May 23, 2007
Visiting the JCPenney Museum
On Monday I took the family to the JCPenney museum at the company’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. (Thanks to Watch it Made in America, my new favorite travel guide.)
I enjoyed walking through the beautiful corporate campus and seeing the growth of JCPenney from a single store in Wyoming to a national retailer with 1,000 stores. The kids would rather have gone back to Six Flags.
But I wanted them to meet – if only through a statue and some black and white film – one of my childhood business heroes. James Cash Penney is one of the people who inspired my love of business, and my belief that it is a force for good in the world.
Business gets a lot of bad press, much of it deserved. There are lots of greedy, selfish business people out there. But there are also business people like Penney, who are guided by the Golden Rule and whose businesses serve the public’s interest as well as their own.
Penney laid out his business ideas in 1913, and they are still great ideas today. Among them:
"2. To expect for the service we render a fair remuneration and not all the profit the traffic will bear."
"7. To test our every policy, method, and act in this wise: "Does it square with what is right and just?"
I want my business to do the same.
Posted by Bob Pritchett at 08:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 21, 2006
Interns
Two more interns started this week. I love interns.
My first real job was an internship at Microsoft which led to a full-time position. Once I left and started my own company I knew we needed interns as soon as possible. We hired two our second year, even though we could barely afford them. (We couldn’t fly them out. They came 2,000 miles on a bus. And brought their own computers.)
Identifying talent from a resume and interview is difficult. We use summer internships as a 12 week interview that helps us smoke out the winners in next year’s graduating class. This gives us a chance to make offers to the best candidates nine months before they hit the job market. We get in front of other potential employers, we know exactly who we’re hiring, and once they graduate our new employees already know their job, their co-workers, and the location of the restrooms.
We have hired 10 of the 35 interns we have had in software development, and all but one of our application developers started as an intern. Sometimes we don’t have an opening for a great intern, but we try to keep track of them. When a position does open up we know who to call, and we know what we’ll be getting with our new hire.
Internships are great for the company: even though only half of our intern work product turns out to be useful, interns still get a lot done. And we find out who we do and don’t want to hire full-time.
Internships are great for the intern: real world experience helps interns decide if they really are pursuing the right career, and if we are a company where they want to work. And they learn a lot.
Intern tips:
Offer passion a chance. Students without significant work experience often don’t have a compelling resume. An internship is a lower risk way to give a chance to someone whose passion for your business is high, even if their paperwork is weak.
Don’t segregate. Seat your interns in ask-a-question-out-loud distance of their full-time coworkers. Include them in meetings and planning sessions with the regular team.
Throw them in the deep end. Give interns real tasks, not secretarial drudge work. It’s worth a few disappointments to find out who can step up to the challenge.
Make it fun. Feed your interns well and take them on occasional field trips. Use them as an excuse to do something fun with the whole team.
If your business is growing, you need interns. Internships aren’t just an investment in a student; they are an investment in your business future.
Posted by Bob Pritchett at 05:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 05, 2006
Ignoring the job well done
An employee stopped by my office to tell me that Walter was worried I might be unhappy with him.
I was flabbergasted. Even a bit annoyed, I confess. "Why would he think that? Walter's doing a great job."
"Well, you haven't stopped by his desk in over a week."
"I haven't needed to. He's doing a great job!"
At the start of the project I was at Walter's desk at least once a day, making sure he understood the project and answering design questions. I'm pretty sure I was an encouraging presence: I was excited about each day's progress and complimentary about his work. In fact, I was so happy with how Walter was handling things that I stopped by less frequently. Knowing that Walter had it all under control, I gave my attention to other projects.
Walter didn't see my absence as a compliment, though, especially since it followed a period of lots of attention.
The analytical part of me thinks Walter is just too sensitive. In our company, if you're doing a bad job, you’re going to know it. We'll talk about it, fix it, or set you free to find a job you can do well. So being left alone means you’re doing a good job.
The undernourished feeling part of me knows that everybody needs to be encouraged. Everybody needs to hear "great job!" and they can never hear it enough.
I may be able to manage well with my analytical brain. But to lead well, I need to tap my feeling heart.
At least that is my analysis.
(Apologies for wasting time stating the obvious. I needed this reminder for myself, and posted it for the benefit of fellow under-encouraging leaders.)
