An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XX - Dispensationalism

Many Christians would take issue with the fact that the Bible contradicts itself, not to mention historical and archeological records. Many others simply ignore the contradictions — or don't know about them because they don't read the Bible. But from the very early days of Christianity theologians have been aware of contradictions and discrepancies and attempted to reconcile them. (I'm mainly dealing with how Christian theologians addressed inconsistencies, I am not very familiar with how Jewish scholars may have approached issues in the Jewish scriptures).

The question of the nature of Jesus Christ — was he God, or was he a man? — caused a lot of ink to be spilled in the first centuries of Christianity. Even when they thought they had an answer ( he's both!) the minutia of how he could be both, as well as the ramifications of the various theories, occupied Christian leaders for centuries, when it could be argued that they certainly had better things to do. 

The problem that the Church Fathers identified was that there were sections of the gospels and epistles that very clearly indicated that Jesus was a man, a very holy man, a special man, but a man —  not God. There were also other verses which just as clearly came down on the side of Jesus being God. These second century scholars had a choice: they could ignore the question and focus what Jesus preached and encourage people to follow his example and live their life as he taught; they could decide that Jesus being a man made more sense and interpret the verses that suggested that he was also God in that light; or place their bets on Christ's divinity and interpret the verses that said otherwise in that light. What they did was decide that Jesus was man and God. They argued interminably about the details, but ended up with the conclusion that he was fully God and fully man. (The nuances of that stance take up fat volumes — check it out some time). They created a theological edifice to explain away a contradiction — a Christology which cannot be found in any actual book of the Bible. 

A very large plot hole in the Bible is the stark difference between how God is portrayed in the Old Testament and the New Testament. (Other than the Apocalypse of John [Revelation] which reverts back to the wrathful, vengeful God imagery). In the 1800's there arose a theological position called "dispensationalism" which attempted to explain the differences. But long before that, Marcion, a second century Christian, came up with his own solution. Marcion took a blunt force approach to Biblical criticism and simply threw out the parts he thought made no sense. Observing that the vengeful God of the Old Testament bore no resemblance to the God of the Gospels he concluded that they were different gods. In Marcion's view, the Old Testament God was evil, while the New Testament God of Jesus was the "true" God, the good God. He threw out the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John and the non-Pauline epistles and heavily edited what was left. Say what you want, but Marcion took care of those pesky contradictions!

Nineteenth Century dispensationalists eschewed Marcion's approach. Rather than relegating the Old Testament God to second deity status, they arranged history as outlined in the Bible into a number of "dispensations". A dispensation, according to them, was a time period where God dealt with humanity in different ways from the other time periods. One group that I was involved with called the "administrations". There were usually seven of these time periods, although I have seen eight listed as well. Since these dispensations were the opinions and interpretations of the theologians who came up with them, there were difference ways to divide them up. Here are a few ways that people have attempted to assign the breaks in these divisions:

• Innocence/Original Paradise/Garden of Eden - Adam and Eve before eating from the Tree of Knowledge
• Conscience — after "The Fall" — no rules, people followed their own conscience, ended with The Flood
• Human Government — From Noah to Abraham
• Promise — starts with Abraham and indicates God dealing with one specific group of people — ends with Moses
• For some, the previous three are grouped together, sometimes called "patriarchal"
• Law — the giving of the Law to Israel — different interpretations on when it ended
• Christ's Ministry — not all recognized this as separate — some interpretations ended the Law at Jesus' resurrection, some at the beginning of his ministry, some at the ascension, other at the end of The Acts of the Apostles. The Christ's Dispensation likewise had differing opinions on it's scope, or even if it is a separate time period
• Grace — this started whenever either the Law or Christ dispensation ended and includes the present day. 
• Tribulation — starts with the rapture and includes all the horrors of the Book of Revelation
• Millennial — ends with Christ's return to defeat The Beast and The Devil and initiates the Thousand Year reign of Christ on Earth
• Some combine the previous two
• Paradise — establishment of God's eternal kingdom on earth 

Despite there being disagreements among dispensationalists on where these divisions should begin and end, the concept does have its own logic. There's no question that God acts differently throughout different time periods as outlined in the Bible. But there are no bright lines delineating changes in God's rules — if there were, there would be no disagreement among the various advocates of dispensationalism. This is the problem with viewing the Bible as an inerrant and divinely inspired, it's impossible to accept that there are errors, discrepancies and contradictions and one has to sometimes tie oneself into knots to explain them away and make it make sense.

