Shortage of Short Greeks Ruining Us

By Mike Royko
The Chicago Daily News published this column on Dec. 5, year unknown.
This is classic, found all over the Internet. I found it here.

The moment we sat down for lunch, I knew it was a mistake. It was one of those cute new yuppie-poo restaurants with ferns and a menu that listed calories.

I knew it was an even bigger mistake when five minutes passed before the busboy dropped the silverware and napkins in front of us.

About 10 minutes later, I snared a waitress as she was hurrying by and asked: "Is there any chance we can see a menu?"

"I'm so sorry," she said. "We're short-handed. One of the girls didn't show up today."

When she finally brought the food it wasn't what I had ordered.

"There are some problems in the kitchen," she said. "We have a new cook."

"Never mind," I said. "I'll eat it, whatever it is. But what about the beer?

"Oh, I forgot, you wanted a beer," she said. The beer arrived just in time to wash down the last bite of the sandwich.

When she brought the check, which was wrong because she charged me for what I ordered instead of what I got, I asked: "Who runs this place?"

"The manager?" she said. "He's in the end booth having lunch."

On the way out, I stopped at the manager's booth. He was a yuppie in a business suit. He and a clone were leisurely sipping their coffee and looking at a computer print-out.

"Nice place you have here," I lied. "Do you own it?"

The young man shook his head. It was owned by one of those big corporations that operates restaurants in far-flung office buildings and health clubs.

He also proudly told me that he had recently left college with a degree in restaurant and hotel management.

That explained it all. His waitresses were short-handed, his cook was goofing up the orders, the customers were fuming, and what was he doing?

He was having lunch. Or, as he'd probably say, he was doing lunch.

I don't want to be an alarmist, but when this nation collapses, he and those like him will be the cause.

First, we had the MBA - especially the Harvard MBA - who came along after World War II and took over American industry. With his bottom-line approach, the MBA did such a brilliant job that the Japanese might soon buy the whole country and evict us.

But we're told not to worry. Now that we don't manufacture as much as we used to, we'll be saved by the growing service industry.

The problem is that the service industry is being taken over by people like the restaurant manager and his corporation. They go to college and study service. Then they install computers programmed for service. And they have meetings and look at service charts and graphs and talk about service.

But what they don't do is provide service. That's because they are not short Greeks.

You probably wonder what that means. I'll explain.

If that corporation expects the restaurant to succeed, it should fire the young restaurant-hotel degree holder. Or demote him to cleaning washrooms.

It should then go to my friend Sam Sianis, who owns Billy Goat's Tavern, and say: "Do you know a short Greek that wants to manage a restaurant?"

Sam will say: "Shoo. I send you one my cousins. Jus' got here from the old country."

Then he'd go to Greek Town and tell his cousin, who works as a waiter, that his big chance had come.

When the next lunch hour rolled around, and a waitress failed to show up for work, Sam's cousin would not sit down to do lunch. He would put on an apron and wait tables himself.

If the cook goofed up orders, Sam's cousin would go into the kitchen, pick up a cleaver, and say, "You want I keel you?"

He wouldn't know how to read a computer printout, but he'd get drinks in the glasses, food on the table, and money in the cash register.

That simple approach is why restaurants run by short Greeks stay in business and make money. And why restaurants that are run by corporations and managed by young men who are educated beyond their intelligence come and go. And mostly go.

So if you are ever approached by a stockbroker who wants to sell you shares in any of the giant service corporations, tell him not to bother showing you the annual report. Just ask him one question.

"Is it run by short Greeks?"

If he says no, leave your money under the mattress.

How to Improve Your Vision in Five Easy Steps

Matthew E. May (In Pursuit of Elegance) found here.

Sep 22, 2009 -

In my previous post, The Art of Visual Thinking, I told the story of how Kerry Morrison catalyzed the renewal of Hollywood underway through her ability to paint a vivid picture of the present and the desired future. In this companion piece, I explain how to hone the visualization skills of your team with a practical exercise.

The first part of the activity is a “heads up” that draws out the dream of the team. The second part of the meeting is “sleeves up,” to focus energy on a real world strategy that achieves the dream. The exercise is designed to be fast-paced, highly interactive, and visually oriented. Here’s how it works:

1. Hammer out a vision: Our Company R.I.P. (forty-five minutes) The goal of this activity is to get to the big picture and bring the future to the present so that it can be addressed. The traditional approach is to write a success story for the media as if it were some number of years or months in the future. But a better way, albeit unconventional, is to draft a detailed corporate obituary.
   
   This is what Kerry Morrison did in her interview since Hollywood already was dead at the time. The outcome is a much more realistic and vivid picture of perfection, but in exact reverse. What would the article say about your organization’s demise? What would the headline read?


2. Remove obstacles. (forty-five minutes) Understanding what the goal or vision isn’t is often more important than understanding what it is because this process outlines the restraints and obstacles. The reality is that restraints always rule. For most people, painting the disaster scene provides more accessible mental images because they’ve seen these situations before. When the roadblocks appear in the future, they are more easily recognized and effectively addressed.
   
