I don’t like Mondays…

I was discouraged before I arrived at the empty tracks at King’s Cross station.  I’d been going flat out for a week since returning from the US: two teaching days to finish, investor meetings in London, calls on several projects backed up, the end-of-month bookkeeping waiting for attention.

I put my lists together and pounded through the tasks one by one, the momentum of crossing things off building an illusion of getting things done. By yesterday I thought I was well on top of things.

In reality, I was minimally prepared and pretty well worn though when I reached London for the day’s meetings.  The Monday morning messages were the first sign: email is always always sticky, in that answers tend to generate comments rather than closure, but this time there were more questions and issues than usual.  A routine trip to St. John’s to pick up the mail got tangled in cross-town traffic that held me to less than a block’s progress in half an hour.  The trains ran slow; the news paper had more bad news about Afghanistan where my son is deployed.  I know he’s okay, but it’s a worry.

The Board meeting probably lasted twice as long as it needed to, and we missed talking about several key issues.  In hindsight, I didn’t have my proposals framed up or my arguments rehearsed, so we wandered around some key issues instead of deciding them.  On the Tube, thinking back, there’s really a pattern forming: I haven’t been focused, crisp, prepared, on top of the best game that I know how to play.  I was just sliding by: getting things done, but not done well.

There’s a ripple to this.  Tasks have to be redone, supplemental questions need answering.  The interpersonal dynamics shift, confidence ebbs.  I was reading an article last week by Megan Fitzgerald about how lack of confidence shows through to others:

• Being hesitant to speak up, share your thoughts, or advocate a position.
• Lowering the tone or volume of your voice.
• Qualifying or downplaying the importance of what you are saying.
• Using less powerful and clear words.
• Failing to convey all of the value created or possible.
• Burying  distinctive qualities behind generic or neutral qualifications.
• Using less thoughtful and service-oriented language.

It was a menu of my Monday.

There’s not much to do except to dust off and get back into the scrum.  A bit of sleep, a time-out to review, a quick affirmation of the many things that are still going right. 

I can (still) do this.

Layers of Leadership

“Dave, a Board meeting is not a milestone review,” the Chairman gently chided. “They are there to advise, not to judge.”

We walked through the consequences together: a higher-level agenda, more focus on financial performance, less detail on development, questions phrased as propositions, a single-page operating summary. 

Yet another way of doing business.

The seamless hierarchy of business organizations suggests that every manager understands the detail of what people beneath them are doing.  It implies that managers at all levels differ in the quality, but not the type, of their reviews and presentations.

Employees earn promotions based on performance: applying knowledge, leveraging contacts, and gaining experience that qualifies them for the next level of leadership.  A research manager will have successfully innovated; a research director will have completed several projects.  At each level, new skills (budgeting, market analysis) and processes (financial reporting, disciplinary rules) are added.

And so, there was a straight progression from scientist to director.  Department meetings were large versions of project meetings.  And everyone there shared a vocabulary and design model; everyone understood the company’s expectations and the customer’s needs.

We told similar stories. We lived by stage-gate reviews.

And it defined how I did my job: I knew the format of the weekly milestones list and how to frame a goal.  There was a particular report outline and presentation template that spoke to my engineering audience, much like scientific papers and conferences fit diverse information to an expected style.

This changed a lot when I became a general manager at Vitatron.  The people around the table came from different departments, with different processes and vocabularies.  I viewed the group as a confederation of specialists: I was the science guy who could help others understand what was going on in the literature and the design teams.

But what they wanted was confidence that someone understood and had control of the science. I learned to frame the details rather than to present them, touching on aspects familiar to the diverse perspectives around the table, and addressing the risks that they worried about.

How did my activities fit into their processes, what would I need from them?  How did it fit the portfolio budget, how did it support the strategy, , when would I be in the market?

It’s qualitatively different from engineering leadership meetings, where Matlab graphs were the norm.

And, again, at the Board level.  They approve goals, pose questions, leave instructions for the next meeting.   My response would be to give a detailed rundown on what had been accomplished, performance against expectation. A milestone review.

But, again, there is a qualitative difference.  These folks have a very distant and abstract view of the business, not an operating perspective.  They want to know that the leadership has it’s priorities straight, that I have a plan, that I am on top of problems and events, and that I am making money.  Our monthly agenda runs through those aspects, more reassurance than judgment.