Posted by Bob Pritchett at 05:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 23, 2006
Keeping things in the families
I started my business with an unrelated partner; my father, mother, and brother joined early on. And over the years that has been a pattern: we don't just hire people, we hire families. More than a quarter of our employees have a family member working here, too.
We have two quartets of mom-dad-sons. A dad-daughter pair. Three sisters. A dad-son-cousin triplet. And husband-wife pairs? Lots, both hired and "grown on-site".
People from the same family often share the same values and work ethic. Chances are, a great employee comes from a family of great employees. (And if not, the family knows it. I have been encouraged not to hire someone's relative, too.) Having so many family connections throughout the company also improves inter-department communications. We have a killer grapevine.
We try to avoid having family members in positions where they supervise each other, and there are some downsides: We have lost employees in pairs because of a family relocation. It can be awkward when we choose not to hire an employee-recommended relative.
Overall, though, the experience has been great. "Our corporate family" it is more than an empty phrase, and I like it that way.
Posted by Bob Pritchett at 04:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 12, 2006
Read for Cash
I want my employees thinking about the big picture, so every year I run a Read for Cash program and pay them to read business books. This year’s program ended on Monday and saw the largest participation yet, with nearly a third of our employees reading and reporting on at least one book.
The rules were simple:
- The book has to be approved by me.
- Payment will be made if a short (one paragraph to one page) book report is sent to the AllOffice email alias. It doesn't have to be brilliant and it won't be graded. It should show that you read it, tell us whether or not you found it useful, and whether or not you'd encourage others to read it.
- Payment will only be made for pages read in "whole book" units.
- Payment will be made at the rate of $0.15 per page using the last page number in the book. Maximum payout for one employee is $175.
In just over a month, 32 employees read 104 books on marketing, sales technique, business history, leadership, and customer service. The mini-book reports were great: the readers extracted the key points of the book and often included their own thoughts on how we could put to use what they had learned from the book. In an anonymous survey afterwards, participants rated the program 4.6 on a scale of 1-5.
Participants were evenly split on their primary motivation -- learning or cash -- but 96% said they read books they would not otherwise have read, and 100% said that what they learned was applicable to their job or personal life.
Posted by Bob Pritchett at 04:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 05, 2005
Save your packing peanuts
When my new crystal bowl / laptop / sno-globe arrives in a box full of packing peanuts, I dump them into a trash bag and drop them off at our reception desk. All of the old timers at Logos do this as a matter of course, because the peanuts get reused in outgoing shipments.
In the fourteen years since our first software was shipped from her kitchen table my mother (who still runs our shipping department) has only purchased packing material once. And then only in desperation and shame.
We ship hundreds of packages every week, but we don’t waste resources doing it. The inner boxes in which our retail boxes arrive are intentionally sized, and reused, for outgoing multi-pack shipments of assembled product. The regular recipients of bubble-wrap and packing peanuts in our small downtown know that we will be by to collect it. This does not save a lot of money, but the savings add up over time and it is a very practical example of recycling an otherwise worthless and litter-prone material. Who could object?
Our newer employees, it appears.
Recently an email to the whole company explained that we are getting low on packaging material and encouraged everyone to bring in their peanuts. The next day my assistant told me that the grapevine was buzzing with indignation. It was unseemly, I heard third-hand, that a successful company like ours would ask people to bring in their packing peanuts. Why, I buy clean new peanuts when I ship things, someone said.
Respecting the anonymity of the grapevine, I asked my assistant not to tell me who these whiners were. “Just have their department manager fire them all,” I declared. “I don’t want to make it personal, but if someone thinks this recycling is stupid, we can’t afford to have them hanging around making other wasteful spending decisions.”
A moment’s reflection caused me to redirect the judgment, though. Most of our employees were hired after our move into beautiful wood-trimmed offices and during a period of sustained profitability. They had not been around when everyone sat at folding tables and used shower paneling for whiteboards. They did not remember when your paycheck arrived with a request to wait a day before depositing it. They could not imagine the office without a free one-button latte machine.
Along the way to becoming a company that spends on things it can afford – morale boosting free lattes – I let us become a company that wants to spend on things it should not afford – packaging peanuts that are otherwise available for free.
Corporate culture needs to be cultivated. It needs to be planted and watered and pruned and weeded in every new hire. In a fast growing company the new hires can quickly outnumber the old timers and without direction they will redefine the culture. I did not give that direction and I let the scrappy, frugal part of our culture wither away. And now I need to plant it again.
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