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Years ago, I asked my dad to review a piece of promotional copy I was hoping to use to sell my company’s services. He flagged a sentence that presented what I thought was a compelling benefit. It began, “You will learn to …”

“Don’t ever use “learn” if your goal is to attract customers,” he told me. “’Learn’” means you’ll make them work.” Nobody wants you to make them work.”

“What should I use instead?”

“’Discover’! ‘Discover sounds interesting and enjoyable.”

I’ve been publishing Keep the Joint Running and its predecessors once every week since the ball dropped in Times Square signaling the beginning of 1996. In that time I’ve … discovered … a few insights into How Things Work I’ve shared with the KJR community.

I discovered that process optimization is both simpler, more difficult, and harder than it usually gets credit for. It’s simpler because few processes are so complicated that they can’t be cleaned up through a Theory of Constraints loop – find a bottleneck, fix the bottleneck, find the next bottleneck, rinse and repeat.

It’s more complicated because while most process diagrams look like box-to-box-to-box flows of work, they’re really queue-to-queue-to-queue flows.

It’s harder because processes fail if all of those responsible for process steps don’t trust each other. If they don’t the result is massive amounts of rework.

I discovered that leadership is hard. Not hard the way neurosurgery is hard. Hard the way digging a ditch is hard. When I’ve led leadership seminars, after explaining the eight tasks of leadership the question that stymied participants the most has been finding the time to undertake even a few of them.

I discovered that, Adam Smith notwithstanding, money is a lousy motivator. Used well, though, it’s a highly effective communication channel.

Tell employees you value something they did and you’ll be likely to get an eye roll in reply. Give them an Amazon gift certificate and explain that it’s your way of thanking them for going above and beyond and they’ll conclude your expression of appreciation is sincere.

Another discovery: IT focuses so much time and attention making sure its solutions will scale that we fail to notice when our solutions won’t scale down.

Project management is a fine example. The official disciplines truly will help your teams build skyscrapers and nuclear submarines. Use them to build a house for your dog and they’ll choke you in paperwork.

Helping those responsible for small projects scale their methodologies down is what I wrote Bare Bones Project Management for. Based on my correspondence at least, the world needs scaled down project management far more often than it needs the scaled-up version.

Something else I discovered: Things that are fun succeed. Those that require sweat and gruntwork are more uncertain.

In the PC’s early days they were fun. GUIs were prettier, but the early PCs, for which a broad assortment of hobbyist-grade customization tools were readily available, were more fun.

PCs succeeded. So did the world wide web. In its early days, putting together web pages was fun. Now? Fun isn’t part of the job description.

Except, perhaps, for some of Agile’s variants. As I dug into Agile … an approach anticipated in these pages two years before the Agile Manifesto was published … it was clear that the early versions of Agile tried to restore fun to application development.

It worked and worked well.

Then scaling happened, Agile became heavily proceduralized, and the fun is draining out.

Perhaps the most important KJR discovery was that, at the risk of looking like I’m trying to sell books, there’s no such thing as an IT project. I came by this insight honestly – by ridiculing Larry Ellison and his 2001 assertion that Oracle could deliver global CRM in ninety days.

Sure, it might be possible to install and maybe integrate Oracle’s CRM solution in 90 days. But managing customer relationships better? That would require everyone who touches a customer to change how they go about it. In 90 days? Not a chance.

What else have I discovered over the past 28 years? That in the end it’s always about the people – those pesky human beings who, as it turns out, have a greater impact on organizational success than all the process designs, technical and business architectures, and so-called “best practices” that seem to have dehumanizing the business as their central operating principle.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be turning over the reins to my friend and colleague Greg Mader. I’ll give him a more formal introduction as part of that process.

It’s been fun. And more than fun, it’s been a privilege.

“Bob, you always sound so literate. What’s your secret?”

