On August 15 of 2002 I wrote an article for Baseball Prospectus called “The Zumsteg Plan” in which I proposed a revenue-sharing plan that attempted to even the playing field for teams in a rational way that didn’t hurt well-run teams in modest markets.

Singled out were the Phillies, who in 2002 were eagerly taking revenue-sharing money from much smaller teams like the Indians:

At the same time, revenue sharing based on payroll or revenue is wrong. If teams want to invest in their product, to put a good team on the field, to try and bring a pennant home, why should they be punished? If a team builds its fan base in limited circumstances, why should it ever have to give money to a lazy and stupid team playing a much larger market? The Indians gave money to the Phillies last year, and that’s not just pathetic, it’s wrong: There are 2,910,000 people in Cleveland and 5,999,000 in Philly. What kind of a stupid system rewards the Phillies for their ability to alienate their fans?

Also, later, after a table showing the Phillies were the worst team in baseball at making money in their market, I commented that they “suck”.

A year after I left BP as a regular contributor, three and a half years after writing this column, I get this off the BP feedback form:

From – Wed Feb 22 20:24:26 2006
Received: (qmail 18106 invoked by uid 99); 22 Feb 2006 08:23:44 -0800
Date: 22 Feb 2006 08:23:44 -0800
Message-ID: <20060222162344.18105.qmail@mail.bbp.cx>
To: dzumsteg@baseballprospectus.com
Subject: [bpsite] August 15, 2002 The Zumsteg Plan
From: wangkid69@aol.com (timmy)
Reply-To: wangkid69@aol.com (timmy)
X-Mailer: Baseball Prospectus Hyper Fighting Email Script 0.1

BP Username: (Not a registered BP User)
IP: 68.192.153.102
Publish: yes_initials
timmy how come you dont put your email adress on your articles?

you obviously have the courage to call out the city of philadelphia

if I were you i would be very careful

watch ur back

Never mind that I didn’t say anything about the city.

This happens all the time. People go through old articles and they’ll find some random aside from four years ago (“I saw player X in spring training this year and while he’s supposed to have a great arm, I saw him make three throws from right field and they weren’t that good.”) and then email me when that guy throws a runner out running second-to-home. I haven’t written a column for BP in ages, and I still get a trickle of email from (say) White Sox fans, who are ticked I poked fun at Ozzie Guillen for some bizarre in-game strategy he tried out ages ago.

I’ve never understood what drives people to do this. Do people really look up “random player” in Google, stumble across the article at page 500/a billion, read the whole thing, and then decide that it’s about time I got my comeuppance? Does finding some tiny observation and trumping it really make them feel that much better?

The ring tone means someone’s about to pick up. That’s the whole point of the ring tone. If you’re holding and you hear a ring tone, you’ve been conditioned through a life of phone use to think “Oh! Someone’s about to pick up. I should take this call off of speaker and wait attentively, so as not to waste their time!”

I’ve been on hold for ages now. I still jump every time there’s a ring followed by “Please stay on the line.”

At least they’re not feeding me the line about my call being valued.

I just jumped again and then got the message. I’m Pavlov’s customer.

Read a couple of management books or histories of corporate success and you’ll almost certainly find one of the outline-point headings like “build a sustainable organization” or “pro-actively recruit from within” or something. S

There are a bunch of obvious reasons why this is good — for lower-level employees, the perception that they can advance is important. But I want to talk about something more subtle.

Bringing in executives from other companies doesn’t just cap ambition of current employees, it causes a huge amount of chaos. An executive joining a company from the outside has usually been recruited for some outstanding work they did turning around a division, or putting out innovative products or… something.

When they join, they have a couple of priorities.
– Figure out what I’ve gotten myself into
– Get things shaped up

Generally, they give themselves about three months to come up with a great plan for success. During that time, they’re listening to almost anyone’s ideas, try and map out the power lines, and come up with a long list of problems.

They will, almost inevitably, pick the worst people to listen to. It’ll be the personable politically saavy senior VP, or the guy running some random division he was rightfully exiled to. They’re good over lunch, they seem helpful and welcoming, they have a great pitch about the company’s problems.

This, as an aside, is where many execs lose it. When the people who actually make things happen look and see that the new exec is championing the worthless ideas of some scumbag everyone hates working with, that’s it for the new exec’s credibility. This kills morale when people know that the guy with the ear of the new VP or CEO or whatver is a slick moron.

But more to the point: nearly every exec, at the end of that initial period, takes their list and sets out to solve it in exactly the wrong way:

They try and change the world to match what made them successful at the last job.

You’d think that the kind of eagerly-persued talent that gets hired would be more adaptable, but that’s rarely the case.

