Apply Anyway!
A student of mine just alerted me to a job posting for an internship. It reads like this:
General Description: To assist with the preparation of reports, analyses, and modeling.
Responsibilities of this position include:
- Analyze the system design and modifications.
- Develop studies of limited scope and prepare data for cost estimations and analyses.
- Run equipment, performance tests and install and inspect new equipment.
- Assist in maintaining, updating and improving the accuracy of <the company’s> electrical distribution computer model.
Requirements for this position include:
- Junior standing or higher in Engineering or a related field at an accredited university.
- Ability to interact favorably with project and work teams.
- Communication and interpersonal skills involving the ability to work cross-functionally to understand requirements, present alternatives, and recommendations.
- Proficient with the use of personal computers and automated tools.
I don’t get it. A position that specifies its primary functions are to assist with reports, analysis and modeling insists that the qualified candidate comes from Engineering? Because they hold exclusive rights to reporting, analysis and modeling? Don’t get me wrong. I love engineering students and professionals. I’ve been working with them for the past 30 years. They’re extraordinary problem-solvers, sometimes incredibly creative, good under pressure, competitive, smart.
But I have news for the hiring manager for this position (and for others that sound just like it): There are other academic disciplines equally, if not better, prepared for exactly what you’ve described here. Do you think a humanities major can’t write reports and perform in-depth analysis? Think again. Do you think a student of the social sciences can’t model (or at least quickly learn to model) a function, process or operation? Do you really think that engineering students come out-of-the-box ready to perform the responsibliities on your list? Or do you think some ramp-up will be required? I have news for you: It’s likely no more ramp-up would be required in this job for a liberal arts student than for an engineering student. And the “reports” you’d get from the liberal arts student would be readable, probably even interesting.
So to all you English majors, if you see a job posting like this, apply anyway. Add a cover letter that points out your exceptional report-preparing credentials (“developing organized documentation that speeds understanding and accelerates project timelines”), your analytical experience (“synthesizing direction from details,”) and your exceptional ability to learn on-the-job–”OJT,” in business parlance.
Meanwhile, to risk-averse, short-sighted hiring managers who stick to the customary at all costs, consider that you may be missing the hiring opportunity of a lifetime for positions like this one and all that sound just like them. You want an educated thinker who can analyze, write well, learn, perform conscientiously. Much as I love engineers, I promise you they don’t corner this market.
Filed under: job-hunting | 1 Comment
Tags: hiring managers, human resources, employers, HR, job posting, reporting, analysis, modeling, engineers, internships
I keep saying that English majors are well-suited to the job of business analysis because they’ve learned something about research, synthesizing a point, a direction, from details, sniffing out inconsistencies and examining what they mean. But how is that useful in business, really?
What is “Business Analysis” Anyway?
In psychoanalysis, a patient on a couch answers probing questions intended to reveal the secrets of the psyche. When it succeeds, the patient emerges with an improved understanding of himself and uses this newfound clarity to fuel a healthy life.
Business analysis is similar, except there’s no couch. Business analysts examine the details and peculiarities of business operations, expose dysfunction and share a general understanding about “how we do things around here”—or at least how they’ve been done so far. It’s often the case that business operations have become sloppy, confusing, or inconsistent, and business analysts, as they study and document “how we do things,” are looking both for what works well and what doesn’t.
A Real-World Example
For example, in a customer service department, each customer service rep (CSR) answers phone calls from customers. Although customers can place orders online, there are functions that require a CSR to intervene, and that is when customers call in. CSRs help customers who want to (1) inquire about an order, (2) complain about something, (3) cancel or change an order that’s too old to change online. Fortunately for this company, the CSR’s are busy pretty much all the time. The phone never stops ringing. While it’s a positive indicator for the company—i.e., business is good—it’s a problem for the Customer Service department because there’s a backlog of calls waiting to be handled. Customers either wait on hold or hang up because they’re too impatient to wait.
The company hires an efficiency expert to help them figure out what to do. The efficiency expert arrives on site with a business analyst in tow, and together they examine the customer service department. The interview the CSR’s, they read the documentation they produce, they listen in on customer calls, talk with managers, read reports produced by the customer service system (listing number of calls received, duration, outcome, etc.), and they document their findings.
Here’s what they discover: Some CSR’s keep personal spreadsheets documenting all the calls they receive because they’re concerned that The Boss doesn’t appreciate how productive they are. When the question comes up, as it inevitably will, “How much work are you doing for us?” (the unspoken question is “Should we keep you or lay you off?”), they want to be prepared with an answer. What the CSR’s don’t know is that all this information is logged in the customer service management reports—which they never see. Keeping personal spreadsheets is duplicating work effort and a waste of time.
