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This one first ran March 4, 1996. It’s still one of my favorites and some of the best advice I’ve ever given. If I hadn’t written it then, I’d write it now and wouldn’t change one word of it.

– Bob

* * *

“I’ve worked my tail off for 20 years and what do I get?” complained a former co-worker on his last day. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Here’s what I didn’t point out: we all work under an unstated employment contract. Based on financial mathematics, it supersedes all written contracts, union protections and employment laws.

It’s called the 70% rule (by me), and nobody ever seems to mention it. It says, “If you don’t deliver at least 70% more than your salary in value, you’d better start making other arrangements.”

Here’s why. Let’s imagine you earn $40,000 per year. Add 25% for fringe benefits, taxes and so forth, and you get $50,000. Office space, furniture, telephone, personal computer, and other facilities and overhead expenses — at least $10,000 per year — brings to $60,000 the amount your employer spends each year for your services.

Indexed mutual funds earn about 12% per year over the long haul. By paying you the money, your employer forgoes that income — $7,200 the first year. Add it in and you’re up to a whopping $67,200 per year. In round numbers you find the true cost of having you around comes to your salary plus 70%.

According to the 70% rule, working hard doesn’t matter. Managing the coffee fund doesn’t matter. Being right all the time doesn’t matter, and probably annoys everyone when you point it out, too. Your loyalty and all the great things you did five years ago don’t matter either.

If your job doesn’t add enough value, the quality of your work doesn’t matter, and you — not your employer — are responsible for recognizing the fragility of your situation.

Only one thing matters: delivering more in perceived value than you absorb in costs — your salary plus 70%. (Why perceived? Think of unheard trees falling in uninhabited forests. As with quality, recipients, not providers, define value. Nobody has an accounting system that can show the real dollar value each employee delivers, so value in this context is very much a matter of faith and perception.)

Ask yourself how much value you actually deliver. If your company suddenly decided to stop doing what you do, would it lose more than it saves from your salary plus 70%? Who at senior levels of your organization understands and believes in the value you deliver?

Here’s a harder question: will you and your job deliver the same value next year? The year after?

How many batch Cobol programmers failed to ask this question and now wonder what happened to their careers? They delivered value right up until the point nobody needed much batch programming anymore. Then these hardworking, skilled programmers had no way of delivering enough value in the new environment.

American workers have believed in the idea of job security for decades. You won’t find security in employer goodwill anymore. You won’t find it in union contracts, either, nor in an in-flight magazine or a 3-day seminar on making a fortune in real estate in your spare time.

You won’t find it because it doesn’t exist.

What does exist is opportunity. You have to read your own tea-leaves and peer into your own crystal ball — that’s your job, not your employer’s. Then, you have to ask for the kinds of opportunities that will give you next year’s skills, so you can continue to add value in the future. Good employers give their employees opportunities to grow.

You can still fall victim to office politics. Dumb decisions in the executive suite can run your organization into the porcelain facility. The latest management fad can catch you napping or, worse, you can support the old management fad two weeks after your new manager jumped on a different bandwagon. The dollar can rise in international markets, harming the export situation.

Heck, the sun could go nova prematurely.

In the long run, though, the 70% rule puts you in control of your career, and provides the surest guide you have to continued opportunity and job satisfaction.

I read the news”paper” most mornings, in quotes because it’s an on-line replica of the paper version that doesn’t require tree-felling, wood pulping, and ink-smearing.

In it I read an article about what Facebook is doing to combat the extensive disinformation it helps disseminate. Mostly, its plans sound a lot like trying to extinguish a forest fire with spit.

But not being one to criticize someone’s solution to a problem without having a better idea, I asked myself what my better idea was. Happily, I have one.

I have the solution. Not a solution. Not a partial solution. Not something that might make a positive impact but not much of one.

I have the solution! And because you’re a loyal KJR subscriber I’m going to share it with you. Not only that, I’m going to invite you to share it with everyone you know.

Bob’s Big Idea:

-> Read news and opinions in newspapers. Socialize on social media.<-

If every voting-age American would follow this simple guideline it would, in one masterstroke, neuter all actors, both foreign and domestic, who are trying to pollute our political dialog with their repulsive, fabricated, preposterous, divisive falsehoods.

Well sure, you might be thinking to yourself. Bob is a well-known liberal, so of course he’s going to recommend sources with a leftwing bias.

I’m not. Read the Wall Street Journal if you want to avoid the leftwing slant on things, and that’s assuming the print media as a whole has an actual leftwing bias — a debate I’ll leave to those who research and tabulate such matters.

How about cable news? That’s a gray zone, for three reasons.

Reason #1: No matter how much or how little that’s truly newsworthy is taking place, cable news has to stretch or cram it into its 24-hour news cycle.

Reason #2: Because cable news is such a visual medium, dramatic visuals crowd out the mundane, even when the mundane shows what’s typical.

Reason #3: Shouting heads are cheap. Reporting is expensive. A face on a screen making noises, even a well-compensated face, doesn’t cost very much. Inviting a second or third face in to offer their commentary is still economical programming.

