Introduction - Origins

      My Dad grew up poor, even though he wasn’t aware of it at the time. His own father was killed in an industrial accident at Pure Oil in the Toledo area, so his Mom had to ship him out to her sister's farm along with his brother. He would occasionally tell my brothers and I about eating biscuits and gravy for three meals because it's all they had. He never gave up on his education, eventually earning a Master's degree in mathematics and having a long and successful career in the aerospace industry. He would often recount a story about working on the Ohio turnpike to earn money to get through college. Men would line up to earn the princely sum of an extra ten cents per hour to operate the jack hammer. My Dad often told me that story to inculcate the value of an education to me. Unfortunately, I just thought it meant that I wouldn't have to work hard later in life if I got good grades. Even though I liked to plan ahead, I was naturally lazy; always looking for a way to get my work done with minimal effort. Who knew that I could parlay this into an entire management philosophy that has provided modest success? I call it planning to do nothing, the lazy man's guide to management. If you are looking for a book on how to become the CEO of your company, this is not your tome. But if you want to achieve some success in management and still go on the occasional vacation, I think I have some tips.

     As with any self-help book, your mileage may vary. And if you know the origin of that phrase, you might want to give this book to your son or daughter. So we need a few caveats, or as the test team likes to say, some ground rules and assumptions. These will guide your use of my advice. First, I am not an expert. I just have experience, like to read, and have some good friends who are also experienced. I put all of this together and had some success. Some folks, who don’t work for me, liked my approach and encouraged me to write a book. I’m looking at you Sean. 

     Next, like any good project, this advice needs a box that bounds its usefulness. The walls around a project can be temporal, cultural, geographic, organizational, financial, or technical. Here is our box. Applicability is to the era of professional management that has evolved since World War II. Should this style of technocracy radically change, new rules will be needed. Having little experience outside of the English-speaking world, I feel safe to say that these rules aren’t applicable to Turkish corporate management, for example, and probably not even French for that matter. These rules apply primarily to large organizations like major corporations or the government. If you are running a small business, I recommend that you read “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E. Berger. I took some of his advice to heart, but the lessons don’t flow the other way to small business. I have primarily managed technical enterprises my whole life, so this book is primarily geared to the life of the technical manager, whether you are delivering services, products, operations, or projects. Finally, this is a book about management, not supervision; the distinction is that the manager is someone whose direct reports have direct reports. I find supervision distasteful for reasons I may discuss later, so no more of that here. 

     For those who need a CV or biography to know whether to believe an author or not, I will put my biography in an appendix. For the rest of us, seeing if this book confirms our already held beliefs will be the yardstick by which this work is measured.

The Interview Process is part of Rule 3 - Hiring is the Manager's Most Important Decision

     Over the past couple of months, I have interviewed for two positions; and I have to say, I have been pretty appalled at the process.  Everyone in government is enamored of the structured interview process, because the number one goal is to not be subject to an equal opportunity complaint, even thought the goal should be to hire the best qualified candidate. If you are unfamiliar with the structured interview, you can read the entire OPM treatise, but the tl;dr version goes like this.  The candidate gets asked a series of timed, canned questions by the panel, WITH NO FURTHER INTERACTION! Dumbness squared.

     In the first of the two interviews, I was doing it mostly for practice, because it wasn't the job I really wanted. I knew that it would get me the question bank for when the job I really wanted came open.  The bureaucracy did not disappoint.  Taking good notes netted me six out of the eight questions for the job interview I actually wanted. Conclusion: either a well-prepared candidate (like me) or a complete sociopath would do well in this process. Why the sociopath?  Because there were tons of questions that were seemingly situational but highly predictable, but the sociopath could just make up a story, or just read answers to the question on line.  Without follow up questions about details, there was no way to tell if the candidate was lying or not. Knowing there is lack of follow up is bad for the candidate as well, because one might be tempted to exaggerate unverifiable details. 