Everything they look at will be measured against what things were like at the last awesome job that exec had. If they had success at customer-centered orgs, that’s what they’ll do. If they were all about cost control, order office supplies now and lock them in your desk.

I’ve seen this happen over and over. New execs are willing to look at the problems of the institutions they join but rarely at the positives.

For example, say a company’s evolved over a long period of time to produce teams centered around different pieces of particularly difficult technology (I’ll use cell phones, so my current job doesn’t get after me):
– Customer application A
– Payment application B
– Phone application C
…

Each of those has a couple of rocket scientists who have done the core work on the application, and an outer layer of people with specific experience who know their job really well.

The new CEO notes that it’s really hard to get big projects done, because each application has resources and wants to tinker with stuff. Resources are hard to move around. They come from a much different background, where all jobs classifactions were divided up and people might work on anything. So if you want Superproject 2000 to go out, you get 10 analysts, 10 devs, 10 testers, and so on. The new CEO decides they need to reorg around job function.

This fails, because the world can’t be bent to perception. Probably what happens is that everyone moves around on an org chart and then ignores it: the manager in charge of projects for application A goes and gets their old crew together, while application B does the same, with a little poaching here and there. Really undesirables get put on the worst work, or laid off.

Which isn’t bad, but those people should have been weeded out aggressively earlier. That’s a whole other topic though.

The other possibility is the rocket scientists and the other really smart folks leave, and now your silos are filled with dumb folks who can’t get anything done.

Whereas if you promote from within, the worst thing that’ll happen is you’ll have someone who came up through the ranks and knows how to work with the other groups. There are drawbacks, of course — favoritism towards old cronies, inability to let go — but the one advantage someone who comes up steeped in company culture will know is the company culture, and who is to be respected and who should be ignored.

When they face the problems the new exec faces, they are much better acquinted with it. They know why it exists, and what’s happened to previous attempts to fix it. They know who can make the solution happen, and how it can be done.

Sometimes when a company is clearly broken, a new exec is the solution. But often it does far more harm than good, and promoting from within should always be the prefered choice.

Looks like blogger’s been eating posts for two weeks. Always a nice surprise.

Still eating posts.

I’ve been working on SecretApp 2000, which involves trying to re-learn development and all that good stuff, plus it’s been winter… so today, the weather’s nice, it’s not freezing, I put on the gear, pumped up the bike tires, and ripped off a 50-miler for the first ride in months.

Nearly got taken out by a car again — some dude inexplicably thought he could make a left turn from the other direction *through* me. I don’t know if he just didn’t see me or what, but I’m a tall dude and I had some bright colors on.

Yeah. Good fun for the first 40, which surprised even me. Then it got bad. The problem with where I live is that any significant ride requires me to descend first — Lake Sammamish loop, hooking up with the Burke-Gilman, doing the Lake Washington loop, heading out to Duvall — and that means that at the end of my 20-40-60-100 mile ride, I come back and right before I get home I have to take a hellish climb. It’s always nice.

I’ve been meaning to put up more business posts, but I’m always leary of having my day job perk up. But there’s stuff brewing hopefully for this week.

“Don’t hold back!” yelled someone in the audience between songs. This happened a lot, the intimacy of one person on stage, alone, performing.
“I’m not holding back,” Tweedy said. He was a little exasperated at the callers, but also a little amused. “This is all I’ve got.”

I coded tonight for the first time in years. I’ve tinkered a little on USSM stuff, hacked a little PHP, but in the last couple months I’ve been asked if I could code, and my response has been “I haven’t coded in years and haven’t written anything close to production code in seven.”

Which, if you’re curious, was when I wrote a Perl script that automated data collection after a test run of the app I worked on at AT&T Wireless. Not that complicated. Before that I used to do some modest programming in college, and once had a short-lived job where I tried to maintain a horrible, horrible Fortran program at the UW.

Brief digression: that program, when handed to me, was eight pages, uncommented, no spacing of any kind, and had grown out of a “count lines in this census data” to a fairly sophisticated tail-eating snake that would, in the moment before it consumed itself, output a whole bunch of data, like

Family 1
Woman, 60 years old (data)
Husband, 40 years old
Wife, 35 years old
Son1
Son2
Daughter 1
…

When I had to work on this thing I would go back to my apartment with a 12-pack of Natural Ice beer, bring that cursed code up and stare it while I shotgunned two or three beers, at which point I would be numb enough that I could start untangling the thing.

I ended up re-writing the thing in C and then quit before I could get fired. Horrible job.

Back to the story. The problem is that I’m not a particularly good programmer. I go slowly. I pay a lot of attention to design, write really detailed pseudocode, and carefully ease into where I’m going.

It’s not my strength. I’m much better at requirements, design, and particularly the research, analysis, and problem solving, which makes me a far, far better program manager (or analyst– whatever they call people like me at your company).

