Going on Hiatus Again

I wrote earlier this year that I had been blogging on this site for ten years. That isn’t entirely accurate, as I have put the blog on hiatus a couple of times, most notably from December 2018 until mid-2020. I resumed the blog because I missed writing about current corporate, legal, and political events.

But my true interest is in writing fiction. I am working on a novel currently, but it won’t be published under the name Sara Rickover. Therefore, I think my time will be better spent focusing on my fiction and marketing my other books.

I might post occasionally, if the mood strikes and I have something I feel compelled to say, but I cannot commit to regular posts in 2023.

You can continue to follow me on Facebook as Sara Rickover, Author, and on Twitter as @SaraRickover, as well as on my Amazon Central site, where you can find my novels Playing the Game and Playing it Straight. I do want to write a sequel to those books, so perhaps I will resume regular posts when I switch back to writing as Sara again.

Once again, I bid you au revoir, though I hope not adieu.

Today’s Gratitude List

It’s the season for gratitude, and here, in no particular order, is a short list of the things I am grateful for at the moment:

• I am grateful the midterm elections are over and the ads are no longer on television.
• I am grateful I live in the United States. It may be imperfect, but it comes closer than most nations.
• I am grateful for my health.
• I am grateful I have the resources to buy all the physical things I need and many of the things I want.
• I am grateful that in retirement I can set many of my own priorities (though not all my time is spent as I wish).
• I am grateful I can spend much of my time writing, and for the readers that read my books.
• I am grateful for the deer that wander through my neighborhood and for the hawks that fly overhead.
• I am grateful for my communities—my family, my friends, my parish, my writing partners. They enrich my life.
• I am grateful I will soon be a grandmother.

What are you grateful for?

I Miss the Corporate IT Department (Sometimes)

It surprises me that I have written so little about technology on this blog. We are all dependent on technology these days, and our dependence has only grown over the years I’ve been posting.

With our dependence on technology has come dependence on the Information Technology Department, or whatever that function is called within the organization. I was reminded of the importance of IT’s role recently, as I have been setting up a new computer at home for both personal and business use. I no longer have the help of an IT department—in fact, I am all there is of that department.

While I wrestled with connecting to the wireless network, loading programs, and transferring data, I reflected on my history with the IT folks in my former corporate roles.

In my former company, Information Technology began as a mainframe-dependent function that managed data associated with product development, production, inventory, and distribution. This information system was ahead of its times, but all computer resources of the company were devoted to the maintenance of this system, and the IT function kept its focus solely on the mainframe. Support functions such as human resources, marketing, legal, and even some finance departments (those that weren’t related to product) received no support for managing their data.

When personal computing began to develop in the early 1980s, the IT department ignored it. Smaller support divisions in the company began exploring how to use PCs on their own. These divisions had their own needs for gathering, storing, and retrieving data, whether their data be kept as documents, spreadsheets, databases, or otherwise. They weren’t getting IT support, so they went rogue.

The IBM PC XT, photo by Ruben de Rijcke

I worked in the legal division at the time, and our small function had a huge need to produce a large volume of legal briefs and other documents, to retrieve and edit these documents quickly, and to work collaboratively among attorneys and paralegals handling the same project. We had stand-alone word processors that only the clerical staff could operate, but a few attorneys quickly saw the benefits of using personal computers to involve legal professionals in the creation and editing of documents to speed up the writing and editing process. It took a few years, but the legal group moved ahead of IT in the development of a division-wide system of document sharing, email, and other programs that increased the department’s productivity.

Over time, the rest of the company caught up, and IT took over management of these smaller systems and of coordinating systems across the company. The IT group also insisted on uniformity of hardware and software wherever possible. The legal division then had to fight for the right to add improvements to their system, because corporate IT guidelines required that IT bless any new software.

Of course, there are reasons for standardization and for security policies. And IT’s involvement meant that other employees no longer had to set up their own computers and networks, nor to trouble-shoot their problems. Now that I am my own IT department, I recognize that IT’s oversight and help desk support were often beneficial.

But there must be a happy medium between mandating certain software, limiting outside connectivity, and slow testing and approval processes before implementation, on the one hand, and a nimble and flexible approach to each corporate function’s specific needs. The best IT departments strive for this balance.

And, with the move to remote workforces, IT will have to become more flexible. (See here and here.) It becomes harder to control hardware and software when employees are working from home or elsewhere outside the company’s offices. Of course, data and system security become more critical, so balance is still an issue.

