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Book Review: Managing to Save the World

Posted on September 24, 2015July 24, 2016 by Sonya Mann

In my experience as a reader, there are two main types of book. These types span all genres and topics. The first is steady going. I read a few pages every night, maybe a chapter — I plod through. The second type is gripping. I tear through the book. I pick it up (or open the Kindle file) and can’t put it down.

The quality of the book isn’t the distinguishing factor. For instance, I’m working on The Design of Everything Things at the moment. It’s an excellent read in terms of intellectual content, and the writing is accessible. But it’s not a rip-roarer. Who knows why? Probably my reaction is determined by something very idiosyncratic about my personal tastes. And yet, when reviewing a book, I must hope that others share my proclivities, at least a little.

pens and pencils in a messy bun — Photo, *work hair*, by Emergency Brake.

As an opposite example, Boss Life pulled me through quickly. So did Managing to Change the World. The latter is a primer on how to be an effective manager at a nonprofit company, written by Alison Green of the invaluable Ask a Manager blog and Jerry Hauser, who used to be second-in-command at Teach For America. Together they work at The Management Center.

“Fundamentally, a great manager is someone who cares passionately about getting results. And that can’t be faked. If you are truly determined to get results, it becomes the fire that fuels everything you do[.]”

I’m such a fan of Green that I felt confident enough about the book’s probable quality to write this post’s intro before I finished reading it. I was right — Managing to Save the World is very good, and the advice is applicable to professionals outside of the nonprofit world.

In essence, Green and Hauser organize common sense into principles and processes. They are straightforward, presenting various concrete examples and tools. Managing to Save the World is a textbook for professional adults, complete with a summary of key concepts at the end of every chapter.

Here are some of Green and Hauser’s suggestions for managers:

Use time efficiently and effectively to get results. How? Well…
Guide rather than do. Your time should be devoted to tasks that only you can complete.
Learn to delegate and create a culture of accountability…
By supervising and following up throughout every project.

An acronym mentioned in one of the chapters represents the book’s overarching ethos quite well: “SMART goals are strategic, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-bound. Goals should measure outcomes rather than activities whenever possible.” Managing to Save the World is definitely a recommended read!

Kindness Makes Communication Work Better

Posted on September 14, 2015May 20, 2016 by Sonya Mann

Niceness is pragmatism.

Tech-culture podcast Exponent came back from its summer hiatus on the 6th. In the most recent episode, hosts Ben Thompson and James Allworth discussed Amazon’s work culture in reaction to that now-infamous New York Times article. Their conversation touched on the necessity of soft skills even in creative environments where solid ideas take precedence over everything else.

Successful companies set high standards and enforce them. They must! There is no other way to ensure excellence. Trade-offs are inherent to this arrangement — you can’t care profoundly about your professional results, work devastatingly hard to build something amazing, and still spend plenty of quality time with your wife and kids. The laws of physics forbid it — you can only be in one place at a time. If you’re at the office, then you’re not tossing a frisbee around in the backyard.

office drone lyfe — Illustration by Yue Wu.

More crucially, competitive companies develop and cherish workplace cultures that demand people to identify and demolish subpar ideas. When you prop up bad suggestions to make their progenitors feel good, you guarantee a future of low-quality initiatives. Next stop, loss of market share! It makes sense that brilliant executives want to stamp out the impulse to be nice. Except wait, no, it only makes sense superficially.

Allworth called this attitude “the primacy of ideas”. He pointed out that brutal honesty about the merit of any proposition favors “thinkers” over “feelers”. We INTJs and the like are able to maintain some emotional distance, to take a step back and rationally examine feedback. (Which doesn’t mean we aren’t hurt by criticism — Thompson added that this type of person also views their work as their source of human value. If the output is deemed inferior, we judge ourselves very harshly.)

Allworth explained that a workplace culture hostile to people who prioritize relationships will end up being a monoculture, alienating the voices of potentially useful employees and limiting diversity of thought. Well… yeah. It will.

be well at work :) — Illustration by RSO.

I’m probably reacting emotionally (ha) and not being fair to either Thompson or Allworth, but it was frustrating to listen while they grudgingly came to the conclusion that there’s value in being nice. I can’t help but think that only men would hash this out at length before tentatively agreeing that maintaining relationships is important. I even felt bitter while listening. It seemed like a classic example of “feminine” strengths being devalued, left invisible by default. Of course, the conversation’s outcome was better than if they had decided soft skills weren’t worth anything at all — but did it really need to be debated?

I’m an intellect-first, analytical kind of person. I’m also a woman, socialized to be nice and put up with a lot of nonsense from other people. Maybe the combination of those contradictory tendencies makes it easy to realize that you need to present information in a way that people find acceptable. Intellectual merit isn’t everything — in fact, it isn’t anything without soft skills. Smart people who can’t work with other people aren’t going to get anything done. (To be clear, this is something the Exponent hosts mentioned and agreed on.)

illustration of a good idea taking off — Illustration by Senya Pixelev.

Of course, I went through the same personal-growth phase that Allworth and Thompson also discussed, aggressively wanting to be right and constantly believing that I knew best, before I realized that a good idea you can’t get anyone to buy into has the same results as a bad idea. That’s really my whole point here:

A good idea that you can’t persuade people to believe in is functionally the same as a bad idea.

Even famously brutal tech founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos had to figure out people-friendly ways to present their plans. We know this happened in part because otherwise Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon wouldn’t be iconic companies.

