that others have made over their lifetime. I don't have to reinvent the wheel and I can try to learn from others' life experiences, good or bad. The same thing applies to business.
There seems to be a trend in hearing and reading about famous people's lives these days, I'll call it the "Pollyanna Cycle." Countless people who are interviewed for biographies recall their glory days when they were young and had mentors who taught them about "old-fashioned" values.
Generation after generation, living up to these values actually made them famous and successful beyond anyone's comprehension! Unfortunately, as these people started to grow up and wanted to realize their independence, they brushed off these values and went for the fads, became followers of the pop culture, or sophisticatedly poo-pooed these virtues. Over the years, many of these people's lives became obscure, confusing and disappointing to themselves and to their followers.
Fortunately, these people began to realize that what had made them so happy and successful in the past was missing in their lives; and it became their quest to try to go back in time, before it was too late, to recapture the happiness and stability they had started out with in their youth. Ashamed of the ways they had lived out their lives, they wanted people to remember them as they used to be and to erase the memories of those "experimental" times. Yet, the cycle seems to keep repeating, as generation after generation we continue to hear about young people who want to shed their "goody-goody two shoes" image and enter the exciting and scandalous world of fame and fortune.
Common sense suggests that a person and a business can be successful and have a greater advantage in the long-run if old-fashioned values are lived by and remain as their foundation. Values -- such as patience, perseverance, discipline, attention, honesty, courtesy and respect -- will always increase pride, provide motivation and get you places.
The lessons I have learned from hearing and reading famous people's biographies always come back to: 1) Be who you are, 2) Don't give up your destiny to outside controlling forces, 3) Work hard at what you do best, 4) Always be true to your core values. A business that practices these lessons will be a winner in multiple respects.
Perhaps the greatest win of all is that maintaining a steadfast course will attract others' attention and teach a new generation of business people these values without having to reinvent the wheel.
Susan Fox-Wolfgramm is a professor of management at Hawaii Pacific University. She can be reached at sfoxwolf@campus.hpu.edu.
BACK TO TOP |
Put your e-mail box
on a diet, cut the spamI don't condone violence, but mention the word spam and you're asking for trouble. Obviously, it's not Spam musubi that bothers me, but the garbage that clogs your e-mail box with ads for Viagra, porn, diet pills, Nigerian get- rich-quick schemes and medications guaranteed to enhance the size of body parts.
I'm an expert on spam, primarily because I used to get more than 400 spam messages a day. No, I don't work with the purported Nigerians, rather, in the early days of the Internet, I made a crucial error in putting my e-mail address into the Internic, which is the main registry for domain names.
And, I've never been bashful about putting my address out there since, as evidenced at the bottom of this column.
Spam is a sort of moving target that has spawned an endless battle between purveyors of junk mail and a growing antispam industry that is forever creating countermeasures to keep it out of your face. Sad to say, the good guys are not winning this war. Perhaps an indication of where things are going is a July 28, 2003, readers survey from InfoWorld that concluded that the "biggest technology hype" was antispam software.
I don't quite agree with that poll, but there's no question the antispam market is filled with products that are far from perfect. There are, however, many solutions that are both affordable and effective.
If you only have a single PC to protect, there are many decent antispam programs available, such as Spam Killer from McAfee. It costs about $40 and allows you to set up your own filters, which keep your friends in and the junk out. It's a bit time-consuming because every day you have to filter out new junk, but it does eliminate most of the garbage.
Remember, no matter how hard you try, some spam will evade your filters.
A new antispam technology, named challenge-response, creates a "white list" that opposes machine-generated spam by forcing correspondents to prove they exist. Thus, if someone mails you who is not on the white list, the software will respond with a message that asks the sender to type a number or word on a screen or answer a question to prove that they are flesh and blood. It's annoying sometimes to deal with these responses and, moreover, not always in your best interest. For example if you order a book from Amazon, you're going to get automated responses from a machine. If you use this type of antispam software, you'll be blocked from getting those messages.
Mailfrontier Matador (www.mailfrontier.com) is an example of a company that utilizes this type of technology, but allows you to turn the challenge- response system off. It also employs other methods to block junk and has been favorably reviewed in the trade press. At $30 it's a good deal.
Cloudmark Spamnet (www.cloudmark.com) has also gotten good reviews in computer magazines. Its technology is called "community based." It uses the power of public opinion (its end users) to decide what's junk and keeps a database so that if one person votes against a spammer, everyone benefits from it. Cost is $4 a month.
For businesses small or large, I recommend going with a managed service. Several companies provide such services, including Front Bridge (sold locally by Sprint as Sprint Email Protection Service), Postini, and Brightmail. Basically, these services get your mail before you do, check if it's spam (or virus-laden), and forward anything to you that it thinks is OK. Costs range from $2 to $4 a month for each mailbox.
We use services such as this for our in-house needs as well as our clients', and they are actually pretty impressive. In the few months we've used our service, my spam has gone from more than 400 a day to fewer than 10.
The bane of spam-filtering services is that sometimes they grab legitimate mail and treat it as spam. The better services will allow you to review all your mail it thinks is spam, to look for these "false positives."
