Beware Experts Who Aren't

Campbell Harvey, finance professor at the Duke business school, is an expert.  He must be, it says so right on his CV.  He also supposedly has a perfect track record for calling recessions.  He just put that record at serious risk.  He thinks the current economic crater will be over by the end of the year.  And he thinks that largely because he believes the world will know by then that we'll have a vaccine for SARS-COV-2 in Q1 2021.

Folks, there isn't an epidemiologist on Earth who believes we'll have a vaccine that quickly.  The good professor may know a lot about business finance, but he knows so little about epidemiology he doesn't even know how little he knows (See Dunning-Kruger Effect.).  I've helped a few biotech companies get started, but that in no way makes me an expert in research pathology.  So the next time some supposed expert starts giving an opinion, do what we do in court (or at least what we're supposed to do in court): Determine whether the opinion fits within the expert's field of expertise.  If it doesn't, you might as well be getting an opinion from the next person you meet on the street.  Or one of my cats.  Probably the brain-damaged one.

Another HR How-Not-To Lesson

I've been focusing largely on real estate lately, so it's time to do a business management entry.  I was called in to provide some advice on this mess just last week.  The company in question has a pool of employees it brings in as needed for a certain type of work.  One employee hadn't been called in for awhile, so he called the company and was told he needed to come in to meet with them.  It then took the two bosses two weeks to get around to meeting with this guy.  At this meeting they took issue with his having missed one of the training days.  They took issue with his level of communication with them.  And they took issue with his actual work product.  Turns out, though, there were some issues with these issues.  I'll lay them out below as lessons.

Lesson One: If you are going to accuse someone of not communicating, you had better have looked at their communications.  The employee had emailed the bosses he would not be available for that training day.  The company's response was that he had responded to the wrong email, so they did not know what he meant by "I am not available the following days."

Lesson Two: If you are going to accuse someone of not asking questions to get clarification, you had better have asked some questions yourself.  The email in Lesson One was actually pretty clear.  The company never followed up on it to ask what the employee meant.  The employee was apparently supposed to figure out on his own that the company was confused.

Lesson Three: Do not treat informal communications away from the office as if they were formal communications made in the office.  The employee and one of the bosses ran into each other at the grocery store.  The employee mentioned in passing that he was going to miss one of the training days.  The boss claimed he told the employee to call the other boss about it.  The employee claimed he never heard any such thing.  The boss never followed up with an email to this effect, either to the employee or to the other boss.

Lesson Four: If you are going to accuse someone of violating a policy, there had better be a policy.  The company claimed the employee had not followed policy concerning communication.  There was no evidence such a policy existed.

Lesson Five: If you are going to accuse someone of shoddy work, you had better not have already signed off on it.  The company claimed some portion of his work was unsatisfactory.  There were in fact some items that had been returned to him for revision (I won't go into the inadequacies of the bosses' notes seeking revisions, but trust me, they weren't good.).  Those revisions had been made, and the company had accepted them.  Now the company wanted to renege on the acceptance as part of disciplining the employee.

So to recap: 1) The company was told the employee would miss the training day, but the company's communications are so pigeonholed that a clear statement sent to the RIGHT PEOPLE will be ignored and not considered to be communication; 2) the company tried to cover its lack of communication by having a boss tell the employee in a grocery store aisle that the employee needed to call, a communication the employee denies receiving and the company has no follow-up verification of having made; 3) there was no policy violation because there is no policy; and 4) work that had been acceptable was retroactively deemed unacceptable to support the current discipline.

And now the killer.

Lesson Six: If you have a problem with an employee's performance, do NOT wait for the employee to contact you to straighten it out (and do not stall for an additional two weeks after that).  Even if everything the company said were true (which it obviously was not), the employee should not have had to sit around wondering what was going on and finally call in on his own.  That is called Passive-Aggressive Management.  If it's your management style, you shouldn't be a manager, and you probably won't be for long.  If you're an owner and pulling these stunts, I guarantee you're driving away all the best people.  Soon your competition will have all the good ones (Maybe that's why Passive-Aggressive Managers congregate in government: no competitors.), and you'll be left with what's left.  And I shouldn't need to tell you where that leads.

So How Fragile IS the Economy?

Macy's in Holladay is finally closing.  Congratulations, Holladay, you've finished the job of turning a regional mall into a cow pasture.  For those of you keeping score, Macy's is also closing the Layton Hills store and the stores at the Three Rivers Mall in Kelso and the Everett Mall.  Sixty-eight stores, over 10,000 jobs.  Lowe's is chopping 2,400 full-time employees in effort to cut costs by using more part-time workers, in the further Walmartification of the US job market.  The Limited has filed Chapter 11, but it isn't reorganizing, it's liquidating.  American Apparel is gone, along with its 110 stores.  Albertsons is shutting down stores all over the territory.  Sears is closing the Vernal, Layton, and Tacoma K-Marts and the Alderwood Mall Sears (I'm waiting for the K-Mart next to Ivy Place to go.).  And in local tech news, Endurance International Group, which went public in 2013 and is still trading below the IPO price, is closing its Bluehost business in Orem (I wonder if Governor Available is going to mention that while bragging about all the jobs he's brought in.).

These aren't just lost jobs.  They're a sign that people aren't buying because they can't buy.  And as more people lose their jobs, more people can't buy.  That's called "spinning in."

If Small Business is the Backbone of the Economy...

...the economy is an invertebrate.  I know, I know, small business owners are the scrappy folks who keep it all going.  And most of my clients are small businesses.  And I'm a small business.  But....

Too many small businesses have no clue how things work (as I've noted several times, such as here and here).  And they also tend to be clueless on just how badly the deck is stacked against them (such as our glorious, bad check statute, which I discussed here).  But I am now witnessing Transatlantic delusion.

First, the UK is in the throes of Brexit.  A recent study of small businesses indicates that a plurality exporters and a majority of importers believe Brexit will have no effect on them.  Wow.  Just wow.  Pulling out of a free trade zone and putting a large hole in your financial industry isn't going to leave a dent.  That isn't optimism, that's insanity.  Meanwhile on this side of the pond, small businesses are expecting Trump to stabilize things for them.  Yeah.  Uh, no.  Trump is stirring the pot into a hurricane, and he's doing it for the greater glory of the big boys.  That includes ACA repeal, which frankly was a big win for small businesses.  If that goes, good look offering your employees a benefit package of any kind, let alone one that can match the bigs.  And if you can't attract talent, where are you?  Going dark, that's where.

So keep ignoring reality, small business owners.  It is sort of a requirement for club membership.  Just don't be shocked and whiny if reality doesn't ignore you and bites you in the backside.

Experts Agree Everything is Fine

These people get paid for these opinions?  A bevy of local experts has met and concluded that SLC will face no more than an economic bump and will soon be right as rain.  They quickly gloss over the vacant lots, vacant storefronts, and aging "For Lease" and "For Sale" signs.  They focus on all the construction cranes downtown.  Never mind that there is no logical connection between the LDS Church's ability to build City Creek and merchant's and consumers' abilities to populate it.  Of course one of these "experts" is Frank Gray who has been completely outflanked on the Sugarhouse pit fiasco by Craig Mecham, who isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, so logical conclusions shouldn't be expected.  In the mean time, the county's revenue projections are down nearly $11 million due to the economy.  Yeah, that sounds fine to me.

If you're in business, there are times when you need experts: an accountant here, a lawyer there, an HR adviser some other time.  When it comes to determining if you have enough business, though, or what your customer traffic is going to look like when half the tenants in your shopping plaza go dark, you are the expert, and if someone tells you things are fine when you know otherwise, turn down the sound.