On June 1, I became the new Director of Supply Chain Strategy and Analytics at Flexjet . I'm excited for it: the role is aimed at the kind of process-building that I greatly enjoy , the team is high-energy and passionate, and I get to stay in the aviation industry. I spent 14 months unemployed (while serving as a stay-at-home parent and through bouts of self-employment and otherwise occupying myself ), and I want to reflect a little on my job hunt.

I've taken several negotiation courses over my career, and they had little connection with negotiations in the real world. Then I read Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and it all made sense. Classes often emphasize taking the emotion out of the negotiation as much as possible. Voss' book centers the fact that everyone involved in the negotiation is a human being, and so everyone involved is influenced by their emotions.

During my job search, I've seen job postings go up, stay up for weeks or months, and then get re-posted.  So at risk of generalizing my experience, if candidates can't find jobs and companies can't find candidates, is the job market working for anyone?

I've had the rare privilege of managing an aircraft development program from early drawings on napkins through first-flight approval. During that time I had the most effective of feedback loops: living with the consequences of my choices earlier in the process. Due to the holiday on Wednesday, today is my only post this week.

When confronted with a new role at work, I often review the existing instructions, procedures, and templates. Frequently, I have found them out-of-date and involving wasteful steps. To pass on things better than I found them, I try to leave an impact through making process improvements and updating those documents.

In 2019, the country of Turkey took delivery of S-400 air-defense systems from Russia. The US government then took long-threatened action and forced Turkey off the F-35 fighter jet program. The six F-35s that Turkey had received were impounded in the US (there for training) and Turkey was banned from manufacturing F-35 components .  Enter me.

Collecting approvals and signatures is never fun, but in order to implement a large change in any organization, it needs people with authority to "buy in" to the change. In a large organization, that includes signatures and presentations; in a small business it might be pausing between bites of lunch to mention the change and see if the owner objects. Either way, if the people with the power to implement or stop a change aren't in favor, the change won't happen. One of my first tasks in 2023 upon assuming a new role was learning about a key initiative and pushing its approval through many layers of management.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a manager in possession of a project, must be in want of a project schedule ( With apologies to Jane Austen ). On large projects for the US government there is an "Integrated Master Schedule" (IMS). The IMS is often used as a report deliverable, and so is updated monthly for the customer to see it. I have found that the IMS is most useful as a working document. This is for two reasons: 1) it saves me all of the time to update the IMS for the customer because it's already updated for me, and 2) the IMS is recommended for a reason, and I try to take full advantage of it. 1937 Panama Canal schedule My peak time using IMS as a tool was doing new product introductions for military landing gears. At that time I had several simultaneous projects, all requiring Department-of-Defense-compliant Integrated Master Schedules, which included a 14-point compliance check as well as a variety of metrics that defined the "health" ...

This week's Economist includes a column "Are superstars as good when they move jobs?"  It highlighted findings that superstar employees aren't instantly superstars at new companies because that out-performance came from the superstar working with the support team they've built. Everyone needs a team!

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently. My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

I've gotten a broad view of the various aircraft out there today, and have been involved in the design or manufacture of many too. All photos are mine or public domain.

The Economist's Boss Class podcast recently interviewed Robin Dunbar of "Dunbar's number" fame, which reminded me about some other reading I'd done about spans of control. How large can a team get before it becomes ineffective? Surprisingly small!

I've had direct reports temporarily assigned to me a few times.  Normally that meant that I didn't manage their "HR" tasks (e.g. time cards), but for whatever reason I needed to step in to help a team achieve a turnaround that was durable enough that the people could be "handed back" to their regular manager after only a few weeks or months and the benefits would continue. I understand management expectations, set team expectations, and manage the team while improving their processes and tools.

