My Friend, The Dictionary

In my last post, I talked about performance reviews and promised to tell a true story about a performance review I received several years ago. I had the same job that I have now, and the same boss, Morris.  It was near the end of the year.  Morris had completed my performance review, but I was on vacation until just before New Year’s, so we didn’t bother to have a face to face meeting.  He simply emailed the performance review to me.

As I read the review, I was pleased.  It was all positive, with excellent feedback.  I wasn’t really surprised, since Morris and I spoke frequently about how things were going.  As I read, I must have skimmed over some of the initial comments.

I was reading it at home, with my wife nearby.  She asked what I reading, and, after I told her, I offered to let her have a look.  As she read, she paused at one point and questioned the following statement:

“Daryl is the consummate executive at Noetix.  I regard Daryl as perhaps the most vesicle of all the executives.”

“What does ‘vesicle’ mean?” she asked.  I replied: “I’m not sure, but I expect it’s probably good, since everything else is so positive.”  With her encouragement, I decided to look it up.  Off I went to dictionary.com and here is what I found:

      ves·i·cle   [ves-i-kuhl] –noun

1. A small sac or cyst.
2. Biology. A small bladderlike cavity, esp. one filled with fluid
3. Pathology. A circumscribed elevation of the epidermis containing serous fluid; a blister
4. Geology. A small, usually spherical cavity in a rock or mineral, formed by expansion of a gas or vapor before the enclosing body solidified

Well, that certainly wasn’t what I expected!  It’s not every day you find yourself compared to a sac of pus!

I thought about letting it drop, but instead opted to have a little fun with it.  I sent an email back to Morris:

Thank you.  I very much appreciate your praise and confidence.  I do have one question.  In the final bullet you state [the vesicle comment]

Sensing an opportunity to expand my vocabulary, I quickly went to www.dictionary.com, where I discovered this [and pasted the definition into the message]

I’m pretty sure that none of those would be considered a compliment, so I’m a bit puzzled.

A few hours later, I received a short response – my first email of the new year from my boss:

“F*$% you – I meant versatile. But my misspelling may work as well.”

Since that day, it’s been a running joke, within the company (and within my family) that I continue to be “the most vesicle.”  I treat it as a badge of honor.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Spell check is not foolproof – it might validate a misspelled word.  Sometimes that can be pretty funny.

Reviewing the Situation

We’re getting ready to do performance reviews here in our office.  We do them annually and (at least in my department) we invest a lot of effort in completing them.  Throughout my career, I’ve heard (and even participated in) a lot of grumbling about performance reviews being a “waste of time” (sometimes with even more colorful language!).

Why do we do this?  There’s always lots of competition for our time.  It would be easier to skip this time consuming process.  Surely, our top performers know they’re doing well and our worst performers know they’re in trouble, right?  Generally, yes.  However, there’s a lot more to it.

Performance reviews should be part of an ongoing dialog between a manager and an employee.  Communication about performance can’t be a “once a year” event.  The performance review should provide a focal point for frank discussion – reflecting back on what went well and what went poorly in the review period AND looking forward to new goals and growth opportunities for the employee in the coming year. 

What shouldn’t you do?  Here are several traps I think should be avoided:

• Don’t focus only on low performers
  Many managers spend the bulk of their time addressing “performance problems” with difficult employees.  If more of that time was spent helping the best performers become even more productive and more valuable, the payback would be much greater.  Spend time providing serious and thoughtful feedback to the top performers.  How can they become even more valuable?  How can you challenge them?  What new goals or projects could motivate them to grow (and help the organization as well)?
• Don’t do it all yourself
  When you’re writing a review, it’s unreasonable to think you have the complete perspective on that employee’s performance.  Ask for peer reviews.  Ask the employee to complete a self-review.  Use everything you receive as input for (but not a replacement for) your own assessments as you complete the review.
• Don’t focus exclusively (or even primarily) on a numeric rating
  Most companies use some kind of numeric rating.  These systems provide a good “short hand” for summarizing the content of the review, but I don’t recommend that you rely on them.  The core of the review should be in written comments, including feedback on previous projects and goals and specific suggestions for future improvement, along with objectives for the next review period.
• Don’t compare employees to each other
  Lots of companies (including big ones like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard) do “stack rankings”.  Personally, I think that’s stupid.  It’s a waste of time to force managers to “fight for” their employees while comparing people who have applied disparate skills across vastly different responsibilities and expectations. 