How does your IT department manage various corporate needs? Or, like me, to you wish you had an IT person to talk to from time to time?

The Changing World of HR . . . And What Is Constant

I have now been outside the corporate HR world for about fifteen years. In that time, the issues that the Human Resources function must handle have changed more than I could have expected.

Here are a few of the ways in which work and HR have developed since my departure:

1. Work from Home and Hybrid Work Models:

When I left Human Resources, working from home was a rare perk. Of course, the pandemic changed remote work from rare to ubiquitous overnight in March 2020, and working from home (or the beach) has continued as a norm in many businesses.

I wrote a couple of months ago about the impact of working from home on employees. This year, hybrid models of working are developing as physical offices reopen. For many workplaces, working from home or some combination of in-office and at-home are likely to continue into the foreseeable future. We have learned that work outside the office can be measured and that productivity does not necessarily suffer, as many managers feared.

2. AI and Productivity Measurement:

More and more, algorithms rule our lives. When I left Human Resources, we used online job applications, but other than searching for a few keywords, their usefulness was rudimentary. Now, the algorithms in these recruitment systems can narrow the search for applicants far more precisely than fifteen years ago. This automation of what humans used to do will continue, leading to further workforce changes in the future. Sometimes this will be for the better, and other times it will leave out essential human judgments.

Today, employee productivity is also measured by online systems that go far beyond the simple timekeeping and keystroke counting of prior decades. In order for remote workplaces to be successful, managers need some way of keeping track of productivity, but it continues to be a struggle to include qualitative assessments along with the quantitative. Moreover, as data collection becomes more prolific, HR must help lead the way in deciding which employee data measures are most relevant to the business.

3. Beyond Diversity to ESG:

For the last twenty years or so of my corporate life, employee diversity was important. Organizations counted the race, ethnicity, gender, and age of their workforces. Much of this reporting was to meet government requirements or to defend discrimination complaints. But some organizations even held managers accountable for increasing the diversity of their employee populations and sought to make the business case that diverse workforces were more creative and/or productive.

Now, stakeholders such as customers and shareholders are demanding that corporations meet environmental, social, and governance goals, and this has increased the pressure for companies to recruit and retain more diverse workforces.

Moreover, the increased diversity of the workforce has in turn increased pressure on firms to be more sensitive to their footprint on the environment and on their political positions on issues ranging from climate change to abortion. It is ever harder for businesses to follow the axiom that “the business of business is business,” rather than politics or social welfare. (Note: This quote has been attributed to both Milton Friedman and Alfred Sloan.)

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These changes in the workplace are linked and reinforce each other. Here are just a few of the linkages:

• AI and workforce measurement have enabled more employees to work from remote locations.
• Increasing diversity in the workforce means employees now desire a broader range of work locations, and retention in a tight labor market means employers must meet workers’ preferences.
• The increasing focus on ESG demands that businesses hire a more diverse workforce and attempt to have a smaller footprint on the environment.

These and other recent workforce developments will require the workplace and HR to continue to evolve. But one thing will remain constant—change. The world of work has changed in the past fifteen years, and it will change even more in the next fifteen.

And another thing is constant—Human Resources practitioners will need to be ready to address the changes coming to their workforces and to keep their employees engaged in the needs of the business.

What workplace change in the last few years do you think is the most significant?

Zealotry and Stupidity: Both Sides Are Guilty

Too many people act as if they know it all, though they’ve lived long enough to know better.

I scroll through Twitter from time to time, but rarely post anything other than my blog posts and an occasional retweet of an article I like. I know Twitter is supposed to be a forum for user engagement, but I simply do not enjoy the profanity and zealotry of tweets coming from the left or the right.

Zealotry? On one side, I can hear the left wing cry, “How can I be a zealot when I’m an atheist . . . Or at best an agnostic?”

But in your zeal for wokeness and your inability to tolerate the voicing of an opinion other than one that agrees with you, you are a zealot.

Zealotry? The right wing cries on my other side, “How can I be a zealot when what I say is true?”

But over and over you’ve been shown that what you say is not true, or at least that reasonable minds can differ. In your haste to argue what cannot be true, you are a zealot.

As Jonah Goldberg said in a recent column for The Dispatch,

“People are so hyped up and so torqued out by politics or inflation or COVID or the Italian captivity of Trieste that they wildly over-interpret statements and events to fit their scripts. . . .

“ . . . If you go through life having already determined that you’re gonna be pissed off by whatever happens to you, your listening and thinking skills are going to atrophy. If the slightest provocation is going to make you say, ‘This means war’ because you want war, you’re going to declare war for a stupid reason.”