It's surprisingly easy

I recently read Kenn Ricci's Management by Trust (2006) . It's a quick read at only 140 pages (according to my e-reader) and a few points jumped out at me that would be fun to share. The thesis of the book is that managers perform better and get performance out of their teams when they are trusting and trustworthy rather than treating their employees transactionally. The money saved catching a few bad actors is far outweighed by the loss of energy and creativity by the part of the team that doesn't abuse their privileges. I'll start calling this a series of philosophy, having previously written about it here:  One-on-one meetings Outrage - uses and defuses Scar tissue Leader standard work Communications channels Remote work e-Commerce I made notes as I read through Management by Trust and I'll address what I highlighted as key points. Image from http://www.managementbytrust.com/  Self-consistency I knew that I could never be comfortable trying to be one person a...

I was reading through this week's Economist (4/21) magazine and saw the article " Unlike everyone else, Americans and Britons still shun the office ". As someone who worked remotely 1-2 days per week from the mid-2010s and was 100% remote starting in early 2020, I've got a perspective on working remotely. What caught my eye from the Economist was the penultimate paragraph because it hit home: Maybe, then, the problem with working from home is not its economic impact, but its social one. Put simply, Americans do not seem to be making the most of the time they are no longer spending on their commutes. Socialising and volunteering are both now less common than in 2019; meanwhile, people spend more time “relaxing” and playing video games. All told, the average American spends half an hour longer alone than pre-2020. Using the commute time I definitely experienced this issue when working remotely. My "no-longer-commute" time went to additional childcare in the...

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. All of us use our communication tools in different ways. Some people live and breathe their social media; I'm only on Facebook in case someone from high school wants to send out information about a reunion. I'm not judging. Assuming that your intent in communication is to communicate, then what matters more is matching the expectations of how and when to communicate with whomever you're talking to; let's call them your "partner" because communication is a group effort. Email is not urgent For some people it is, but for me if I need something urgently (or someone needs it from me), email is not the right tool. I check my email at least once per day, but sometimes only that often, and it might be a glance on my pho...

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my follow-up methods using Outlook and related parts of the Microsoft Office suite . Those tools work well for day-to-day tasks and following up, but what about the bigger long-term tasks? When you look back at your month or year, did you get done what you wanted? The key for this is "leader standard work". Inspirations Much of my "leader standard work" was inspired by work I did at my previous company after a small group of us (EV, GR) read Creating a Lean Culture by David Mann , although I later stumbled into a different concept. We adopted the term "leader standard work" from his book, where it tackled the items that team leaders should be performing on a regular basis. This might include walking the production floor (or office area) to check the associated status boards, daily stand-up meetings, and the like. The other inspiration came after I had a lot in-place, but reassured me I was on the right track and helped...

A shorter musing today about why we remember the little things that'd we'd otherwise remember at work: it's not because of diligence, it's because those memories represent scar tissue. During my first stint in Supply Chain as an Analyst, I was impressed with the Supply Chain Managers because they would rattle off part numbers at the drop of a hat. "Did you hear about [Supplier]? They're behind on the ABC123 and DEF345 part numbers!" "Well, as long as GHI678 is holding its commits, I'm happy." They seemed to have developed superpowers where they knew the entire bill of material for the company and could talk about each part in minute detail. Now, many years later, I also can rattle off part numbers at the drop of a hat, but they're different part numbers. Because ABC123 might never have hurt me, but I've laid awake at night wondering if the machine shop could complete JKL999 without any more quality issues. Anyone who has been r...

  In my time as a Program Manager / Value Stream Leader, I came to two realizations about outrage: the advantages of having someone in the organization be outraged, and the ways to defuse outrage by a customer. Using Outrage When I had been working for my company for around 10 years, a new-ish hire (MF) walked into my office and complained about how poor our on-time delivery was. Our process to get from a customer order to the part starting manufacturing (in-house or at a supplier) seemed to take forever, the lead times at the suppliers were long, or quality issues would crop up (introducing more rework time). And I realized that I didn't notice our on-time delivery anymore. When I first joined the company, I thought our lead times on a report were measured in days (because when I saw "40" for a part that seemed reasonable) and they were actually measured in weeks. When I started I thought that of course we should be able to hit our delivery commitments. After all m...