In Guy Kawasaki’s speech “The Art of the Start” (one of my favour speeches by the way) he mentioned the rule of hiring people – “Hire better than yourself”.

“A player do not hire A player, A player hires A+ players. B player hires C players, C players hires D players, and D player hires E players. So if you start hiring B player, you are going to wake one day and you will be surrounded by Z players” – at around 28:45 of the video

From my working experiences, I realised the importances of hiring A+ players. A+ players don’t just create higher value for you, but they also increase the competition among other players you hire. No body want to be a loser in their jobs. If you see other people are working harder than you and getting promoted, I’m sure it won’t be a good feeling and you will try to work harder to compete. That’s another value I can see from hiring A+ people. In the place I work, there are quite a few people are better than me, and they stimulate me to work harder. Same as other outstanding people in my class. I want to be A++ one day.

So I want to add to Guy’s example: if you hiring A+ people, eventually you going to wake up one day and all your players become A++.

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• August 19, 2006 -- A managment lesson: Mr. A and Mr. B (3)
• August 14, 2007 -- Working hard (0)
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People communicating with readers on their books publications or research, it’s a good way to gather some other ideas and interesting thoughts. I’m currently dealing with my dissertation (yes, finally it comes to my schedule seriously), why not putting it here and discuss with friends and readers of this blog?

My dissertation is going to be on “a cultural aspect of Sino-Japan Management”. I know there are lots of paper on this subject before and it’s hard to have some new finding on a single dissertation (8,000 words limit), but personally I’m very interested on this topic and want to read about it. My biggest curiosity is that both country are based on Confucianism yet has been developed very differently. To outsiders (I meant those who didn’t really look into the difference of Chinese and Japanese culture), Asia countries are similar. Indeed, the difference between China and Japan is less than the east and the west, however there are many differences between these two countries in many aspects, specially in cultural one. And in management, which is everything to do with people, how to manage people from these two cultures trigger my interest a lot.

Right now I’m reading a book called “Intercultural Management in China – Strategies of Sino-European and Sino-Japanese Joint Venture” by Nikolaus S. Lang. It’s a very interesting book and if you are interested it’s recommended to have a read.

Need to hand out the first draft by the end of this month, Errr….

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• February 9, 2007 -- Hire A+ people (0)
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• May 4, 2006 -- Learning from practice (2)

The more I work with people and friends, and more I realise management is not a easy subject. These days I came to realise that a good management is:

To manage people to work effectively, but more importantly, happily!

The “happily” part makes me think a lot, and also learn a lot.

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I had a conversation with a guy at work today. He told me he couldn’t understand why the top manager Mr. A needs to mop the floor by himself, he can ask other staffs to do it. Since started working in this restaurant, I have been paying attentions on its management. So I had a little thought on his comment.

There are two managers in the restaurant, say “Mr. A” and “Mr. B”. They are totally two different persons with totally different managing styles. Mr. A is the top manager and Mr. B is below him. However, this doesn’t make many differences on their managing styles. Mr. A is “fix-then-teach” type, whereas Mr. B is more like “blame-until-you-fix-it”. Say if I make a mistake a work, Mr. A will fix the mistake first, and then when everything is ok and not very busy, he tells me what I did wrong. But Mr. B will just standing there, point out the mistake, tell you what to do, but he never help you to fix it.

This makes a huge difference when it’s busy time. Say when it’s lunch time, lots of customers around waiting to order. I make a mistake by putting different sauces into a burger. When Mr. A sees it, he will come and make a new one immediately and keep everything going without saying anything, but I do realise I made a mistake and will learn from it. But if it’s Mr. B, he will just point it out, standing there telling me I made a mistake instead of helping me fix it. One person doing nothing is a huge waste of human resources when it’s busy, but he just doesn’t realise that and cross his hands, watching me fix the problem by myself.

I believe people learn from action more effectively than verbal orders. Like Mr. A mopping the floor this morning, rationally when other staffs see that, they would think “since the managers are doing, I should do it too”, but not “the manager is doing it now, so I don’t need to”. If it’s Mr. B, I guess he just ordered somebody to mop it.

From an employee’s point of view, which one do you like better and more willing to work with? For me, Mr. A.

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Here are two different part-time agency jobs I did in the last two weeks.

+++++ No.1
Location: a sports club in County Durham

It’s an 8 hours shift, four agency staffs (include me) were assigned to serve in a dinner of 30 customers. The manager was a young girl, I guess she is about 25 or something, obviously without any experience of management. She didn’t even give briefing before at the begging until I asked her what we should do.

We worked 8 hours straight without being given any breaks. Two staffs was told to have 20 minutes break before the dinner start, so me and another girl asked the manager for a break after the other two came back, she said the dinner was about to start and we could go for break after the dinner finish. At that time, it was 6 hours after we started, and we basically did nothing but standing for the first 6 hours, it was mentally destroying.

