Neighborhood New Years Party Lessons
Every year, a group of friends and neighbors in my community get together and rent our golf club’s Verandah room to celebrate the New Year. It is conveniently located in our neighborhood so we don’t add to the drunks on the road and has become an annual event. I always have fun at our neighborhood parties, but I don’t really fit in. You see, I live in a golf community and don’t golf. Most of the guys who live here are either salesmen or business executives. The conversation is all about whatever golf shot they hit on whatever hole, or their new luxury car, or their European vacation coming up, or the remodeling they just completed on their kitchen. I’m more inclined to want to talk about how to repair dual carburetors from a 71 MGB, get into a week-long ski clinic in Taos, or repair a dish washer to get another 10 years of use out of it. After ten years of attending these types of parties, I’ve come accustomed to being introduced as “Roy, the tech guy”. Most of the time I don’t mind it, but occasionally a neighbor tries to use our relationship to resolve a problem they are having with some sort of technology (PC isn’t working, wireless down, can’t connect to the Internet, etc.). It is when trying to help someone with these problems I have occasioned the “urge to kill” sensation and the party this week reminded me what triggers this sensation.
Here it is: I don’t want to be a slave to the gutless or lazy son-of-a-bitch. I really don’t mind helping someone figure something out as a partner. If you have tried your best and have exhausted your personal reservoir of ideas, fine – I’d love to help you. But so many of these salesman and business executives ask me to help before giving an earnest attempt on their own part. Whenever I provide “free” help, I always insist that they be physically present and attentive at all times. In part that is because I might want them to fetch me a beer, after all – nothing in life is truly free. But I think the real reason I insist on it is that it allows me to study what is at the root cause of the problem in the first place. From my hundreds of personal experiences, I’ve concluded there are three root causes: 1) Insufficient training to deal with the problem; 2) Fear of being accountable for the solution; 3) Lack of a willingness to invest any effort. You might think that the first cause (insufficient training) is the most prevalent. Nope, not in my neighborhood. Every now and then someone calls and says they tried this or the manual said to do that or the customer service guy told them to do this other thing. But that is not that common. What is more common is to hear things like, “I just don’t understand these things” or “I’m afraid I might break it. When I’m actually using someone’s time is when I find out how many of them really expect magic at zero effort. I recently had a neighbor beg me to help him fix his network problem. It was urgent – his whole household was put on hold until the problem was fixed. Being a bud, I rushed to his aid to find his new wireless router still in its shrink-wrap. He was hoping I would install it while he played golf and was completely non-interested in his security options that came with the unit he purchased. I got him a copy of Wireless Home Networking For Dummies for Christmas but I’m sure he hasn’t read it.
I’ve seen the same kind of thing play out in businesses as well. It is all well and good to point out that the technician needs to learn the business language and speak in a way that a business person can understand. But what gets less press is that the business person needs to want to understand and have the courage to make decisions that involve technology. This is problem that may disappear as the baby boom generation retires from the work force. Younger generations of workers do not make the technical/business distinction as readily as us older folks are inclined to do. They see technology as much a part of business as anything else. “I don’t really understand technology” is not an acceptable excuse to them and frankly, should never have been for anyone in any case! Many people look at the IT organization when trying to access the overall technology maturity of a company, but I think the best barometer is the IT Savvy that the business has as whole. Some of the work of Peter Weill on IT Savvy would seem to support this notion.