LGBT Time To Shine In Business

Today I completed an Economist Insights survey distributed to business thought leaders. I get these all the time from various media outlets seeking to aggregate my genius with that of other leaders. This one was about LGBT inclusion, something I don't think I've ever addressed on the Alfidi Capital Blog. The world has gone without my awesome wisdom on this topic for far too long. I won't keep you all deprived any longer.

You'd think that LGBT inclusion would now be a given among corporate executives. Globe-trotting honchos are supposed to be some of the most cosmopolitan and enlightened people around. The tone of the Economist survey's questions hinted that executives in some regions are further behind their global peers. Local culture is probably a limiting factor. Imagine writing an inclusive HR policy for a multinational conglomerate only to discover that local government officials in some backwards country won't tolerate contact with an openly LGBT employee.

Catalyst's Quick Take: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Workplace Issues from May 2015 is the most comprehensive body of knowledge I could find on the workplace value of LGBT employees. They have plenty of buying power but they also face more barriers to advancement. I may not have blogged much about workplace discrimination in the past, but I have definitely blogged about how C-suite personal behavior and HR performance incentives determine the entirety of corporate culture. Change starts at the top because people emulate their leaders' personal behavior and respond to economic incentives. Get CEOs out in front meeting with their LGBT employees' affinity networks, and get their public endorsements of nondiscriminatory HR standards. Advances in ERP knowledge management modules now offer collaborative tools that managers can use to ensure everyone, gay or straight, stays engaged.

I have tried reaching out to LGBT people here in San Francisco. I sat at the same table as a gay man and a post-operative transsexual female during my service on the City and County of San Francisco's Veterans Affairs Commission. I never had any problems with their personal histories, although other Commissioners frequently disagreed with my policy ideas. I may have ruffled a few feathers in 2012 when I declined to endorse one Commissioner's idea to name a US Navy ship after Harvey Milk, because I do not believe in naming warships after politicians of any stripe . . . not even for the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76). I stated back then that I would much prefer to see the US Navy name a ship after Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a true Revolutionary War hero who was probably homosexual. If anyone can carry the torch for a group that's been ignored or suppressed for most of human history, it's someone with battlefield bona fides. I'm pretty sure the San Francisco County Veterans Service Office has a record of my Commission statements on file somewhere.

Alfidi Capital is a one-person operation for a single, straight white male (that's Yours Truly, Anthony Alfidi, in case you need the hint). There isn't any internal policy change I could make with this enterprise that would make a difference for the LGBT community because I would only be talking to myself. My so-called white male privilege doesn't help me around the home office if I'm the only one here. Running my mouth to the outside world is a far more effective way to make people change their minds. Hey corporate honchos, lots of your LGBT people are in hiding because they wonder whether their leaders care about them. It's their time to shine after spending forever in the dark.

Ethics And Escalation

I will throw a few thoughts on ethics out at the blogosphere for some weekend musing. Have at them with gusto. Marcus Aurelius was not the only one to jot down his meditations for all to see. People tell me I am a genius.  Here is some proof.

One can never be more honest or more competent than one's boss. The moment you outshine your boss is the moment you become a threat to their career. Most humans are sufficiently insecure about their own place in a pecking order that they will sabotage or steal from capable underlings. The remaining minority could be a lot more productive if they work for themselves. Supervisors behaving badly can fake it for a long time if their subordinates stick around out of desperation.

Everyone who works for a large enterprise will eventually be forced to choose between career success and personal integrity. We all choose one or the other. These are mutually exclusive choices. If you avoid making the choice, your boss will make the choice on your behalf, and your acquiescence is the moral equivalent of concurrence. Choosing personal integrity usually leads to negative career consequences. Repeatedly choosing integrity eventually guarantees a path to either self-employment or starvation. Choosing career success means immediate monetary rewards, plus long-term legal risks that no one can hide forever. Col. John Boyd, America's greatest military theorist, framed the choice as "to be or to do" for his acolytes. Being means choosing extrinsic rewards of money and glory. Doing means choosing intrinsic rewards of moral clarity and professional productivity.

Escalating a decision to one's boss means surrendering moral responsibility for the outcome. Sometimes this is unavoidable. Enterprise policies often define escalation triggers, especially in crisis management. Junior employees can learn from watching seniors handle the escalation even if the results remain hidden.

Humans owe a duty of loyalty to their superiors at the beginning of a professional relationship. This duty grows stronger or weaker over time based on the superiors' behavior. Bosses who demonstrate ethical lapses deserve progressively less loyalty as their deficiencies become obvious. Prolonged exposure to a superior who is unethical or incompetent is a career hazard. Never hitch a wagon to a dead horse. Escaping from unethical people is a moral imperative, not to mention a salve for one's sanity.

That is all for tonight. I will be up in Santa Rosa tomorrow, watching a charity polo match. Wineries will have their wares on display. I may bring home a bottle or two.

The Haiku of Finance for 08/08/15

Some office blowhard
Mouthing off without data
Never gets called out

The Haiku of Finance for 03/19/15

The price of friendship
Time lost versus wisdom gained
Always so human

The Business Case For New Mentoring Tools

I recently visited with the enterprising minds behind MicroMentor, a derivative of Mercy Corps.  I don't participate in their program but they offer a good value proposition to anyone seeking mentoring via social media.  Entrepreneurs pressed for time now have another option besides SCORE.  They can also share knowledge with peers at Startgrid.  The good news for proteges seeking financial inclusiveness just keeps on coming.