And of course, the best services don't have any false positives.
Several local companies have gotten into the spam-killing business. One is the Honolulu-based ISP, LavaNet, which provides "Spammo" (www.lava.net/support/utilities/spammo/), a free utility, that identifies, flags and/or deletes probable spam from any LavaNet account.
It's also free to LavaNet subscribers. Colleagues who have used it report that it works well. So well, in fact, that Lava has spun off a new company, Tiki Technologies (www.tikitechnologies.com), to market Spammo to businesses as a service, appliance or combination of the two.
Peter Kay, Hawaii's own serial tech entrepreneur, has also launched an antispam product called TitanKey (www.titankey.com/), which is a variation on the challenge-response theme. According to his Web site, Kay states his solution is the only one that offers mailbox owners less spam the longer they use a particular e-mail address. According to an article from the Web site ISP Planet, he has created a proprietary technology that he maintains is superior to anything else on the market. I can't vouch for this, but give him credit for his bravado. Currently it's only available for ISPs.
John Agsalud is the president of ISDI, a Honolulu-based IT outsourcing, systems integration, and consulting firm. He can be reached at jagsalud@isdi-hi.com or by calling 944 8742.
BACK TO TOP |
SHOPPING SAVVY
Inside Santa’s workshop:
Building sets for girls
If a little girl can learn to build her own toy castle, perhaps she will grow up to be an architect or an engineer -- or someone else who relies on herself, instead of Prince Charming.
That's the idea behind the Disney Princess Palace, a child-sized playset of sturdy plastic blocks for girls ages 3 to 7, and other building toys for girls from Mega Bloks Inc., a toy manufacturer in Montreal, Quebec. The toys, made under a license from The Walt Disney Co., feature such beloved Disney princess characters as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Ariel the Little Mermaid.
"When I was a little girl, I wanted construction toys and there weren't any," said Lisa Joyce, a Disney Princess product designer.
The Disney Princess Palace snagged an "All Stars" award from Toy Wishes magazine -- a first for Mega Bloks -- when the magazine unveiled its Christmas 2003 toy picks at a news conference in New York. The pink and lavender palace should be in stock at Toys 'R Us by Nov. 1 and at other toy retailers, including KB Toys, Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart, around the same time.
"The one thing we've definitely heard is there are girls who want to build and do things," said Kelly Cullen, spokeswoman for the Toys 'R Us Times Square store in New York. "But most of those toys are geared to boys. It's great to have building toys where girls can use their imaginations."
Building toys accounted for $765 million in retail sales in 2002, according to NPD Group, a New York-based market research company. Total toy sales in 2002 were about $21 billion, with 2003 sales forecast at steady to up 1 percent to 2 percent.
Prescription from Dr. Toy
Stevanne Auerbach, an author with a doctorate in child development who evaluates toys on her Dr. Toy Web site, said building sets for girls can help them learn math, eye-hand coordination and other skills."They're building their mental capacities when they build," Auerbach said. "They're learning how to count, how to stack things. They can learn how to space things."
That's important since national educational tests have shown girls sometimes lag behind boys in their ability to judge spatial relationships.
Memory skills also get a workout with building sets, said Susan Spiegel, director of marketing communications for Mega Bloks.
At a suggested retail price of $99, the Disney Princess Palace is among the more expensive items to get the nod from toy experts for this holiday shopping season. But Spiegel said parents and other shoppers will get a lot for their money.
"It's the versatility of the big block" that gives this toy staying power, in her opinion. "It's a totally unique play environment that you can build and build again.
If space is an issue, the Disney Princess Palace can be set up flat against a wall to give a fairy tale backdrop to a little girl's room. It stores flat under the bed or in a closet.
The company's Mega Play Castle also rated an "All Stars" award from Toy Wishes magazine for holiday 2003 shopping. (Spotted at KBToys.com at just under $56.)
Among other Toy Wishes "All Stars" picks: Mattel's Ello Jungala, which lets girls build a jungle world, for $34.99; and Supermag, a 50-piece set of magnetic rods and balls that can be used to build the Eiffel Tower or other structures, from Plastwood's Geomag line, for $20.
Pretty in pink
The Mega Bloks Girlfriends building sets, priced from $6.99 to $21.99, already are a hit in the KB Toys store at Ala Moana Center, said a sales person.Karen Isono, administrative manager of Education Works in Honolulu, said her store's holiday offerings will include jewelry-making sets, toy organizers, a picnic table and a Clifford the Big Red Dog table and chair set, but no building sets strictly for girls.
Mega Bloks won't be at Education Works this year.
"We had it last year and we had to sell it at a loss," Isono said. "Because it's huge, the freight is so high. We can't compete with Wal-Mart on price."
Jan Paschal is a New York-based shopping columnist. She can be reached via e-mail at: jansshopsavvy@aol.com.
To participate in the Think Inc. discussion, e-mail your comments to business@starbulletin.com; fax them to 529-4750; or mail them to Think Inc., Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 7 Waterfront Plaza, Suite 210, 500 Ala Moana, Honolulu, Hawaii 96813. Anonymous submissions will be discarded.