     What is to be done? If you are a federal manager, or any manager in a large bureaucracy, you are facing pressure to prove that your hiring process won't get your organization sued.  I am here to help.  The surprising answer is to conduct a structured interview, but just add follow up questions. Step 2 is to ask questions that will smoke out the liars and sociopaths. The first part is easy, conduct a structured interview, but set time aside for follow up from the panel.  Panel members can then deep dive an answer to ascertain what the candidate is really saying, and to get a better sense of the context for the answer.  Letting candidates understand that this is the process ahead of time will also help coax better behavior out of the interview process.  It can be surprisingly revealing as well.  I have had more than one candidate withdraw from consideration during the interview process when the probing revealed actual lack of qualifications, because the resume had some "puffery," to use a Judge Judy term.

     The harder part is the design of the questions.  You are looking for questions that are revealing in ways that the candidate doesn't realize or can't help but reveal.  My favorite example follows. If you are looking for a candidate with project management experience, you can ask a series of questions that are all negative in nature, but are inevitably going to happen if you perform project management long enough. You tell the candidate that if the situation never happened, you will just move on to the next question.  The liars and sociopaths will never admit to any of the negative situations, because they lack the empathy to understand that the interview panel isn't looking for evidence of bad behavior, but for evidence of how the candidate handles difficulty.  I had one candidate who actually took umbrage (feigned or not, I couldn't tell) that we would suggest that any of these things had ever happened.  Here are the questions, developed by my friend with initials PV:

Describe a time as a project manager where you experienced _______. If you never had that experience, we will just move on to the next situation.  

a.      A project where you had difficulty achieving partnership with a customer.
b.      An assignment where you were called upon to ensure the future success of a program or project with a long history of failure and a demoralized team.
c.      A project related business situation where your professional and personal integrity were seriously called into question.
d.     A never-ending project that you could not complete to the satisfaction of the business.
e.      A situation where program/project sponsors were determined to pursue a course of action that violated regulations, organizational rules, and/or your own personal sense of ethics.

Once the answer is yes to one of the situations, make them describe it, and ask follow up questions, even uncomfortable ones.  The outstanding candidate will have insight as to what they could have done better and, more importantly, an understanding of the organizational context that led to the difficulty.  Liars and sociopaths will not want to reveal anything negative and deny that any such thing could ever happen; but by so stating, they have revealed themselves.

     Big caveat: This process is designed for situations where many of your candidates are total strangers.  More often than not, we are hiring people who we already know, or who are already established in our organization.  Professional reputation is much more important in that context. However, if you have to compare those whom you know to complete strangers, this process will level the playing field and help give you good results. The other caveat is that the interview is only one small part of the hiring process.

    To recap, if you use the structured interview process, then you will be subject to applicants who took advice from this guy. God help you.

Plan to Do Nothing

Rule 1. Plan to Do Nothing and You Will Certainly Achieve Your Goals.

This rule started out as a bit of joke, along the lines of if your plan for a goal of doing nothing, you can always achieve that goal. But then I noticed something as a manager, the busier I was, the more I was doing every day, the less effective I was.  At first, it seemed like a wicked problem, with no real solution. (I may write on some real wicked problems later, but for now, you can check out this somewhat depressing treatise.)  Fortunately, managerial busy-ness has a cure, planning to do nothing.  Posh you say, the speed of today's work means that he manager will always be busy. Managers are the hardest workers of all, if they are to be successful, or so we are told.

That view fails to answer: what is the work of management? The key concept here is planning.  The manager must be working very hard at planning!  And what is he planning? TO DO NOTHING! This doesn't mean that the organization is doing nothing; the mission and the work remain and must be accomplished.  But the rule should look like this: Every predictable aspect of the team's effort should be planned as to who has responsibility for execution.  Further, the responsibility for any routine work should NEVER be allocated to the manager.  This allows all routine and predictable work to flow to the correct performer.

Does this mean the manager is doing nothing? Of course not. Unpredictable new tasking is always arriving. The changing environment is always causing work to be re-planned. There is always a crisis.  But if your day is filled with executing routine work, where is the time to handle the all of the predictable crises? Not that each crisis is predictable, or you would have planned for it. But it is predictable that there will be crises. And some crises do become predictable; so we PLAN to be ready for them.