The advent of microfinance and microenterprise means mentoring must adapt to changing times.  The Aspen Institute's FIELD program documents the latest data on how microbusiness sectors adapt.  Aspen has tons of other programs too numerous to name here that can help.  Mentors who need ROI trackers for their board service and volunteerism need look no further than True Impact.

A web search of topics covering mentoring reveals a ton of open-source research on personal mentoring for disadvantaged youth.  The research on mentoring within a business context is often behind the paywalls of academic journals or held in the private databases of consultancies.  The best open-source business cases for mentoring are in the Society for Human Resource Management's research and tools.  Searching SHRM's site for variations on the word "mentor" reveals everything a good manager needs to know.

The existing literature on mentoring has some gaps.  Mentoring disadvantaged youth makes sense from a humanitarian standpoint.  Finding a mentor at work has potential payoffs in the time-honored tradition of riding a superstar's coattails.  The HR coursework I recall from my business studies showed that formal mentoring programs often lead to mismatches.  There is room for disruption in mentoring.  Social media enablers like MicroMentor and Startgrid are natural evolutions in business relationships.

Investing in Collaboration

I attended "The Art of Collaboration" yesterday at the Commonwealth Club.  Stewart Levine was an intelligent and witty presenter on the importance of collaboration skills in the workplace.  I think the dude should teach at the Learning Annex but he's probably got a full calendar working with Resolution Works and Mobile Business Academy.  I learned enough about his themes to want to read his book Getting to Resolution because I must apply financial metrics to collaboration.

The one point Mr. Levine made that jumped out at me was that organizations now hire people for their emotional intelligence (EI).  I can only assume he had senior management positions in mind where skills in managing people matter more than technical competence.  I am absolutely certain that EI does not matter at all in low skill, entry-level jobs like the ones I held before becoming self-employed.  Some level of experience is still a primary requirement to obtain even the lowest position in a white collar professional career.  No amount of EI can replace entry-level skill but EI doesn't matter when working with low skill idiots.  I really liked Mr. Levine's advice on dealing with sociopaths:  Get away from them.

Collaboration has tons of literature supporting different approaches throughout history.  I am more immediately concerned with determining whether managers can measure collaboration's ROI.  The Wikipedia articles I like to reference feed a non-profit collaborative platform.  Macrowikinomics extends the original Wikinomics model into a for-profit ecosystem.  Understanding this framework is key to determining where to make effective investments in something billed as a "collaboration" enhancement.

Investing in collaboration IMHO poses two challenges.  The first is how to incentivize collaboration with HR policy.  The second is how to track collaboration's results.  Solving those two challenges requires a knowledge management (KM) approach integrating two different families of enterprise-wide metrics.  Incentivizing people to work together means deploying ERP modules that mine email traffic for expert references and plotting those experts' recorded interactions.  Measuring results means scoring the products of group work by market share growth, costs saved, and other bottom-line KPIs.  This gets complicated and KM people will have to speak the IT department's Cloudonomics language.

The ERP cost of monitoring collaboration is an investment.  A Google search of "collaboration ROI" reveals plenty of expert thinking on how such an investment pays off.  This Information Week article from 2011 discovered several studies of how collaboration tools impacted enterprise productivity.  Cisco has developed a serious framework breaking down the ROI of collaboration, referencing Ron Ricci's and Carl Wiese's The Collaboration Imperative.  Carl Wiese also authored Cisco's 2010 white paper, "The Return on Collaboration."  It's all terrific theory, but frankly I've had some experience with one of Cisco's collaboration products called Cisco WebEx.  Solving frequent video and audio disruptions would definitely enhance collaboration.

I do not enjoy collaborating with other humans.  I usually have to decelerate my thinking cycle, speak more slowly, and use simpler concepts than I would if I were working alone.  One major drawback to collaboration is its tendency to produce a suboptimal result when superior performers' work is averaged down to a lowest common denominator acceptable to all.  Modern techniques in data analysis and knowledge management are supposed to alleviate this tendency.  They may work best when a manager with high EI is in charge of getting the most out of people.  Proving a collaboration ROI means connecting the dots between costs of systems deployed to track human interaction and the results of such group work in financial KPIs.  Get to work, KM professionals.  Your product managers need those collaborative tools.  

HR Community Owns Training ROI Calculation

I have not thought much about the HR community ever since I completed my undergraduate major in that subject.  I washed my hands of the profession in 1995 after concluding it was not a path to high corporate achievement.  I have a newfound respect for HR right now after discovering that they can contribute to the bottom line.

Check out SHRM's ROI methodology for assessing training.  ASTD also publishes material on the ROI from learning.  The equations for ROI are pretty simple, just like many other concepts in finance.  The hard part is assembling the data measuring use cases to make "before and after" comparisons.  In other words, comparing error rates, message delays, etc. after training a workforce should show cost savings that exceed the cost of that workforce's training.

Assembling the data in pre-enterprise computing days would have required some Cheaper By The Dozen type of efficiency expert timing workers with a stopwatch and collating their misplaced records.  Enterprise computing makes it all so easy today.  Knowledge management reps can track workflows in MS SharePoint or Evernote suites.  Tally up the missing files and misdirected workflows for those post-training comparisons.  Even the training itself can be almost costless with self-directed modules requiring little downtime.

I'm glad I never worked in HR.  Executives still see it as a cost center because most HR people don't think in ROI terms.  Maybe that's why I never belonged in that field.  I changed course with an MBA in finance.  I would rather invest in faceless corporations than live human beings.  Knowing the ROI for human effort takes some of the risk out of dealing with people.