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My Core Competency

Posted in Management with tags , , on February 10, 2012 by jrvitalis

Puppy lost a tooth recently. Yes, another one. That fact in and of itself isn’t surprising, but the fact that I managed to botch the whole Tooth Fairy thing yet again is. I mean how hard can it be? Kid loses tooth, kid puts tooth under pillow, Mom or Dad takes tooth and leaves a reward in return. Simple, right?

Not in my house. Here, complications always arise. Once, Puppy’s tooth fell out during the night and she swallowed it. Another time, Mom forgot to play Tooth Fairy. With Puppy’s last tooth, Mom remembered, but didn’t have any cash or change to put under the pillow. And now this.

Putting her tooth in a bowl to keep it safe while we ate breakfast seemed like a great idea. Except after breakfast I rushed to clear the table so we could get out the door.

It wasn’t until we got home later that day and Puppy asked to see her tooth that I realized what I’d done. I spent the next thirty minutes with my hand down the garbage disposal, hoping against hope that I could find and salvage the tooth. No such luck.

Fortunately, Puppy is fairly pragmatic. While I searched for the tooth, she drafted the following letter to the tooth fairy (In the interests of full disclosure I should note that I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning up the spelling):

 

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I know I promised that you would always get my teeth ever since I swallowed my tooth. But my mom accidentally misplaced my tooth so I am sorry I broke my promise. Could you still visit me please?

From,

Puppy

p.s. My mom put it down the garbage disposal so it is not my fault

 

Fortunately, Puppy is now sound asleep and I’ve not only successfully removed the letter from under her pillow, but also deposited a handsome reward in its place, accompanied by the following response:

 

Dear Puppy,

Thank you for the update on your tooth. Of course I’ll still visit you! After all, it wouldn’t be fair if I held you responsible for your mother’s mistakes. Just promise me I’ll get your next tooth, okay?

Keep Smiling,

The Tooth Fairy

 

Playing the role of the Tooth Fairy is obviously not one of my core competencies, but fortunately writing is. Good thing, too, because with only seven teeth down, I’ve obviously got my work cut out for me.

 

 

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Obtaining Buy-in for the Big Move

Posted in Management with tags , , , on February 3, 2012 by jrvitalis

My husband will be getting his Ph.D. this spring and our family will be facing an out-of-state move. In business school, it was always emphasized that obtaining buy-in from employees was a critical factor in implementing any major changes. With this in mind, I’ve encouraged the children to be as involved in the relocation process as possible. As my husband interviews, we look up his location on the map, talk about what it would be like to live in each place, and sometimes even look at real estate online together.

 

So when Puppy announced a couple of months ago that she only had one request about whatever house we ended up living in, I was eager to hear her thoughts. (A blue bedroom? A bunk bed? A play house in the back yard?)

 

But no.

 

With a serious look on her face she said, “I just really, really want to make sure we buy a house with no electricity.”

 

This shouldn’t have come as a surprise since the girl is obsessed with Little House on the Prairie and spends every free minute pretending she is Laura living in the “olden days,” but it definitely caught me off guard.

 

I started explaining all the reasons why it wouldn’t be practical to buy a house with no electricity, but her mind was made up. Obviously I couldn’t agree to her demand, so we ended up comprimising: we’d occassionally turn the electricity off.

 

I thought that was the end of the feedback I’d receive about the move, but last week Kitten made a request of her own. Again, I was eager to hear her thoughts. I expected she’d ask for a purple and pink bedroom (her favorite colors), a loft bed, or even a kitten. Instead, her request stunned me.

 

“Mom,” she said. “When we move I really, really think we should buy a house with a big swimming pool in the living room. And it should turn into a wave pool. And on the other side of it, we should have a hot tub.”

 

Too stunned to argue, all I could think at the time was that obtaining buy-in for this move just might be harder than I expected.

 

 

 

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Framing

Posted in Management with tags , , , on January 27, 2012 by jrvitalis


Just after her fourth birthday, we discovered Puppy was virtually blind in one eye. We hauled her in to a specialist where she was diagnosed with amblyopia. Basically, her eyeballs are shaped dramatically differently, so right after birth, her brain shut off the connection to one of her eyes. In an effort to turn the connection back on, she had to wear a patch over her good eye ten hours a day for eleven months. The good news was that this worked, and her “bad” eye now has nearly perfect corrected vision. The bad news is that “corrected vision” means she has to wear glasses every waking moment of every day for the rest of her life (so her brain doesn’t shut her eye back off).