 
What should you do? Here is what I recommend for creating a worthwhile performance review:

• Broad participation
  Employees should write self-reviews and everyone should be asked to provide “360 degree” review feedback – peer reviews and subordinate reviews of managers – for the people they’ve worked closely with during the review period.  This collective input gives the manager writing the review a more complete perspective of the work the employee has done.  Naturally, the manager needs to be careful to ensure that the source of candid 360 degree feedback is anonymous.
• Focus on constructive feedback – both backward and forward-looking
  It is important to identify what the employee did well and what skills they have that are strong.  It’s equally important to identify where the employee can improve and grow.  This is especially critical for the best employees.
• Deliver the review in person, in a one-on-one meeting
  A review document isn’t a complete, stand-alone entity.  It’s a part of a conversation – it provides reference material and talking points for the dialog between the manager and the employee.

 
In the end, if the information delivered in the performance review is a big surprise to the employee, then the manager probably hasn’t been communicating effectively throughout the year.

Next time, I’ll share a funny story about the most interesting performance review I ever received.

 For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Performance reviews, like many other management tools, provide value that’s directly related to the effort you put into them.

Before looking forward to 2011 in this blog post, let’s take a few minutes to look back at 2010.  I launched “In the Limelight” at the beginning of July and posted 24 times (including the two video blog posts that Morris Beton and I recorded).

So many bloggers create “best of last year” and “predictions for the coming year” that those lists can become trite and repetitive.  I won’t post a list of predictions here.  Instead I’ll just list some areas of interest that I’ll be watching in 2011:

BI Industry

The big players (Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, MicroStrategy) all have major new releases of their BI platforms.  Will that change the playing field or are these mostly “me too” commoditized changes?  What impact will relative newcomers like QlikTech and Tableau have?  Who will be the next wave of innovative vendors to gain traction?

Oracle

How will Oracle’s recent aim at HP and IBM succeed?  What about the ongoing competition (and feud) with SAP?  Mark Hurd and Safra Catz will be co-presidents for the entire year.  What impact will we see from Hurd?  Will hardware continue to become more pervasive throughout Oracle’s offerings?  Will integrated hardware/software systems dominate their messaging?  If so, will they gain any traction with customers, especially with small and mid-size customers?

In addition, Oracle has acquired at least 35 different companies over the past five years, including nine in 2010 alone.  Who will be the acquisition targets of 2011?

Musical Theatre

My son will be working on his first Broadway musical (Catch Me If You Can), beginning later this month.  Based on its current schedule, it’ll be eligible for the 2011 Tony Awards in June.  How will it do?  Will Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark ever open?  If so, how will it be received?  What other shows will capture my attention?

Sports

The Seattle Seahawks (our local NFL team) became the worst team ever to qualify for the post season.  Will they get embarrassed in their first game?  Will Tom Brady and the New England Patriots continue to be dominant all the way to the Super Bowl?  Will the addition of Cliff Lee make the Philadelphia Phillies rotation as good as expected?  Will the Seattle Mariners be any better than last year?  Will the threatened labor disputes in professional football and basketball result in cancelled games (or even entire cancelled seasons)?

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Thank you for reading my blog in 2010.  I look forward to a busy and interesting 2011.

Noetix Executive Bloggers Morris Beton and Daryl Orts sat down to discuss the 8 gifts the Business Intelligence Industry received for Hanukkah in 2010. Click here or watch the video below.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to Jazz Alley in Seattle to see the jazz vocal ensemble Manhattan Transfer.  We’ve seen them several times before and they always put on a great show.

Manhattan Transfer features four vocalists – Alan Paul, Tim Hauser, Janis Siegel, and Cheryl Bentyne.  Interestingly (at least to me), Alan Paul played the Teen Angel in the original Broadway cast of Grease and, in that role, was the original performer of the songs Beauty School Dropout and Born to Hand Jive. As a child, he was also in the original Broadway cast of Oliver! [I realize as I write this paragraph that I’ve been remiss in including musical theatre references in these blog posts!]