Detail only matters when matters become public or affect investors.  The press release and fundraising were disproportionately discussed; operational status matters much less than financial ones. 

There’s a temptation to say “Look, this is important; we worked hard on his, look what we did”, naked approval-seeking <laugh>.

But I’m learning to create and stick to brief updates and Q&A.  They willingly engage if I have a question, but I’m also learning what questions they can be most helpful with.

It’s not that milestone reviews aren’t important, or that experience doesn’t matter.  It’s that audiences are more diverse at the top of the hierarchy than lower down.  So Board presentations are not just more polished department presentations.  And there are still meetings that will want technical detail (the science review) and operational status (my CFO and I).

The trick is not in being able to hold more polished conversations, but in being adept at leading more types of conversations.

Expats and the job market

A recruiter called me a few weeks ago: a major new diagnostic testing facility was going to open in Maastricht in the next year and they are looking for an experienced leader.  Would I know anyone qualified for the position?

The facility will have state-of-the-art instruments, found nowhere else in Europe.  It will be run as an academic / government / commercial partnership, bringing together sharp minds and leading ideas with commercial links and technology transfer opportunities.  And it will be pan-European, with an expectation of having a Continental flow of patients and research, partnerships and spin-outs.

Intriguing stuff: I applied and passed the screening interview.  To my credit, I’d worked in business startups, commercial-academic collaborations, organizing teams, and technology transfer.  However, I was new to this particular field, had managed products instead of services, and was an expat applying for a high-profile position in a government sponsored venture.  I did my homework, reviewing business plans, visiting similar facilities, and planning a strategy for branding, supply chain, pricing, and costs that would establish a solid operating footing and a growing customer reputation within one year.

And, in those aspects, the formal interview (2 hours long) went well.  As with all Dutch negotiations, the folks were well prepared, had practical and pointed questions, and genuinely listened and dug beneath my answers.  Well and good: after four years I’m comfortable with that style and was ready with references and anecdotes from working with scientists in for-profit Dutch settings.

The hardest questions were about how I might handle press interviews and investor meetings as an expat and without Dutch fluency. I can see the worry: in times of economic stress and public debate about immigration, integration, and cultural homogeneity, a non-Dutch CEO could be controversial.

And, while praising my preparation, plans, and style in the interview, they did chose someone else.

I hate to lose, but I don’t feel too bad about this one: I would have made the same choice.

But it does set me to thinking about how expat applicants compete in the professional job market.  It seems like there are two alternatives:

One is to go toe-to-toe for professional positions against qualified Dutch applicants.  In that case, you do have to be both ordinary and exceptional.  Ordinary in the sense that I would have an established local presence, know the language fluently, and integrate transparently into both style and culture.  Exceptional in the sense that I would still need to bring an international reputation, a network of established connections, a history of high-profile success.

The alternative is to serve international markets, more in the style of a trader and facilitator, conducting business from US perspective within a Dutch base.  In this role, I am ordinary in being comfortable in either setting, exceptional in having dual sets of local knowledge and experience, parallel access to resources and network.

I’m probably more effective in the latter role, building on my expat status rather than suppressing it.  It’s an important distinction from a practical sense to: from skill-building to personal branding, the choice drives many decisions that build into business and personal success.

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Sculptures and paintings by Lucia Nogueira, on exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.  Photos of Untitled, 1989, metal, glass lenses, gauze, which was my favorite, for the way the work changes as the viewer moves through the space around it.

The McKinsey Way

Newsweek published an article this week reviewing recent predictions made by the management consulting firm McKinsey and Company.  McKinsey advises many large corporations, companies, and institutions, and their influence has dominated strategic management consulting for much of it’s 75 year history.

Newsweek tallied the accuracy of predictions made in their 2007 State of the World report, The New Power Brokers, and cites how, in almost every instance, they got the future dead wrong.  Unfortunately, their updated 2009 report is likely to have the same accuracy because they commit the same errors: assuming that trends of the recent past predict events in the near future.

Why should we care?