 

Obviously this wasn’t news we were happy to hear, but my husband and I knew that our reaction would frame how Puppy viewed having to wear glasses. So we made the whole thing very exciting. We took her to the eye glasses store, let her try on as many pairs as she wanted, and encouraged her to pick out a very cool, funky pair.

 

Our plan worked. Puppy received and continues to receive regular compliments about her glasses, and when I told her about contacts recently, she couldn’t imagine why in the world anybody would not want to wear glasses.

 

Unfortunately, our plan worked a little too well. A few weeks ago Kitten told me that she was seeing white dots in her eyes. With a knot in my stomach, I hauled her to the eye doctor. It wasn’t until she announced at the eye exam that she hoped she’d need glasses like her sister and best friend Otter that I realized the whole thing was likely just a ploy to get glasses (which proved to be the case when she was given a perfect bill of eye health).

 

Then yesterday, Otter’s big brother got glasses. When I told the girls at the breakfast table this morning, Puppy jumped up and started dancing. “Yeay!” she yelled. “Now Squirrel, Otter and me all get to wear glasses!”

 

I looked over at Kitten, who was sitting quietly in her chair. Her head was down, and her little chin was quivering.

 

“Are you okay, Kitten?” I asked.

 

She looked up at me, a single tear dripping down her cheek. “It’s not fair,” she said. “How come everybody in the entire world except me gets to wear glasses?”

 

On the outside, I played the sympathetic mother, but on the inside I was howling. How many parents have to deal with a child who is devastated that they don’t “get” to wear glasses?

 

So this afternoon, you’ll find me in the sunglasses section at Target, where I’ll be buying a pair of kiddie sunglasses so I can pop the frame out and give Kitten a pair of glasses of her very own.

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Less is More

Posted in Management with tags , , , on November 25, 2011 by jrvitalis


For those of us in the United States, yesterday was a day of Thanksgiving; a time to count the blessings in our lives and enjoy our families. Unfortunately, with Christmas just around the corner, we are also being bombarded with images of what we “could” have.

We live in a culture that conditions us to want more, more, more. More money, more prestige, more choices. Paradoxically, research by Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia Business School professor and author of The Art of Choosing, indicates that offering too many choices actually leads to lower levels of satisfaction.

Sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But think about it. How many times have you been overwhelmed by making some simple decision, and then afterward kicked yourself in the pants for having made the wrong choice? But with so many options, how could you possibly have picked the right one?

This lesson hit home recently during a birthday party Puppy attended at Chuck E. Cheese. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the venue, Chuck E. Cheese is a children’s destination that allows kids to play games in exchange for tickets, which they can later trade in for prizes. Having earned something like 110 tickets, Puppy had a wide selection of toys to choose from.

She stood at the counter agonizing. First it was a sucker and a bracelet. Then a top and a sucker. No, maybe a notebook and a pen. On and on it went. She was one of the first children at the counter, and was still standing at the counter after every single party attendee had traded in their tickets and made their selections.

Finally, I gave her a two minute warning. Puppy managed to make her final selection (a sucker and a green plastic lizard) before I had to put my foot down, and she seemed thrilled with her choices.

But it wasn’t five minutes into the ride home before I heard Puppy mumble, “I should have chosen the orange lizard.”

That’s when it hit me; the whole process was so overwhelming, it would have been virtually impossible for her to have left feeling like she’d made a good choice. Maybe less really is more.

(As an aside, Dr. Iyengar happens to be blind, making her research on choices all the more compelling. There is a fascinating New York Times article about her and her work at this link.)

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Who Gets What?

Posted in Management with tags , , , on October 25, 2011 by jrvitalis

With the death of the visionary businessman Steve Jobs, the issue of succession planning has undoubtedly been on the minds of corporate leaders around the world. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, but apparently it is a topic up for discussion in our household as well.

Both Puppy and Kitten were home sick with croup. Puppy was working on a sewing project, and I’d pulled out a kit I keep that contains a variety of miscellaneous items such as pins, old jewelry, and buttons. Having never seen the kit before, the girls were delighted. They set aside their projects and immediately began sorting through the kit, digging for treasures.