The four of them have been singing together as Manhattan Transfer for more than 30 years and their comfort with each other is evident.  At different times throughout the concert, I noticed the easy interaction between the different combinations of performers.  When Alan and Tim sang together, the connection between the two men presented a contrast to how each of them interacted with either Janis or Cheryl.  Similarly, duets with the two women presented a completely different view of their personalities and singing styles.  In addition, I noticed that each of the four made a special effort to acknowledge and recognize their supporting performers – the pianist (and music director), the percussionist, the guitarist, and the bassist.  I was particularly touched by their genuine appreciation for those other musicians.

After the concert, I thought about the interactions among those ensemble members and realized that it’s similar to the interactions among the members of our management team.  There are six of us – Morris (CEO), Doug (CFO), David (EVP of Sales and Marketing), Jan (VP of Professional Services), Pat and me (both VP’s of Engineering).  Each of us has different responsibilities, with different strengths and experience.  We rely on each other in very different ways for advice, coordination, and responsibility sharing.  [Sadly, we have zero Broadway credits in the backgrounds of our management ensemble.]

We’ve been working together, in our current roles, for nearly seven years (which, in today’s business world is an eternity).  When we’re all together, there are generally accepted roles that we’re accustomed to – some of them are explicit, based on our job responsibilities while others are implicit, based on our skills and strengths and previous experiences together.  When we work one-on-one, I recognize that my own interactions with Pat (for example) are very different from how I relate with Jan, Doug, David, or Morris.  Naturally, there are exchanges between the others that don’t involve me at all.

In the end, I realized that much of what makes a musical ensemble successful is similar to what it takes for a management team to succeed:

• Talented individual members, who are capable and skilled on their own
• Complementary skills, so that individuals can rely on (and trust) each other
• Unique one-on-one relationships among various combinations of team members (and with the rest of the organization)

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Building a successful management team goes beyond just talent – interactions among the managers on that team are critical.

In Morris’s blog post today, he draws an analogy between the BI industry and a turducken.  He’s on the right track, (funnier and more irreverent than I am, too) but I think his comparison would work a lot better with a different approach.

A turducken is a deboned turkey that’s stuffed with a deboned duck that’s stuffed with a deboned chicken. The cavity of the chicken and the spaces between the birds are usually filled with sausage, breadcrumbs, or stuffing.  [For the curious or adventurous, the venerable New York Times provided the history of the dish and a recipe in a column from November, 2002.]

This image conveys the main idea:

To compare this to the Business Intelligence sector of the software industry (as Morris does so colorfully), we need to understand some core facts about that business:

• The primary objective of all BI projects is to provide access to data. [Wikipedia defines BI as “computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data.”
• BI platforms (by themselves) don’t solve BI problems, because they don’t have any “content” to help users find their data. [See my blog post from July describing this.]
• Most of the cost of BI projects (as much as 60%) pays for consulting services to get things working. [Morris wrote about this on his blog in June]

So, it seems clear to me that the center of the picture – the chicken in our turducken – is the business data itself.

Wrapped around the data – representing the duck in our turducken — is the BI platform. The BI end user doesn’t generally see it and, by itself, it doesn’t do anything.  It’s the bridge between the core and the outside.

The stuffing (between the chicken and the duck and between the duck and the turkey) represents the “BI content” – the data models and the reports, dashboards, and queries.

Engulfing the entire thing (and weighing the most, just like the turkey in our turducken) is the huge array of consulting services that are required to provide a workable solution for the business.  Without the turkey to wrap everything, we’d have a bunch of stuffing (not to mention duck and chicken pieces) spread all over the place.

So, here’s the image, updated to match our BI analogy – notice how Consulting Services show up everywhere.

Morris’s summation is absolutely correct:

Business Intelligence is the Turducken of the software industry. It’s one thing stuffed into another and then once again stuffed into something much bigger surrounded by a lot of hard work and complexity. It’s big, expensive and hard to swallow, and if you do it wrong, you get badly burned.

Try not to get burned.

Click here to watch the Turducken debate.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought (about the real turducken – not about the BI metaphor):

It’s an amazing thing – to watch someone fall in love.  When that someone is your own child, it’s even more special.

It was the fall of 1995.  My son was seven years old when he fell in love with baseball.

