Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

This week I picked up additional responsibility over Facilities and Travel. I'm glad to take on whatever needs to be done and add value wherever I can. This move will take me somewhat out of my role as "the HR guy" and back into a more general managerial role as in my life before Nelson, and that's gotten me thinking back to how we managed in my prior life. That inevitably takes me back to W. Edwards Deming whose teachings were the basis of the Japanese system in which I last held this type of role. His systems have turned around so many companies, and helped others actualize into outstanding enterprises. I believe we have much to learn from Deming and that adopting several of his teachings, both you as an individual and us as an organization, can accelerate our turnaround. For those of you who aren't familiar with Dr. Deming the link above is very informative. What it doesn't say is that Dr. Deming, who developed his theories while improving industrial outpu...

I'm out of the office for a couple of days, but through the magic of modern communication I've gotten wind of a rumor running through the company. I want to give a big shout-out to our Publishing division, of which I have been critical in the past regarding rumors, as this one doesn't come from and isn't being spread by you. I have six confirmed instances in two days of the rumor that we've had another layoff. Now this is different from all the other, "there's going to be a layoff" rumors over the past year. This one is different and goes something like this: "I hear there's been another big layoff." "Nobody knows how big it was because management's not talking about it." "I hear that the Curriculum staff got fired." "I hear that two people in the warehouse got fired." "I hear that half the warehouse is gone." Friends, the reason the leadership team isn't talking about "the big la...

I've just finished a three-day recruiting swing through D.C., Atlanta, and Ft. Lauderdale. This week reminded me that we don't recruit like a lot of other companies. Both the Regional Manager with whom I was pared and some of the candidates weren't prepared for our focus on fact-checking as a fundamental recruiting discipline. Here's the how and why of our process. Facts are Important Fact checking in recruiting is so fundamental to the process and yet its often not done properly, if at all. HR practitioners often defer to the on-line criminal background check rather than vetting the candidate's resume or application face-to-face. In Christian business hiring managers often think the best of candidate and accept the facts presented by them at face value. I've even had Christian hiring managers and even HR practitioners express concern to me that we were unfairly questioning a candidate's integrity by questioning their resume or application. Depending on whos...

I'm writing this from a Fairfield Inn near Washington, D.C. We are up here on the first of a three-city recruiting trip looking for contract outside sales professionals for our Live Events division. I don't do a lot of this type of recruiting anymore, so this has been a great refresher course to keep my recruiting chops current. We've had a response ratio of about 130 resumes for every opening, and for "my" three cities its told me a lot about what's going on in the economy, whose up, whose down, and whose surviving. It also has reminded me of the dumb things people do that sabotage their own job search. Industries Responding While applicant flow is up overall due to higher unemployment, some segments of the economy are represented more than others. Since sales is a profession that cuts across industries, you can tell which sectors are suffering more by the applicant flow from those industries. I read a disproportionate number of resumes from auto salesmen, R...

Insurance renewal negotiations are on-going and I thought it might be wise to give everyone an update on our activities and likely outcomes. Like everything else in this economic climate, the news isn't pretty. Here's the latest, and the timetable for a final decision and announcement. Claims Experience For the last five years our claims have run 84 - 86% of premiums paid. That leads to a flat or slightly increased renewal, as underwriting typically involves taking the last 12 months and trending those costs 15 months looking forward . This is done because the broker uses claims and census data after 9 months of the current plan year, at which point it is 15 months before the end of next plan year. Medical costs typically increase from 9 -15% per year, and average about 12% annually, or 1% per month. So, when we run around 84 - 86% of claims-to-premiums, we usually end up with a 0 - 2% increase. This year our actual claims have been between 100 - 104% of premiums. We've h...

From television news to the Wall Street Journal we've heard the comparisons of this economy to The Great Depression. This is a historically tough economy, but the Second Great Depression? Seriously? I know Nashville fares better than many communities in good times and bad, but I pass a lot of $40,000 vehicles on the way to restaurants with full parking lots. I don't recall a robust restaurant industry from video footage of the Depression. There's a serious disconnect between news reports of "how bad things are" (which is the big story of the last several news cycles leading up to the election) and the number of people without jobs and incomes. Examples of manipulated or hysterically inaccurate news reporting on this economy would make a great doctoral dissertation. The limits of the blog format and my attention span won't allow for that. Here, however, is just one instance of a "fact" offered as evidence of "how bad things are" drill...

We are moving all Nashville office staff and leadership into the Corporate Office building. There we have five secret weapons that, if unleashed, can shorten iteration loops for almost every process. We can react quicker, bring products to market faster and smarter, and cut the man hours it takes to do almost everything. I learned how to wield these powerful weapons from a Japanese executive for whom I worked in the 90's. I offer those to you, gentle reader, that your career and our company might flourish. The guru of wielding these secret weapons was "Mr. Oba". I don't know that I ever knew his first name, because the emphasis was on the "Mr." He was the second most powerful man on the org chart when I was a pup. He was the top ranking member of management from one of our joint venture partners and we heard that he was the highest ranking manager from that company ever posted in the U.S. Our President didn't cross him. He stood about 4' 11" in ...

