The Secret to Having Happy Employees

by Jay Goltz
Thursday, March 11, 2010


About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come with her newly minted M.B.A. boyfriend. As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.

Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. "I'm sure you treat them well," he replied.

"That's half of it," I said. "Do you know what the other half is?"





He didn't have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

I'm not. I have learned the long, hard and frustrating way that as a manager you cannot make everyone happy. You can try, you can listen, you can solve some problems, you can try some more. Good management requires training, counseling and patience, but there comes a point when you are robbing the business of precious time and energy.

Don't get me wrong. This doesn't happen a lot. There's no joy in the act of firing someone. And it's not always the employee's fault — there are many bad bosses out there. Bad management can make a good employee dysfunctional. On the other hand, good management will not always make a dysfunctional employee good. And sometimes people who would be great employees somewhere else just don't fit your company, whether it is the type of business or the company culture.

In the worst cases, the problem of a bad fit can have a bigger impact than just one employee's performance. Being in charge does not necessarily mean you are in control, and being in control does not necessarily mean being in charge. Have you ever seen a company or department paralyzed by someone who is unhappy and wants to take hostages? It is remarkable how much damage one person can do. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you watch "The Caine Mutiny." Basically, one guy takes apart the ship. He was unhappy. It only takes one.

This is only my opinion. I don't have a Ph.D., an M.B.A., or even an economics degree. What I do have is a happy company. And that makes me happy. Now I know some people argue that business is about making money, and not everyone has to be happy. That is also an opinion. Everyone has a right to his or her opinion. When you own a company, you also have the right to surround yourself with the people you choose.

I have spent the last year and a half focusing on cutting costs, figuring out how the market has changed, and worrying about the economy. Things seem to be getting better, or perhaps I am just getting used to it.

Either way, I had a good day today. Not because I got a big order, great financial reports or even an employee stopping by to tell me what an awesome boss I am. (That generally doesn't happen. You have to tell yourself. It's a boss thing.) I had a great day because I spent most of it walking around the company and appreciating the fact that even after a year and a half of soft sales and cutbacks and furloughs, I have wonderful people working for me. They care. They are committed. They understand the whole customer–staff–company triangle, where all of the legs support each other.

If you read books on great companies, they usually leave out a dirty little secret. It doesn't make for good public relations — like talking about how you "empower people" or how your "greatest assets" are your people. Both of these well–worn clichés are true. What is also true is that it's hard to build a great company with the wrong people.

When you have the right people, business is much easier. I know because I have tried it both ways.

Jay Goltz owns five small businesses in Chicago.

Clifford Stoll's 1995 Internet predictions (from Newsweek)

The Internet? Bah!

Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana

This is hilarious! It just goes to show how hard it is to predict the future and how your predictions can come back to haunt you. Thanks a lot, Clifford. I really enjoyed this.

By Clifford Stoll NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 27, 1995

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love videogames—but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I'll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

STOLL is the author of "Silicon Snake Oil--Second Thoughts on the Information Highway," to be published by Doubleday in April.

© 1995

The Dream Drain

by David Mitchell

On the eve of departing, a novelist reflects on the pitfalls and perks of Japan.

An expatriate's relationship with the host country is a shifting one, and during my eight years in Western Japan, I have run the whole gamut: Greenhorn-in-Wonderland, hyper critic, "Excuse-me-but-you're-standing-in-my-Japan," culture-intoxicatee. I am returning to the U.K. at the end of March, but, paradoxically, my tie with Japan is due to grow much stronger in mid-May when my wife gives birth and I become the father of an infant Japanese-Briton.
This prospect changes everything. Many long-term western expatriates in Japan inhabit an Edenic state of bourgeois affluence with no strings attached. We enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, yet remain untroubled by civic duties. We can't vote, we may lack linguistic fluency, our opinions are presumed to derive from our national stereotypes, we rarely blip on the national radar, so we are absolved from caring overly about where we live. Japan's problems, except in a Japanwatching way, are not our problems. However, as someone who intends to return in five years to put a child through Japan's elementary-school system, the country's failings suddenly matter more.

My sharpest worry is that national homogeneity continues to be Japan's modern religion. There are no degrees of citizenship here: if you are not "a Japanese" your gaijin status is hammered home at every encounter with officialdom, every gape from rural school kids and every well-meant compliment on your chopstick skills. This is not an "Expat-as-Victim" article: I know that in the immigration authority's hierarchy of gaijinhood, Caucasians have a far easier time than, say, Filipino "Japayukis," Russian exotic dancers or South American laborers. My point is that foreignness is like a magical garment from a folktale, one with the sewn-in curse that its wearers cannot remove themselves. Only social consent will allow my child to feel at home in his or her Asian mother-country.

