NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Five Keys to Personal Growth in the Great Pandemic Do-Over

Circumstances that you never anticipated are giving you permission to change your life and your business. Take advantage of this moment--and don't forget to forgive. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

If there’s even the slightest silver lining to the pandemic, it’s clearly that it has given millions of Americans permission to make radical changes in their attitudes toward their work, in their behaviors toward their family, friends and others, and in their philosophies going forward as to what exactly they’re hoping that life will bring them.

Ideally these will be changes for the better. Changes that will endure once the world returns to whatever the new normal may be. But nothing will improve if these folks just sit around and wait for things to happen to them as opposed to seizing the moment and making those things happen for them and their businesses. As Ayn Rand said: “The world you desired can be won.” 

While no one is entitled to a perfect life, it seems that many of us now possess once-in-a-lifetime, remarkable and previously unavailable (or at least unimagined) levels of power and agency to alter our lives -; hopefully in positive directions -; and to change the ways in which we run our businesses as well. How each of us emerges from the limbo of the last two years and seizes this brief window of opportunity will set the course for our futures - both personal and business. The best entrepreneurs learn to ride and master the waves they encounter rather than letting the waves carry them away or roll right over them.  

What’s even more amazing is that the same permissions and prospects apply - in virtually identical fashions - to both our lives and our companies. While there may be many more, here are my favorite five.  

You now have permission in your personal life and your professional life as well to: 

1) Face up to things you’ve avoided or denied for years. 

“Necessary evils” are often just cheap and lazy rationalizations that we employ to keep doing things that we know are wrong, wasteful or destructive to our mental well-being or our company’s culture and spirit. As Springsteen says: “It takes away from your soul when you do what you don't believe in.”

The truth is that you can’t do good business with bad people. If your best salesperson is an asshole, now’s the time to bite the bullet and get rid of that person. It’s not the employees you fire who make you miserable; it’s the ones that you should fire but don’t. This goes for bad customers as well - deadbeats, people who treat your team members poorly, cheapskates focused solely on price and not value. Now’s the time.

2) Forgo commitments, obligations and entanglements that are no longer meaningful, valuable or important to you.  

This has been a time for considerable introspection, and we’ve all realized that, in certain parts of our lives and certainly in parts of our businesses, we’ve been going through the motions and phoning things in for quite some time. Do you really need all those club memberships and board seats when you’ve really been bored out of your mind at most of these events and meetings because you no longer have the necessary passion, interest or commitment to actively participate and contribute? You’re just taking up space and dragging yourself to places you just as soon never be. It’s time to pull the plug, make room for new folks, and get out before they work up the courage to ask you to leave. You’ll be doing everyone a favor - especially yourself.  

3) Finalize all those tentative and dangling undertakings and open-ended intentions and aspirations.    

Do it or dump it. Fish or cut bait. Half-hearted efforts are distractions which suck time and energy from your forward progress and still leave you unhappy and unsatisfied. Rand called these “the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all.” Maybe now’s not the time to master a new instrument or learn some new skill. That boat has sailed and, while it might have been a realistic dream if we knew the pandemic was going to last two years, at this moment it’s time to get back to business and more immediate concerns.

4) Focus on a few critically important objectives and do those things as well as possible.  

This shouldn’t be news to anyone. You can’t be all things to all people or spread yourself and your team a mile wide and an inch depth. In the rush to get back to business, it’s easy to get distracted and pulled in too many directions. And it’s especially hard to say “No” to longtime customers who stuck with you during the toughest of times. But you’re in it for the long run and now’s the time to make the hard choices. Focus, take small steps first, walk before you run, and stick to your guns.

5) Forgive people for their youthful indiscretions, uncontrollable passions, slights (imagined and intended) and other stupid mistakes because everyone - including you - is entitled to a chance to change. 

Everyone gets one pass and a chance to show that they’ve changed. We need (especially in politics) a virtual statute of limitations on stupidity. Not merely in terms of legal or financial accountability, but a practical bar and agreed-upon prohibition against even mentioning acts of juvenile and unthinking stupidity that took place more than a dozen years ago or when the alleged wrongdoer was in college. Frankly, the same thing goes for your own HR people who spend way too much time looking for warts rather than focusing on the bigger, positive picture of the person in front of them. 