Plus, knowing how to program is like being able to run the VCR back in school: if you demonstrated any kind of ability to troubleshoot AV equipment, the teacher picked on you for that stuff all year. It’s like when relatives fixate on one aspect of your personality, except that instead of incresingly tiring elephant-themed gifts every Christmas you get forced to jiggle the cables in the back of the TV or re-thread the projector.

So I’ve always pled ignorance. Sure, it shows up sometimes when I can follow devs into the cubbyhole during discussions, but by and large their expertise is so vast that what little knowledge I have is so small in comparison as to be non-existant. It’s not an issue. I’m almost never considered to go troubleshoot some bug: there are always better options around, and I’m better used negotiating with a vendor or something.

But I have this idea, you see, for something fairly simple and cool I want to do, and I’ve written the design docs. So I went out and installed some things today. I felt this trepidation while I was getting everything running, and reading the docs I started to feel nervous and kinda sick.

Then I got a trivial test app to compile, and I started smiling. Now if only I had some Natural Ice.

I log in to sell something. Every time I sell, it prompts me to sign up for automatic payments. If I cancel, I’m dumped out of the process.

There’s no notification anywhere that I have to sign up. But I do. There’s no other way.

No big deal. I sign up. PayPal’s page then tells me that

“You can review this billing agreement or cancel automatic PayPal payments at any time by going to your PayPal Profile and clicking the Preapproved Payments link or by modifying your eBay Seller Account preferences.”

Except that I can’t: there’s no link anywhere on the ebay seller account to do this.

I don’t understand how stuff like this goes live: do they seriously not have anyone doing QA at all to look for cases like “instructions point to non-existant option” and “user is able to sell something”?

And now, of course, ebay’s got a hook into my wallet. Which is reassuring because they are so trustworthy and all.

In my job, a reorginization kills my productivity for months and directly hurts my pocketbook. After a reorg, I’ve got a new team that doesn’t know how to work well together, a new boss who doesn’t know me or how to make my life easier (or how hard I’m going to make their life), and now the developers, testers, business customers, and operations people I’ve built good working relationships with are all replaced with new versions who I need to start over with. Often, everyone now has to work two jobs half-time, supporting whatever they used to be doing and trying to pick up their new jobs.

I don’t do my job really well until months after a reorg. This means for those months, the company isn’t getting as much out of me for what they’re paying, and that’s a poor choice. My annual review will then include a period of months where — despite my best efforts — I wasn’t as good as I normally was. And if my review goes:
Q1: Star
(Reorg)
Q2: Good after a period of largely ineffective
Q3: Outstanding, getting back to stardom
(Reorg)
Q4: Good but not particularly effective

There’s no way I get the “star” review score (and raise, and bonus). And it’s the best people, who invest in building relationships and doing the best work, who are inordinately hurt. Someone who’s just okay and goes through two reorgs is going to look fine. Someone great through a similar wringer will look erratic.

Every reorg costs every top-quality peer-level person in the company thousands of dollars. And there’s never any attempt made at compensation, either directly (“We know this reorg’s going to hurt your review scores, so everyone gets an extra 1% on their bonus”) or indirectly (“Review scores will be based on months unaffected by the chaos of the reorg”).

At each level, the pain is lessened, both by having broader goals and by the ability to have those goals thrown out. For instance, when I was at AT&T Wireless, when the company would post horrible results that missed goals, the board would lower those goals so that the executive leadership could get their bonuses and millions of low-priced stock options. The grunts, of course, didn’t get comperable treatment.

No wonder people on the ground level have such negative views of these things.

For managers, it’s a little better. Since they’re not held to the kind of “get x features into production” review standards a grunt is, and their networks wider, they’re better adapted for change. A manager who works on, say, the retail line-of-business applications and gets moved into working on customer-facing applications is going to find far more of their immediate contacts stay the same compared to a grunt-level worker.

However, managers get hit when the people who work for them change. People with a new boss are reluctant to rate their boss highly, especially on qualities that take a long time to establish (“My boss is honest with me…” and so on). And conversely, it can help mitigate bad scores for bad bosses, since employees are reluctant to rate a boss extremely badly if they’ve only worked for them for a month or so.

The more they’re evaluated on their ability to manage their employees, the more they’re harmed by reorgs. And even if they’re not, they’re still far less effected compared to an exec.

Soon, you’re at the level of the vice president of IT, and you have entirely different motivations. Your goal for the year isn’t “ship x widgets” though you may have some high-level initiatives you’re charged with getting out the door. It’s more likely “address supplier concerns” and the goal’s met if the suppliers rate the IT organization is “responsive or highly responsive” on the year-end survey, a dramatic improvement from “sometimes responsive”.

