Management Metric Madness

As every self-respected manager knows (I know because I’m UPPER management), you have to have metrics to measure your goals and assess your progress. You have to have metrics to measure your physical wellness, your productivity, your savings, your laundry habits — everything. Let’s say you’ve worn the same underwear for the last three months; a reasonable goal would be to wash it at least once a week. 

All over the world, corporations and incompetent people alike pay thousands of dollars for coaches who tell them they need metrics. I was very skeptical, so I did some research on these coaches. I discovered that the only experience they have is telling other people how to achieve their goals; the only goal they’ve ever achieved is getting a website; and the only metric they count is the number of fools who hire them.

I found my solution right here on my Outlook email program. I decided to use the Tasks Tab to record my goals and to color code them. After typing furiously for seven hours I recorded 257 goals with all the colors of the rainbow:

Blue: Get rich.

Purple: Look like Hugh Jackman.

Green: Get hired as a coach.

I tried them for a week and it didn’t work so I hired a coach. To protect my privacy, let’s call him ‘Coach Fernando Know It All de la Sabiola Jr.’ At least he was a student. He was studying to become a chef and he had a really nice website. There were lots of pictures of him surrounded by beautiful women. The website also said that he belonged to the “Latin Kings,” which I’m sure was some kind of charitable organization. With such stellar credentials I hired him right away. He told me I had to be more specific, and more gradual. I revised:

Blue: Make $5,763,112 in seven years.

Purple: Get Hugh Jackman’s muscles.

Green: Get four  people to visit my website. 

He told me I needed to choose. Three goals are way too many. I chose the first two. He made me a plan to get Hugh Jackman’s muscles. He told me that if I ate meat three times a day, put on about another 100 pounds, lifted more weights, and went to Butts and Biceps on US 1, the plastic surgeon might be able to extract some flesh from my big nose and implant them into my biceps. 

What about my blue goal? He said that if I started saving, invested wisely, opened a clinic, and defrauded Medicare, I would have a chance. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?” he said. I tried to explain that I was a PhD, not an MD, but he wouldn’t listen. 

The importance of metrics was driven home again when I watched 60 Minutes the next day. Turns out, true story, that a certain health care company, let’s call it “From Your Sickness to My Wealth Management Inc.,” set metrics for its emergency room physicians in hospitals around the country. At least 20 percent of patients seen in the emergency room had to be hospitalized to generate revenue for the hospital. No matter what the patient had — bleeding nose, periorificial dermatitis, evil eye, flatulence — it was all the same, a metric is a metric. If the doctor needed to meet a quota, somebody was going to get the stretcher. 

After a few days, Fernando left me. He had to flee the country suddenly. Too bad, I had grown fond of him. Next I hired the former CEO of “From Your Sickness To My Wealth Management Inc.,” but he also had to flee the country. I was on my own again, so I went to his company’s website to  learn as much as I could about management. 

I learned that you have to plan your day, your week, your month, your year. They tell you to track everything, to color code your activities, and to take note of any obstacles. They ask you to download tracking apps and keep meticulous records of your hourly achievements. When you get home, they ask you to log into a special website and check a bunch of little boxes to document your progress, minute by minute. By the time you are done with all this, you have exactly three minutes left in the day to do any work, or admit 3,462 bogus cases into the hospital.

Read original article in the Miami Herald at

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/26/3524079/a-light-take-on-management-by.html. 

Once a Jewish Mother.........

Our son got married last week. Ora, my wife, spent 9876 hours on the honeymoon itinerary. She spent 47 months planning and making sure our little baby and his lovely wife would have a great time. In fact, she started planning when Matan was 4. They left for Greece last Sunday.

What does a Jewish mother do when only son gets married? True story: Ora emailed the taxi driver in Greece to make sure the “kids” were picked up from the airport in Athens. George, the affable taxi driver with whom Ora exchanged 89 emails replied “kids safely deposited in hotel.”