Our family had just moved to the Seattle area.  Through the spring and summer, I found it easy to adopt the local team – the Seattle Mariners – as my own, even though at that time, they were perennial losers who had never been to the playoffs.  I would listen to games on the radio as I drove home from work and I would watch casually on TV when I was home in the evening.  I was captivated by the lyrical descriptions offered by Dave Niehaus, the Mariners lead play-by-play announcer.  He made images come alive, he made casual plays seem captivating, and he made exciting plays sound magical.

Late in the summer, the Mariners found themselves in a familiar place – far behind the first place California Angels, trailing by13 games.  Surprisingly, they began winning and continued winning through August and September.  As they got closer to catching the Angels, it seemed that the entire city became enchanted and enthralled.  Each win seemed to come in a special way and, every time, Dave’s descriptions made them even more extraordinary.

Through those months, I noticed that my seven year old son began to pay attention.  He started to watch with me and listen with me.  We listened to Dave’s calls together.  My son and I sat together on the sofa as he slowly but steadily began to develop a love for the Mariners and a love for baseball.  Dave’s descriptions were a big part of that process – everything sounded a little more meaningful, a little more charming, and a little more thrilling through his words.

The season itself was magical for the Mariners.  Their comeback succeeded – they caught the Angels and defeated them in a one game playoff for the division title.  In the post-season, they fell behind the New York Yankees, 2 games to none, before mounting another comeback.  They won three straight games, winning the series on a dramatic 11^th inning double by Edgar Martinez that marks one of Dave’s most memorable broadcasting calls.  Although the Mariners magical season ended before they reached the World Series, it was still the most successful in their history.

All of it was wondrous for me.  The Mariners’ success was thrilling, but sharing it with my son (and sharing his newfound excitement) was even more rewarding.

I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember.  My earliest baseball memory comes from the summer when I was eight years old.  The New York Mets, my mother’s favorite team, were lovable losers, much like the Mariners.  That year, the Mets made the playoffs for the first time.  When our family dog had puppies – we named each of them after Mets players.  I became captivated, just as my son did more than 25 years later.

I’m thrilled that my son has developed the same love for baseball that I have.  It’s a special bond that we share together.

Dave Niehaus, broadcaster for the Seattle Mariners since their initial game in 1977, died from a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 75.   I can’t begin to explain the impact that his death has on Mariners fans, but I know its impact on me.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Thank you, Dave.

I’ll always be grateful to you for helping my son fall in love with baseball.

Here’s a video montage from the Seattle Times (with apologies for the ad at the beginning)

This Sunday is Halloween – a (mostly) American annual holiday observed on October 31.  On Halloween, there’s a tradition of “trick or treating” – children dress in costumes and go from house to house in search of sweet treats by asking the question “trick or treat?”  The “trick” is an implied threat (almost never a serious one) of trouble if a treat isn’t provided.  It’s all done in good fun.

Many companies, especially technology companies, have moved work offshore, expecting a “treat”.  Frequently, things don’t work seamlessly.  Instead of cost savings and increased productivity those companies end up getting “tricked” when they don’t achieve the benefits they expected.

How can you avoid the “trick” and ensure that your business gets the “treat”?  I think the approach we’ve taken at my company provides a good model, though not the only one.

About six years ago, we took action on the trend that was (and continues to be) obvious to nearly every U.S. based technology company: skilled resources are available at much lower cost in developing countries like India and China.  We had recognized the trend for a number of years and finally decided to move some of our software development offshore.

We realized that our products were pretty complex.  It took months for a new U.S.-based engineer to get enough training to be productive.  We were leery of trying to replicate that training program in a new location, thousands of miles away, with communication barriers caused by both time zone variations and language differences.  We knew we needed to do something, and so we took care to make sure we would be successful.

In setting up our offshore operation, we made two key decisions that provided the foundation for our success:

1.  We hired our own employees instead of outsourcing.

Outsourcing is a quick, low cost way to move work offshore (or move it to a professional services company onshore).  However, with that approach you lose a lot of control.  The outsource partner determines the resources to assign to your team.  You have a lot of input, but ultimately you don’t own the hiring decisions.  In addition, many companies that have taken this approach find that the most skilled people get moved off their projects. These resources are the most valuable so the outsource vendor is tempted to re-assign them to high profile projects for other clients.