Then after the dinner all the guest left, that manager just didn’t have any intention of giving me and the other girl a break. It was almost finishing the shift so we didn’t bother to ask her, just hoped we could finish quicker and left that horrible place.

So for that 8 hours shift, I didn’t get any break. We guessed it’s because we two asked her too much for having a break and annoyed her a bit, she ended up exploiting us for 8 hours. We shouldn’t ask her for a break, it’s something they should give us. Also, it was from 3pm to 11pm, and we didn’t get any food neither.

+++++ No.2
Location: A college in Oxford University

It was a 4 hours shift, four staff. The person in charge was a young guy about looks like 30 something. When we arrived, he introduced himself with a friendly smile, and had a little chat about what we need to do. It was a college dinner and we need to serve 40 people between four of us. We need to do silver service for main course.

It was fairly easy job and I didn’t feel it was 4 hours long, because we can talked and chat when not serving, they prepare a few starter for us before started working, and what’s more, that manager gave each of us a glass of champagne or wine! I never had that before as most managers are afraid you got drunk and make some stupid mistakes, but come on, who will be stupid enough to get themselves drunk when working? What I want to say it’s not about a glass of champagne or wine, but how workers like us perceived the managers and working environment like that. That manager knew that, so he poured us a few drinks and asked us to relaxed, just work happily with a smile! Indeed, I enjoyed a lot working in that shift and I like to work with them even get lower pay!

In case one, clearly that’s illegal! We can suit them for such a terrible working condition, however most students workers like us will just complained and never return to that place again. Whereas in the second one, I would like to work there again even with lower pay, because it was a friendly environment and people treat you as people, not just a few temporary staffs from agency who you can exploit for a few hours and you will never see them again.

In my management class we did a lot about working under pressure and labor work. Although waitering is a bit higher than labor work, but it’ still in an environment involves a lot of physical work and under pressure. For this kind of works, employees’ expectations is relatively low, some of the time they just want a break, a few drink or sandwiches after working long hours. All these requirements are minimum, after all they are lawful requirements. However in most places I have worked before, they don’t give you these basic benefits. As far as I know, this is the reality of working in a lower class environments in UK. I would be lucky if I get some jobs that fulfill these requirements.

Just treat your staffs a little bit better, they would work harder, as simple as that!

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I really like a quote from one of the most influential people in organisational management – Peter Drucker:

“Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills – accounting and what have you – but you can’t teach them management.”

I have been learning management from my first year. Although I wrote essays and answered tough questions in the exam paper and understood most theories in this subject, but they are still just some knowledge in my mind. I can put them in an exam paper, but I can’t call them skills. However, since I started managing the society with the execs team, I have learned a lot so far.

From textbook to reality
What we have learnt from management textbook? I can name a few here. For example “Motivation”, “Power”, “Conflict” and so on. They sounds simple on the book, and you can learn them and memories them. But when they come to real practices, it’s another story.

How can I motive the team to be more active? Some of them want to contribute more to the society but they also want to spend more time on their revisions. So it’s a challenging question of motivating team members while avoiding pushing too much.

What’s the level of empowerment, ie. how much power should each team member has? If giving too much power without giving clear instructions, then it might cause confusion. If give not enough power and freedom to each member then it might turn down their motivation and putting too many responsibilities to myself. A good manager to me is not doing every thing s/himself, but to allocate human resources effectively.

Conflict is always there when different opinions come out in a discussion. Certain level of conflict is good for generating new ideas, but too many will cause problems, worse will affect the cohesion of the team and cause bigger problem in long term.

All these looks very simple in the textbook, but when I actually think about them and deal with them, it’s very difficult. Most the time I had to think twice before saying “Hey, would you like to take of this?” or “could you get this done by next Monday?”.

Anything to do with people is not simple
I believe most people know about this statement. My dad always told me about how difficult to manage people in his company when I was little. But knowing something is different as experiencing it. I can know it from my dad’s words, but I can only learn it by expericing it myself.

Each individual has different personality, educational background (both academic and from families) and different way of thinking. So when you try to put a team of people to work together to achieve the same goal, sometimes it’s harder than it seems to be. Some people want to be given instructions and do whatever they are told to do. Whereas others might be more willing to take initiatives and do things they think are appropriate. But of course it’s impossible to make up one rule and apply to anyone in the team. Accessing people’s personalities and abilities then using different managing styles is very essential.

Having fun
As Peter Drucker said, one can’t learn management from textbook knowledge but real practices. I am enjoying matching what I have learned in management classes to organizing the society. It’s very challenging but I like it. It becomes more obvious to me now why good MBA school requires a certain working experiences, because it’s a subject that you can’t understand fully from books.

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