Stuck on Stupid, by Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch, August 12, 2022.

We all need to take it down a notch. We need to listen to opposing viewpoints and possibly learn a thing or two. That’s the only way we will avoid the stupidity of which Mr. Goldberg speaks.

When was the last time you talked—and really listened—to someone who disagrees with you on a political or social or moral issue? When did you listen with the intent of understanding how another rational being could end up on the opposite side of the issue from where you are? When did you last even suppose that those who oppose your position were rational beings?

Lance Morrow wrote recently in an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal,

“[Americans] grope for the truth in a labyrinth of outlandish story lines. . . .

“Since the time of Herodotus, history has been shaped less by facts than by half-truths, rumors, outright lies, ideologies, daydreams and ardent misconceptions. These narrative energies weave themselves into story lines—self-myths and morality plays. Anyone trying to understand the American crisis should think about the trouble that story telling gets people into.”

America’s Political Story Lines Need a Reboot, by Lance Morrow, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 14, 2022.

The story lines that we tell ourselves and our fellow believers get us into trouble. Our self-myths are what lead us to into stupidity.

Like the tweeters I cringe to read, I have opinions. I have come to my opinions after much thought and occasional wavering. I know I can be wrong. I might learn from the tweeters. I should try to get through their offensive language and over-the-top rhetoric. But will they meet me halfway?

Only if we all step back from the precipice of stupidity and act and listen with humility will we find the truth.

Do you think this is still possible?

Who Really Governs? Administrators and Judges

At some point during my career as an attorney and human resources manager, I realized that the people we think we have elected to govern are less important than the people in government who are not elected. I came to believe that the people who really run the country are the bureaucrats in administrative agencies and judges, not our legislators.

I think I reached this conclusion around the time that the Department of Labor published the final regulations for the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1995. But it might have been as early as 1991 when the regulations for the Americans with Disabilities Act were published.

I supported the purposes behind both these pieces of legislation. But in my opinion as a practicing attorney at the time, and later as the manager who had to administer my employer’s compliance with these laws, the regulatory terms went far beyond the basic language of the statutes. How did a three-day absence and a doctor’s visit come to be deemed a “serious health condition” under the FMLA? Because the Department of Labor regulations said so.

In other situations, I thought judges made law that went beyond the terms of the statutes they were interpreting. Roe v. Wade is a prime example.

And so, in my opinion, statutory language and Congressional intent were less important than what regulators and judges made of these laws.

Congress can, of course, push back on regulators and judges. One example is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, in which Congress essentially overturned a 2007 opinion by the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court building, from Wikipedia

The Supreme Court’s decisions in the term that just ended has brought to mind my past opinions about the importance of judges and bureaucrats in governing our society. Much of the media and the public are up in arms because the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But Roe v. Wade was itself an example of the Supreme Court making up law. That the Court has now reversed Roe means only that the majority of the Court decided to undo their past “legislating” and return that task to the states.

That the Court declined to approve the EPA regulations in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency means that the majority of the Court decided the task of addressing climate change belongs to Congress. The Court is telling Congress it can no longer defer to administrative agencies on “major questions” such as climate change.

Both of these Supreme Court decisions reduce my perception that administrative agencies and judges make the nation’s laws—it almost seems as if the Supreme Court is deliberately telling Congress (as well as state legislatures) to do their jobs.

Whether Congress and the states will step up to the task of legislating remains to be seen. Congress, like much of the nation, has become increasingly polarized and almost evenly divided. It’s unclear how much our federal legislators will be willing to compromise to get things done. Congress recently made minor progress on gun regulation. Perhaps minor steps are all that is possible until trust is rebuilt.

What do you think—will Congress step up and start legislating?

The Chaos We Do Not See

I have watched the news avidly in recent weeks—the war in Ukraine, mass shootings and the potential for Congressional response, the January 6 hearings, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department’s response to inflation. The issues of the day are many and daunting. Any one of these matters could monopolize government, and yet as a nation we must deal with them all.

As I’ve watched the news, it occurred to me that dealing with these crises causes chaos for the people responsible for managing them. We saw one small indication of this chaos when Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien had to cancel his attendance at one of the January 6 hearings this past week because his wife went into labor.

Just imagine the chaos that birth caused not only for the Stepien family as they refocused their energies, but also for all the Congressional staffers responsible for preparing for the next day’s testimony. How would the gap in the schedule be filled? Who would pull together the clips from his deposition? Who was preparing his attorney’s opening statement? The ripple effect of this child’s unexpected appearance was huge.