Anthony Weiner to Sue Mobile Phone Company

Mr. Weiner was defiant yesterday during a press conference about his continued sexting. He claimed that he was going to sue the mobile phone company responsible for his sexting. He asserted that “before this technology was available, I never used to sext”. He argued that “it is time these companies took responsibility for putting in the hands of people weapons of self-destruction.”

In their defense, makers of the “promisQ-E-T” phone told the media that Mr. Weiner should have activated the “savemyass” app that comes with the phone. The app, specifically designed for politicians, shuts off the phone every time the user is about to take a picture of flesh.

In a related development, Eliot Spitzer is about to sue credit card companies. Mr. Spitzer claimed that before there were credit cards, he never used to leave tracks of encounters with women in hotels.

Meanwhile, Silvio Berlusconi is suing Morocco for sending beautiful women to Italy, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn is filing papers to bring to court the entire female population of the world.

NCTQ to tackle Syria and Obesity Next

Educational policy affects the well-being of students, teachers, parents, and especially Deans of Schools of Education.  A recent report has far reaching implications for the well-being of the nation, and beyond.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), an organization much loved by Deans of Education around the country, is poised to tackle Syria and obesity. After fixing education in this country through their report on teacher preparation programs, NCTQ is ready to tackle other global problems.

The report, universally acclaimed for its high scientific and ethical standards, has drawn great praise from the former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, The Plumbers Association, and Bernie Madoff. The report raises the bar on scientific approaches to social problems; so much so that President Obama is going to replace the Chief Scientist at the National Academies of Science with an NCTQ intern. Meanwhile, Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ, is rumored to head the Expedited Ethics Board, a new federal agency designed to protect the rights of lobbyists in Washington.

When asked about her data collection methods, Walsh replied that they used drones to gather data from Colleges of Education that refused to cooperate. She went on to describe how telescopic technology was used to read course syllabi that students would discard in the toilet after final exams. To assess the quality of programs, they obtained NSA data provided by Edward Snowden. Mr. Snowden, who was busy teaching an ethics course in the Moscow airport, could not be reached for comment.

Democrats and republicans alike praised the techniques used by NCTQ to solve education in this country. In a rare bipartisan statement, John Boehner and Harry Reid wrote: “We have so much gridlock in Washington. It is time to take an entrepreneurial approach to education. When we ask the National Academy of Science for answers on policy issues, they usually tell us they need to conduct randomized controlled trials and go through lengthy ethics reviews before they can do anything. NCTQ is a model of policy entrepreneurship: fast and decisive. They never equivocate on their decisions. None of this on one hand, but on the other hand nonsense.”

Critics observe that the exclusive focus on teacher preparation may divert attention from social issues such as poverty. When presented with data that instruction accounts for only a quarter of student outcomes, Walsh replied that “the methods used by researchers in the social sciences are highly flawed and antiquated.” She further accused those focusing on poverty of acting on behalf of Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Given the success of NCTQ in collaborative approaches, they are going to assist the UN in mediating between rebels and the Syrian government. NCTQ developed a secret algorithm for bringing parties together that proved very useful in dealing with intransigent schools of education. Their toolbox includes paying for informants, shaming the other side, and bullying. These techniques, developed by NCTQ staff, “will be very appropriate in the Syrian context,” officials with the UN say.

On the domestic front, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is asking NCTQ to tackle bullying in schools. Duncan believes they have the necessary experience to identify with bullies and understand their point of view. “It takes one to know one,” the Secretary said.

Meanwhile, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has also reached out to NCTQ to help her with the obesity epidemic. Sebelius is interested in learning what families actually eat. According to Sebelius NCTQ has the technological capacity to learn about people without ever talking or interviewing anyone. “They can tell us a great deal about what is going in people’s kitchen. Just as they discovered what is going on in people’s Colleges of Education without ever talking to anyone, I’m sure they can tell us what is inside people’s fridges.”