McKinsey’s theories and data are enormously influential across upper management.  I have seen a groupthink tendency across Forbes 500 executives and aspirants: they follow a uniform set of  journals, conferences, books, and gurus.  Advice from McKinsey carries disproportionate weight in this circle, heavily influencing thinking and behaviors: if McKinsey is wrong, there’s a greater chance that C-level thought and actions will be wrong.

McKinsey is also called to help ratify decisions as well as to create them.  A CEO who wants to implement change will use McKinsey to give objectivity for their strategy and legitimacy to their plan.  McKinsey’s analysts will, in turn, draw on the firm’s data and predictions to support their recommendations.  A poorly rationalized decision, undermines the company’s leadership, diminishing trust and motivation among employees.

I interviewed with McKinsey several years ago, where I was honestly told that they wanted to hire associates with no experience, people who could simply be trained in the firm’s practices.  They were seeking (and this is a direct quote) “the men you want to be and the women you want to be with” as figureheads to work with their clients.   I was amazed by the shallowness of the pitch and the arrogant assertion  that real-world experience only got in the way of their jobs.

In light of my personal experience, I am not surprised that they got things wrong, yet they remain highly respected and widely listened to.  And, as we think about how to (re) build strong companies, this is a problem.

It seems to me that companies must commit to seeking out genuine expertise and experience when they look for advice.  They need to critically assess the performance of their gurus based on evidence rather than on cachet.

They need to find a different Way.

Thrills and Chills

The Vrijthof Square has lit up with a summer carnival just a bit ahead of the actual arrival of summer.  The Speed Tumbler looks absolutely breathtaking: I’ve been watching the arm spin above the rooftops each evening and working up the fortitude to try it.  The roller coaster was good; the haunted house was more scary on the outside than the inside.  Still, it was good fun ahead of the warm weather (and, best of all, Oliebollen made an unseasonable return!)

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  While the fair had the chills, the thrills were all in Amsterdam today.  With eventual severance from my parent company seeming increasingly likely, I’m hardening my Plan B life alternatives.  This involves two tasks: creating a new corporation (a BV, or Besloten Vennootschap in Dutch, the only form of company that preserves my 30% Tax Exclusion), and making a DAFT application (Dutch American Friendship Treaty) to reside as an American entrepreneur in the Netherlands.

The final articles of incorporation were ready for review today at Finsen's, and I signed off on the application papers for the Notary to process.  So far it’s all going according to script, and I highly recommend the accountancy for shepherding expats like me through the process. 

Preliminary incorporation should be granted in about two weeks , creating a skeleton (B.V. i.0.) that allows me to fund the business and finalize it.  Typical details of the process are summarized here. Interestingly, the papers are moving through more quickly than usual since the real estate market in Amsterdam has slowed, giving the notary more time for processing business applications.

It’s potentially a big, bold step into a very different future, and I am alternately excited and frightened as this moves forward.

 There’s going to be lots to talk about…I’ll probably be just as spun as I was on the Vrijthof rides

Keeping up with the literature

I’ve never been good at keeping up with Literature.

In times past, the department librarian would circulate journals with a list of names stapled to the cover. Researchers were asked to scan the table of contents, read the articles of interest, and pass it on within a day.  Within a week, the publication would get back to the library.  In reality, it would hang up in a pile on someone’s desk, out of reach.

Scheduling a half day to go to the library, browsing the shelves or pulling a stack of journals, is similarly impractical: time at work is too fragmented and scheduled, and time at home requires taking away the journals overnight (our librarian was always checking me for filched issues).

The Internet has changed a lot of that: we have broad on-line archives stretching back many years and fully indexed by topic, keyword.

About once a week I need to search a clinical topic in depth: I like using Stanford’s Highwire interface over Pubmed.  Their links to cited and citing literature, and to related literature and reviews, are marvelous. I can complete a substantial research project in an afternoon, building a .pdf archive for the project and printing a few key papers to read on the exercise bike.

It’s still hard to browse an e-journal, though.  Circulation comes by email, JAMA and the New England Journal offer podcast updates, but neither has access to full-content. To get an article, I have to log into the company server, route through many security screens, then drill down to specific issue and article.

I do like using RSS feeds to aggregate content across sources. InCirculation  feeds about 30 summaries each day, and Medworm also looks promising.  I collect new literature into Netvibes, along with blog updates and news feeds, and dispatch it all over coffee in about 30 minutes.