Before long, Puppy held up a small fabric pouch containing a small gold chain and pendant. “When Mommy dies,” she shrieked, “I get this!”

Not one to be left in the dust, Kitten jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed a small pack of amethyst stones. “Yeah, and when she dies, this one is mine!”

With that, the floodgates were opened and both girls raced to stake claims on their treasures.

I sat watching in bemused silence, remembering full well all the times I’d made similar comments to my mother as a child.

Finally, Puppy and kitten grew tired of the game and fell silent.

“Girls,” I pointed out. “When Mommy and Daddy die, everything we have is going to be yours.”

“Yes,” Puppy piped up, “But with all this stuff, I think there is going to have to be some serious coin tossing to decide who gets what!”

Her comment wasn’t totally out of left field because when my grandmother passed away recently, she wrote something similiar into her will. As the mother of fourteen children, she must have known the issue of handling her estate would be complicated. Always one to think outside the box, Grandma directed that each child label each item in the house they wanted with a stick-it note. After the funeral, anyone with their name on an item with more than one name on it was directed to roll a dice for that item. Whoever had the highest roll “won” the item. This simple but creative solution removed much of the drama from what otherwise may have been a long, painful affair, and while I hope it will be many years before my children have to worry about such matters, I’m happy to know this issue has already been resolved in our household.

I wonder if Apple can say the same?

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Think Outside the Box

Posted in Management with tags , on September 30, 2011 by jrvitalis

Think outside the box may be the biggest cliché in business, but there is a reason it lives on. It works, both in business and in parenting. Take nighttime at our house for example. Until recently, Puppy was never a great sleeper, and Kitten struggled to make it through a night without calling for Mom or Dad. It’s not far from the truth to say I’ve read every “how to get your kids to sleep” book on the market, and at various times I’ve implemented techniques from many of the books.

But despite advice from the experts, I’ve found one of the most useful techniques to encourage sleep in my house has been a tool I’ve not seen in any baby sleep book: a dreamcatcher.

Dreamcatchers—round hoops with webs woven inside and decorated with feathers—are from Native American traditions. Tribes such as the Ojibe believed that dreamcatchers had the ability to filter dreams, allowing good ones to pass through and trapping the bad.

The dreamcatcher turned out to be a lifesaver for Puppy, who would blow her bad dreams into the dreamcatcher at night and go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that only good dreams would be allowed in her head.

The dreamcatcher worked with Kitten, too. Until a few weeks ago when she woke up in the middle of the night scared of the shadows on her wall. After comforting her, I encouraged her to blow her scary thoughts into the dreamcatcher and go back to sleep.

She shook her head. “Mom,” she said. “The monster wasn’t in my heart, it was on the ceiling!”

I consider myself fairly adept at thinking outside the box, but in my middle-of-the-night stupor, I couldn’t come up with a response.

Oh well. The sleep was good while it lasted.

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Money Stealing Machines

Posted in Management with tags , , , on August 5, 2011 by jrvitalis

We’ve all experienced buyer’s remorse at one time or another. How many times when you were a kid did you spend your money on something, only to wish weeks, days or even minutes later that you’d saved it for something else?

The other day, Puppy had her first experience with buyer’s remorse. I’ve worked hard to teach her about the value of money and she generally does a good job managing it, but she was dazzled by the gum machine at the entrance to a store.

“Please, Mommy? If I buy Kitten one, can I use my money to buy a gum-ball, too?”

This was a loaded question. On one hand, Puppy knows I don’t love gum. On the other hand, she also knows that I do love it when she’s generous with her sister.

I generally try to give her autonomy with her money, so I decided to leave the decision up to her. “Are you sure that’s what you want to spend your money on?”

“Oh yes,” she answered. “I’m sure.”

Both girls jumped up and down as the gum came rolling out of the machine, but their excitement was short lived. Walking out of the store a few minutes later, Puppy announced, “That gum only lasted like two minutes—it totally wasn’t worth it.”

Waiting to see where she’d take the thought, I offered my sympathy. The whole situation must have really bothered her, because a short time later, she announced, “That bubble gum machine was more like a money-stealing machine!”

I’m guessing she won’t be so quick to pull out her pocketbook the next time she’s tempted by something. Thankfully, this lesson only cost her two quarters—well worth the price, in my book.