One recommendation: Share the management reports with the CSR’s and ask them not to spend time logging their own activities. Saves time, saves money (and business is all about saving money).
Of course the efficiency expert and the business analyst make many such discoveries thanks to their research and documentation, but we don’t need to detail all of them here. You get the idea. The point is business analysis, like this, has several goals, among them eliminating waste and improving efficiency. Analysis often precedes bringing in some much-needed technology to the workplace, anything from a single device to a full-blown, new, company-wide system.
Making Order Out of Confusion
If you haven’t worked in a business environment, you may think that the common workplace is a repetitive, predictable place, where every procedure is well-understood, fully optimized, humming like a well-tuned orchestra, where one has only to follow the sheet music exactly as written in order to fully perform. I promise you that’s not the case. It’s why business analysis is here to stay.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: business analysis, customer service, efficiency expert, new systems implementation
Buzzwords in Bizzness
When I announced my departure from my last corporate management job, a friend game me a homemade version of a word game called “Buzzword Bingo.” The note that came with the game said, “We are worried that, away from the office, you might begin to speak English. Here is a game to help prevent that and keep you ready for the business world.”
The rules of “Buzzword Bingo” are simple: Players start with cards on which are written common (usually over-used) business terms, words people are likely to say in a meeting. Some examples: viral, open-source, incentivize, bleeding edge, killer, burn rate, ROI, braindump, visionary, 24/7, synergize, drill down, bubble up, fudge factor, bio-break, silo, and so on.
In addition to the cards, players have markers, little discs that look like Tiddly Winks (if you remember those). Every time someone in a meeting says any of the words on the card, the player covers that word with a Tiddly Wink. The first person to cover an entire row wins. The idea is that it won’t take long before some under-inspired discussion re-cycles these tired words often enough for someone to call “Bingo!”
Although I’ve never actually played it, I did take it to my boss’s staff meeting right after I received it. I handed out the cards and Tiddly Winks to everyone but the boss. They all had a good laugh, and so did the boss, but his smile faded when it appeared to him we were actually intent on playing and, with some of his remaining good humor, he collected the cards and returned them to me.
Buzzword Bingo is a meaningful jab at an important business problem: Anemic language is the hallmark of business communication. Although business didn’t invent “boilerplate” language (journalism did), business writing has made extensive use of trite, tedious prose. Reading most business writing is a deadening experience, which is especially too bad considering that much of it is important, interesting content. It’d be more interesting if we weren’t re-reading canned phrasing we’ve trudged through many times before, if we weren’t “drilling down” while we hope to “synergize” to maximize “ROI” and “incentivize” our “employee base.”
If you can see the trees in this under-enchanted forest, business people need you to lead them back to the dictionary, to help them infuse their communication with something fresh, to revitalize the language that’s describing breakthroughs, controversies, inventions, disclosures, agreements and other important business matters.
Filed under: business communication | Leave a Comment
Tags: boilerplate, business language, buzzword bingo
I teach “Writing and Presentations” for Engineering Management students at Portland State University. It’s a course within a graduate program (the Engineering and Technology Management Department) aimed at preparing future leaders for their responsibilities as managers of technology organizations and teams.
The program at PSU is internationally renowned, with a reputation as a ground-breaking forward-looking collection of thought leaders who understand that managing the mysteries and vagaries of the technology industry is different from other kinds of management. Not all the students in this program have engineering preparation, but many do, and helping them get ready for the particular leadership challenges that are unique to leading tech teams, projects and organizations was originally the idea of Dr. Dundar Kocaoglu, our department chairman.
It was also Dr. K’s idea to include this course, “Writing and Presentations,” in the program because he’s sure (and he’s right) that engineering leaders who can’t handle public speaking and who can’t write proposals, reports, product evaluations or even holiday greetings will struggle, or fail, as leaders.
It was nearly two years ago that Dr. K and I began talking about this class, about the possibility that I might teach it. One of the things I said in those early conversations was that I’d like to assign the students a novel to read, a good novel, a great work of fiction. When he looked at me a little quizzically (reading fiction in an engineering class?), I explained that if students want to learn to write well, they should read the works of great writers—not the works of great engineers.
“Who were you thinking you’d assign?” he asked.
“Hemingway.”
He rocked back in his seat a bit, smiled, and then said “Sure, I think our students should read more Hemingway.”