Unfortunately, I’ve found nothing in the technical or business literature that offers the same broad, deep, cross-linked access capability.  I’ve tried subscribing to Wired (too much) or IEEExplore (no detail) for technology, or EBSCO (no access) for management information, but it’s really unsatisfactory.

Worse, I’ve found that I really have to play with technology to learn about it.  Today I saw a reference to Curl in a tweet from Adam Curry; it’s a new language for creating rich internet applications developed at MIT.  Wikipedia gave me a bit of background and a couple of key links, but I feel like I’ll need to invest days to really understand what it’s all about.

All of which begs a recurring question: What matters to me as a manager?  My role is

1. Support management with informed strategic insights and accurate project estimates,
2. Supply cross-functional teams with technology details and clinical data for planning and resourcing, and
3. Lead and evaluate the work of scientists and engineers in my group, evaluating their proposals and intermediate results and coaching them on alternative approaches and career development.

So, in my role (circa 1985, right) I need to be top-line familiar with the latest medical news and research findings, and can increasingly do that from feeds and searches for clinical literature.

But it’s the details of technologic innovations where I worry: I can apply a process to assessing the quality of results, and an intuition to whether an engineer is getting lost.  But I can’t help redirect them unless I’m prepared to invest a lot more time in learning, or trust outside experts with the task.

The fact in the fiction

I was talking with a friend last night who is thinking of leaving his day job to start a new business.

Yes, he’s thinking about it even in this economic climate.

His rationale is that while the BigCo’s cut costs, programs, and people, innovation will spin out towards the industrial periphery.  We’re in for a few years of small shops and virtual teams until the industry starts to condense back towards the majors again.

Now, he reasons. is a good time to build evidence, value and position for the future: late winter before the economic spring.

His problem is, he can’t say ‘Look, I want to go do what you won’t.”  Instead, his attorney is recommending a vague white-ish lie: “I want to spend more time with my family / health / grandkids / interests /  traveling / giving back.” (Slate recently reviewed this time-honored strategy)  It’s a safe gambit: BigCo has a short memory and wavering focus.  Chances are that nobody will ever check up on how all that quality time is going.

Still, I think that there is more than a little truth in this.

First, if he really believes his own hype that he’s quitting his old job just so that he can show BigCo how things ought to be done, he’s doomed.   There had better be some leavening wisdom in his excuse just to help him keep his sanity.

Second, given a choice, who wouldn’t want to go pursue their own interests?

Why plunge straight back into the same less-fulfilling lifestyle, a combination of ‘do more with less’ work and evaporating benefits.  Like the post-9/11 period, I know that the downturn has stimulated talk among friends about proper work-life balance. Some have voluntarily cut their hours at work in response to management programs for payroll reduction, allowing them to put more emphasis on the lasting and fulfilling parts of their life.

I may only make another evening or two a week available for dinner with friends or life-drawing with charcoals. But, with spring blossoming across South Limburg, a goal of ‘taking more time for…” sounds like a good resolution nestling within my friend’s fiction.

Working across borders as an expatriate

I am an American expatriate working under a valid work permit in the Netherlands.  So here’s a simple question: can I work as an employee of a company in the UK?

No: Dutch work permits are not transferable outside of the Netherlands.

Now, under the same circumstances, I have a contractual relationship with a UK-based company (also, of necessity, approved by my current employer).  Is this work allowed?

The answer turns out to be much trickier, and I needed to consult a UK immigration attorney to sort it out.

So, today I wanted to share my experience to illustrate the potential complexity of this question.

Disclaimer:  I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  This is intended only as encouragement to engage legal advice before you begin any cross-border consulting as an expatriate.

As a business visitor, you must be careful not to enter into any professional or compensatory relationship where you might appear to be an employee of a UK company.  Additionally,

• You must be based abroad, with no intention of transferring your base to the UK even temporarily and you must have intention to leave the UK at the end of your visit.
• You must have funds to support yourself whilst in the UK and to pay for your outward journey from the UK
• You will not receive any salary from a UK source, although reasonable expenses to cover the cost of travel and subsistence can be paid from a UK company.
• You must not remain in the UK for a period longer than 6 months continuously, nor more than 6 months total in any 12-month period
• You must not be involved in selling goods or services directly to members of the public.