Start at The Beginning: Part I 

Workin' Man - Part XX - Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 Well, this was something different. In my previous management assignments I was looked at as the new guy who didn't know anything. When hired as a Grocery Manager at 48th & O my grocery experience was negligible. When I was promoted to Assistant Store Director (ASD) at Cornhusker I was replacing a popular and knowledgeable individual who had a very different management style. It was uphill all the way. In both stores I was eventually able to prove myself; but when I arrived at the South 27th & Pine Lake Super Saver I came with reputation for knowing what I was doing, and for being a tough but fair manager. (Although one person told Bob, our General Merchandise (GMD) Manager, that I was "moody" — fair enough!) In retrospect, my five years as ASD at Pine Lake were probably the best years of my grocery career. Store Director Nick was easy to work for — he gave clear direction, but was not a micromanager, and the Center Store Managers were experienced, knew their jobs and took direction well. 

One of the big differences starting out at Pine Lake was that, unlike my start at Cornhusker, things were organized. Nick was not a "nice guy" — he was friendly enough — but did not play favorites and kept a sharp eye on what was going on in the store. Shannon, our HR Coordinator was also pretty direct. My old Store Director, Matt K, once remarked that the employees at Pine Lake must have always been pretty clear about expectations with the three of us in charge! Employees definitely had their preferences for who they would go to with issues. What they didn't realize was that we talked all the time and made sure we were in agreement on major issues. There was no going to "dad" because you didn't like "mom's" decision. One incident stands out. I was upstairs, looking out the window to the sales floor below and saw Tom C, the Frozen Foods Manager talking animatedly to Nick. Technically, since I was his immediate supervisor, Tom should have been coming to me with whatever his problem was. When Nick finished talking to Tom, I asked Nick what the conversation was about. Tom C was asking if he really needed to work until close on Christmas Eve, which I had made a requirement for all department managers. Nick asked him "What did Tom J tell you?" and followed up with "Whatever Tom J told you, that's what you need to do". We had each other's backs. 

Tom C, as it turned out, was not a very good Frozen Foods Manager, and as it further turned out, Nick & I dropped the ball when it came to supervising him. In some respects the department appeared to be in good shape. He hardly ever ran out of anything, he always had his ad displays up on time, and the profit margin was always at or above budget. I was guilty, as was the company overall, of not questioning success. Tom C was a big man, he had to be well over 500 pounds. One morning he fell on some ice in the parking lot and couldn't get up; he hurt himself so badly that he couldn't work for what turned out to be seven months. As Center Store Manager I was his immediate supervisor and temporarily took over managing the department. I figured I could have a clerk do the stocking and I could order and build displays. I quickly found out what Tom C was hiding. 

Every department utilizes "backstock". During an ad you try to have enough on hand to get you through the ad week, in this case you store it in a walk-in freezer. Sometimes you just order too much, and you "run the backstock" before putting in an order so you don't order what you already have. When an ad is over, any unsold ad items are put in a secondary display and priced somewhere between regular prices and ad price. Tom C was not managing his backstock. When I took over the department there were at least 80 pallets of assorted backstock in the freezer. Ten pallets would have been excessive. Every shelf was filled, and every inch of floor space was full of pallets. After stocking the load from a delivery, Tom C would put any excess on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. On his next order he would bring in more of what he already had. After an ad was over he would put what wasn't sold on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. The result was that every week the backstock grew and grew. It's not like it was even organized. Every pallet had a jumble of different types of stock. It was a mess. Tom C, realizing that his department was such a mess that he would not be able to get it in order, turned in his resignation. We hired a replacement, who we were very upfront with regarding the shape the freezer was in. He lasted less than a week before he claimed that he fell in the freezer and spent another week on light duty. He quit once he was off light duty. 