 Yearbook investigations spanning past decades in the faint and sleazy hopes of finding an embarrassing photo or two should be regarded as the wrong-headed and hypocritical wastes of time which they have always been. The entire “gotcha” culture is both the last desperate act of a print/video industry desperate for relevance and revenues and what seems to be the entire raison d’etre for the Facebook/Google ad-tech duopoly, which is algorithmically driven by manufactured click-bait controversies, cheap sensational headlines, and misleading chyron streaming banners. 

A few obvious and long overdue changes might mean that otherwise entirely competent candidates for any number of positions in multiple industries (and especially in government) will no longer be precluded from pursuing these opportunities by virtue of the media - egged on by the culture cancelers on both sides of any topic-- seizing upon and spewing overheated exaggerations and phony outrage about their youthful indiscretions.  

We all need to take a breath and give each other a break from the hate and rampant ugliness of the Trump years, when there was nothing too low and no lie too great to say about another person. As a country and as individuals, we can be better than that. 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

 

I Will Not Die of Stupid

 

JOHN KASS: LIGHTWEIGHT'S A LIAR - ANGRY, INCOMPETENT, LOST AND OVER HER HEAD

THE LIE ABOUT THE BAGPIPES AT THE MORGUE

Lightfoot’s story was designed to protect First Deputy Superintendent Eric Carter from himself as Officer French’s body was taken to the morgue. Lightfoot’s defense fell apart on Wednesday. Earlier this week, I reported what Carter had done.

For years, Carter has handled the somber, heartbreaking ritual of police funerals for officers killed in the line of duty. He knows the drill, so what he did at the Medical Examiner’s office was inexcusable.

As French’s body was being brought to the morgue, hundreds of officers lined up outside the ME’s office to pay their respects. There were bagpipes, and a drum, and the officers who lined up saluted.

“It’s a sad, slow roll,” a senior police source told me. “The drums, the pipes, it’s what we’ve done for decades when a police officer is killed and taken to the morgue. It’s our last chance to salute before the body is processed. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done. It’s always been slow.”

But Carter didn’t like slow. He didn’t like waiting. He wanted to get the procession moving. He rushed them.

“We don’t have 20 minutes for this s—,” he’s recorded as saying on a video from outside the morgue, within earshot of several stunned officers under his command.

This s—?

“We’re not gonna be waiting on the bagpipes. Go ahead and get the vehicle inside. Take it all the way inside. Do not stop,” Carter says on a police scanner a few minutes later.

Take ‘it’ inside? That is the body of a murdered Chicago Police officer. Cops were outraged, and rightfully so, and many want Carter fired or demoted.

But Carter is Lightfoot’s guy now, and she’ll protect him like a boss.

“Lightfoot defends First Deputy for trying to speed up ritual at morgue for Officer Ella French,” was the headline of a story by the paper’s savvy City Hall reporter Fran Spielman.

In it, Lightfoot said it was Carter’s decision to speed up the procession, “and I support what he did.”

Spielman quoted the mayor as saying a “well- meaning but not well-organized group that wanted to hijack the procession, which would have meant that the family would have been delayed exponentially in getting to the morgue.”

Hijacked the procession? That’s bad enough. Then Lightfoot really stepped in it.

“Given the new restrictions that the new coroner has put in place, that wouldn’t have been fair to them,” Lightfoot was quoted in the Sun Times as saying. “So, a call was made under those circumstances to focus on the family. Eric Carter made the right call. I support what he did. And I’m horrified that, in this moment, people are trying to savage him for whatever agenda or purpose.”

A funny thing about those “new restrictions,” that Lightfoot was talking about. They don’t exist. Natalia Derevyanny, a spokesperson for the  Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, issued this statement:

“Protocols for processions at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office have not changed since the pandemic began. First responders have always gathered in the office parking lot and dock to pay respects to fallen police officers and firefighters.

“Early Sunday morning, police officers gathered in the parking and dock area as usual, and bagpipers accompanied the body of Officer Ella French through the parking lot to the dock. At no time did personnel from the Medical Examiner’s Office try to impede officers or bagpipers.”