I once went through a period where we were tasked to produce a "stop-light" chart with detailed notes to show what additional funding we needed to get our portion of a major defense program to green.  We put the brief together, it was presented by our program manager, and we congratulated ourselves on a job well done.  But then a funny thing happened.  We didn't get all of the funding. And another opportunity to brief came up on short notice, late on Friday with a Monday deadline.  And this happened again.  Third time was the charm; we just started keeping our charts up to date because the short notice tasking wasn't going to cease, and didn't for about 9 months. But as manager, I didn't keep up the charts, my project controller did so by coralling necessary input from product leads on a weekly basis. 

Once the routine work and predictable crises are planned, we can start to do our real job, which is making things better. Some like to call that "continuous process improvement," but that sounds way too bureaucratic and non-value add. Making things better is just asking basic questions over and over to make sure your team is performing well.

1. Is the team fully productive? If not, who is under performing and how can we help them improve.

2. Do my reporting processes give me the right, TIMELY, information for decision making? Do they give my boss the correct and TIMELY information?

3. Do we have the right people on the bus? (H/T Jim Collins.) Who do we need to hire or fire?

4. Are we organized effectively? Is work flow efficient? Do we have the right tools?

5. What is the next threat or opportunity? How do we get ahead of it?

Answering these questions may not feel like "real work." But if you don't plan to have the time to answer them, you will lurch from one crisis to the next, and always be busy and ineffective.

Riehm's Rules - All Ten

I skipped rule 6 in my last post, because I had apparently lost track of the count.  It gave me an opportunity to revisit my rules in light of my more recent experience. I had thought of adding Rule 5 "Simulate Concern." But that only has situational applicability, and was already taken by someone else.  Besides, I need a rule 6.  Here is the new list.

1.  Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.
2.  Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all. Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.
3.  Hiring is the manager's most important decision.
4.  Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.
5.  The commodity in shortest supply is management attention. Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no." Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.
6.  Don't fight market forces.
7.  Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.
8.  Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
9.  Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.
10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

Not fighting market forces can have different meanings, depending on your organizational context. Two key elements stand out.

1. Broad market forces are going to drive technology available for you to conduct business. That's obvious but bears repeating, I often see arguments for using the "better technology," but if no industrial base exists in five years to support the choice, it wasn't a good choice.  Managers also have to show some common sense regarding technology trends.  One example, you can expect a mutually reinforcing cycle of operating system upgrades and hardware upgrades to be required of all your embedded technology, not just your laptop.  This means we should lean forward to be at the high end of the state of the shelf to avoid technology obsolescence, announced or otherwise.

2. Your organization is an ecosystem with market forces of its own. Attempting to force fit new technical solutions, except when absolutely necessary, is another way we can be fighting market forces.  We make more allies within our organization and deliver faster with lower sustainment costs when we cause the already delivered enterprise solutions to be modified rather trying to bypass them.  For a seemingly ludicrous example, the Department of Defense has been billions on a public key infrastructure technology.  There are occasions when the technology doesn't fit a particular use case. But reverting to user name and password log delivers low security that will either cost a lot due to a breach or cost a lot when the organization directs an upgrade.

Next up. Start outlining all of the rules in a more rational order.

Riehm's Rules of Management

After quoting myself one too many times, a friend of mine suggested I write down my management principles for all to see. Perhaps he thought to avoid my repetitive remarks. Regardless of his motives, it seemed like a good idea. I am too lazy to write a book, more on that in my rules, but a series of blog posts that I incrementally improve seemed achievable.

I am a civilian manager for the U.S. Navy working in technology management and acquisition.  My experience probably translates well to any large English speaking organization, but your mileage may vary (YMMV). Years ago I wrote the outline below.  I went searching for it to see if it stood the test of time.

1. Plan to do nothing, and you will certainly achieve your goals.

2. Management is hard, leadership is better and supervision is most difficult of all. Corollary: Hire people who don't need supervision.

