by Gary Mintchell | Jun 5, 2023 | Leadership, Personal Development, Workforce
Trust seems to be a commodity in short supply these days—if we are to believe all the media we might be consuming. My personality type tends to trust most people upon first meeting allowing them time to prove themselves either worthy of trust or someone to avoid. Many people default to distrust allowing another to perhaps overcome the distrust—if ever they can.
Building trust becomes essential to both building a brand and building a team.
Therefore, this article I saw in the MIT Sloan Management Review struck me as relevant.
A lack of trust between colleagues and managers in remote and hybrid environments can damage workplace culture and morale.
It was inevitable that the rise in working from home would create tensions inside many organizations. But it didn’t have to be quite this bad. According to a new survey by Envoy, less than a quarter (24%) of employees trust their colleagues to get work done remotely.
Twenty years ago, I told my manager I was going to do more work from home. I was a writer. The cubicle life at the company detracted from the ability to concentrate on writing. I churned out more articles and news from home. In fact, no one on the staff turned out more work. But the boss, worried about control, said, “As long as you get your work done.”
Research shows that distrust damages workplaces, whereas high levels of trust fuel engagement and motivation while reducing absenteeism.
Four points:
- Assess Employees’ Individual Environments
- Simulate Natural Interactions — Lots of Them
- Be Transparent About Monitoring
- Train Team Members in Getting to the Truth
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pamela Meyer is the author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) and the CEO of Calibriate, a deception detection and inside threat mitigation consulting firm. Her 2011 presentation “How to Spot a Liar” is one of the 20 most popular TED Talks of all time.
Bullet number two should be stimulate natural interactions. Good people management both of local and remote teams benefits from such an environment. Don’t let people burrow into lonely caves. Especially if you are managing nerds.
Transparency is always a key to good leadership. Let people know what you are doing, where you are going, and how they stand with you.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 4, 2023 | Commentary, News, Personal Development
It speaks for longevity and persistence if nothing else. This is post number 6,000 over two different websites. I actually contributed a few posts to MESA many years ago and had an asset management website briefly when I was working with MIMOSA. I don’t count those.
Dave, Jane, and I along with Jim, Wes, and Mike started Automation World in 2003. I was busy with that as editor-in-chief. Blogging was catching on. When I had a chance to pause and think, I started a blog on Dave Winer’s Radio Userland in 2003 as an experiment. The sales guys wanted to sell my blog to advertisers. We worked out a process that kept me pure but used it for promotion. I later moved the blog to SquareSpace when Userland folded. I renamed it Gary Mintchell’s Feed Forward—the title of my AW Editorial Page.
I left AW in 2013 after many changes. I hired a guy to remake the website. He moved it to WordPress. I renamed it The Manufacturing Connection—I could buy the domain name and wanted to feature the word Connection.
I have a second blog ongoing since about 2007 that focuses on personal and spiritual development called Faith Venture just because I have many and varied interests.
We came to Automation World from Control Engineering (both magazines still exist). I believed technology and requirements had moved from control and instrumentation to automation—which I defined as control + information. I wanted to cover how users (people) used these new technologies to make their operations better. I had writers focus on the “automation team” emphasizing that it takes teamwork to accomplish goals.
The industry has seen many fads come and go over the past 10 years of this incarnation of this blog. The market has consolidated greatly. That has resulted in loss of advertising revenue for the magazines (and me). I appreciate the long-standing sponsorship of Inductive Automation—which also seems to be the one software company still growing and “killing it” as one industry veteran told me.
Through it all, you all are still out there solving the same problems I was trying to solve when I was out in industry. The tools are better. Software mostly doesn’t require you to change your processes to fit their model. But the problems remain.
That means my focus must continue to evolve to match what is happening.
Let’s just see what 2023 brings. All the best!
by Gary Mintchell | Feb 27, 2023 | Leadership, Personal Development
[This is last week’s newsletter. You can sign up for a weekly (almost) newsletter by clicking the envelop icon on the right. I use Hey.com–an email service expressly designed to do away with tracking and other obnoxious Web practices.]