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360 Degree Feedback, Revisited

Posted in Management with tags , , on July 8, 2011 by jrvitalis

In tip number two, we discussed bottlenecks and I proposed cleaning the bathroom while my girls bathed as a potential solution to the age-old lack-of time-dilemma. Unfortunately, Puppy has decided that she is too old for baths (apparently big kids take showers), so rather than join her sister in the tub, she recently decided to sit in the hallway and *grade* my efforts while I worked.

Her final report on my cleaning?

Bad.

Reasons, as recorded in her official notebook:

  1. Wet (not true)
  2. Dirty (not true)
  3. Gross (not true)
  4. Slow (definitely not true!)
  5. Uses the same rags (not true)
  6. Talks back
  7. Sweeps not very well (not true)
  8. Leaves a mess (not true)

Okay, I’ll grant her the talking back thing. When I caught wind of her grading, I definitely had a few thoughts of my own to share. Nevertheless, it didn’t take me long to realize that her list was designed not so much to provide 360 degree feedback as it was to antagonize Mamma.

For that, she gets and A+!

 

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Create Redundancies

Posted in Management with tags on June 24, 2011 by jrvitalis

No self-respecting businessperson would be caught without redundancies, particularly in critical aspects of their operations such as computers, accounting, etc.

In our house, we have built-in redundancies, too. Her name is Puppy. She was apparently born with an attention to detail that both her father and I sometimes lack.

Take three years ago for example. Puppy was almost four, her sister one. We were all scrambling to get out the door. I was planning to drop my husband and the girls off on campus so I could go to an appointment.

As usual, we were running late. Standing in the bathroom brushing Kitten’s hair, I yelled to my husband, “Don’t forget Kitten’s shoes!”  After  I finished the hairdo, we all rushed to the car.

About halfway to campus, I turned around and glanced in the backseat. “Where are Kitten’s shoes?”

“Darn!” my husband said, slapping his forehead.

I checked the clock. If we went home for her shoes, I’d miss my appointment, but she couldn’t run around campus without them.

Suddenly, Puppy piped up. “Don’t worry, I grabbed them!”

My husband and I looked at each other in disbelief. Thank goodness someone in our family is on top of things!

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Pixar’s Magic Formula

Posted in Management with tags , , , , on June 17, 2011 by jrvitalis

Last winter Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, posted a blog sharing the secret behind Pixar’s phenomenal track record at the box office. It’s not what you might guess: great plots, state-of-the art animation, or even the talent of their employees (although it’s no stretch to say that all of the above are part of the recipe). Instead, the factor that they identify as the key ingredient in their magic formula is simply this: removing hierarchy. According to Mr. Murphy, when the company identifies a problem with a movie, they immediately bring in a “brain trust” to trouble-shoot the problem. But the brain trust has no authority over the movie. Instead of providing a set of recommendations, they share what their experiences have been in similar situations in the past. Those responsible for making the film are free to take their suggestions, or not, as they see fit.

Mr. Murphy asserts that “Removing formal authority, losing the hierarchical relationships, liberates both the giver and receiver of feedback. No matter how tough the feedback is, if you remove the power dynamics, the typical problems with defensiveness, anger, etc., immediately dissipate.”

He goes on to state this philosophy holds true with his children, as well. If he forces them to eat their vegetables, it becomes a power struggle. If he leaves them on the table as an option, they disappear. With respect to parenting, I would take this argument one step further, and add the importance of education in allowing children the freedom to make their own decisions.

Take the vegetable scenario for example. Offering tomatoes as a choice without forcing the issue may or may not work with any given child, but I’ve found with my own children that the more they know about the health benefits of a particular food, the more likely they are to at least have a few bites. In addition, this can make for a fun topic of conversation at the dinner table, with the kids asking questions about how a particular food will benefit them. Kitten, of course, doesn’t understand these discussions on the same level as Puppy does, but when she reaches for a cherry tomato, she frequently asks if it is a “strong” food. As for Puppy, she doesn’t care much for spinach, but she’ll nearly always eat a leaf or two because she knows it will benefit her body.

I may not have any box office hits under my belt, but if giving Puppy and Kitten some autonomy gets more vegetables into their system, I’m willing to continue working with Pixar’s magic formula.

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