Michael Jordan's Weblog

I remember the time when, leaving my first job ever (staffer for U.S. Congress Committee on House Administration) for my second job (as a sys admin for a law firm) that I was pretty nervous to tell my manager that I was leaving. I thought "what if she gets upset how will I handle it? What if she tries to bribe me to stay would I have the strength to resist in favor of this new career interest?"

Neither happened. She gave me this kind of annoyed look and then said something like "Fine."

As a manager, sometimes you're in the position to keep an employee from walking out to take a different offer. (However, once it gets to this point with an employee you want to keep, you've probably already failed in your retention effort.) What is an interesting question is How to handle soliciting commitments from employees to prevent them from seeking other opportunities.

Ever ask an employee to commit to a certain period of time?

I've seen this happen a few times, especially when organizations are going through a lot of upheaval. Staff gets nervous, starts looking for other jobs. Managers want their people to stay. Normally, management teams' discussions of retention planning center around bonuses and other perks, formal initiatives. These are necessary, certainly.

But so is appealing directly to valued staff. It's a risk because managers can't make promises they may not be able to keep. But it can be an effective option when there is a high level of trust between a manager and their staff. It signals, often explicitly, a commitment on the part of the manager to help the employee with their career (whether or not in the same group). And there is something empowering to both manager and employee when destinies are hooked together in this way. The manager feels a stronger commitment to the employee and vice versa.

Tips on asking for a commitment from an antsy employee:

• Put yourself in their shoes; handle the discussion openly
• Make it clear that the commitment is something mutual but be honest about how far you can go
• Ask for honest feedback on how far your staff is willing to go
• Talk time limits based on what's going on in your business that made this conversation necessary

This can be an effective way to avoid surprise resignations, build trust, and, most important, work together between manager and employee on a win-win career decision.

Don't take it lightly.

I've been dealing with the "same name as Michael Jordan"-thing since I was 16. I remember the first time fairly vividly: Michael Jordan had been a famous basketball player for about a year. But no one had said anything to me until one day I was in line for the cafeteria during Boys State in Eugene, Oregon. The boy in line in front of me turned around, noticed my name tag, and said "Michael Jordan?!" Ever since then it was hard to go a day without someone saying something about it. (Not to mention that I've always really enjoyed events with name tags.

Mostly I'd just get comments from store clerks or waiters (people that see my credit card). Every once in a while, I'd get a phone call from some young kid who really thought he'd discovered Michael Jordan's phone number. And, now, in the internet age, I'm happy to report I get several hits a day to this blog from Google. I know whoever is running these searches isn't looking for me -- take a look at a sample of the search requests:

• Michael Jordan's email address
• Michael Jordan photos
• Michael Jordan and Leadership
• Michael Jordan's Wife (?)
• Michael Jordan's impact on pop culture
• Michael Jordan and music (?)
• Michael Jordan where is he now

I can't help but wonder why people think that Michael Jordan (the rich guy) has a blog at blogs.sun.com. But, hey, file it under "you never know."

For those of you who don't know, for years Sun provided donuts to employees every Wednesday morning (and bagels). It was just a Silicon Valley cultural thing (or maybe just something to go along with the coffee in the break room). Either way, the tradition was put on hold when the economy turned in the wrong direction, until last Monday when Scott brought it back as a one time event in celebration of our Solaris 10 release.

Donut day was/is more than just a day with donuts to me:

• My first interview for my first job at Sun happened to be on Donut Day. Coming from jobs at a law firm and in the U.S. Congress, this seemed novel and fun.
• There was a time when Donut Day influenced me and my coworker to arrive at work early on Wednesdays to get the kind of donuts we liked. (I remember my coworker used to drink orange juice with his donuts -- yuck!)
• I met my wife on Donut Day. We were both working at Sun at the time and the first day we met it was over donuts ("What kind do you like?" "You better finish these.") I guess you had to be there.
• I remember more than a few Donut Day meetings that would start with a short walk down to the break room.

This past Donut Day was interesting because in my current job I had a tiny role to play in the project to get the donuts (or the culturally relevant local alternative) delivered worldwide. It's a nontrivial exercise to deliver donuts worldwide, especially when the machinery is rusty. We did Donut Day this time as a celebration of the Solaris launch but also as a nod to the return of some of the old-style fun. People may disagree about the importance of donuts or the return on a cultural investment. It may not even be the healthiest way to mark a milestone.