Many of my students are international, for whom English is a second (sometimes third) language. From the list of novels they can choose, they often select The Old Man and the Sea, probably in part because it’s short. The others read Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and The Financier, by Theodore Dreiser. This quarter, 13 of my 18 students read The Old Man, and all but one said they loved it.
The young man who didn’t really care for The Old Man said he’d never before in his life read a novel, not in English, not in his native language (Arabic). He didn’t care for it because Hemingway was repetitive, he thought, and he hated what happened to the fish. But at least now he can say he’s read a novel, read it closely enough to get mad at it. When I asked him if he’d read another novel in the future, he said “Maybe.”
What surprises me every time about the novel-reading assignment in this engineering class is how much the students enjoy it. They’re supposed to make note of passages that stand out to them, wording that’s different, attention-getting, phrasing that makes them stop and say “I wish I’d said that.” They’re supposed to track the narrator’s internal monologue (or the protagonist’s view of the world) and see what they get to know about him along the way, how his actions and thoughts compare to their own, and what they learn about him thanks to the private disclosures in the course of the story-telling.
It’s “lite” analysis, indeed, but this isn’t a literature class. In some ways, it’s an exercise in bridge-building, where engineering students discover something about writing. Maybe it will help to unleash some hidden potential, or at least to encourage future business/technical writers to break out of the doldrums and to write in ways that aren’t predictable and drab, as so much business writing is.
If it accomplishes that, I’ll be delighted.
Filed under: higher education | Leave a Comment
Tags: business writing, The Great Gatsby, The Financier, The Old Man and the Sea, Portland State University, engineering and technology management, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Dundar Kocaoglu, technology
Breaking a Three-Way Tie
A few years into my management career, I found myself part of a triumvirate of managers. Three of us—Tom, Vince and me—of equal “rank,” working in the same department, and vying for control over our shared resources. (That’s what managers call people: “resources.”) It was an untenable situation, the three of us jockeying for position all the time, trying to be The One In Charge, trying to break this stupid three-way tie.
The boss wasn’t especially concerned about our plight, which is why this situation went on for such a long time. But after awhile he began to realize it was troublesome for the people who reported to us. They (the “resources”) recognized the competition between us and were a bit confused by it, since they all performed more or less the same job for one of us. We were three arbitrarily chosen people who seemed to be headed nowhere in particular except into each other’s paths.
When the confusion in our midst finally got the boss’s attention, he asked the three of us to meet and decide among ourselves which of us should lead the entire group. Instead of three managers of equal managerial standing, we were to emerge from this polite slugfest with one of us noticeably in charge and the other two of us somewhat reduced in rank. (If you’re thinking this was a strange approach, you’re correct. It’s not a model to follow.)
So we met. Not surprisingly, nothing was decided. We emerged from the meeting at the same impasse we’d been facing when it began.
Imagine my surprise when, an hour or two after the unsuccessful meeting, my phone rang and it was our boss calling to tell me how delighted he was the three of us had arrived at a decision.
We had?
“Vince told me you three agreed that he would be in charge.”
We had?
“I’m delighted to hear it’s all worked out.”
I thought to myself, “But we decided no such thing,” though I didn’t say so. I’m not sure why I didn’t—I’m rarely tongue-tied—but instead of speaking out, I reflected. It wasn’t like the boss to lie, so I was fairly sure he hadn’t made this up. I thought about Vince, and tried to imagine him telling the boss we’d proclaimed him the victor when we hadn’t.
I had observed a few things about Vince in the time I’d worked with him. He was nervous, but he pretended confidence. It wasn’t hard to see through that. He blinked ferociously, licked his lips frequently and thrummed any available tabletop. He was also articulate, energetic, and sincere. Sometimes he was even gracious. How did that add up to dishonest?
Although it would be nice to say I arrived at the answer to that question, the truth is I didn’t. But I wasn’t thrown by the inconsistency, and perhaps that’s because I’d met so many characters in books who were nothing if not inconsistent. What’s literature without protagonists who say one thing and mean another, who do the unexpected for reasons we sometimes understand, who stagnate, waffle, even lie? Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom comes to mind. So does Sloan Wilson’s Tom Rath, from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Even Gatsby (or perhaps especially Gatsby).
Vince continued on as The One In Charge for many months. But as you might expect, he didn’t take us anywhere. He wasn’t a visionary, and he wasn’t a man of action. As a group, we followed his example—waffling, wavering, accomplishing little. Within a year, someone else was put in charge of the group, and I broke off to work for a different part of the organization.