From your perspective, it makes total sense to order a reorganization around suppliers. Each supplier now gets their own team, with dedicated resources, and they’ll all do the projects that supplier wants! Ad-hoc teams will form around releases for each product! Sure, there’ll be a few months of depressed productivity, but after that, it’ll be great!

It works. The supplier’s overjoyed that you’re willing to go through this to better serve them. They understand that it’ll be tough at first, and you get a pass. During that initial honeymoon, as their new dedicated teams start to fight, the supplier’s going to be happy — look at the little ants go at it! They’re so cute, and the red ones are fighting for me!

The “highly responsive” box gets filled in. As the VP of IT, this stunning success gets you a huge bonus and a pat on the back.

When the annual employee survey results come out, and morale is down, people are mad about how bad communication is, express frustration with the direction of the company, with the competence of the leadership, there’s a ready excuse for you: the grunts are understandably frustrated because they’ve had to switch teams and bosses, and things will look better once they’ve settled down.

Then your boss realizes that actual productivity has ground to a halt because every team’s fighting every other team. Your reorg doesn’t get blamed — you get a new goal for next year, to streamline planning and build a unified build platform, or some such thing.

That clearly requires a reorg.

I had my resume on Monster.com briefly a while ago, when I’d quit my job before finding a new one, and before I decided to stay and fight. Despite having a good resume, I got no hits at all for a couple days. Nobody even read it. Then I realized that I should go through and fill out the different education/qualification fields, even though they were on my resume.

First offer came in the next morning, and kept coming until I took it down. Here’s why that sucks, beyond the obvious cautionary tale.

I just finished reading “Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams” by Darcy Frey. It’s about basketball but also the horrible conditions for kids growing up in Coney Island, and the institutions that exploit those who can play basketball.

Here’s the bind for a kid, even one who can play well enough at the high school level that they’re chased by recruiters: they have a crap education, so they can’t pass the SAT barrier required by the NCAA. If they’re amazingly talented, they can go pro out of high school. If they’re lucky, they can attend a junior college and hopefully transfer to a four-year school from there. Or they can get tutoring that tries to cover the gaps in their horrible education before they take the SAT tests.

Mostly, though, when the recruiters realize they’re not going to get a high enough SAT score, they’re dropped, and that’s the end of them.

Now for a second, imagine if they couldn’t play basketball, and all they got was the horrible education. Even if they were smart and dedicated, they’re screwed. They have to get out into the workplace, work their way into a full-time position (which is a difficult road) and find somewhere that’ll help with tuition. So that’s years before they’ve got a shot.

By contrast, take me. I grew up in the Kent-Renton area, attended schools in the Kent School District, which is no great shakes but compared to any account of the horrible state of inner-city schools (and, in “Last Shot” the Coney Island ones) seems like a paradise. Everyone I know in my class with half a mind to going to college managed it. If you were reasonably smart, you went to Western or the UW or some obscure college in Minnesota, and if you weren’t, you went to WSU (or, in fairness, if you wanted a good communications degree). Even those of us who went to public in-state universities and still took out
Stafford loans and worked in the library or other hapless jobs for a penny over minimum wage ($4.26) made it work.

Compared to the kids in Coney Island, our advantages were huge. From better-quality teachers and (as crappy as Kentridge was) facilities to community characteristics like better libraries* to read and study at.

Our background spotted us enough points that we were guaranteed to get in somewhere, which in turn meant x% graduated and then dominated the job marketplace.

But back to the topic at hand: the prejudice in favor of college degrees in an environment where college admission is hugely tilted towards affluence, and where a college degree means better job prospects and more money, is effective and sustainable discrimination against those who start out with less. This is exacerbated when the state of public education ensures that the different people start out on massively unequal footing.

What’s worse, I think, is that even if it’s unintentional and a recruiter’s means to cut down the available applicant pool to something more managable, it’s clear that not only are they not even looking at qualified resumes without a degree — they’re not looking at ones that have a degree if they can’t easily sort on that. I could have taken an entirely different path and worked my way out of a call center, with the same experience and the same abilities, and no one would be interested. But because I have a four-year degree from the University of Washington, where I learned that I can’t handle Southern Comfort, I am.

I don’t argue that everyone should enjoy equal results, and I don’t have any good solutions on how to solve it. If you’d told me I couldn’t go to the UW because someone from a horrible school system had put up substantially worse grades and SAT scores and bumped me out, I’d like to think I’d have understood, but I don’t really know.

If nothing else, the value the marketplace puts on college degrees makes it clear that barring widespread societal change, equality in early education — equality of opportunity — would make a huge difference in getting a more diverse group into colleges, and from there, into the workplace, which would in turn help end this discriminatory cycle.

* which are totally being screwed up, but that’s another post.