As a business visitor, you are allowed to perform a limited range of activities subject to certain conditions.  You must be careful not to create "product" for delivery in the UK while you are physically in the UK.  This may include preparing plans, analyses, presentations, or reports, not just physical product.  Activities which are specifically permitted include,

• Attending meetings or conferences
• Arranging deals or negotiating or signing contracts
• Undertaking fact finding missions
• Conducting site visits
• Speaking at conferences provided that the conference is organized on a not-for-profit basis and is a 'one-off'
• Attending board meetings in the UK -- a company director is an "office holder' of the company of which he is a director, and may receive a fee and expenses for attending a board meeting.

The consequences of violating the rules can be severe; the client company can be hit for hiring you as an illegal alien, and you can be fined for working without a permit and barred from entering the UK.

Organizing a presentation

It’s been a busy week for travel and presentations, first in the UK and now in the US.  When I was younger, it was hard for me to give public speeches.  My mind was on the audience, I was self conscious, I worried that I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say.  Clenched muscles, shaking hands, and quavering delivery was the sorry result: my best prop was a podium to clutch.

Over time, I learned to organize material while teaching community college, and I watched how my directors presented and connected with their audiences.  Business school focused on the pitch: how to capture and persuade an audience.

Today, I really look forward to talking with a group.  I never get butterflies; I keep a good pace and make better eye contact.  I still make mistakes, but (I hope) I’ve also gotten better at  learning from them.  And a lot of that success depends on the preparation work, the thinking and organizing that distinguishes timid talks  from engaging ones.

Broadly, I first think about whether I am lecturing or pitching.  A lecture is a journey from common ground to unfamiliar frontiers; I always identify where we start together and what (limited) new knowledge I want to leave them with.  In contrast, a pitch builds a more emotional case, still facts and data, but traveling from a shared problem to a consensual solution.

Then I set my subconscious to work. A talk on remote medical monitoring is really about how can a physician keep track of hundreds of patients scattered across a city.   I get associated insight everywhere: looking at Facebook, where I am keeping track of dozens of friends scattered across the country, or reading how computers at CERN distinguish significant events from meaningless ones.  I scribble it all into a notebook.

I storyboard my notes to define the talk, using big flip-chart pages to collate my notes, then cutting them up to arrange thoughts by progression or affinity.  It’s a mess, but reveals the major themes that I want to share.

Time constraints define the structure: A half-hour talk allows about 25 slides.  I take a blank sheet and segment out a storyline: 5 slides for the introduction, 6 each for three major topics…the storyboard migrates onto the storyline.  In formal lectures, I expand the storyline into an outline of lecture notes.

I simply transcribe these topics into slides to create my first draft,getting thoughts composed clearly and topics into the right order. Each slide forms a paragraph: a logical unit of thought flowing into the narrative ahead and behind.

Once the story is complete, I challenge myself to take a third of the material out, editing, focusing, tightening. There’s often too much background, or excess detail where the point isn’t being made. In the end, I want a strong narrative flow to carry both me and my audience.

Finally, I fix the visuals, adding  illustrations, ensuring that the font and headings are consistent, making the text blocks visually interesting. I like the Fast Fade transitions between slides, but rarely use animations except to introduce sequences of pictures.

And a  final review by a friend catches any last spelling errors and obscurities.

When my talk arrives, I own the topic. I’m excited about the ideas, the points are clear in my mind, so there’s no need to read from the slides and I can get engaged with the audience..

Disasters still happen: I included some borrowed slides in a talk this week and got lost trying to present them. There was nothing to do but declare a break, rip out all of the offending slides, and then make the top level points without any presentation materials. I kicked myself hard: I know better.

But when the session moderator cut my pitch on the fly yesterday, asking that I skip ahead to a particular topic of interest, I could adapt.  I knew my material: nod, Slide 24 please, and we were off without missing a beat.  That’s how I like to be able to do it.

Triangulating the glass ceiling

As I talk about my future career alternatives with friends and colleagues, the potential for a “glass ceiling” emerges repeatedly.  Am I aspiring to positions beyond my reach?  Will I be considered for positions where I’m qualified?