If there are lessons in all this, one is a business management lesson: Bad decisions don’t usually stick. For awhile, sure, but not for long. But the other, perhaps more important, lesson is that an understanding of, or at least an acceptance of, human behavior is key to success in the workplace. Leaders, followers, decision-makers are inconsistent, frustrating, complicated, and while we might want determinism and predictability from them, we rarely get it.
People who have spent time in the pages of great books, getting to know humankind thanks to the characters they’ve met, are better prepared for the vagaries of business life.
Filed under: management | Leave a Comment
Tags: ambiguity in the workplace, Gatsby, John Updike, management decisions, power struggles, Rabbit Angstrom, Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
I was asked recently to review a new book about project management (as if what the world needs is another book about project management; the PM bookshelves shelves runneth over as it is). However, I agreed and have been happily surprised to find this book is competently written—literate, well-organized, nicely expressed—by someone who knows what he’s talking about.
I’m not planning to tip my hand here and tell you what book it is, who it’s by and what I really think beyond that first impression. I’ll save that for the finished product which you’ll be able to read on Amazon.com before long.
I will tell you, however, that the voice of experience who wrote this book on project management repeatedly makes a point that project managers are all-too-familiar with and English majors ought to be more familiar with, and that is this: What goes wrong on projects often can be blamed on poor communication.
In business, this word “communication” is a catch-all phrase for writing, speaking, listening and reading. While those who decry the problems of project management place a lot of emphasis placed on poor writing and speaking abilities, the other two are just as bad. Business “communicators” are often poor listeners and readers, at least in part, because the writing and speaking aren’t very good. It’s hard to read something that’s not well written.
Projects generate “deliverables”—which are documents and graphic depictions of things the project has figured out to do. When a project’s documents are poorly written, when status reports are boring, when emails are cryptic, ambiguous and confusing, then progress suffers. Projects are all about progress. Impeding progress is, to a project, a fate worse than car trouble, food poisoning and bankruptcy combined. When project progress is impaired by anything, project managers scramble to recover and project stakeholders (i.e., the people paying for the project and the people who have to live with its outcome) go nuts.
So our author and experienced project manager rightly identifies poor “communication” as a frequent cause of project trouble. One of the points he makes is how often project deliverables go unread. I know this to be true myself. Someone on a project team writes something (a status report, minutes of a meeting, a product evaluation) and sends it out to the project team and nothing happens. No one asks questions, argues with what’s written, suggests revisions—nothing. Not a peep. Why? Because business people are used to drab, dull, lifeless written works and, on a typically busy, over-booked day, the last thing they feel like doing is reading something that fits that description.
One of these days, a corporate champion of expense reduction is going to take a look at the amount of quantifiable waste a project experiences because written documents are boring, poorly organized, hard to follow and clumsily written. And where will they find people who can fix this problem? Look no farther than the nearest mirror, English majors.
Filed under: business communication | 1 Comment
Three Cheers for “Plain English”
I was driving along listening to National Public Radio this morning and tuned in halfway through a story about “police speak.” You know, the numbers thing. “I’ve got a 5150 here,” means I’m dealing with a mental case. Or “What’s your 20?” means “What’s your location?”
This is a form of communicating that came about in the 1920s for two reasons: (1) to expedite messages (why use several words when a number conveys so much more?) and (2) for security reasons, a not-very-sophisticated form of encryption meant to obscure the message from the rest of us non-police types.
We all know the latter reason is pretty much forgotten. “What’s your 20?” is, according to the NPR reporter, a common lyric in rap music. A Google search will deliver the entire list in a matter of seconds. So much for keeping secrets from us plebs.
The other reason, to expedite messages, might have merit were it not for the fact that “police speak” has morphed, and different groups have assigned new meanings to old numbers. What “5130” means to the LAPD may be entirely different from what it means to the State Police. Misunderstandings abound. When one law enforcement group thinks “510” means “traffic violation” and another thinks “510” means “officer down with multiple gunshot wounds,” you see the problem.
So the police, bless them, have decided a return to English is in order. Not only will they be replacing the numeric vocabulary with actual words—“Responding to a report of a prowler in the neighborhood” instead of the once-popular “responding to a report of an 11-7”—but they’re also encouraging their officers to use plain English. Instead of “made entrance to the building,” something more like “went in through the front door” is now recommended.
Maybe there’s an opportunity here for a resourceful English major to write the definitive decoder guide: “A Police Officer’s Guide to Plain English” to support this reformation movement. The book could include examples of how to formulate complete simple sentences, for those who have forgotten, along with ways to catch yourself when a number tries to creep back into casual parlance.