The NCTQ report is going to be very useful to prospective students of education. For example, the report found the best teacher preparation program in Kishinev, Moldova. John Kerry has already ordered the US embassy there to be ready for an influx of American students going to Moldova for their excellent teacher preparation programs. Walsh said that she would not recommend any teacher preparation program in the United States. To supply new teachers to schools she would look to paragons of efficiency and honesty, like the mortgage industry. She would create an incentive program to recruit former mortgage dealers to teach math for the common core curriculum.

As for Deans of Education, she recommended retraining in Siberia. 

 

 

 

Getting Organized Key to Well-Being

Being organized is key to well-being, but only 0.0000000000000000001 percent of the world's population can legitimately claim that they are organized: my aunt Eusebia and I.

Since she passed away over 25 years ago, it is now my sole responsibility to teach the world how to be organized. To be organized you have to be awake (dreams are always very messy), you have to have paper and pencil, or you need to download one of the 5,576,444,290 apps that claim to help with organization, time management, priorities, schedule, goals, objectives, and bad breadth, all essential for success at work. 

If you are like most people, you are going to spend 2,789 hours choosing the right time-saving app from the app store. After you download it, you are going to use it for about three minutes until you get an email from your brother telling you that you must watch the latest TED talk on productivity. As you are about to click on the link, you are distracted by various pop-ups with offers to purchase cruise tickets, houses on foreclosure, and antiques from Estonia. By the time you are ready to watch the video on productivity you realize it’s time to go home. 

After dinner you get your iPad and finally have time to watch the talk on productivity. The speaker recommends that you download a goal setting app. Because you are a discerning customer, you are not going to download just the first app that appears on your screen, so you are going to spend 592 hours comparing features, at which point you forget what you were looking for and settle for the latest version of angry birds. 

My identification with the Prophet Job has grown considerably since marrying my wife. When our son was old enough to be expected to carry out tasks, my identification with Job was complete. I felt that God had presented me with the toughest cases of disorganization to prove my conviction with the mission to bring order to the world. 

Soon after my wife Ora and I started living together in Israel, I remember a weekend when we decided to clean our apartment. We literally turned everything upside down to do a thorough job. In the middle of the chaos, Ora found an old letter that I had sent her, and she decided to stop everything, lie on the unmade bed, and start reading the letter for nostalgia’s sake. 

I found this episode totally endearing but profoundly disorienting and stressful. In the house I grew up in, you finished what you started before you moved on to other activities, let alone frivolous ones, like reading an old letter. I did my best to act normal in the face of her spontaneity, but later that night I threw up. 

My befuddlement was alleviated when I met Ora’s parents, who had just come from Canada for our wedding. I understood then that the gene responsible for tidiness had fallen off her family tree. I slowly moved from perplexity to acceptance. 

Our son Matan showed no inclination to be organized until he turned 22. These were the most disorganized and distressing years of my life. Nothing had prepared me for it. 

When we lived in Australia, Matan used to go to summer camp. Upon return from one such adventure, we picked him up from the drop-off point and drove home. Three blocks on our way home we spotted one of his shoes in the middle of an intersection. I am sure that the shoe had an irrepressible urge to jump out of the bus. Anything to get away from my kid’s smelly feet after a month-long camp. 

I used to have a recurring nightmare that I would die and that Ora and Matan wouldn’t find the life insurance policy and instructions for burial. I feared they wouldn’t find my will and that my entire retirement fund would go to fund the 48th year of the war in Afghanistan — but no more.

I’m pleased to report that in the last five years Matan has become dangerously like me. Ora has also become much more organized, threatening my supremacy as the most neurotically habitual member of the house. Don’t give Ora amaranth instead of gluten-free, organic steel-cut oatmeal from Whole Foods in the morning, and please, please, don’t overcook the broccoli. Twelve extra seconds can make a big difference in the nutritional chemistry of a crucifer, not to mention family harmony.

Read the original column at

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/07/12/3497600_organizational-neurosis-welcome.html