When we go to high school and university, we think we’re supposed to memorize many facts. It’s not a bad thing to learn and remember. The essential characteristics and behaviors of an educated person are these, however:
- Ability to learn on your own
- Ability to think clearly
- Ability to express yourself clearly
Many people learn that one of the best ways to think is to write. I write a couple of thousand words a day. Often there is no clue when I begin a piece where it will end up. In the beginning is an idea—usually from my reading. Then there are thoughts on the initial idea. Then the ideas build upon themselves until there is an essay.
Perhaps you should consider this both when you are hiring new people and when you are counseling young people.
Recently the Rework podcast from the company called 37signals (developers of the HEY email platform where this newsletter resides) featured Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (co-founders) sharing why writing is at the heart of the success of 37signals and why they believe it’s essential for every employee to be a skilled writer, regardless of their title or role.
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Speaking of thinking, here is a thought from Nassim Nicholas Taleb from his book Fooled By Randomness, “Trading forces someone to think hard, those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy.”
I am assembling thoughts and notes for a webinar I am giving April 5 most likely on the Myths and Reality of Digital Transformation. One path I am exploring concerns change management and how these initiatives often run low on focus and intellectual energy. I guess maybe I’ve been involved in at least one too many of these.
If you have thoughts about this topic (or any topics), send an email to [email protected]
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The more data we have the more likely we are to drown in it.—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
Trade media and marketing types have touted “data as the new oil” or some such malarky for the past 8-9 years. That includes Internet of Things, sensor networks, MES, Industrie 4.0, and the like. Data is, indeed, useful. It’s impossible to perform 5 Why’s or other Lean initiatives without data.
Adding more sensors, more databases, moving compute to the edge, no, wait, move data to the cloud, connected everything, digital twins, and…whew!
Yes, you can drown if not careful. Be careful what you ask for!
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Be sure to check out the latest news and thoughts on The Manufacturing Connection.
Gary
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by Gary Mintchell | Feb 18, 2023 | Business, Personal Development
My last newsletter coming from the ARC Forum of February 6-9. Sign up for newsletters by clicking on the envelop icon on the website or clicking here.
The annual ARC Industry Forum was last week. It was great to catch up with many people I have not seen for a while. Attendance was good considering there is now a Forum in Europe as well as Asia. Many do not have to travel so far. Attendees were energetic in the initial receptions and the conference tracks I attended attracted interest and questions.
I always have many meetings during the event. Sometimes more information is gleaned in hallway conversations, though.
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There were several conversations regarding the pending Emerson acquisition of NI. My first reaction was somewhat negative thinking from an automation point of view. Emerson, duh, is a conglomerate. In order to grow, it requires acquisitions. Organic growth will not yield the growth Wall Street seeks. This acquisition would add markets and adjacent growth to Emerson’s current businesses. It has recently divested several business units, which must be replaced in its portfolio in order to sustain growth.
NI has restructured a couple of times over the past several years and now has a structure that would allow business units to be separated and perhaps even sold to provide funds for the acquisition.
I’ve worked for a few conglomerates in my career. Sometimes they leave the business units alone to pursue their businesses without too much interference from the “suits” from corporate. Trust me, that’ll only last as long as profits are rolling in. Been there, done that!
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Search has become increasingly frustrating. Some many companies use SEO that results after page 2 often are just repeats of page 1. I’m seldom surprised by search anymore.
Microsoft thinks the “large language models” of AI like GPT that it invested in will totally change search. Google countered with its Bard, which failed miserably in its debut demo. But GPT isn’t all that good either. An article in the MIT Technology Review pointed to many mistakes that it makes.
Something else to think about—Google and followers gave a list of links to a query. It didn’t point to a definitive answer. It gave you more options. GPT spits out a paragraph of text, which may or may not make sense. This sounds like a definitive answer, rather than a list of suggestions. That has implications for future generations using search.