The following message was sent last week from Nashville Mayor Karl Dean regarding the Special Election this month on English Only. His message is on-target so I yield this blog post to our Mayor. Many thanks to David Leach for sending it my way. Dear Friends, I hope that you and your family enjoyed the holidays and were able to take some time to reflect and appreciate the year gone by. As I have had the opportunity to say many times over the last year, Nashville is a great city. I enjoy being Mayor and I am grateful to the citizens of Nashville for allowing me the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. It has been an exciting year for the city. We’re making progress on my plans for education reform. We’ve added over 100 new officers to our police force. And plans to build a new downtown convention center are well underway, which when completed will give our city a huge economic boost. We face many challenges, but I truly believe that our best days are yet to come. As ...

Most of you who read this blog by now know that by the end of January we will close our Lakeview offices and move almost all office jobs to the Corporate Office Building. This is a tremendous opportunity for our company in terms of savings, teamwork, and tightening iteration and product development cycles, but that's a subject I'll take up in another blog in a few days. For now I want to address how the move to corporate, which was one of my goals for WFH, changes this program going forward. It was a significant downsizing, not WFH, that made this move possible this quickly but I'll take it however it comes. In my opinion, the move of all office operations into one building leaves us no choice but to accelerate the program into the space sharing phase. It is my understanding that we're getting LVP employees into the Corporate building with about 3 open spaces to spare; that's all. Those spaces will most likely be used for temporary workers and the occasional contra...

In every burst of an economic bubble you find where legitimate profits were made, where smoke and mirrors substituted for profits as in the Bernard Madoff scandal, and where profits were made by short-cutting laws and cheating honest people. To quote Warren Buffett , "Its only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked." The naked truth behind double-digit retail profit growth was unmasked this week for two major retailers. A huge wage and hour settlement at Wal -Mart (estimated at $350 - $620m) and the upholding of a $35m judgement against Family Dollar indicates that both companies engaged in wage and hour fraud and cheated low-wage employees out of earned wages. I'm a pro-business guy and these companies are customers of ours, but this is justice long overdue. In the Wal -Mart case lawsuits had erupted in multiple states claiming the same offense; hourly workers forced to work without breaks and lunches and compelled to clock out at the end of thei...

I have been putting off commenting on the regrettable "English Only" initiative currently on the ballot for Nashville voters. This is an important if not critical decision for this community and I wanted to wait until I had time to get the facts right and make a compelling case. Well, a coalition of religious and business groups has formed under the name Nashville For All Of Us and they have put together a great white paper on all the reasons this initiative is wrong for the community. You can get the facts at this link: http://host1.bondware.com/~tennes/photos/File58.pdf I try to shy away from politics in this blog because my mission is a harmonious and successful workplace and political conversations work against harmony. Unfortunately, this referendum is so bad for the culture and business climate in our community that we can't sit back in our business cocoon and let bigotry kill what is one of the strongest local and regional economies in the nation. Passage of this ...

The week of the staff reductions, which were implemented on that Tuesday, we conducted outplacement meetings on Thursday. We held two sessions, both conducted by members of the HR staff including me. There were no current employees present other than the HR staff. I stepped out for literally 20 seconds to check a voice mail message, during which time a presenter was speaking, so I can accurately say that I didn't miss any discussions during either meeting. Those two meetings are now being cited with some authority by a person or persons in our current workforce as the basis for two pretty ridiculous rumors. The first is that there were comments made that indicate a third round of staff cuts coming in February. The second is that one of our departing sales reps got up and made an angry rant against the company. Here are the facts. 1. There was no discussion of additional staffing cuts. None. Zero. There was no question asked to that regard, none answered, no speculation mad...

Its been a week since our last round of staff reductions; long enough hopefully for a little dust to settle. I want to address two rumors that went around last week in the emotions of the moment and make sure that the air is cleared and facts are known as to the role that our Paid Time Off (PTO) program played in these terminations. For those of you reading from outside the company, about three weeks prior to these terminations we made an intentional move away from paying for unused PTO; converting instead to a "use-it-or-lose-it" policy. This move will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars next year, or the equivalent of about 40 jobs. We announced this change both in writing and at informational meetings, most of which I conducted, a few days prior to our staff reductions. The two rumors or comments that I've heard about this policy change are (1) that we said we'd do this instead of cutting jobs but then cut jobs anyway, and (2) we did this to avoid having to pa...