You need a translation?

Mayor Pinocchio, your pants suit is on fire.

And Toni Preckwinkle, boss of Cook County government, which runs the Medical Examiner’s office, isn’t going to put it out for you.

What’s truly astounding is that Lightfoot would put herself in Preckwinkle’s hands that way, like some  foolish rookie getting picked off third base in the 7^th inning of a tight game. Or like some incompetent, inexperienced politician who’s great at doing friendly interviews on MSNBC, but still doesn’t know how to play politics.

Lightfoot kept stepping in it, saying police don’t like Carter because he isn’t part of the old “friends and family program.”

But Carter’s wife, who also works in the police department, was recently, perhaps miraculously, promoted to the rank of acting commander, meaning increased status and a pay bump for the Carter household.

That’s the “friends and family program.” It’s called the Chicago Way, Lori.

LIN'S BIN WXRT

 

Here's the transcript of yesterday's Lin's Bin about masks, vaccines and other stuff.

 

Nancy writes, In the past year I have learned that a mask over just the mouth will only work if you're a mouth breather. 

What has Lin Brehmer learned?

 

I’ve learned that Chicago is more relatable when people are safe to walk the streets.

 

And when a perfect summer day arrives and bicycles are rolling on the lakefront and young people are lazing away the afternoon on the beach and sailboats are tilting into the swells, Chicago seems like the best place on earth.

 

I have learned that some people will wear masks when asked, some people will wear masks but only up to their upper lip and some people will do somersaults of logic to never wear a mask.

 

I’ve learned that liberty is now a euphemism for selfishness.

 

I’ve learned the longer Covid finds willing hosts the better chance it has of mutating into more dangerous variants.

 

I’ve learned that many people on ventilators who were never vaccinated wish they were.

 

I have learned that the phrase: “What do you have to lose?” may convince some people to try a drug called hydroxychloroquine even though they never heard of it.

 

I’ve learned that the same phrase may not convince people to try a vaccine that has been administered to over 4 billion people with few side effects.

 

I have learned that people who have refused to get a vaccination do not want to hear why they should get a vaccine.

 

I’ve learned that the mere suggestion that one should wear a mask or get a vaccination will make people angry with me.

 

I’ve learned that I’ve reached a point where I don’t care if people are angry with me because I believe it’s more important to join a chorus of doctors and scientists who only want to prevent sickness and death.

 

My cousin is a doctor in Texas. A few days ago I asked him how things were going. He wrote,

“I was covid doctor last week. We have escalated from 1 covid-19 units to 4. Had 2 fathers in their 50s die. Both unvaccinated as are 98% of my covid patients. So sad and so frustrating. As I was told on vacation, I need to invent a vaccine against stupid.”

 

I’ve learned that David Ross can still stand after being knee-capped.

 

I’ve learned that our memories are short.

 

I have learned that a world with live music is better than a world without live music.

 

I’ve learned that we not only missed live music, but we missed the people we always saw where the live music was.

 

I’ve learned that everyone remembers where they were the last time they saw a band on a stage before the lockdown.

 

I have learned to be thankful for restaurants who managed to re-open and pray this winter will not force them to close their doors again.

 

I have learned that the reason I enjoy going to restaurants with friends is because chefs cook better than I do. And good friends and good food is a kind of salvation in a world hungry for grace.

 

This is Lin’s bin on 93XRT

WITHOUT IMMIGRATION ...

 

SICK MAGA GOVERNORS

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Follow These Four Rules For Returning to the Office

There's a lot of angst out there about who has to come back, and when. The need to return isn't necessarily fair to everyone, but it does need to be communicated honestly and clearly. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

As if we didn't have enough angst and division in this country, the newest emerging conflict (soon to dwarf even the disputes with the moronic anti-vaxxers) is between the WFHomers and their employers, the RTOers, who are intent upon and insisting on increasing the amount of time staffers need to spend in the office each week. While plenty of companies are pushing off the start dates for the grand return -- some of the main tech companies are already targeting early next year -- it's clear that there's a widening employee expectation gap, which is likely to expand even further as the Delta variant and its progeny spread. And the most disappointed team members aren't necessarily who you'd expect. It's the folks stuck in the middle who have the blues.