3. Hiring is the manager's most important decision.

4. Stay on message. Communicate consistently. Repeat your theme repetitively.

5. The commodity in shortest supply is management attention. Corollary 1: The most important word in a manager's vocabulary is "no." Corollary 2: Email is an evil leach of your time.

7. Understand your firm's economic engine and your unit's.

8. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

9. Deliver the bad news yourself, let your people deliver the good news.

10. If you can't cover yourself in glory, cover yourself in paper.

Did they stand up? Apparently not, because I skipped number six while counting to ten, which I attribute to not completing kindergarten. That's a story for another day. Since I first wrote these down, I was deeply influenced by Scott Adams book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big and Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan. Those two books will influence my updates.

That's enough work for today.

Favorite Beers

Because I review beers for the Clairemont Times, I often get asked what is my favorite beer.  That's obviously too hard to answer given the plethora of beer styles; you can't compare an IPA to a stout, they are just different things.  However, I thought I would make a list by style and keep it updated.

Current Favorite Beer List by Style:

Helles Lager: Firestone Lager - Firestone Walker, Paso Robles, CA
Czech Pilsner: Lagunitas Pils, Lagunitas Brewing, Petaluma, CA
German Pilsner: Trumer Pils - Trumer, Berkley, CA (2nd place: Northern Pilsner - Sudwerk, Davis, CA)
Doppelbock: Celebrator - Ayinger, Aying, Germany.
Schwarzbier: Schwarzbier - Eppig Brewing, San Diego, CA
Brown: Palo Santo Marron - Dogfish Head, Milton, DE
Kölsch: Claritas - Mike Hess Brewing, San Diego, CA
Porter: Dawn of the Deft - Deft Brewing, San Diego, CA
Imperial Porter: Bine & Vine 4th Anniversary Ale Adams Avenue Imperial Porter, New English Brewing, San Diego, CA
Chocolate Porter: FivePine Chocolate Porter - Three Creeks Brewing, Sisters, OR
Wee Heavy/Scotch Ale: Icelandic Wee Heavy - Einstök Ölgerð, Akureyri, Iceland
Pale Ale: Equinox - Lagunitas, Petaluma, CA
IPA: Revolver - BNS Brewing, Santee, CA
Double IPA: 90 Minute IPA - Dogfish Head (Maximus - Lagunitas close 2nd place.)
Imperial IPA: 18th Anniversary Ale - Coronado Brewing, San Diego, CA
Strong American Ale: Bourbon Barrel Aged Freudian Sip - Rough Draft, San Diego, CA
ESB: Young Danny Boy - Half Door Brewing, San Diego, CA
Irish Red: O'Hara's Irish Red, Carlow Brewing, Carlow, Ireland
Dry Irish Stout: Wagon Crasher - Thorn St. Brewing, San Diego, CA
Stout: City of the Dead - Modern Times, San Diego, CA
Imperial Stout: Hawaiian Speedway Stout - Alesmith, San Diego, CA
Russian Imperial Stout: The Butcher - Societe Brewing, San Diego, CA
Old Ale: Sucré - The Bruery, Placentia, CA
Saison: Hennepin Farmhouse Saison - Brewery Ommegang, Cooperstown, NY
Belgian Quad: 7 Swans-A-Swimming - The Bruery, Placentia, CA
Belgian Tripel: Pinot Noir Barrel Aged Triple Emboozlement - Rough Draft
Belgian Dubbel: Two Tortugas - Karl Strauss, San Diego, CA
Belgian Strong Golden Ale: Tie. La Chouffe Blond - Brasserie d'Achouffe, Houffalize, BE; Vertical Epic 11.11.11 Aged in Red Wine Barrels - Stone Brewing, Escondido, CA
American Adjunct Lager: Coors Banquet Beer - Coors, Golden, CO
Mexican Adjunct Lager -  Pacifico - Grupo Modelo, Mazatlán, MX
Light Beer: Lite - Miller, Everywhere USA

Fall Brewing – North Park Neighborly

In February, I ventured to North Park to visit Fall Brewing, at 4542 30th Street. Fall has become a neighborhood favorite hangout, attracting a packed house by early afternoon on my President’s day visit. Co-founders Ray Astamendi and Dave Lively took the name from the idea that they had fallen in previous experiences in the brewing business. I talked with sales manager and Bay Park Resident Larry Monasakanian about Fall Brewing’s history, direction, and of course, craft beer.