We chose to create our own office in India.  We decided from the beginning that everyone working for us would be an employee of our company.  We would sign their paychecks.  They all would receive stock options and vacation and other benefits provided by us.  We would put a local management team in place and those managers would report to executives here in the U.S.

2.  We sent an established expert from the States to build and lead the India team.

It’s difficult to build an office thousands of miles away.  Interviewing and hiring are more challenging.  Establishing a corporate culture is tricky.  Understanding local business practices and legal requirements can be confusing.

When we launched our Hyderabad office, we were fortunate to have Krish on our team.  He was a Director of Engineering, intimately familiar with our technology and our processes.  Krish was originally from India and agreed to return to India for six months to establish the office.  His mixture of corporate knowledge and awareness of Indian local business realities was invaluable.  He led the hiring and the training of our initial employees and oversaw the knowledge transfer necessary to make the team productive as quickly as possible.

Looking back, our company got the “treat” in this arrangement.  Our India office is incredibly successful.  Employee retention is very high – in fact, many of the initial employees hired by Krish more than six years ago still work for us today.  We’ve built a strong foundation of knowledge of our products, our processes, and the core principles of our business.  Our U.S.-based executives travel to India regularly to spend time with our team there.  In fact, I’ll be flying there again in a mid-November.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

The lure of a sweet treat can be tempting, but plan carefully before moving work offshore.

Happy Halloween!

Most new managers get promoted into a position in which they manage people doing the same thing they were doing before they got promoted.  Software developers become software development managers.  Sales reps become sales managers.  Clerks at the supermarket become managers of clerks at the supermarket.

It seems pretty obvious and makes natural sense.  The best person to supervise a task is someone who is an expert at doing that task herself.  This allows the manager to directly train, supervise, mentor, and evaluate the employees who are being managed.

However, what happens when a manager progresses higher in the organization?  Taken to its extreme, the “manager as expert” rule would require that a CEO be an expert in sales, finance, product development, marketing, manufacturing, human resources, and any other discipline in the company.  It’s not a realistic expectation.

One of my most rewarding managerial experiences came when I took over responsibility for some areas in which I was not an expert.  I was VP of Engineering for a software startup that had recently been acquired.  As we became integrated into our new parent company, I took over the role of “Site Manager” for our entire location.  The rest of the integration wasn’t yet complete, so we retained many of the normal functions of a small company: finance, HR, IT, and facilities.  In a short time, each of these functions reported to me.

I wasn’t an expert in any of these areas.  I had a reasonable grasp of what our IT group did, since the Engineering team I ran was the primary IT customer.  When it came to finance and HR, I was pretty clueless.  I have to admit – there was a little bit of “Uh oh – now what do I do?” panic on my part.

Lucky for me, we had some very capable people in place.  Most important was Kris, our controller.  She had complete responsibility for the financial operations.  In addition, because one of the startup’s original founders had left, she had also been managing HR for a few months.  Kris was wonderful – the ideal co-worker and employee.  She was smart, knowledgeable, and professional.  She took initiative without being unaccountable or unmanageable.

My first action seemed pretty clear.  I met with Kris and acknowledged what was obvious to both of us: she knew her functional area and I didn’t.  I further explained that, as far as I knew, there weren’t any immediate problems that needed to be corrected, but I could be wrong.  After that, I just listened.  Kris explained the current challenges, along with the status quo things that worked just fine.  I asked where she thought she needed help and we discussed a few areas where we could improve things.

I repeated that interaction with the managers of the other groups – IT, HR, Facilities, Customer Support.    Those initial meetings provided the model for our working relationships as we moved forward.  We established mutual trust, which served as the foundation for all of our communications.

What did I learn?  Here are the key points of advice for managing an area outside your own expertise:

1.  Recruit capable people who deserve your trust

This is critically important (and can be the most difficult to achieve, if you’re not as lucky as I was with the team I inherited).  As a manager, it’s essential to have confidence that you’re getting accurate information and that your input will be accepted.

2.  Agree on (and clearly articulate) the objectives

Make sure that everyone understands what the goals are and how you expect the team to get there.  Let the people who understand their functions develop the detailed tactical plans.