   To do this, make a master list of all the items identified in the obituary—the company “killers.” To the right of each deadly factor, list the countermeasure. What is the opposite of the ailment? How will each obstacle be overcome or avoided? These now become the critical success factors that form the framework of the future vision.


3. Set goals. (thirty minutes) For each success factor, list a key objective or measurable goal. Use the list you just developed to spark a discussion of the major goals. Combine ideas, wordsmith, refine, remove—whatever is needed to arrive at what the group agrees is a comprehensive list of goals incorporating all the critical ideas from the visioning exercise.


4. Prioritize. (thirty minutes) There’s nothing sophisticated here: have each individual write down what they believe are the three most important goals. Then go down the list and ask for a show of hands indicating how many chose each item as the number-one priority. Tally the votes to identify the top five.


5. Form projects. (thirty minutes) Now turn the top five priorities into key projects, assign a champion, and put thought into who does what by when. Don’t make this exhaustive and detailed logistics planning, but rather high-level action planning.

You now have working template from which future planning can be conducted. Companies spend days in off-site retreats developing visions and strategies. You can do it in about three hours if you follow this procedure.

Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, and blogs here. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Grant Writing Tips

Notes from a Federal Reviewer as found in a Grantstation article.

by Sandra Jewell, Grant Writing Consultant and Writer

The Objective (Peer) Review

"The applications have arrived and the objective review begins."

The central procedure in the federal funding cycle is the objective, or peer, review, which is carefully, legally, designed to maintain the integrity of the decision making process.

Before the peer review panel meets, non-voting (technical) reviewers from the branch sponsoring the RFA vet each application to ensure its compliance with the goals of the branch.

Because objective review is so crucial to the ethical strength of the process, the peer reviewers who score the application are never from the branch soliciting the proposal because the likely applicants are generally constituents of that branch, sometimes known personally to branch staff.

The grant writer would do well to remember that funding decisions rest largely in the hands of reviewers who almost certainly have no direct experience with the subject area.

There are other important issues to remember when replying to an RFA:

First, no one is ever hired by an agency specifically to review grant applications. Reviewers take time away from their day jobs, usually in other parts of the agency, to do this as a service to the soliciting branch. They also know that their branch will need reviewers for their own RFAs.

The reviewer is often given three to five applications to evaluate within a brief time frame. Before the review panel meets, s/he first must invest the considerable effort needed to get up to speed with a new subject area and with the needs of the funding branch as documented in the RFA and any supporting materials. The next step is to read and score the applications, each of which can easily require a full day, and then to spend one or more days participating on the panel.

The entire review process is a massive investment of time and emotional energy and can leave reviewers bleary eyed.

It’s been said that half of all grant applications are poorly written, which may be an underestimate. And to be honest, almost all applications make for tedious reading for reviewers who, as mentioned earlier, are rarely more than temporarily and peripherally involved in the subject.

There are several strategies to consider when developing a response to an RFA that will reinvigorate a reviewer:

First, to help ensure that a proposal ends up in the fundable range, which will generally be well above 90 points on a scale to 100, present a great, new, idea. Reviewers love to have the possibility of helping along a creative and significant initiative.

Although grant writers may have little control over the proposed project, they have considerable control over something equally essential: its presentation. If a grant writer can create an application that is professional, well written, and responsive without being terminally colorless, reviewers will be grateful. More important, they’ll pay attention.

Here are a few more suggestions:

Many requirements are included in an RFA but one of the most crucial is unwritten: Responders must convince the reviewer that the proposal is important. Every word in the application should be strictly, concisely, targeted to that goal. That means that the writer should diligently avoid unexplained assumptions and field-specific jargon.

Conversely, there is no point in over explaining anything that is common knowledge. Reviewers may regard too much irrelevant verbiage as a loss of focus within the proposal and, worse, have their own attentiveness derailed by insignificant details.

No matter how good the idea, it’s not going to sell itself. So, right up front in the beginning paragraphs of the narrative, tell the reader why this proposal is worth doing. Never assume that the reviewer knows or will spend extra time filling in gaps that should be part of the presentation. If applicable, spell out what is known, what is unknown, and where the proposed activities fit. Bring the reviewer up to speed at the start or risk the possibility of permanently losing traction.

Don’t underestimate the potential for confounding the reviewer in the dozens of pages of detail that comprise the usual application. Eliminate cross references that require diversions to another part of the proposal and, where feasible, include an abstract-type summary of each section.

Applications that do well are concise and clear. They flow. They have none of the confusing juxtapositions and inconsistencies that so often baffle and frustrate reviewers. They tell why the project activities are needed, what the applicant expects to achieve, and the methods that will be used. They explain how their progress will be assessed and what happens if and when federal funding ends. Depending on the RFA and agency goals, reviewers often expect funded proposals to be eventually self sustaining.

The application should be internally consistent. Nothing is quite as unmistakable, or as jarring, as an application put together by a number of writers with different writing styles. To get the money in cases like this, someone must do the editing.

In terms of style, another extreme is the application transparently created by a coolly disinterested, professional grant writer. Occasionally an application is so slick it reads as though it was untouched by human hands, sort of like a house decorated by Holiday Inn. Proposals that sound as though humans are only an after thought rarely do well in the review process.