It is not over, yet.
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One hallway conversation I had was with Mark Fondl. When I first became an editor, he was a vice president of an automation technology provider. We had many meetings where he extolled the virtues of Ethernet in automation. I recalled several of my early podcasts explaining Ethernet. They still are downloaded after 15 years. Here they are:
Paul Wacker interview on Ethernet from 2007
Paul Wacker follow up for more on Ethernet from 2007
A third Paul Wacker interview on Ethernet from 2008
Two other podcast interviews I did with Rockwell on safety are still downloaded:
Interview with Rockwell Automation on machine safety
Follow up interview with Rockwell Automation on functional safety
Inductive Automation (who sponsors this newsletter and my website and podcasts) is 20 years old. Here is an interview I did with two early employees from 2011.
Interview with Inductive Automation 2011
And I have a new podcast recently released focusing on Twitter, AI, and Video.
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I’m an avid learner and practitioner of fitness and nutrition. I recently came across this newsletter from Arnold Schwarzenegger called Pulse Daily.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 16, 2023 | Personal Development
This is post number 3,000 on this blog dating back to my experimentation with the genre in 2003 while I was trying to get Automation World off the ground. I have almost 2,900 posts on my other blog focusing on personal development. I guess these are my Ickigai–the reason for getting up in the morning.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream.
I was a student when Martin Luther King delivered that speech. I don’t know the degree to which this comment inspired me or if I was just always this way. I have tried to treat people individually where they are. If they are poor or rich or powerful and they have more stuffing than a Christmas goose, I deal one way. Most people are hard-working individuals trying to do their jobs. I don’t care if they are CEO or junior assistant account executive. They deserve to be treated with honesty and respect. And I try.
Today in the US is an official holiday observing the birth and work of Martin Luther King. It is good to remember the good he did, what he stood for.
The movement did some good. Laws were passed. Barriers were broken.
Today I believe that there is broader acceptance of people of varying skin colors, races, languages. Yet, still much work remains. Some prejudices are hard to overcome. They require a change of heart in each individual.
Unfortunately, you don’t change hearts with laws or with one magnificent speech. Ann Lamont wrote a wonderful little book Bird by Bird, where she tells the story of her brother. He procrastinated over writing a report on birds for school. Now it’s the night before it’s due. (Sound familiar?) He whines to his father about how he’ll ever get it done. “Just write bird by bird and you’ll get it done.”
Just like a good bread requires time to rise, so a changed heart requires time for the change to root and grow. And it happens one heart at a time.
Dr. King set out a vision. Much good did happen. But the hard work remains for each of us. What is the condition of our own heart? Where can we nurture another’s heart?
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 11, 2023 | Personal Development, Productivity
Futurist, X-Prize guy, longevity researcher Peter Diamandis appears in my email inbox regularly. This email about emails caught my attention. I receive about a hundred a day. Many are from PR professionals seeking attention for their client.
Evidently they all went to the same school and bought the same template. The subject line seldom tempts me. The opening paragraph attempts to set a context with a trend or recent news item. Then there are a couple of filler paragraphs containing generic marketing words. If I have stuck with it this long, by the fourth paragraph or so, they discuss a little of the product or solution with an invitation for me to publish a guest article (which I don’t do) or an interview that, if I’m lucky, contains five possible topics.
I know several things from this.
- They have no personal relationship with me
- They have not looked at my blog
- They do not know what I write about
- They do not know if I’ve covered the topic previously
- They cannot come to the point
Therefore, I offer this summary of Diamandis’s post on emails. Visit his site for deeper analysis.
- Keep it under five lines
- Make the subject line unique, meaningful, and searchable
- Use easy-to-read formatting
- Put your specific action request in the first line
- Make the ask really simple—make it hard to say “no”
- If something is really urgent, don’t email—call or send a text