Nick had the idea that before we hire another manager the first step would be to organize everything. He and I, joined by Assistant Grocery Manager Jamie, and a team of grocery clerks, pulled all the pallets out one by one and organized them by type of product: potatoes on one pallet, frozen vegetables on another, frozen dinners on a third, and so on. When we started it was so disorganized that there literally were potatoes on every pallet. This took two different sessions to get everything organized. While we were working we found several pallets of old ad items that were seriously out of date, those had to be thrown out or donated. We initially got the number of pallets down to around 65. For a while we had grocery clerks pulling pallets out and stocking from them each night. We had wrapped each pallet in plastic and affixed a sign with the last date that it had been worked. We had a system. Except Nick caught the grocery clerks rolling out pallets, unwrapping them, moving the top layer around, and then putting them back without actually stocking anything. He banned the clerks from running backstock. Which meant that I and some of the other managers had to do it.

Little by little the number of pallets decreased. There were some mornings when the Frozen Foods order was less than a dozen cases because we had so much backstock! We had probably gotten the number of pallets down to around 40 when Pat Raybould stuck his head in the freezer one day and freaked out. He demanded that we set a date when the backstock would be down to a reasonable level (10 pallets?). I tried to tell him that it was impossible to do, we had no idea how long it would take us to get to an arbitrary number. Of course he had no idea how bad it had been and how much progress we had made, but the law of diminishing returns was setting in, as well as the lack of any more low-hanging fruit, and a dearth of other available cliches. I eventually picked a random date, which we ended up not making, but he soon forgot about it, as he usually did. 

One of the side effects of having to run Frozen Foods for so long was that I learned to drive the standing forklifts. In addition to the traditional sit-down forklift, Pine Lake had two stand-up forklifts. Since at the time we were the only store that had them anyone transferring from another store didn't have any experience with them. The advantage to them was that they had a tighter turning radius, which was helpful in narrow aisles. The down side was that if you were trained on the sit-downs, everything felt backwards. I had to work in the freezer every morning, which, once we cleared the floor of all the excess pallets, was very spacious. This made it the perfect place to practice driving the stand-ups. More on forklift adventures later. 

One of the first things I did after transferring to Pine Lake was to convince Nick that we needed to adjust our schedules during the holidays. Officially those of us who were salaried were required to work a minimum of 45 hours a week. In most stores this meant that you were scheduled for 45 hours, but if an crisis came up you worked extra. No allowance was made for getting those hours back. What I proposed was that we plan to average 45 hours per week during a holiday season. This meant that during Thanksgiving or Christmas week we all might be working 60+ hours, but we would work 25 or 30 on the slower weeks. This was difficult to do over the Christmas holidays since we were busy leading up to Christmas, which was immediately followed by a busy New Year's, with year-end inventory in there somewhere. I would start mapping out the managers' schedule well in advance in order to get Nick's approval (especially since I was writing his schedule too). The benefit to scheduling this way was that the store had the maximum number of managers during the peak times, while no one worked more than an average of 45 hours per week. Of course the corporate office would not have approved of this arrangement, and we sure weren't going to tell them! We also instituted a requirement of mandating that department managers work certain peak times during the holidays. All managers had to work until close on Christmas Eve, and work a 12-hour shift the day before Thanksgiving. Nick and I scheduled ourselves this way too, so no one could legitimately complain. I was surprised to learn that in a lot of stores the schedule didn't change for holiday weeks and stores were staffed during peak times by third tier evening supervisors instead of department managers. There was some complaining, but I believed that if you agreed to work in a retail store you had to be available to work on holidays. 

One of the managers who was challenging to schedule was Peter, the Assistant Grocery Manager when I started. He was a rabid Husker fan and had season tickets, as well as attending several away games each season. At first this wasn't a huge problem, since the assistant grocery manager usually was scheduled on Sunday, with Saturday off. He turned down at least one opportunity for promotion to grocery manager in another store when he was adamant about having Saturdays off during the football season. Eventually he was promoted at Pine Lake. I honored his time off requests for every football Saturday for the first year he was in that position, but after one season I announced that I would no longer accept time off requests, since it seemed like everybody wanted off on game day. He worked it out by switching shifts with another manager, but I never thought that he was committed to be a manager in a retail grocery store. Attending Husker games and playing golf seemed to be his main priorities. Otherwise he did a good job and was a key member of the management team, as long as there wasn't a football game conflicting with store priorities. 

