DEAR ASK RANDS:

Not tightly related to this thread, but... well, two related ideas:

My boss is branching out from solo legal into leveraging his MBA, so you've made another sale - I have an excuse to slip him your book. Hopefully he can get past the software/technology angle, since I can't think of any better introduction to "corporate" culture, its rationale (making profit, avoiding knife-fights in the hallways..), and its quirks (why *so much* Process? what's up with meeting/'PowerPoint' culture?) for someone who's never been directly exposed to it. [He's always wanted to be there, but wanting a pony doesn't mean you know how to ride one..]

So from that perspective - I've got my own ideas, but it'd be interesting to hear you ruminate on the Jack Tramiel business-is-war approach vs. the common-case business-is-golf-and-PowerPoint approach vs. the Steve Jobs business-is-hypnosis approach. (Well, Tramiel and Jobs are both close in attitude, just that one targeted "the masses" at retail and the other "the classes" with 'luxury' design and marketing. I can't think of a more legitimate/less-contradictory exemplar of the 'laid-back-Californian' approach right now, though.)

Since those are CEOs, maybe it'd really be an easier/simpler exercise to classify corporate cultures in general? "Keiretsu" (Sony et al), "American Keiretsu"/"East-coast stodgy" (GE, Xerox, Kodak), "Meat Grinder" (EA, ??), "Animal House" (not sure if that should apply to cultures that are very cigar-lounge who-knows-who fraternities, or lights-on-but-nobody's-home/lunatics-running-asylum shops), "Land of Oz" (Disney, Apple, don't-look-behind-curtain / own-dogfood-running-out-their-ears shops) ... "Bait Shop" (YouTube, Flickr, Twitter - where management's 'core product' is to get acquired as quickly as possible) ... "Assembly Line" (manufacturing or any equivalent culture where employees have tightly defined roles/directly quantifiable performance), "Toy Shop" (Google), "Misfit Toy Shop" (SGI, Sun), "Sweatshop Toy Shop" (Microsoft), "Detroit"... Maybe some of those aren't distinct cultures, just the same culture applied to different products, but it'd be an exercise to look at what worked where and what burned down like the Hindenburg.

... Inspired because said boss definitely takes the Tramiel approach right now (...maybe not as successfully, and he's about to smash face-first into not just 'corporate' culture, but .tw Confucian corporate culture) ... and hell, even I have some of the same Tim Taylor grunt-grunt you're-getting-paid suck-it-up-and-perform work-harder-*and*-smarter attitude - which is why we're both complete frickin' burnout cases now.

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So, uh, yeah, WTF, second thought:

Plz consider doing a "Complete Asshole's Guide to Budgeting" kthx?

Specifically: I'm along for the ride with this guy [we're family, of course] on the existing practice, the upcoming corporate work, and a startup involving a manufactured product that's gone nowhere for years because no resources have been allocated to packaging, marketing or manufacturing.

That's not what I'm suggesting you tackle, though - lots of people start a business but don't follow through - it just shows the extremity of the dysfunction.

What I think you might want to write about is a more general situation, eating a lot of SMBs alive, especially re: IT:

Start with any dude with some authority, one or more employees/subordinates to delegate to, and a "budget" for the entity his authority controls [team, workgroup, business, whatever]. To adapt to your perspective, let's call him The Manager.

The Manager recognizes that certain expenditures are necessary to conduct business and make money - rent, phone... paperclips.

Those get taken care of pretty smoothly. Either The Manager handles them directly, or someone fills up the cart at Staples.com, gets The Manager to sign off (or takes out the second box of paperclips), and life goes on.

IT, however, is where the record stops with a screech. Let's generalize that as The Specialist Field (any dark art that The Manager has no real expertise or understanding - or direct interest - in).

So... from The Manager's perspective, everything in The Specialist Field is off his radar until it forces itself in front of him. Then, ohshit, a Specialist is needed.

Here's where the Mysteries of the World unfold:

In Specialist Fields where no Specialist is on staff, a Manager must call in a Consultant - and a Consultant, by nature of his business, will make a pitch with 100% confidence, provide a quote, and The Manager will either approve it as a one-off expense or tell the Consultant to fuck off and go find another Consultant. If The Consultant fucks up, The Manager will not know until the failure occurs, at which point it's time to call back The Consultant if it's not obvious that it was a fuckup - or a different Consultant if it is.

In Specialist Fields where the Specialist is on staff, though:

- The Manager wants direct approval over every expenditure;

- The Specialist on-staff knows his ass is on the line unless the expenditure performs (The Manager, of course, always wants immediate ROI, but a Consultant is out of there before any problems emerge);

- The Specialist is part of the operation and gives a crap about making sure the solution is actually appropriate to The Manager's needs / the entity's overall budget.

So begins the waking nightmare of many Specialists at "small-to-medium-businesses," especially if they have roles beyond being a Specialist: The Manager wants something done that's going to require expenditure. The Specialist can think of 500 ways to do it and asks The Manager for a budget and time frame: Fast, Cheap, or Reliable, pick two.

In my experience, The Manager who can't [*refuses to*] ballpark an answer to both questions is failing the Specialist and the overall managed entity: To the Specialist, he's communicating his insecurity about the Specialist Field, and leaving it on the Specialist to prepare a report on every option without scope - begging for an education in the field rather than a short list to pick from and Get It Done, then getting pissed off if the report comes back and reads like an introductory text for the field.

Gridlock: The Specialist's going to lose sleep and eat time-on-payroll trying to guess at business priorities and cash flows he has no data on. He's got those 500 solutions in his head and needs The Manager to scope it down so he can get to work. The Manager knows nothing about the field, can't fix a priority, and no matter how much he might blow in Vegas, can't decide what fraction of business funds to ante on getting this_thing done.

In an Enterprise situation, this is either sussed out through meeting and reporting culture or Falls Off the Radar. In a small-to-medium-business, it just becomes the dead horse rotting in the room and poisons trust and productivity - The Manager remains consistently angry that The Specialist hasn't reported to him yet, and is suspicious that he just wants to procure some expensive toys; The Specialist knows he's going to have his head bitten off no matter what he does, so either doesn't do anything or ends up doing it with his own money and bringing it in, pissing off The Manager by creating a tax headache.

...and heh, maybe that's burrowing deep into my specific situation, but there's the general problem: in nearly any field, specialty, role, whatever, there are expenses and tradeoffs between time and expense. Secretarial duties can, for instance, be performed on a PC, or scratched out on a pad in longhand - or can go to the extremes of beating reeds for papyrus and berries for ink or renting a mainframe and support staff to handle mail merge. IT needs spares, upgrades, and might wish to evaluate products from time to time without a demand that they go into production - *if* times are good and budget permits. Programmers need books, software, compiler farms. Legal needs books, subscriptions, paperclips, support from IT... Everyone's supposed to be working together, right?

What I'm wandering in circles about is: Money is, *ahem,* the universal currency. Most people are actually not that bad about doing back-of-the-envelope math as to how to act rationally with it, particularly if they know to expect a fixed amount across a specific time. People who blow budgets should be held accountable - and are going to be naturally selected out, if they spend and fail to show results - but if you count paperclips, your core competency rapidly becomes paperclip-counting with the original business crammed into your spare time.

So - got any heuristic management can use and feel_smart_about when delegating budgets so subordinates can get shit done? As far as IT, there are plenty of articles saying "devote N%" - and in a small business grossing low 6 figures, lord, $1,000 a year would be plenty and might leave a surplus that could go back to payroll in 5 years - but it's hard to make the case to a manager who thinks every unallocated cent is somehow earning more interest in the bank than one allocated but not yet spent.

Blurf.