Japan withholds this consent like a zealot withholds an admission of doubt. At the political level there is no provision for dual nationality in adulthood, so on his or her twentieth birthday our child must go through the ritual of renouncing British citizenship in the eyes of Japanese law�while retaining both European Union and Japanese citizenship in the eyes of British law. On a civic level, even Hiroshima, my home for eight years and, according to its tourist literature "the international city of peace," denies Korean conscripts killed in the A-bomb blast a monument in Peace Memorial Park because its foreign presence would sully the sanctum's purity. "Internationalization," as oft-quoted a mantra here as anywhere, means little on street level beyond flag-bunting, expressway signs in English and more Starbucks franchises.

The sea-change necessary to update Japanese society's relationship with the rest of the world and its peoples is not on the horizon, not yet. Gerontocracy keeps younger talent away from powers of decision making, resulting in a US-bound brain drain, a Europe/New York City-bound arts drain, and, more depressing for a father-to-be, a "dream drain": a pervasive acceptance that a creative and fulfilled life in a human-friendly environment lies only in the Paris of Am�lie, the Rome of Audrey Hepburn's Holiday and the Canada or Hawaii of Japan Travel Bureau brochures. An economy gnawed by deflation produces a climate where xenophobia heats up, not cools down. Education should propagate multiculturalism but instead fosters cookie-cutter conformity in a marathon sprint to brand-name universities which offer a woefully shoddy product. If my wife and I have a daughter, she may well need to sacrifice all hope of a rewarding career should she elect to stay in a Japan as sexist as it is now. The political forces that steered Japan to global dominance in the 1980s are now too dead to kickstart the country back to life, but not dead enough to roll over, expire, and allow their 21st century successors to take over.

This pessimism may be too murky. Japan changes more by revolution than evolution. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 catapulted Japan into the industrial age in the blink of a historian's eye, as did the post-war economic "miracle"�a word employed by Western commentators who failed to see rapid growth coming. It may be that the demographic and financial meltdowns Japan faces will trigger another volcanic transition, and soon. It may be that this change will promote meritocracy, protect the environment, modernize the economy, strangle the Yakuza, muzzle corruption and, crucially for my family's future, usher in a broader definition of what it is to be Japanese. I hope so. I have a strong affection for our child's Asian homeland, an affection that I want him or her to share as a native and not a curio. "Ah, so your child will be a Half," I was told by my colleagues when they learned of my wife's pregnancy. "No," I said, "my child will be a Both."

Mimi switch

Nudge and wink may turn on all your gadgets



A wink, a smile or a raised eyebrow could soon change the music on your iPod or start up the washing machine, thanks to a new Japanese gadget.

The device looks like a normal set of headphones but is fitted with a set of infrared sensors that measure tiny movements inside the ear that result from different facial expressions.

The gizmo - called the "Mimi Switch" or "Ear Switch" - is connected to a micro-computer that can control electronic devices, essentially making it a hands-free remote control for anything.

"You will be able to turn on room lights or swing your washing machine into action with a quick twitch of your mouth," said its inventor, Kazuhiro Taniguchi of Osaka University.

"An iPod can start or stop music when the wearer sticks his tongue out, like in the famous Einstein picture. If he opens his eyes wide, the machine skips to the next tune. A wink with the right eye makes it go back.

"The machine can be programmed to run with various other facial expressions, such as a wriggle of the nose or a smile."

The Mimi Switch could also store and interpret data and get to know its user, said Taniguchi, chief researcher at Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering Science in western Japan.

"It monitors natural movements of the face in everyday life and accumulates data," Taniguchi told AFP in an interview. "If it judges that you aren't smiling enough, it may play a cheerful song."

Some may use the device for relaxation - perhaps by changing music hands-free while reading a book - but Taniguchi said it could also have more serious applications to make people's lives safer and easier.

"If the system is mounted on a hearing aid for elderly people, it could tell how often they sneeze or whether they are eating regularly," he said.

"If it believes they are not well, it could send a warning message to relatives."

The device could also serve as a remote control for appliances for physically disabled people, from cameras and computers to air conditioners, or alert medical services if a person has a fit, he said.

The Ear Switch follows on from an earlier device called the Temple Switch that was small enough to fit inside a pair of eyeglasses and also read the flick of an eyelid.

"As the ear switch is put in the ears, its optical sensors are unaffected by sunlight," Taniguchi said.

He said he was planning to patent his new device in Japan and abroad, work on a wireless version, and seek corporate funding to market it for practical uses -- something he expected might take two or three years.

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