In light of the post-Covid shift in the employee-employer power dynamic, it might seem like we were too tough on our employees when it came to scheduling and time off. These days post-Covid you hear a lot of people declaring that they aren't requesting time off, but informing their boss that they would be gone. Even now, I stand by my position that if you are going to work in a store that is busy on weekends and holidays, by accepting employment there you are agreeing to be available during the busy times. I think that the fact that the whole management team was there during the holidays, not taking advantage of their position or seniority, helped sell the idea that no one was getting vacation time approved during holidays. 

One of the most important things that I learned from Nick was that you did not run out of anything during the holidays, especially not "holiday" items or anything that was in the ad. During a holiday week we would make a list of everything we were out of first thing in the morning. We would start out by calling other Super Savers and Russ's to see if they had any extra that they could transfer. Then we would split up the list and head out to our competitors to buy as much as we could of the items that we needed. This procedure led to the case of the infamous Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes. I was sent to Hy-Vee with a mission to secure Bisquick, canned pineapple, and for some reason, jalapeño jelly, on a snowy Christmas Eve. I had found all three items on my list, emptied the shelves, and headed up front to pay for them all. Now people who have never worked retail might think that this was a win for the store that was being raided — they're making sales, right? But what's really happening is that their customers will be disappointed when they can't find these items on the shelf. (Hy-Vee used to try this with us just about every Sunday in order to replenish their ad items. After it happened once I refused to sell to them!) But anyway, back to Christmas Eve. As I stood in line, pushing a shopping cart full of just three items, I was starting to attract attention. Customers in line curiously asked me what I was doing with these seemingly mismatched products. I tried to deflect attention by telling them that I just got whatever was on the list, but that didn't satisfy them. Thinking fast, I told them that my wife was from the Falklands,  and every Christmas Eve, for our whole church, she made a Falklands delicacy — jalapeño-pineapple pancakes! I made it out the door with my cases of mismatched breakfast food, and told the team back at the store about my adventure. The next two Christmas Eves I actually made jalapeño-pineapple pancakes for everyone to try — surprisingly tasty — and popular! 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XXI

Managers Part XX - Good Leaders CAN be Bad Managers

Reading a novel the other day I came across this quote "People often confuse leadership and management, you may be an effective leader, but terrible at minutia". It was in reference to a pilot who was promoted to a position where she no longer flew, but planned the missions of her subordinates.

So often we hear the traits of leadership praised while those of management looked down upon as inferior, as if a manager is someone who somehow failed to be a leader. I have always taught that leadership is just one trait of a good manager. But this quote made me want to take it further. A leader is someone who can inspire others to follow, and I've always thought that someone who had leadership qualities in a management role was by definition a good manager, but I am rethinking that position. Effective management is, in part, a function of effective leadership. Inspiring one's followers to the point where they can have responsibility delegated to them is a mark of a good manager. But that part of the quote about minutia is the key. A person can be an inspiring and charismatic leader, but lacks the skill at analyzing, organizing and planning that are essential ingredients that go into the makeup of a successful manager. Visualize a manager who is well liked, whose subordinates will follow any orders, but cannot put together a schedule, or properly budget, or order the right amount of product; who cannot articulate the needs of his business unit to corporate headquarters. He wouldn't last too long, despite his popularity with "the troops". 

In this series on managers, I have concentrated mostly on the people management aspect of being an effective manager. What has been the unspoken assumption all along has been that, in order to manage the people, you first need to be proficient at the other management skills — the minutia.

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXI

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XX

One thing that I want to make clear is that despite my characterization of The Way as a cult, I believe that many of the tactics that people have used to oppose cults is also wrong. 

Many people define a group as a cult based on what they believe rather than what they do. Scientology has a lot of bizarre beliefs, but are the beliefs by themselves harmful, or is it the level of control that they exert on their members what is actually harmful? And what constitutes a bizarre belief? Are the Scientologists sci-fi based doctrines really more unbelievable than an invisible god who is really his own son born from a mother who never had sex? Or this same god-who-is-really-his-own-son ascending bodily after being dead for three days? What about a boat with two (or is it seven) of every animal in it surviving a world-wide flood? Talking donkeys? People living over 900 years? The difference is that the majority of religious groups don't attempt to control every aspect of your life, and if your behavior is far enough outside their norms, you can just leave. The church that I grew up in was pretty oblivious to whether I attended services every Sunday and likely didn't notice when I left. Cults, on the other hand, engage in harmful practices. It's true that sometimes these harmful practices are based on harmful beliefs, the beliefs by themselves are not harmful. 

