Managers: Don't Let Your Computer Become Your Boss

I wouldn't know a blackberry from a kumquat. I have to be dragged kicking and screaming into any kind of electronics store before I get serious about purchasing the "next big thing." I'm not just curmudgeonly, though, I have a strategy.

The Marketing field has developed a rather sophisticated model of business evolution called the Product Life Cycle (PLC.) It is only a general model that paints in broad strokes, but it is robust and therefore very useful. In the PLC, the growth in total sales of a product category, across a broad market and over a long period of time, and summing all producers, follows an s-shaped curve. At the beginning of the life cycle sales are zero and start growing slowly, but something happens to make sales "take off" and grow rapidly for a while before eventually slowing down and then flattening out. Sooner or later technological obsolescence and/or market saturation sets in, sales decline, and the product dies out of the market altogether. While the cycle considers the interactions of several dimensions - marketing, production, technology, costs, prices, and so forth, one of the simpler ideas is that the type of consumer evolves over the PLC.

At the beginning the typical consumer is someone that just "has to" have the technology, be it the geek or the government. The early-stage consumer is price-insensitive, willing to pay premium prices for a technology that still has considerable bugs left in it. Later, the "sophisticated" consumer appears and is very price sensitive, and representative of the mass market. Between the pioneer and the laggard are several other terms for consumers, and I fall somewhere in the middle.

I am not against or afraid of new technology. I just prefer other people to pay high prices for technologies that don't work right yet, and then I make a purchase later when prices have come down and standards of performance have been clearly identified. Metaphorically speaking, I never bought a Beta Max in my life. But by the same token, I only got wireless in January of 2008. I've finally and grudgingly accepted cell phones, but give my number only to family and close friends. I am not, not I say and I've circled my wagons around this, available "24/7."

But this series of essays isn't about me, and for that matter it isn't about you or other consumers. It's about new managers, for whom I have complete sympathy and with whom I share empathy.

Once I was about to begin class in an MBA course I was teaching. For some reason I took out my paper-based, executive-leather wallet calendar, that I had been using since 1982 and still do (no, smarty, I have replaced the paper calendar yearly, I just continue to use the wallet.) One of my students started busting my chops for not having a PDA.

Going along with the joke, I challenged him to a contest. I suggested we race, using our respective technologies, to produce our mothers' phone numbers. In the split-second that it took me to find mine, he had not even removed his stylus or turned his gizmo on. Never mind that I already knew my mom's number, I won. Sure, I can't get e-mails on my wallet calendar, but as I said, I am not available 24/7. I've made some decisions for myself about just how technology fits into my professional life, and I have set boundaries. Nobody ever said any famous last words on a cell phone, or at least I don't plan to.

To use another anecdote, once I was trying to get the stupid computer in my classroom to work. The PowerPoint application wouldn't cooperate, and I didn't know how to fix it. It struck me that in the short fifteen years that I had been teaching at the University level, I had gone from using a blackboard to using BlackBoard (the most popular distance learning platform in academia.) But, I assured my students, I still knew how to teach using chalk and lecture notes, and we proceeded. OK, it was a stinky white-board marker, but the point is the same.

I may not be a wizard at using computers, but I do not depend on them either. Before sending an e-mail to the person I know is sitting 100 feet from me, I get off my rear end and go talk to that person. Before waiting for IT to fix my PC so I can fire up Excel, I am perfectly comfortable using a calculator and even then, a pencil and a good education are usually all I need (thank you, Sister Mary Francis.)

For all the young and/or new managers reading this, I assure you that computers do not do one single thing that a human being cannot do. They just do it faster. I respect that. I respect that a lot and in fact am always startled by the power of speed. But that's all it is, speed. Human beings designed, made, and programmed computers to do what human beings do. Computers are not some species of silicon-based alien that you saw as some computer-generated special effect in some computer-animated flick.

Furthermore, and this is one of my most favorite sayings, computers are 100% logical and 0% reasonable. At least as of this writing, they are completely unforgiving of even one typo, whereas humans can adjust to huge variations on the fly and make great decisions with limited information. Maybe tomorrow computers will be reasonable and intuitive in addition to being logical, but I already told you that you are going to suffer the bugs and pay out your nose before I buy into it. Thank you.

Dear new manager, don't misunderstand me. I'm not the least bit afraid of computers, and you shouldn't be either. I constantly re-train and upgrade my skills, and so should you. I'm saying that I don't hold them in awe because it's just garbage-in, garbage out, and you need to understand what is going on between those two stages. I'm saying that you should not let computers do your thinking for you. Understand what they are doing before you depend on the outputs. Use their amazing speed, and combine it with your powers of reason, to make great decisions.