And what was happening in the lives of the people responsible for all the work necessary to accommodate the Stepien family? No doubt some of them have small children, elderly relatives needing care, and other personal obligations that suddenly shifted into different places on the priorities of their days.

Chaos. Our lives are made up of chaos. We cannot control the problems we encounter each day.

I had a personal example this past week when the relative for whom I am providing significant care had a doctor’s appointment. But his health declined suddenly that morning, and getting him to the appointment became much more difficult than accompanying him as a second ear to what the doctor said. I had to drive. I had to get him to the car in a wheelchair. I needed help to get him out of the car at the other end. I needed help from the doctor’s staff to move him about in their office. I had to handle more of the conversation with the doctor than I had intended. My day turned into chaos.

Thankfully, people rushed to help, from medical orderlies who transferred him into the chair to valet parking attendants to the doctor’s staff. I was able to cope and to focus on my relative’s needs.

Chaos. Our lives are made up of chaos. We cannot control the problems we encounter each day.

This post is a reminder to workers everywhere that each day you encounter people whose lives are in chaos. As is your own life, most likely. The only way to cope with our colliding chaotic lives is to greet each other with a smile, a kind word, and a helping hand. And a heartfelt “thank you” after service is rendered.

There have been many times when I have complained about poor customer service. And no doubt I will continue to complain in the future when I have to deal with incompetence. But I will do my best not to presume that incompetence, but to approach the service providers I encounter with recognition that we all lead chaotic lives. The problems in the matter between us are the tip of the iceberg in what we both have to deal with that day. We do not see the chaos roiling unseen beneath the surface.

What is causing chaos in your life at the moment? I’ll bet you didn’t have to think long to come up with something.

Working From Home: When Does It Work?

Although I am no longer working in an office environment, I have followed the debate about working from home as pandemic restrictions have eased. It amazes me that much of the American workforce has transitioned from long hours in the office prior to the pandemic lockdowns to now preferring working from home. This sea change has happened in the space of about two years. I wonder if there has ever been any comparable revolution in work in such a short time.

Many millennial employees now look for opportunities to work from home when applying for positions. Many older employees are just as enamored of the ability to avoid commutes and dressing for the office.

And yet, there are many employees who also want the benefits of an office environment.

• They crave the face-to-face time and the ability to get immediate feedback from their managers (if their managers are good at giving feedback).
• They like the camaraderie that develops far more easily in the office than during Zoom social chats—popping into a colleague’s office or grabbing lunch at the neighborhood deli.
• They even like tech support (those dreaded curmudgeons who control what we put on our laptops actually do provide a service when things break).

And so, the great debate about work/life balance continues. In fact, the debate has now expanded beyond how much we work to where we work. Though, of course, many employees are in service or production jobs that require they leave their homes to work, whether they go to a factory, a retail store, a transportation setting, or some other commercial or industrial setting.

Working from home or the office?

We have also learned through the last two years that many employees relish flexibility more than a strict work-from-home environment—a hybrid arrangement. Many employees prefer a different place of work depending on the tasks they need to accomplish, what is going on in their home life that week, the weather, and other factors. Where they believe they can be the most productive varies from day to day.

For many employees, two or three days in the office, with the rest of the time spent at home, makes the most sense. One survey reports that on average, employees want to be in the office for two days a week. Many managers would prefer more office time.

I am grateful I do not personally have to wrestle with these issues. Now that I devote my time to writing and managing a family business, I can work from home most of the time. I do have group meetings that work better in person than over Zoom, but they are only a few hours each week. Otherwise, I am at home, balancing the tasks that need to get done that day with personal matters.

I think if I were still in a corporate job I would still like a significant amount of at-home time. After all, I am an introvert. A lot of my time in the corporate setting was wasted in meetings, which—if they occured at all now—would be more efficient on Zoom. Phone calls and emails could be handled anywhere.

However, there were certain employee meetings that were better conducted in person. Employee complaints fit in this category, though I would be interested to know how dispute resolution programs have worked through and after the pandemic.

I leave this post wondering whether we have learned much about workplace flexibility—whether we are permanently changed or whether we will revert to long office hours. I think some workplaces are changed for good; others, unfortunately, are probably not.

What do you think about this sea change in where we work?

The Complexity of the Internal Revenue Code Only Grows

It surprised me to realize that I haven’t written about the complexity of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code since an early post in 2012.

