Ahwahnee Hotel: Unsatisfactory

The Great Lounge in 2009

One of our best vacations this century was an unplanned trip to the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite.

We roamed the uncrowded 98-year-old national landmark shortly after the new year in 2009. The snow made it difficult to get in or out, and we were "forced" to extend our stay. No worries--no one in our party complained.

So we were disappointed to read that the Ahwahnee Hotel has been mismanaged, according to reports from the National Park Service.

Rodent activity, improper food storage, lapses in facility maintenance and other public health concerns are among the pervasive issues called out in the report. The park service also dings Yosemite Hospitality for failing to conduct inspections.

Yosemite Hospitality received an overall “unsatisfactory” rating. That’s the lowest possible rating and a downgrade from previous years; in 2023, 2022, 2019 and 2018, Yosemite Hospitality received a “marginal” rating in its annual review.

The litany of problems will take years to correct. I'm glad we went when we did.

Nvidia's Management Secret: Top Five Things

(Bennett / aol photo)

Founders of world-class companies each have their distinguishing management characteristics--think Steve Jobs' perfectionism, Bill Gates' ruthlessness, and Elon Musk's first principles. Jensen Huang's is T5T (Top Five Things):

T5T emails began as a solution to a surprisingly tricky problem. Huang is allergic to the bureaucracy that infects organizations as they get bigger. But as his startup grew, he “needed to somehow keep tabs on what was going on inside Nvidia in order to make sure everyone had the right priorities,” [“The Nvidia Way" author Tae] Kim writes.

This turned out to be harder than etching billions of transistors on a silicon wafer.

The documents that make it to a typical CEO tend to get so watered down along the way that they’re liable to leave a puddle on his desk. Huang doesn’t bother with any of them. He doesn’t believe in formal strategic planning or status reports, either. “Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them,” Huang said last year. “They’re barely informative.”

He doesn’t want information that has already made its way through layers of management. What he wants is “information from the edge,” he said last month in a public interview with Laurene Powell Jobs.

The way he solved this problem was by asking roughly 30,000 employees at every level of the company to send regular emails to their teams and executives that even the CEO can access. Which he does—every single day. They’re usually brief and include a few bullet points, and glancing at them gives Huang a snapshot of what’s happening inside Nvidia, Kim writes.

It might just be the only way he can get the sort of unvarnished truth that nobody wants to give the CEO but every CEO needs to get. After all, Nvidia’s employees are not telling Huang what they think he wants to hear. They’re just telling him things.

T5T emails became a “crucial feedback channel” for Huang, Kim writes, because they allowed him to pick up on trends that were obvious to junior employees, even when top executives were completely oblivious.

All the aforementioned founders have been called workaholics because they don't make the mistake of over-delegation. Over-delegation tempts them to coast on their marketplace dominance, which dissipates often invisibly because they took their foot off the gas.

Through T5T Jensen Huang seems to have found an efficient way to access uncurated information flowing through his vast organization, but he still has to work around the clock. May he remain at Nvidia's helm for many years.

"What can your manager improve on?"

(grosum image)

About 30 years ago the Human Resources (formerly Personnel) function steeply ascended in importance. For the first time workers had to fill out forms evaluating their bosses.

The change was spurred by the publication of books about how excellent companies "treat[ed] rank and file employees as a source of quality," or a new appreciation of the costs of employee turnover.

Sexual harassment, typically of female workers by male bosses, was raised in the public consciousness by the 1991 Clarence Thomas Senate hearings. Bad publicity and legal liability were the consequences if organizations did not police their managers.

Those who were halfway up the pyramid, like your humble blogger, found the process to be exasperating. Not only did I have to compose upward feedback very carefully as a matter of self-preservation, I had to respond to workers' criticisms--thankfully there weren't many--with an action plan. (All this was on top of the annual evaluations--written and in-person--that were crucial to determining raises, bonuses, and promotions.)

It appears that employees are still agonizing over giving feedback on their bosses. [bold added]

Everyone seems to want our take these days. We’re subjected to quarterly 360 reviews, weekly pulse surveys and drive-by requests for input by the coffee machine. It’s part of a longstanding shift from command-and-control leadership styles to more collaborative ways of running companies, says Doug Stone, who teaches conflict management at Harvard Law School and co-wrote the book, “Thanks for the Feedback.” A lot of it stems from employees who have demanded more of a voice…even if another app wasn’t what they had in mind.

It's a wonder that companies get any real work done.

A Soupçon of Pleasure

Out with the old (left)

Sometimes it's useful to take a break from big, complicated projects and work on something that can be completed in a small amount of time, e.g., clearing the paperwork on a desk, weeding a patch of the flowerbed, etc. And so it was that I finally took care of an irritant that consumed a few minutes every week.

The plastic shoe rack in the garage was old and flimsy. Pulling items out too hastily caused the whole thing to fall over because one of the posts was cracked.

A light-metal $25 rack was ordered from Amazon and put together in an hour. The old rack was trashed and every item transferred.

Completing this trifle rewarded me with a shot of dopamine, and it still gives me a soupçon of pleasure every day when I walk past the new rack.

And after two months it has never tipped over.

More Important Than Ever

If one had to list the factor most important to a company's productivity, what would it be? Popular guesses might be technology, workforce education, and visionary leadership (e.g., Steve Jobs, Elon Musk). The answer is surprising: [bold added]

Graphic from projectmanager.com

The results confirmed something Gallup had seen before: a company’s productivity depends, to a high degree, on the quality of its managers.

What no one saw coming, however, was the sheer size of that correlation—something Gallup calls “the single most profound, distinct and clarifying finding” in its 80-year history. The study showed that managers didn’t just influence the results their teams achieved, they explained a full 70% of the variance. In other words, if it’s a superior team you’re after, hiring the right manager is nearly three-fourths of the battle.

No other single factor, from compensation levels to the perception of senior leadership, even came close. “That blew me out of my chair,” says Jim Clifton, Gallup’s chief executive.

Anyone who's had a job has had a boss and has thought or said out loud "if I was in charge I'd do things differently." Upon promotion, one finds that supervision of others is a lot harder than it looks. Above all, it requires sublimation of the self--doing what's best for the organization (which means sometimes being the bad guy to the workers) and doing what's best for the employees (training them and being willing to let the best ones move on).

Good management includes near-religious attention to communication upwards and downwards and reviewing others' work before doing what the manager may enjoy (research, writing computer programs, attending conventions (!))

After decades of eliminating organizational layers, the managers that remain are more important than ever.