But even an organization that's been dieting for a few years deserves a celebratory splurge from time to time.

For me anyway, it felt good.

I've been suspecting this for a while but I think the post-bubble hangover is over at Sun.

Sun has, and has always had, fundamental technical advantages (e.g., maven, clive, GavinLu, for recent ground-level examples; not to mention the recent gold medal award from the Wall Street Journal). And the opportunities are unlimited (e.g.,: RFID, market growth in phones and other devices that are driving the use of serious server power and storage).

More important, what's going on inside the heads of Sun employees? More and more employees have realized their power to choose. In that little space between stimulus and response, choosing to be more enthusiastic and positive. All the right reasons are within reach but it takes that shift in mentality to go for it.

The flywheel seemed to be slowing down for a while but the momentum is back. It's palpable. And in this operating mode, Sun is unstoppable.

This will be my wrapup comment on things I noticed during my attendance at the CORENET Global Conference in San Antonio, an industry trade show for corporate real estate (CRE) execs, suppliers, brokers, etc.

Now, I want to assure all you CRE conference attendees that what goes on in San Antonio stays in San Antonio. However, as impressed as I was with your knowledge of everything ever invented about real estate, economic development, lease administration, facilities management, and other topics, I gotta say that ya'all need to bone up on your pop culture knowledge.

Case in point: On Tuesday night, there was a certain amount of dancing going on at Polly Esther's in San Antonio. It was a veritable "who's who" in the CRE world! When the DJ spun the song "Yeah" by Usher I was appropriately moved to sing along. Much to my embarassment (for you), I seemed to be the only person in the whole place who knew the words. Now, the CRE folk need to get on board with me on this one. How can you be a player in any industry, even in the CRE industry, without knowing the basics. I mean, this song was on an album that came out in March!

I will send a free copy of Usher's album (Confessions) to the first CRE exec who reads this and contacts me! For now, study the lyrics, people!

At the Fall conference for executives in the corporate real estate industry (CORENET Global, San Antonio) one of the educational sessions was about best practices for companies wanting to attain government incentives for bringing new jobs to an area. Depending on the location and the magnitude of the new business, these incentives can be huge: Over $100M in direct incentives were awarded to Toyota for bringing a manufacturing facility and related supplier business to the San Antonio area.

Once the work is done to secure the commitments (can involve corporate executives, local government officials, economic development agencies, and consultants), there remains the question of how to manage the actual attainment of all the committed incentives. In other words, the government doesn't just write the company a check; documentation is usually managed and filed for a variety of incentive categories such as training credits, job creation credits, environmental and social impact, etc.

This is as good an example as any of where the management skill of follow-up is critical. Good managers and leaders have to set a vision and direction, certainly. They must inspire a commitment to successful, aligned execution. They also need a system of monitoring progress and following up on the tactical commitments necessary for success. This system may be as simple as cascading short term goals down into an organization and using the management team or project leaders to track progress. The top manager responsible cannot afford to publish his/her vision and then walk away.

This is not about micro-managing. Micro-managing requires a very short cycle between goal-setting, review, and accomplishment. For me personally, setting 30-, 60-, 90-day outcome-oriented milestones is about right. After my team and I agree on what these outcomes should be, we review these 30-, 60-, 90-day plans about once a month. (Junior employees may require a more frequent review, in part because they have trouble planning anything beyond 60 days.)

Your mileage may vary.

As I worked my way around the CORENET conference exhibitor hall, I stopped at several booths of companies selling software to help other companies manage their leases. (Understandably so, since lease admin is one of those things that all big companies need.)

I asked several vendors about their software. All pretty much had the same functionality: web-based (mostly), customizable databases that would help you know what's going on with your leases world-wide. Each had customizable dashboards. What I wanted to know from these lease administration experts was, What's the one performance metric to which I should hold my lease admin program office accountable? No one really had a good metric.

The answers to the question centered around "anything you want it to be." This was disappointing to me because if these guys are putting together these big databases they ought to have a sense of what successful lease administration is. And if they know that, they should be able to tell me what the primary performance metric should be.

The closest thing I got to a good answer was from Sequentra (at least they gave me an answer!). Their answer was "rent recovery." Now, financial performance is a good one, but I'm looking for the transfer function from financial performance to an indicator of what's going to happen. Anyone can look back at performance but by then it's too late!