KISSed in the Face

Most designs and strategies start off as simple and elegant.  

But then the KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly) qualities of the plan get lost during implementation.  

As Mike Tyson put it, "Everyone has a plan—until they get punched in the mouth."  

The challenge is maintaining Strategic Simplicity®.

Gender Pay Gap, Transparency, and Privacy

The Economist recently had an interesting article on the gender pay gap.  April 4th was the deadline for employers in Britain to start reporting the difference between the average pay of men and women (for disclosure, The Economist reported a median gap of 29.5%).

As The Economist pointed out, there are some caveats to these values because they compare total salaries, without regard to similarity in roles.  So, for example, the gap will be really high for Premier League football (soccer) clubs because they would be skewed by the players' salaries on the men's side.

However, in general, they think the data could lead to a dialog about the causes of the pay gap, which they think would make it worthwhile.

One of the causes that The Economist mentions (besides the need for better parental leave) is the asymmetry between employers (who know all salaries) and workers, which give employers an advantage in negotiations.

They feel that more salary transparency is needed for good-faith negotiations.

The trade-off then becomes transparency vs. privacy.  For example, in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, anyone can look up anyone else's salary.  This is pretty radical and would probably meet with resistance elsewhere, such as in the U.S.

However, from the article, I thought that Germany has found an elegant compromise.  Rather than showing individual salary data, companies with at least 200 employees have to provide employees who ask with the average salary in their peer group.

Six Causes of Productivity Loss at Large Corporations

1. Conference calls where too many callers are multi-tasking and not paying attention.  When they are asked a question, they need information to be repeated because they weren't listening the first time.

2. Internal applications which are slow and do not have well-designed interfaces.  IT departments tend to devote the best resources to customer-facing (external) applications, but give too little importance to internal ones.

3. Overkill on documentation.  Forced to create large, formal documents which are then filed away.  Where as, a less formal one page document or spreadsheet would actually be used and consulted more often.

4. Not enough up-to-date communication between important groups on a project.

5. Roles not clearly defined.

6. Gaps—important tasks not assigned to a specific team.

The Global Economy: Panama Canal and South Carolina

The Panama Canal is almost 2,000 miles away from South Carolina yet, as an illustration of how globally connected world economies are today, the upgrades to the Canal are having a profound affect on Greenville, SC.

The widening of the Canal means larger ships can pass through which, in turn, mean that it's now cost-effective to ship cargo directly from Asia to the East Coast.  Warehouses and transportation networks (plus jobs) need to be created, and South Carolina has a edge over other Eastern cities, in terms of cheap labor and real estate.

Info World Article: 7 deadly career mistakes developers make

I was quoted in a recent Info World Article:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3069558/application-development/7-deadly-career-mistakes-developers-make.html