3.  Manage by asking the right questions, rather than by providing answers

Even when you’re not an expert, you still need to provide guidance.  The best way to do that is to ensure that good thought processes are used.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions that reveal your ignorance.  Don’t just accept a decision (or an answer or a recommendation).  Ask why.  Ask for alternatives.  Ask why those other options weren’t chosen.  Ask “what if?”

4.  Ask how you can help

Even when you have trusting relationships with people reporting to you, those same people can be reluctant to ask for help.  Pre-empt that reluctance by offering your help.  Ask what you can do.  Ask if there are obstacles.  Ask if there’s a better way to do something.  After you ask, listen.  Really listen.

All of this advice can work just as well for managers who are responsible for things they understand well – there’s nothing that constrains this advice to “things I don’t know anything about.”

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Don’t panic if you’re asked to take on new responsibilities.

Solid management practices still make sense.

In my last post, “Learning from Mistakes,” I discussed a question I like to ask interview candidates: “What is the biggest mistake you’ve made?” and promised to explain how I would answer that same question.

Before finishing, I’ll equivocate a little bit.  I’d probably answer differently depending on who asked the question.  Is the questioner going to be my boss, my peer, or my subordinate?   I would want to choose something that would be directly relevant.  Having said all that, there are several situations I would consider, but there’s one that stands out to me.

My wife and I were good friends with our next-door neighbors (I’ll call them Connie and Phil).  We had barbecues together and celebrated birthdays together.  Phil and I even took turns cutting each other’s lawns (allowing us each to face that chore only half as often).  We were all close friends.

Connie was a talented and ambitious manager.  She was professional, organized, and well-spoken.  We had talked frequently about our jobs and I was consistently impressed with her descriptions of how she handled herself at work.  She had recently left her job, taking time off to have a baby.

At the time, I was VP of Engineering for a software company (but not the one where I currently work).  My responsibilities had just expanded to include Technical Documentation, as well as Software Localization.  Both functions were new for our company and we didn’t have anyone internally to oversee them.  I needed to hire some help.

One weekend, as the four of us enjoyed a bottle (or two) of wine, we were discussing these changes.  I explained that I needed to hire a new Documentation Manager.  Connie asked if I’d consider hiring her. I was intrigued, but hesitant.  She had never been a Documentation Manager (although both she and Phil had done a lot of technical writing, so she knew quite a bit about the function).  In addition, she was my friend – if it didn’t work out, would it damage our friendship?  What about her friendship with my wife – would that be impacted?

Fast forward a few weeks – we interviewed Connie, everyone thought she was great, and I hired her.  It started off well and we commuted to work together.

As I already knew, she really was talented and she was very organized.  She created a solid organization structure, hired some good tech writers, put standards and processes in place, and had things on the right track.

Fast forward a bit more – it didn’t take long for problems to surface.  Within just a few months, Connie began pushing for broader power and more responsibility.  “Daryl – why not give me Localization too?”  “Hey Daryl, how come Henry is a Director and I’m just a Manager?”  “You know, Daryl, I’m worth more than you’re paying me.”

Fast forward to the end, less than six months later – it didn’t end well.  I resisted Connie’s pleas for more power, more money, more control – and she resented that.  Our friendship frayed.  Her work began to suffer – she wasn’t as committed or focused and it showed.  I took too long to confront the problems and address the issues (largely because I was struggling to separate “being Connie’s boss” from “being Connie’s friend”).  I allowed her to make poor decisions without correcting them.  I didn’t address questionable managerial decisions quickly enough. Finally, Connie saved me from my own neglect by resigning and moving on to another job (with the Director title that was so important to her).  Our friendship was irreparably fractured and, fairly quickly, her friendship with my wife dissolved as well.

What did I learn from this experience?  There’s the obvious: be very careful before hiring a friend to work for you.  I’m not saying never to do it.  Obviously, it can work and can be very successful, but it’s risky. More importantly, it showed me (painfully) how damaging it can be when I let personal feelings (“being Connie’s friend”) prevent me from making good business decisions.

In my next post, I’ll discuss a very different situation of managing a friend – one with a much better outcome.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

When hiring a friend, be wary of the possible consequences.  After hiring that friend, stay aware to avoid letting the friendship cloud your decision making.