The opposition of the people of Sidney (which I will get into shortly), was based on ignorance. They may have heard about a few things that The Way taught that deviated from standard Christian teaching, but it is highly unlikely that they were aware of the harmful practices that went on inside The Way. Groups that received the cult label based on their beliefs (or misunderstanding of their beliefs) were lumped in with the People's Temple and in the minds of the ignorant were dangerous. This ignorance fueled a counter-belief that any opposition to a cult was justified. People were kidnapped and mentally tortured under cover of the pseudo-righteous term "deprogramming". Families were broken up over these differences. Much of what I will describe about my time in Sidney is akin to the "villagers with pitchforks and torches storming the castle" that you see in old school horror movies. My own assertion that I was involved in a cult in no way absolves them of ignorant and bigoted thinking and actions. The very acts of persecutions was in fact something that stiffened my resolve and stick with The Way despite the obvious red flags that popped up throughout my WOW year. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XXI

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XIX

Having driven from my home in New York City to Way headquarters in rural Ohio a few times, I was familiar with the concept of small town and farms, but living in a small town like Sidney, Nebraska was big-time culture shock. One of the biggest shifts was the prevalence of churches. I grew up in the New York City neighborhood of Rosedale, Queens. The 2010 census put Rosedale's population at around 25,000. At the time there were six churches — two Catholic, one Presbyterian, a Lutheran and an Episcopalian, plus a small Baptist church that may have actually been in Springfield Gardens. Sidney, on the other hand, with one-fifth the population, had twenty-five churches of various denominations. Of course, there was the size. Sidney was small enough to walk across in a half hour, the populated areas appears to be around 2 miles east-west and 2.5 miles north-south, excluding the area on the interstate and other areas within city limits that are not developed — and Sidney is the largest town for hours in any direction. Another feature of a small town (at least from my perspective) is the suspicion with which "outsiders" are viewed. Everyone seems to know everybody else, and families that had been in Sidney for decades were still referred to as "the new people". This may seem like paradise to many, but for four young people (we were aged 20-22) from outside the community who were representing a religious cult, this was anything but. 

We arrived in Sidney a week late, and after a night in a hotel and a dinner of chicken-fried steak (a first for me) at Dude's Steakhouse, we set about finding housing and jobs. This was surprisingly easy. The next day we rented a two-bedroom duplex one block off the main drag of Illinois Avenue/Highway 30. Steve, as the interim Way Corps leader, had been sent to scout out the city a few weeks earlier and already had a job lined up detailing cars at a local dealership. Rosemarie and Gail found jobs waitressing at a Dairy Queen and at a hotel restaurant respectively. I was the last one to secure employment, an apprentice glass cutter and go-fer at carpet store just a few blocks from our new home. 

The WOW year, especially the portion spent in Sidney, (we were reassigned to Kearney, a larger college town mid-year) was another of those red flags which should have inspired me to leave the group. On one hand we were subject to non-stop persecution by the locals and on the other the supposed "spiritually aware" leadership was incompetent. But these pressures, at least in my case, paradoxically served to make me more committed. 

Steve was a member of what was called the 10th Way Corps, i.e. the tenth group to start the so-called  leadership training by The Way. He had made it through his first year of training at various Way training locations and was now on what they called an interim year where he was to put his training into practice before returning for his second year "in residence". Steve was supposed to be a leader, someone who we were to look up to, someone who would keep us on a godly path  and lead us to success. Steve was also an irresponsible, immature, entitled, horny twenty year-old who was impressed with his own status as a member of the Way Corps without the slightest idea how to motivate or lead. Part of this was due to the top-down style that was ingrained in Way "leaders" who believed that they were blessed with a version of the divine right of kings (including droit du seigneur). Steve's weakness as a leader would be exacerbate the pressures that resulted from opposition of the townspeople. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XIX - No True Scotsman

In my previous "Agnostic's Look at The Bible", Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian, I discussed the phenomena of Christians deciding that other Christians weren't "real" Christians based on doctrinal disagreements. In this week's installment I'll look at how Christians behaving badly are dismissed by other Christians as "Not True Christians".

The classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, from whence it derives its name, is this: McBeth claims that a Scotsman will invariably eat haggis regularly. McDuff replies that he's a Scotsman and he never eats haggis. McBeth retorts "Well then, you're not a true Scotsman". The "No True Scotsman" fallacy is a species of circular reasoning where the premise is redefined to exclude any inconvenient deviations and contradictions. This is a pretty common fallacy employed by Christians who by and large adhere to the "love thy neighbor" ethos against coreligionists who don't. When someone points out the horrible behavior of a group of Christians, you can be sure that someone will claim that "they're not really Christians because true Christians wouldn't act like that". 

Of course, Love Thy Neighbor Christians will argue that they're not the ones deciding who are true Christians and who aren't, God has set the standards in The Bible. The trouble with that, as I have pointed out many times in this series, is that the Bible isn't clear or unambiguous in what it has to say. In addition, "Christian" is as much a cultural identifier as a set of religious doctrines and behaviors. Anyone who says they're a Christian is a Christian. One might argue whether a particular Christian is living up to some perceived Biblical standard, but that doesn't make them Not A Christian, any more than abstaining from haggis makes an Edinburgh native whose roots go back many generations Not A  Scotsman.  

This doesn't mean that the Love Thy Neighbor Christians don't have a good reason to be embarrassed by the antics of their bigoted, hateful brethren. Like a family of cops who have that one sibling who just got out of prison, they think they're making them look bad. Guilt by association. But these hypothetical cops don't claim that their ex-con brother isn't their brother. But Christians are trying to boost their godliness average by eliminating their more embarrassing brethren from the statistics. 

This is by no means a Christians-only phenomena. Fundamentalist Muslims who require their women to wear a hijab look down on the Muslims who don't as not true Muslims and the burqa-wearing sects are sure the rest of the Muslim world are just as damned as Christians and Jews, maybe more so. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are pretty judgmental about their Conservative and Reform branches — some don't recognize weddings officiated by non-Orthodox rabbis. Heck, I've even encountered this tendency among Pagans! But since Christians are the power wielding majority in this country, this is whom I'm focusing on. 

The truth is, that between Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Conservative Traditional Catholics, Mega Church Pastors and the like, cultural Christians who identify as right wing conservatives and espouse beliefs largely divorced from the Love Thy Neighbor morality are likely the majority of self-identified Christians in the United States. You can't just pretend they're not the face of 21st Century Christianity. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

Workin' Man - Part XIX - A Shady Business

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 All four Lincoln Super Saver ASDs switched in one move. The Cornhusker ASD (me) moved to Pine Lake, that AD  moved to 56th and Highway 2, the 56th ASD moved to 48th & O, and that ASD moved to Cornhusker. I'm going to divert from my own personal story to focus on what was going on in another store. 

Store Directors earned bonuses based on how close their gross profit was to what was budgeted. In most situations if you achieved or exceeded your budget the budget was increased the following year. Rarely was it lowered if you failed to achieve the profit target. For some reason the exception was the store that the previously mentioned Ron S ran, the 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver. The profits regularly exceeded the budgeted amount by a huge margin, but the budget was never increased. This guaranteed that the Store Director and Assistant Store Director received the maximum amount in their annual bonus. The ASD who was leaving 56th was very upset about leaving. He was used to getting the maximum bonus — in fact, he had recently divorced and his child support was based on the assumption that he would continue to receive the maximum bonus. As I mentioned previously, Bill had been transferred out of my store and to the 56th Super Saver, since Ron S had been "promoted" into the corporate office. A couple of things happened in the wake of these moves. The first was that the budget for gross profit was changed to more closely reflect the business that the store actually did. (Why not sooner?) The second was that the store's inventory was counted more closely. 

Without getting too deep into the math, one of the key numbers that determined a store's profit was the inventory level. If inventory was undercounted, profit calculations would be low, since the assumption would be that the missing stock had been either thrown out for being outdated, or stolen, since there was no revenue to account for it. If the inventory, on the other hand, was overcounted, then the opposite would be true and the profit margin would be calculated higher than the real number. The latter was what was going on at 56th under Ron S. 