I’m sure someone named Bob received a compliment like this. I haven’t, but I’m not dead yet so it could still happen. In the meantime, here are a few of my … well, if they aren’t my secrets for sounding literate, exactly, they’re techniques I rely on.

Think geometrically: No, no, no, no, no. When deciding whether a rectangle, triangle, or rhombus is best for enclosing text on a PowerPoint slide, choose what you like. I’m suggesting you organize whatever document you’re creating like a geometric proof.

As you might recall from your high school days, depending on which high school you attended and what shape your memory is in, geometric proofs begin with stated assumptions (axioms) and proceed with inferences drawn from the axioms and from previously stated inferences, until the geometrician has reached the desired conclusion.

When you write to make a point, you should also take care to make sure each point you make flows clearly and logically from the previous points you’ve made, stating and explaining each transition without asking your reader to figure out the connections.

Put yourself last: We’re talking about lists, not cafeteria lines. If you and several colleagues worked on something, for example, you don’t say, “I, Sam, Merry, Pippin, and Gandalf destroyed the ring of power.” You say, “Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, and I.”

It’s better writing, and better manners.

Choose the best word. A friend used to talk about the pointlessness of worrying whether to say “happy” or “glad.”

Guilty as charged. Here’s why: “Happy” has childlike overtones. “Glad” doesn’t, but still isn’t as adult as “pleased.”

Except that “worry” is the wrong word too (see?). I evaluate the two words to choose the one that fits the situation best.

Second example, for something more negative. Do you think it’s awful? Disastrous? Poorly done? Putrid?

Will the result be disappointing? A calamity? Horrible?

English provides a wide range of overlapping but distinct alternatives for most situations. Take advantage of it.

But don’t show off. There are underused words you can and should take advantage of. On the positive side of things, I put “phenomenal” in this category. On the negative side there’s “wretched” — a word I’m quite fond of, but that rarely belongs in business writing.

Speaking of choosing the best word …

Avoid “thing.” Whatever “thing” you’re talking about, in the English language you can almost certainly find a word that nails down what you’re talking about more precisely than the most generic noun in the language. Well, one of the two most generic; “stuff” is just as generic, and almost always just as avoidable.

They also aren’t interchangeable — things are discrete and countable where stuff is continuous. And, stuff has a slight overtone of messiness, too.

Sludge is stuff. A vat of sludge is a thing.

And another thing …

Avoid “there are.” There are usually better ways to start making a point. For example, “You can usually find better ways to start making a point.”

Get “that” and “who” right. When you’re talking about a person it’s always “who,” as in, “Harry is the employee who best exemplifies what I’m talking about,” vs “Netflix is the company that best exemplifies it.”

Get “less” and “fewer” right. When you’re talking about stuff, use less. When you’re talking about things, use fewer, as in, “With the new quality program we’ll have fewer defects.” Now, now, don’t be skeptical. It’s just an example, to distinguish fewer from, “With the new program we’ll have less waste.”

Avoid duplication and redundancy. Not really. Sometimes, “Saying this is redundant and duplicative,” does help emphasize a point more than just one or the other. I’m talking about phrases like, “We have to plan for the future.”

Not that this is a bad period of time to plan for; certainly it makes more sense than planning for the past or present. But “We have to plan,” (or, “We have to develop a plan,”) sounds just an increment more literate and makes the same point.

Make paragraphs short. With more than five or six lines in a paragraph the human visual system has a hard time keeping its place in the text. Reading content with long paragraphs is fatiguing.

Short paragraphs are, in addition to being more courteous, also selfish. With short paragraphs, those reading your dulcet prose are more likely to read it instead of skimming.

Keep the whole thing short. As short as possible, that is, and no shorter. KJR, for example, adheres to a strict length limit and I work hard to keep it within

Management Speak: We have to do it the way we’ve always done it, even if it is wrong, because changing it would cause too many problems.
Translation: Everybody involved in creating this monster is either dead, retired, or laid off.
Revealing the name of this week’s source would cause too many problems