Ten years ago, I was still preparing my husband’s and my tax returns myself, with the help of TurboTax. As I wrote then, I thought that if I had a law degree I ought to be able to file my own tax returns.

Since then, I’ve given in. I started using a CPA firm for the 2014 tax year. I rationalized the decision because our personal tax returns were more complicated with the addition of a couple of small businesses, and because I wasn’t getting any younger (or any smarter).

But I’m not sure the move to a CPA has been a benefit. It costs a lot of money to hire a tax preparer, and I still have to gather all the data. Moreover, every year, I catch one or more errors that the CPA has made.

So what am I paying for? I suppose the consolation that the CPA will be by my side if I am audited. And one year, the CPA talked the IRS into forgoing a penalty (though I still had to pay interest) after the CPA firm failed to file our returns on time.

For this post, I wanted to update the statistics I put in my 2012 post on the length of the Internal Revenue Code. I learned that

“For Tax Year 2021, the tax code contains nearly 10,000 sections. . . . In 1913, the tax code could be printed on a single page, while modern tax codes can take up to 174 pages. . . . This incredible growth can be attributed to both expansions and revisions that are made to patch up tax loopholes. Over the past 10 years, it is estimated that the tax code has been amended or revised over 4,000 times.”

Another source quotes the Taxpayer Advocate Service, a part of the IRS itself, as follows:

“A report from the Taxpayer Advocate Service to Congress in 2008 about the complexity of the tax code, outlined how the word count of tax code has grown from 1.395 million words in 2001 to 3.7 million words when the report was done. That’s a 265 percent growth in word count in seven years.
“ ‘The Code has grown so long that it has become challenging even to figure out how long it is,’ the report said.”

If the IRS itself can’t calculate the length of the law it manages, then something is wrong. But PolitiFact decided Senator Roy Blount was correct in estimating that the Internal Revenue Code had doubled in length between 1985 and 2017. How much more has it grown since then?

My returns are certainly lengthy. I look for the high level numbers when spot-checking my accountant. I cannot parse through the Form 1099s to every last LLC and other pass-through entity that requires yet another three or four pages on my return.

And I continue to complain to friends and family about the complexity of the tax code. Even if I haven’t blogged about it.

Are you concerned about the complexity of the U.S. tax code?

Twenty Years Ago, and a New Reflection on Corporate Politics

This seems to be a period of reflection in my life. Last month I posted about ten years of blogging and some thoughts on leadership. Recently, I had reason to reflect on where I was twenty years ago, and so that is the subject of this post.

Twenty years ago I was still working for a major corporation. The leadership of my division was in turmoil, and no one knew what to expect next. Uncertainty. Jockeying for position. Rumors and speculation. We had all of these.

I survived that round of corporate change and worked for several more years in that environment, switching to another position about halfway through my remaining tenure. My new position was a growth opportunity, but it placed me even more squarely in the middle of corporate politics. With my boss. With my peers. With my clients outside my division. With corporate executives. It wasn’t easy navigating daily maelstroms, and some days I did it better than others.

I remember during this time period that one of my subordinates complained about having to deal with corporate politics. “There’s no avoiding it,” I responded. “Any organization has politics.”

I wrote about corporate politics in one of my early blog posts. I wrote in that post

“any group of people is political. . . . Any time people gather, politics are involved. Get over your dislike of politics. It’s real, and it’s everywhere.”

I still believe this is true. Yet corporate politics can be enabling or toxic. The choice of how we act is up to each of us. But along the way, each one of us will confront people who try to support us and others who try to sideline us.

Still, we cannot change other people’s behavior. We can only change our own. We can choose how to respond to those who support and those who interfere.

We should thank those who further our goals and support them in turn when we can. We should watch those who stab us in the back and call them out when we can.

And when the backstabbers outweigh the supporters, we should leave. Life is too short to remain in a toxic environment.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned in the last twenty years. I finished my corporate career, feeling like I had done as much as I would be permitted to do. There were more challenges left to me outside that corporate environment than in it. Some of the reason I left was that I did not have the support I expected from my bosses in situations when I was blindsided by other executives jockeying for their own position. I had reached my limit in dealing with corporate politics.

Since then, I’ve managed an independent mediation and HR consulting practice and written several novels (two under the name Sara Rickover). While I’ve experienced less political interference in these endeavors than when working for a major corporation, there are still interpersonal politics involved. With clients. With editors. I must keep reminding myself that any time people gather, politics are involved.

When have you encountered a difficult work environment because of corporate politics?