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I bet you’re expecting a Cubs-themed KJR this week. It’s a rich vein to tap, what with a World Series featuring two excellent managers who are class acts all the way; who win by recruiting the best talent, treating players with respect, turning them into team, and not over-reacting when things don’t go their way … and I could go on and on and on, but there’s already been so much written about the subject that really, what would be the point.

On a personal note, there were two big events I was hoping to enjoy during my stay here on earth: Halley’s comet, and the Cubs winning the World Series. Halley’s comet was a serious let-down. But the Cubs? After 59 years of rooting, the Cubbies, along with their partners in coronary sports the Cleveland Indians, gave us what might have been the best Game 7 in history.

One out of two ain’t bad. Even the best hitters don’t do that well.

* * *

Tomorrow is election day. We appear to have a national consensus on the most important issue: Is this the best we can do?

Please don’t vote. Every citizen who refrains makes me more important. Mathematically speaking, my vote constitutes 1/nth of the POTUS decision. Those who don’t vote make n smaller. So stay away from the polls, and ask all your friends to do likewise. Thanks.

If you insist, but still can’t make up your mind, try this: List of all the reasons to vote against each of the two major-party candidates … tangible, separate reasons, not vague statements like “she’s corrupt” or “he’s a horrible human being,” no matter how fervently you believe such things.

List only those issues that are tangible and backed by evidence that doesn’t require a conspiracy with a hundred or more members to be credible.

So Clinton’s email server is in. Vince Foster is out. The Trump Foundation paying to settle lawsuits against Trump’s for-profit businesses is in. The rumor that he molested 13-year-old girls is out.

The shorter list wins, no matter how angry any one transgression makes you.

Or, take the advice given in this space from time to time: Ignore policy and ethics completely, and vote for whichever candidate you think would be more competent in the job.

Competence matters most. Competence is what separates those who trust evidence and logic from those who trust their instincts. It’s what separates those who appoint the most qualified people they can find from those who prefer cronies who tell them what they want to hear.

It’s what separates those who take Salvor Hardin’s advice (The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov) that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” from those whose first instinct is to nuke ’em.

* * *

Following my recent Sherlock Holmes pastiche, some correspondents raised a significant challenge to making evidence-and-logic based decisions: Given the ease of setting up plausible-looking but phony websites, how can anyone decide which sources are credible and which should be ignored?

Here’s how I go about it, for whatever it’s worth:

  • Read multiple fact checkers. Any one fact-checking site could be a fraud. When FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” agree, fraud would require a conspiracy.
  • Spot-check the fact checks. Don’t just read the ratings. Read some of the essays behind the ratings. If you detect ranting, raving, and expressions of outrage, chances are good it’s a fraudulent site.
  • Spot-check sources. No matter what you’re reading, if the author’s evidence mostly traces back to a few obviously partisan sources (e.g. Breitbart, Michael Moore) you’re looking at a phony fact checker.
  • Look for one-sidedness. If every claim of falsehood is about one political tribe while confirmations of veracity are always about the other, someone is trying to sucker you.
  • Read the opinion columns. I rely on these more than on news stories, with these provisos: (1) I ignore columnists who demonize those they disagree with. This cuts out at least 90% of the noise. And (2) I search for writers I don’t agree with who aren’t screened out by proviso #1.

What’s this have to do with the worlds of business and IT? Well, there is a nice irony: While we’re busily turning into a post-factual society, the world of business, awash in data that’s subjected to sophisticated multivariate analysis, is becoming increasingly dependent on evidence and logic for decision-making.

Other than that, not much. We’ll get back to it next week. That’s a promise.

Not a campaign promise. A real promise.

A good friend told me, “I was terminated with 20 minutes left in the day, on a Thursday. They had said I would be severed sometime during the month but they had led me to believe it would be closer to the end of the month. Nice treatment after 24 1/2 years …”

Another company bought his employer a few years before. He had known the day was coming, and he never once expressed resentment over his coming layoff. Elimination of redundant staff is one of the realities of a merger or acquisition. Yes, it’s painful, but there’s no foul — business is out to make good business decisions.

Why was it was managed so badly?

Consider the Portuguese man-of-war. As we learned in high school, although it looks like one animal, it’s actually a colony of independent coelenterates, each of which feeds and reproduces separately.

We’re colonies, too. As Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, a body is just a gene’s way of making more genes. Even that is a simplification. An unknown proportion of our internal constituents began as independent critters. Mitochondria, for example, the organelles that make oxygen the key to metabolism instead of a toxic gas, started out as free-living bacteria.

Even though each of us is a colony, we manage to act as a purposeful organism – so much so that we harm individual colony members with callous disregard. (Example: Every time someone goes on a diet they starve or kill billions of fat cells – and just think of how many are destroyed during liposuction!)

Liposuction creates personal change. How about business change?

IS projects have always been about business change, and an increasing number of companies recognize that all IS projects are really business change projects that inject significant new technology into the equation.

Most business changes both create and eliminate jobs within the enterprise. Whatever your role in IS, at some point in your career you’ll help eliminate the jobs of innocent employees who did their jobs competently but whose roles are no longer needed because of the business change you helped the company achieve.

Companies are getting better at managing business change. They’ve learned to redesign processes, integrating technology into the new process design. They’ve learned to train employees in the new processes and technology rather than assuming everything will be self-evident. Most have learned to communicate the reason for a change, not just “here’s your new job – now go do it.” Some have even learned that redesigning the organizational chart comes after redesigning processes and technology, not before.

Sadly, though, many companies still see employees as nothing more than adipose cells … hence the phrase, “Getting rid of the fat.” And if you raise your hand to protest a layoff you risk being branded as soft – the business equivalent of “bleeding heart liberal.”

So here’s some advice: If you have an opportunity to influence how your business will manage a change that requires layoffs, don’t get all righteous about what is ethical, compassionate, or the right thing to do. In business, ethics is a personal matter, and ethical businesses get that way through leaders who act ethically, not through preaching.

Instead, be practical.

Point out that the long-term goal of business change is growth, and the cost of laying off one group of employees and then recruiting a different group is far higher than the cost of retraining the employees you have.

Suggest that when “trimming the fat” the company should use a sharp knife, not a sledgehammer. If valuable employees who support change find opportunities while non-performers and change resistors find themselves on the outside, most employees will quietly applaud when they no longer have to cover for their non-producing peers.

Most important of all, point out that every time the company treats departing employees like the cast-off byproducts of cosmetic surgery, the morale of every remaining employee plummets, and employees who might otherwise support change will become sullen and passive resistors of it, something every bit as poisonous as some colonists in a Portuguese man-of-war.

That’s bad for profits, and even worse when the next big change comes around.