Fall opened in November 2014, with Astamendi as head brewer. Building on his previous commercial experience, he designed the layout of the facility to achieve a clean work flow for the brewer. His handiwork is visible from the tasting room. Lively had extensive experience in graphic design in the San Diego skate, surf, and music scene. They were coworkers at a previous brewery who wanted to “get it right” with a neighborhood craft brewery. The goal is to brew clean, classic, consistent, and drinkable beers. Part of getting the classic recipes perfect is getting the water chemistry correct for the style. A reverse osmosis unit built into the brewery aids that. The beer line up reflects a desire for variety, but since this is San Diego, hoppy beers are the most popular, according to Monasakanian. Fall recently got on board with the Hazy New England IPA trend, Goo Goo Muck, was packaged and sold out quickly, but is still available on draft. Currently, Fall is selling Green Hat IPA, Rise Up, Plenty for All, and Magical & Delicious Pale Ale in select stores and BevMo. In March, Fall will be putting a new hazy into canned four packs, Lupulin Saturation. Another recent San Diego trend is towards lagers. Fall has separate lagering tanks, long recognizing the importance of that style.

The vibe is dominated by the musical influence of the punk rock scene, and it shows up in beer names as well. Each month, a new art show is featured on the left wall. Concert advertising from Lively’s personal collection add more character. The music on the sound system reflects those tastes but isn’t too loud. For eats, Fall has worked to get a varied food truck line up 7 days a week, after 4 p.m. Kabobs, sushi, burgers, or Mexican are in the mix.

The beers were all terrific. Fall deliberately limits the alcohol content of their beers to less than 9%, allowing you to sample more of their product. I started with Rise Up Czech Pale Lager. This was very clean tasting, balanced to the maltier side; a challenging style done very well. Crystal Mess is a floral, hoppy pale ale, but still clean. A little wheat softens it up. Speedo’s Tiki Love God is a traditional nutty brown. It is sweet up front, and just slightly dry. Another tough style done well by Fall is the German Pilsner, Plenty for All. Sweeter than Rise Up, this has softer taste than Rise Up, offset with noble hops. Rods and Mockers, is an English Mild, at the lighter end of the pale ale spectrum. You can taste the breadiness of the Maris Otter malt, with a little hop balance. Monasakanian dropped Fall Brewing’s flagship IPA, Green Hat, into middle of my tasting session. This is a very West Coast IPA with bold citrus hitting your nose and tongue right away. It is still a little cleaner than similar San Diego IPAs, and an excellent flagship offering.

Berliner Weisse is low alcohol German sour wheat beer. I normally avoid this, but Watermelon Jazz Hands was a treat. The sour and watermelon combined wasn’t syrupy, just refreshing and easy to drink. We shifted gears to Puppy Cuddles Milk Stout, a lighter stout with lactose mellowing the flavor. 2AM Bike Ride is a coffee stout brewed with whole bean coffee from nearby Dark Horse Coffee Roasters. The coffee flavor dominates but is very mellow, due to the use of the whole beans, rather than ground or brewed coffee. The one non-traditional, “Frankenstein” beer was a hoppy, amber, Imperial Lager, Enormous Schwanzstucker, brewed in collaboration with Revision Brewing and Automatic Brewing. It was malty, dry, and hoppy, and pretty decent. I finished Nucular Strategery, a barrel aged Imperial Stout that was my favorite of the day. Bourbon notes were subtle, and a little coconut finish made for a delightful balance. Worthy of note, a barrel-aged version of Jinx Remover Imperial Black Lager won the gold at the 2016 World Beer Cup in the barrel aged strong category.

How would I describe Fall? A chill neighborhood brewery serving a good variety of drinkable beers.

 Larry Monasakanian with co-founders Ray Astamendi and Dave Lively of Fall Brewing.

This article was originally published in the Clairemont Times on page 13.