What's especially concerning about the arguments on the right way to return is how quickly this debate is morphing into an economic class and caste struggle.  It's already become challenging for even the best-intentioned management teams to explain, try to empathetically justify and, ultimately, to honestly break the sad news to certain important groups of their employees that life still isn't fair, and that one size and one solution still doesn't fit everyone. Telling people things they don't want to hear is never easy. Years from now, when we all look back on this time and the pandemic in its entirety, one of the most discouraging realizations will be how disproportionately and unfairly COVID-19's burdens were borne by people in different economic strata.

Executives across just about every industry will need to quickly figure out how to explain to their people, the media and the world that many of their lower-paid workers need to be on site even though the company isn't going to require others with different job responsibilities and requirements to do likewise. Worse yet, they're going to have to tell a bunch of mid-level workers who clearly thought otherwise -- and believed that they had a lot more flexibility and control over their lives than the folks on the factory floor -- that they too are expected to show up. This latter news is likely to be the rudest of all the awakenings, because it's as emotionally bound up in matters of perceived status as it is with regard to commuting costs, productivity and other domestic issues.

Some of the companies that have tried to make the new requirements applicable across the board have found that - unlike the lower-level blue collar and no collar folks who pretty much knew that they were screwed since the pandemic started - the folks in the middle are already raising the biggest stink and threatening to go elsewhere, which is really the last thing these firms can afford at the moment.

Unfortunately, a lot of these "knowledge" and creative workers believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have many other alternatives rather than forlornly marching back to their cubicles. We'll know soon enough whether their confidence is well-warranted or sadly misplaced. My own guess is that a lot of these folks will find that the type of positions and salaries they're looking to replicate aren't exactly abundant in the newly streamlined economy. And the ones wrapped up in the idea of simply starting their own businesses are even more likely to end up unhappy.

Another key part of the problem is that many of the senior people making these decisions have ridden out the crisis with minimal disruption, smoothed and softened by a robust stock market, so they don't necessarily understand or appreciate just how radically millions of lives and circumstances have been changed, uprooted and transformed.  Nor do they get just how long and painful the return to whatever the new normal is likely to be for families concerned with continuing health and housing issues, their kids' education, rearranging and resuming child and pet care, and supplementing lost spousal incomes.

Management has neither time nor the option to see what competitors are doing or how the variants are progressing when the day-to-day demands of the workplace and the requirements of the reinvigorated economy require clear and consistent answers and directions for their people. Now's the time to bring people back to reality as well as the office, because, if you aren't structuring and leading the "back to work" conversations, you can bet that the vacuum will be promptly filled with commentary, complaints and criticisms that aren't likely to be helpful in any way.

While there aren't any perfect answers, here are four important ideas to keep in mind as you craft a policy and, more importantly, as you try to honestly communicate it to all the members of your team.

(1)  Explain what applies to everyone.

These conversations should start by making clear that the overall policies of the company are generally applicable to everyone (as they always have been) and that everyone is expected to comply. There will be exceptions based on a variety of reasons and criteria as there also have always been. But no group of employees is being specially treated or afforded privileges that don't have a clear business-related purpose and value to the firm.

 (2) Note that there have always been variable shifts, seasons and schedules.

In many respects, once we return to the "new" normal, the way that the business will operate won't be materially changed for most of the employees, and it's important to make this clear. If the company's basic policy is going to be "all hands on deck," which it always was pre-pandemic, then there's not really much left to discuss. It's just getting back to business.

(3) Make sure your distinctions are meaningful and matter.

You can be sure that everyone in the firm will know exactly who is being asked to do what. That means it's very important that you have a precise and ready rationale for each group of employees who are treated differently in some respect. Having your senior team lead by example and make it their business to be on site and visible will be very important.

 (4) Focus on what you can fix.

It's essential to show all the team members that the company is being proactive and helpful in addressing and providing assistance and solutions for the various recurring issues that many will be dealing with. Flexible hours including early departure times, pet friendly offices, in-office Covid testing, and vaccinations are some of the common remedies. But be ready to improvise.

AUG 17, 2021

HOW SAD...