Sending a reporter and camera crew to where news is happening costs a whole lot more … and that’s also in comparison to what it costs a newspaper to send a reporter there.

So on cable news, economics favors shouted inanities over reliable information.

All of which goes to demonstrate just how pitifully the newspaper industry has responded over the past 25 years to the threat to its existence that is the Internet.

Newspapers could have pooled their resources to provide local and national classified advertising. Instead, they gave up the field to Craigslist, Monster.com, Autozone.com, and so many other list services that would have had to compete with newspapers if only newspapers had decided to compete.

And that’s the revenue side of the industry. How about content?

Imagine newspaper companies thought in terms of competing for news consumers’ business. What might they do?

I’d think they’d advertise, offering engaging accounts of how they ensure the content they publish is both newsworthy and reliable … the steps they go through and the principles they adhere to before committing content to printing plates.

If they were even more bold they’d contrast their process to the vetting that precedes posting on social media. They’d portray, perhaps, a bunch of Russians laughing as they clink their vodka-filled glasses and click their mice, or perhaps a few deranged individuals with poor personal hygiene, popping pills and screaming into microphones as they click.

The fact of the matter is that most newspapers do adhere to a code of ethics, do have processes and principles in place to keep misrepresentations out, and issue corrections when their preventive measures fail.

Social media sources are the polar opposite.

What does this have to do with KJR’s mission of providing practical advice people in business can make use of as soon as they finish reading?

There is, unsurprisingly, a business parallel.

Just about every business function is, for those outside it, an arcane, needlessly complex, expensive waste of corporate resources. Few decision-makers outside IT understand why it’s so hard; likewise CIOs looking at Marketing, Chief Marketing Officers looking at Accounting …

Every business decision-maker and influencer benefits by understanding why what other parts of the business do is so hard. If the CEO doesn’t insist on this sort of information exchange, the rest of the executive leadership team should take the initiative.

The alternative? Look at how well social media works as a source of enlightenment.

# # #

Like this idea? Know anyone in the newspaper business? Please don’t hesitate to share this with them. Who knows — maybe someone will pay attention.

If you missed the news, the population just hit 6 billion.

That’s a lot of people. If we were all to lie down end-to-end on the ground, we would go around the earth about 2,600 times. If someone put us all in a swimming pool, packed tightly together like sardines or flying in coach-class, the pool would have to measure more than a quarter of a mile on each side.

Then there’s the Y3K problem: We’ll just about outweigh the earth itself by the year 3000. It’s enough to make you believe there are limits to growth.

Amazingly, with all these people to choose from, many IS hiring managers can’t find enough qualified applicants to fill their open positions.

We can’t solve everything at once, so today we’re going to focus on just one small part of the problem: the help desk.

For many of those running IS, the help desk is an afterthought. It isn’t strategic, executives don’t interact with it very much (and when they do they get special treatment), and it generates no measurable return on investment.

Let’s recalibrate. The level of trust and respect between IS and the rest of the business is pretty low these days. (I base this on a large volume of anecdotal evidence, not formal surveys; your mileage may vary.) Your help desk is, or at least should be, the most frequent point of contact between your organization and the employees whose trust and respect you need every time you implement new technology.

The first step in making sure your help desk increases that trust and respect is staffing it with people who can actually solve problems instead of simply dispatching a trouble ticket to a technician.

Except … Bob, you idiot! Haven’t you heard there’s an IT labor crunch? If we do find people like this, we have more important places to use them.

News flash: You don’t need computer science majors on the help desk. Chances are, they wouldn’t be able to figure out that the end-user has a notebook resting on one of the cursor keys anyway. Here’s who you do need on your help desk:

  • High school seniors: Sure, you’ll only get them for a few hours a day during the school year (more during the summer, of course). But who better to diagnose PC problems than someone who assembled a high-end gaming system from spare parts? You can pay a lot more than the local Taco Bell and still save a ton compared to those computer scientists you can’t find anyway.
  • College students: Yes, you’ll have to work around class schedules, and you’ll have to pay more than you would pay a high school student. Here’s the upside: You get highly qualified help desk analysts, still at low cost, and they’re all potential recruits when they graduate. After a year, you’ll know who you’re going to want to hire – offer them scholarships in exchange for two years as full-time employees when they leave college.
  • Internal PC mentors: These are the people employees call when they need help because they’ll solve the problem before your help desk would have finished writing up the trouble ticket. They’re already employees, they’ve already proven they can do the job, and many of them would love an opportunity to move into IS.
  • IS analysts: Rotate your analysts through stints on the help desk. Here’s what they’ll gain: humility (as they find out just how much they don’t know how to fix and how knowledgeable and sophisticated those dumb end-users really are); listening skills (because to fix problems they have to hear beyond the symptom to what’s really going on); a better understanding of how work gets done (they’ll see it first-hand); and, most important of all … they’ll learn what the rest of the company thinks of IS.

Staffing shortage? When it comes to the help desk, at least, we don’t suffer from a staffing shortage. All we suffer from is a lack of imagination.