Questions

In honor of the just-ended Passover celebration during which four questions are asked to help understand the holiday (leave it to us Jews to need four questions to understand a holiday!), TJOW offers these pressing questions for your consideration and entertainment:

65. Why don't more companies -- especially those in competitive industries -- operate like successful sports teams? It's curious to us that while many organizations invoke sports analogies frequently, most fail to operationalize one of the most valuable lessons from successful teams: Top teams help all of their players achieve outstanding performance. That's every coach's job. On top teams, that's also a responsibility of every player. They don't wait while one of their players, or one of their colleagues, performs at a mediocre level, watching to see if he or she will magically improve. They don't provide veiled, nebulous 'feedback', hoping the individual will 'get it'. They don't wait for failure before acting. Winning requires that every player performs at a high level. Top teams simply can't afford a bell-shaped performance curve. Why do many companies think that they can?

66. Has Yahoo! become People magazine? Is The National Inquirer their aim? Just some of the topics recently headlining on Yahoo! (and we quote verbatim from the home page):

• Adopted Boy's Sad Story
• Pregnant Athlete in Olympics
• Man Surprised With Dream Backyard
• Niecy Nash Meets 47-year-old Virgin
• Megan Fox's Body Art Mystery
• $5 Million Elevator for RV
• What Kate Beckinsale Reads Her Daughter, and, not to be missed
• Pitt and Jolie Are Engaged.
  

We're not kidding. We're afraid that if we were to look harder we would find these choice stories:

• Baby Born With Two Heads Accurately Predicts Future
• Bathroom Makeovers of White Collar Criminals
• Separated At Birth: A Kardashian Secret
• From Truck Driver to Surgeon in Weeks
• Aliens Visit Me Regularly and Block My Driveway
  
• Ten Things Never to Say to the Pope, and
• Planning for the End of the World.

With performance suffering at Yahoo!, we have a modest suggestion: Think content. Just one of a series of idea we have for turning the company around.

67. Speaking purely from an evolutionary standpoint, are we made for work? And when we say 'work', we're thinking what most of us do: Getting up at a prescribed time, putting on clean clothes, going to a specific place of work, confining oneself for the better part of 9 hours (with breaks and lunch) to a carefully-designed and overly-controlled environment where one does a set of tasks usually defined and monitored by someone else, and then leaving at a prescribed time, taking the trek home and doing it all again the next day. Usually for insufficient reward.

Were we made for that? Hardly. We were made, at least the males among us, to do what most men have done from the very beginning: Hunt. That's what we know. That's what we're good at. Slice into our DNA (carefully, please) and you'll find that hunting is at our core. Because unlike our current concept of 'work', hunting allows one to wake up whenever, eat a hearty breakfast to last through the day, gather weapons, pack a lunch, pick up your buddies and set out for a day far away from the rest of the community, away from the reproachful eyes of others. Yes, way back when we had to produce food or everyone died. There's that. But in all other respects (save for the actual killing of animals, that is), it's nearly perfect. And you wonder why guys, to this day, feel 'right' when they're hanging with their buddies, drinking, trolling bars, talking sports and acting like fools. It's who we are. [Tongue somewhat in cheek.]

68. Why don't more companies trust their people to do what's right? A cynical question? Possibly. But we would argue that the true sign of trust is the absence of rules at work regulating behavior. That is, an organization that truly trusts its people to do what's right is an organization without rules mandating what's right. Show us a company without a lengthy employee handbook defining just about every aspect of workplace behavior and we'll show you a company that puts full faith in its people to do the work well. One such company: Netflix. We cite them because the company has no policy regarding paid time off. Shocking but true, Netflix does not track vacation time. Their approach: Take it when you want and take as much as you need. Their belief: Our people will do what's right because they're smart, responsible and care about the company. We find that refreshing. We also believe that's good business.

Question 67 and 68. Take that, Chicago.