As most of you know we lost over 50 really good people this week due to a reduction in force. This event was strictly driven by the economy and the nosedive in book sales we've seen in September and October (I haven't seen November numbers yet). I am gratified that six companies have contacted us looking for great talent, and we have established an email distribution list in order that we may send all job opportunities to those separated this week. The job titles and length of service for all of them are listed below. I have not listed names as I have not had an opportunity to ask each individual for their permission to do so. However, if you are interested in some of the best talent in our industry and in the Nashville market please contact me at jthomason@thomasnelson.com . I will put you in touch with the candidate of your choice. Position Yrs Service Receptionist 18.4 Sr. Acquisitions Editor 25.3 Director, Marketing 1.4 Senior Publicist 2.5 Admin Assistant 0.6 Editor 3.0 VP...

Where should a company spend its money? Logically, you would answer that it should invest where it gains its greatest return. After all why would a for-profit enterprise make discretionary investments with little or no hope for incrimental return? If it were your business, if you were the CEO, would that make sense? Let me suggest, gently, that this is exactly the same flawed logic behind misinterpretations of Wow and World Class Talent in our company. I'm grouping these two different leadership initiatives into the same category, even though they are different initiatives, because they generated the same unintended reaction from the same areas of our company. If it happens here, I'll bet it happens in other companies as well. The theory goes that to get great people or great products you must by definition spend a lot of extra dollars. That theory is just plain wrong. A few years ago the Executive Leadership Team, even before we started calling ourselves by that name, set o...

I'm going to rant here just for a few words. Its been coming for a long time and I'm overdue so forgive me just this once. I am fed up with unresponsive people. I bet you know what I'm talking about. Those people who are supposed to return your calls but don't. Those people who receive your emails and may send you a reply a week from next Tuesday. Now, if they want something from you its urgent, maybe even a matter upon which rests the fate of the free world. Its a culture issue in some places; nobody gets back to anybody else. In other places, its an individual attitude: their time is more valuable than yours. They are more important than you. If you call out this behavior you'll hear some interesting excuses: too overworked, don't have a laptop, don't have a blackberry, wasn't properly trained, technical problems so they didn't get your call (or email, or the post-it note you left on their desk, or the pink message slip from their colleague who to...

When I joined the Church some eight or nine years ago I was fortunate enough to go through several months of classes in moral theology. While I was an occasional guest in Sunday School as a child, this was the first time someone intelligently laid out for me the relationships of God to man, and man to his fellow man. For the sake of brevity I'll summarize it like this: we have a responsibility for our own personal moral conduct as an example to our children, families, and community; we have an equal moral responsibility to the greater world around us in helping the least among our fellow man and to be good stewards of the world given to us. When I learned this I immediately recognized a fact of organized politics; that both major parties have developed their own civil religion that is about half of moral theology. Each uses its civil religion as its own moral high ground against the other party while ignoring the moral whole. On one side we have a Republican civil religion that see...

As part of the Work From Home (WFH) project test I have tried to work from home every Thursday morning unless I was out of town. This was a great time for me to get "head space", but also to test how you lead a staff while not there. Today was different; I started out planning to just work the morning and, by lunchtime, was in such a groove that I stayed home all day. There are those in our company, and outside it, who don't believe you can be productive from home. There are others who think that its fine for staff members, but not someone in leadership. To all of you I offer my day today. Some details are generalized for confidentiality. Because I didn't have to commute in I was in the kitchen when my wife and daughter left for their respective jobs. I never get to see them in the morning and this was nice. After they left, I went upstairs at 8:30, fired up the VPN connection, and the day began. Roughly in this order my next eight hours were: Took care of my overnigh...

In this picture Kristie Cantrell is sitting next to her empty cubicle in the space she now shares with Jack Leichty . The two started today working on alternating days in the office and working from home the rest of the work week. The big move was Friday but has been in the works for weeks. Note that both their name plates are now affixed on the same cubicle wall. To make sure that two people could work from the same space, we required that Kristie's former space be completely emptied, wiped down, and that it not be used for storage. Both of them now have 100% of the materials they need for their immediate work area in one cubicle, or at their home offices. This was no small feat. Since neither uses a laptop IT moved both of them from their desktop PCs to a virtual desktop on the company server. That requires software that's in its evaluation stage and will expire in two weeks. After that, a second 60-day software evaluation will run the virtual desktops and buy us time to make...

Okay, this is not investment advice. If it were, why would you take it from an HR guy when you have so many registered financial advisers at your disposal? This is just a set of observations about mistakes I've seen people make in knee-jerking to a falling market. Take this for what its worth, research your own 401(k) investments, get competent advice, etc...before making investment decisions. Meanwhile, consider this premise; that the market has been here before and come back, that Phil Graham is right in his assessment that as a nation we could be a little more resilient, and that television news coverage is sensationalism detached from the reality of the market. In other words, this isn't a market for the faint of heart but neither is it a meltdown, a historic depression, or any of the other hyperbole you've heard on television. 1. We've Been Here Before - Check out the historical chart of the Dow Jones averages starting in 1900 and continuing up to the p...