Sacred Technician. Part-time human. Gentle hands, sharp tools. Lantern in one, git repo in the other. 🕯️💻🛠️🧠🌌
Austin, Texas
Joined September 2009
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throwing process at every problem is also a symptom of cowardly managers who are unwilling to have behavior conversations.
the ideal approach is for process to enable culture. make the right thing the easy thing and people will always do the right thing.
You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.
Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.
I get why he created it.
A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.
They wasted the customer's time.
So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."
Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.
That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.
Every process you add is a TAX.
And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.
Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:
Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.
In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”
Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.
Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"
Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.
Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.
AI in the hands of the tasteless non-technicals makes this worse.
'I'm upset about a process failure so I'm going to build ANOTHER Google Sheet to track it and require everybody to enter the same duplicate information SIX times instead of THREE.'
anyway here's the good stuff youtube.com/watch?v=7ZaTHJSU…
many imagine libraries as places that preserve books. this is not correct. libraries are (or were) about access to the written word. now they’re mostly about politics.
it’s the sellers of things who do more to preserve books than any non profits or government institutions.
When I was in airplane mechanic school, we had rooms full of old books and equipment.
Our program had been running since 1928, so stuff had just "piled up"
Then one day, the FAA said it needed to be cleaned up.
Of course, the public school system that ran the program ordered us students to stay late and throw everything from these storage rooms straight into the dumpster.
Ironically, two of the students assigned to this were myself, and another student who ultimately became an archeologist.
Everything had to go *into* the dumpster, but immediately thereafter, we took everything of historical value and loaded it in our cars.
I have aviation materials dating back to 1909 sitting in my basement. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes of irreplaceable American history.
Among them were documentation for WWI planes, WWII (particularly bombers), and materials from the jet age.
I ultimately sold a ((real, original)) B29 operating manual to a group in Poland, and it was shipped to them via the Intrepid museum.
A set of homebuilt drawings from the 1960s went to a young eagle from our EAA chapter
Some memorabilia from the 1930s national air races went to Casey Putsch... as much as I can't stand the guy, I know he'll protect it.
But the rest of it? It all sits in my basement.
Valves from the B36, WWII maintenance manuals, periodicals from 1912 documenting the recent advancements in European aviation, every manual for the Lockheed P80A shooting star...
... all of it, waiting for the school to care about their history.
Waiting to go back.
leaving downtown past group after group of F1 stuff leaving the race escorted by police and constables past a guy with his pants around his knees shitting under the 35 overpass screaming at the air.
incredibly Austin.
I don’t care about the personal info leak letters anymore. the horses are out of the barn. it doesn’t matter. do you want more info to leak? I don’t care anymore. free identity monitoring sure. I don’t care. did anybody in your IT leadership get punished. no? I don’t care.
@iRhythmTech was anyone punished for leaking customer info? why are you holding on to my info?
kinda sad I am not in customer service right now. the AI situation must be making for some hilarious call recordings.
spending the evening yesterday updating PHP on my personal VPS. becoming a personal cybersecurity professional.