I’ve always been a positivist: believing that the ceiling is just the natural upper bound of a career’s trajectory, the limit of advancement defined by talent, time, and circumstance, unaided by fortune or ambition.

But it’s been an interesting conversation.  Some disagree with me, holding that there is an arbitrary limit for anyone that results from simple discrimination trumping hard work and merit.

What form might the glass ceiling take?

Princeton describes it as “an attitudinal or organizational bias that prevents women from advancing to leadership positions”.  To me, this seems archaic: I have worked comfortably with, and for, women throughout my career.  In my experience, people earn respect and advancement based on their competency, skills, and congeniality.  Still, it is very real to women I talk with, and it may be that I’ve missed it by working primarily in research and project teams in my career.

Others have generalized the term to include “situations where the advancement of a qualified person within the hierarchy of an organization is stopped at a lower level because of any form of discrimination”.  This one hits closer to home, because I can think of any number of highly qualified people who have been shuttled into the career ghettos.  Their ceiling lies at the public boundary: at the top of the hierarchy, leaders are chosen to reinforce the image that the company wants to project to customers, the media, and investors.  The ability to communicate clearly and to inspire confidence may be the only necessary qualities.  “House” need not apply.

Intriguingly, I also found this definition: “The glass ceiling is the seemingly unattainable 1st page ranking in a search engine, particularly for very competitive keywords. Sites and pages remain on the 1st page and are hard to displace because they are given really high rankings and have extremely high link popularity.”  Extrapolated, it suggests that those above the glass ceiling form a self-reinforcing club: those at the top accumulate perceptions and credibility that keep them at the top.  I suspect that there is a lot of truth in this.

All of these definition have the common quality that a person’s potential for advancement may be limited by bias and circumstance, rather than by drive and accomplishment.  It’s not the way I treat others nor how I think about my own opportunities.  But, as I seek my next position, I sometimes find myself wondering whether perceptions of age or disability, personality or nationality, might, in fact, limit my aspirations.

And, more to the point, how to recognize and counter it.

Photo credit: Judith Orr

Hodo-hodo zoku

The words literally translate from Japanese as “so-so folks”, and the Wall Street Journal says it’s the newest trend among salarymen.  They are workers who are refusing promotions, shunning civil-service exams, and forgoing raises in favor of slow careers.  “Not everybody needs to become a leader…Forget goals, and stay true to yourself”.

  In contrast to the young hodo-hodo, I’ve been a lifelong learner and striver.  But I wonder if there will come a time when I willingly make a transition to a slower career, or to none at all.

I thrive on the creative challenges of medical diagnostic innovation, the competitive sport of releasing products to customers, and the social rewards of seeing patient’s lives changed for the better.  I’ve always been ambitious about wanting to lead projects, programs, and businesses, and I’m fortunate that my career has opened those opportunities for me.

I am close to peers and colleagues who are finding themselves at  crossroads, where reorganizations have isolated their function, where bosses no longer count them as ‘high potential’, where the flow of new opportunities slows.  Some make a transition out of operations and development into positions where they network, mentor, or consult.  Others, faced with health or family problems, drop out all together.

Maybe this is an inevitable part of our evolution in life: at some point, we all ‘go hodo.

I do know that I haven’t reached that stage: I still have visions of needed products and drive to work with talented people.  I even still harbor desire to advance within the organization.

But I’m also know that I’m spending increasing amounts of time on complementary pursuits that matter to me.  I’m developing a Diagnostics course module that I’ll be teaching with others during  winter term at Cambridge.  I love the travel and photography that I’m doing.  I want more time to read books, draw charcoals, and practice Dutch.  I’d like to find ways to do more teaching and mentoring.

Scary: it’s starting to sound a bit like regret…

Earlier this week, I had an open evening in Lausanne, and I ended up drifting into the MIT OpenCourseware archive.  Silly, but I spent an hour watching a fascinating physics lecture on magnetism by Walter Lewin.  Three thoughts, on that evening:

• Don’t we live in a remarkable time, able to casually tap into these resources,
• I wish I had more time to watch the whole series,
• Walter Lewin never had a hodo-hodo moment.

  and, I suppose, neither will I.