This is a project you should consider if you happen to be 1098—I mean, “available for assignment.”
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Revenge of the English Major
“What are the two things that keep people in your organization from advancing?”
That’s the question Brian McCarthy posed to a manager he met this summer from one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. Brian, who’s on the faculty in the School of Business at Portland State University, was one of several dads attending camp with their sons. So was the Big Four manager, and Brian took the opportunity to ask him this one question: What is it that that keeps people from being promoted where you work?
The dad from the Big Four didn’t hesitate: “Presentation skills and writing ability.”
Brian was somewhat surprised, in part because he expected something more like “global team management” or “advanced negotiation skills” to top the list, and in part because the answer came back lightning fast. Not a moment’s hesitation. In a word, communication—or lack of it—holds people back.
But it makes perfect sense: Business leaders who can’t express brilliant, business-saving, even life-saving ideas might as well not have them, since they can’t execute on those ideas in a vacuum.
“It’s the revenge of the English major, isn’t it?” Brian announced. “We advertise for all these technical skills, but what we really want is people who can communicate!”
I knew that.
Filed under: business communication | 2 Comments
The Documentation Gene
I worked with a guy once, a talented programmer, who claimed he was “missing the documentation gene.” That was his excuse for never writing anything down.
“I’m a techie, not a writer,” he often said.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, it meant when he figured out the solution to a problem, he didn’t preserve it for posterity, so the next person who hit the same problem would have to re-discover the solution. It also meant his understanding of how a business process worked (which he’d then translate into some aspect of software) would reside exclusively with him. That might be okay, I guess, if he were the only person who needed to understand it. But of course he wasn’t.
Engineers and tech professionals are rarely interested in writing and they’re usually not very good at it, even when they are so inclined. Yet the need to write down what they’re doing, what information they’re working from, is crucial.
“I’m a writer, not a techie.” Perhaps that’s your refrain.
In the next few posts, I’ll tell you how you can use your abilities as a writer to bring value to technology organizations by performing roles in business analysis, process modeling, project administration and business process improvement.
Filed under: Writing Jobs in Business | 1 Comment
Tags: business writing, careers for English majors, communication, English majors, humanities, Humanities majors, qualifications
As a student of literature, you spend a lot of time examining character and motivation. Why is Gatsby such a chipper guy? Why doesn’t Santiago just cut the fish loose and head home? What are Estragon and Vladimir really waiting for?
When I was in college, I thought examining literature was fun. Occasionally, I even appreciated how beautiful, simple, complicated, powerful was a single phrase, chapter or volume. I had no idea I’d ever have any everyday use for this kind of understanding. At the time I remember thinking literature was interesting, but I worried it was erudite and isolated and in no way a practical pursuit.
But two years after I graduated from college, I landed a job as a supervisor of a small documentation department in a university computing center. (That’s what Information Technology was called back then, either that or “data processing,” if you can imagine.) For me, it was the uncharted beginning of a 25-year career in management, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the time I spend (notice “spend” not “spent”) with great books, meeting and thinking about ordinary and exceptional people in ordinary and exceptional circumstances.
The workplace is full of ordinary and extraordinary people, and often some who seem like average run-of-the-mill folks one day are surprising, amazing, bizarre the next. The workplace itself runs the same gamut, from drab and predictable to intense and creative, from grim and stingy to gracious and good-humored.
Some in business leadership approach people and organizations as if this range of emotions and experiences doesn’t really exist or, if it does, it’s sort of irrelevant. “It’s what you do that matters, not why you do it,” they think. “It’s productivity we’re after!”
After awhile, though, even the more hard-core among the productivity mongers begin to realize there’s a connection between productivity and motivation. That is, when people are motivated to do a good job, they work willingly and productively. When they’re not, they don’t. Suddenly, these same leaders are quite interested in “how to motivate people.” They spend money on seminars, leadership books, in-house training programs hosted by self-described “experts” promising that an army of newly “motivated” employees will take the company to new heights.
Fortunately for all of us who claim to be human beings, motivation is more complicated than that and can’t be cranked into high gear for groups of people using formulas provided by “experts.” The secrets to fathoming motivation live many places. One of them is within the pages of great books. So if you’re reading some, consider that you may, indeed, be preparing yourself to be in business leadership.
I can’t remember a time in history, not in my lifetime anyway, when we’ve had a greater need for leaders with clarity, breadth and depth of vision and understanding. Will literature prepare you for this in every way? Perhaps not. But in important ways, it most certainly does.
Filed under: business leadership | Leave a Comment
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