Luckily, collaborators can give each other straightforward feedback without being cruel. Thompson and Allworth do it on the podcast all the time! (More on this in an upcoming review of Ask a Manager blogger Alison Green’s book Managing to Save the World.) I think that’s why I was so frustrated — the necessity of niceness, or at least courtesy, seems utterly obvious, even if only based on their own dynamic. I don’t think the topic shouldn’t have been mentioned — here I am mentioning it at length — but I wonder why the conclusion surprised them.

How Do People Manage To Do Jobs They Love???

Posted on August 13, 2015May 20, 2016 by Sonya Mann

hunched over spooky creature illustration — Illustration by jessicanicole______ on Instagram. Yes, that many underscores in the username.

During the past few days I’ve been thinking about art and money, about ways to be entrepreneurial while working with art. (Contemplating such things has even entailed posting on my neglected curatorial Tumblr.)

I love the idea of being an art broker, or a dealer, or whatever the correct term is for a person who represents artists and sells their work. The whim has caught me and it’s bouncing around in my brain.

Of course, I love the idea, but I would probably be bad at dealing art. Go-get-’em sales-sense is not my forte. I can be relatively charming but hawking wares makes me squeamish. The hard-sell approach is painful.

colorful abstract money painting — Ten-cent painting (see what I did there?) by Jason McHenry.

ArtBusiness.com has this subject locked down and reading those articles did not make me feel like selling art is lucrative. Not that I’m surprised. People do it for love, not money, like writing. Spoiler alert: creative pursuits don’t make you rich unless you’re incredibly lucky and at least somewhat talented. “Starving artist” is a valid cliche.

The devil on my shoulder — we’re all born with one, I think — discourages every fantasy. I can’t decide if it’s practical or defeatist.

Grotesque painting, Familiar, by Bruno Nadalin; $50 on Etsy. — Grotesque painting by Bruno Nadalin; $50 on Etsy.

Will Social Media Habits Transfer To Labor?

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Sonya Mann

Sam Biddle wrote for GQ, “When even our genuine friendships are being quantified, what hope can we possibly have for treating labor as more than a pack of pixels?” This is an obvious reference to Facebook and all the other social networks. Personal relationships are uploaded piece by piece — voluntarily, it’s worth noting — and then rigorously monetized.

road worker signs — Image via morgueFile.

We are eager to feed snapshots of daily life into websites or apps that promise to show our acquaintances. Soon we learn to rely on digital hearts and stars when defining our social value.

Biddle seems afraid that the same laissez-faire, click-happy attitude will apply to labor and transform the American job market. The evidence behind this notion is ample. Worry has spread so widely that I don’t feel like I need to substantiate with a link. But I do want to help tweak the argument’s focal angle.

Biddle touched on this topic again when he responded to a “gig economy” advertorial on Medium’s tech site Backchannel. The article, called “The Full-Time Job Is Dead”, was sponsored by Upwork, a middleman freelancer market created when Elance and oDesk merged. Biddle wrote, addressing the Upwork authors, “What you’ve described is a societal nightmare in which the only employment is deeply precarious, and only employers benefit.”

I don’t disagree. However, as far as I can tell, we are just seeing the repercussions of supply and demand. (Upwork still bears responsibility — like Biddle, I think their business is heinous.) There are more workers than jobs, so employers have leverage. It’s that simple, right? Of course the people hiring can do whatever they want. The only way to deal with the problem is regulation. (Or is there another solution that I’m unaware of?)

Alternatively, we could wait for the market to change on its own… which might not happen. Unless some bizarre disruption takes place.

Hat tip for the concepts: “Rebuilding the world technology destroyed” and the affiliated podcast.

Learning To Be An Editorial Project Manager, Week #1 Recap

Posted on June 13, 2015May 20, 2016 by Sonya Mann

I just finished my first week of full-time work at a “normal” job. Before this Monday I was freelancing, which is very different from being part of an office team. Now I drive to Novato every morning, talk to the same people all day, and figure out new processes that will hopefully become second nature soon… After seven days of doing this, I’m still scared and excited. Also tired and invigorated.

The company is small, so I have a lot of responsibility — meaning a lot of power. Not in the sense that I order other people around, but in the sense that my choices matter. Thankfully my decisions don’t have life-or-death repercussions, but they do affect success or failure. Correctly deployed, my skills and focus can make the business function better. That’s a very cool feeling. Freelancing didn’t feel that way, except pertaining to my own ability to keep writing for money. In this new job, people are counting on me to take care of their projects — both my boss and our clients.

I have so, so much to learn. On Friday the boss treated everyone to dinner at a local restaurant, and he said to me and the other new employee, “You guys had a big download this week.” That’s a good way to put it. The sheer amount of information we were given was overwhelming and at first the content was incomprehensible. Slowly, I’m getting the hang of things.

baby sitting at a big computer — I’m slightly more useful at work than a toddler. But not, like, a lot more useful. Photo by Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería.

I am an editorial project manager. That’s my title. Basically, my job is to bring books into being. Which is awesome! As I said at the interview, “This is a dream job. I didn’t know this job still existed.” I assumed that most of the publishing jobs were gone because there’s so much pressure on the industry now. Luckily, I was wrong!

The company I work for is ORO Editions, which publishes architecture and design books by some damn prestigious authors. (For example: the journal Landscape Architecture Plus, which I’ll be proofreading.) We also have two other imprints, academically focused Applied Research and Design Publishing and popular-interest Goff Books. Some of the subjects our authors address are totally fascinating.

So far, the only downside is that I miss writing. I’ll have to figure out how to keep it in my daily schedule.

freelance writing -- now it's my hobby instead of work — Me on Twitter.

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