56th & Highway 2 was a test store for using an internal ordering and inventory system called INGEN (I forget what those letters stood for), which, among other things, kept a running daily count of all items in the center store departments. One of the problems with using this system for your inventory count was that there were many possible data entry error possibilities. For example, a customer buys two cases of Chobani yogurt, 12 to a case. There are eight different flavors, but the cashier rings them all up under one flavor. The result is that one flavor's inventory will be lower than the actual numbers, while the other seven will show a higher inventory. Markdowns were another problem. Usually marked down items were rung up manually by department, so there was nothing in the system to indicate that it had been sold. Outdated items that were thrown out had to be scanned out of the inventory, but if not, the system thought they were still there. At 56th under Ron S it was discovered, after he left, that the inventories for several departments were higher than actual and were skewing the profit calculations, making the store look more profitable than it actually was. 

One of the things that B&R Stores engaged in was never questioning good results, while freaking out over bad ones. The 56th and Highway 2 Super Saver was a profitable store. At the time there were no competitors nearby (this was pre-Walmart), so no one questioned the continual high profits. The store management who were raking in huge bonuses certainly didn't question it. It wasn't until a new management team came in that the inventory issues were discovered. One of the things that stores were supposed to do, was continuously update their inventory. There was to be an employee specifically dedicated to this task who would rotate through the store, keeping the inventory accurate. Bill, and his new ASD Dan set about to check their inventory and get things in line with company policy. They found out that things were really, really bad. The inventory numbers were way off. So much so that several departments had negative gross profits, which is virtually impossible. Another thing that was virtually impossible was the scenario where the new management was so incompetent as to take a very profitable store and run it into the ground in less than one year. Not only run it into the ground, but screw it up so badly that it was losing money. (One of the things that I found out about that store was that routine maintenance and repairs were being ignored when Ron S was in charge. This led to Bill having to spend a lot of money fixing things that never should have been broken. The store was also filthy. When I was there for a reset the dirt under the shelving was so thick that small animals could have gotten lost in it. When we discovered this Ron [who with us] tried to get us to believe that years of dirt had accumulated in one year)

Around this time the corporate office decided to change assistant store director responsibilities again, using 56th as a test store. The position of in-store HR Coordinator would be eliminated, and each store would have two ASDs, one of whom would be responsible for HR functions as well as a couple of departments, and the other would oversee the rest of center store. This was a project pushed by Operations VP Tom Schulte and opposed by HR Director Donna Bristol. A second ASD was brought in and Dan, the existing ASD was given the HR responsibilities, which he was completely in the dark about. He attempted to get help from corporate HR, who refused to assist him, or even educate him on his HR duties. He reached out to HR Coordinators in other stores, who were willing to help him, but were prohibited from doing so by Donna, in a petty retaliation for losing the battle to Tom. Of course Dan failed. He was set up to fail. 

Meanwhile, in order to solve the problems that took place under Ron S's watch, corporate sent in...Ron S. He set up a little card table in the grocery office as his desk and went about micromanaging the management team, including mandating the precise number of hours that Dan could spend working HR. Of course nothing that he did fixed the problem. The problem traced back to overstating inventory, which, when corrected, led to low and negative gross profits. Correct inventory levels would cause the profit problem to correct itself. These obvious observations never occurred to the corporate directors. Bill and Dan were blacklisted and moved to smaller stores as punishment. This opened my eyes to the kind of people that I was working for, even though at the time it had no direct effect on me. 

Before I close out this sordid chapter, I want to call back to another sordid chapter. HVAC maintenance and repair for all the stores had been contracted out to A-1 Refrigeration, a local company. While I was still working at the Cornhusker store, one of their technicians was sexually harassing a teenage girl who worked in the Deli. She complained to the Store Director, who complained to A-1, who immediately fired him. Dan H, the pervert in question, went on to start his own HVAC company. With the collusion of John W, one of the Super Saver ASDs, he obtained some of A-1's invoices and approached Jane Raybould to become contracted to maintain the HVAC equipment at some of the stores, underbidding A-1's rates. Jane gave him the contract for all the Russ's Markets, leaving the Super Savers to A-1, despite being made aware of why A-1 had fired him. His company was also given the contract for the new Russ's at Coddington and West A. Jane eventually fired him, but only because he did not obtain permits for what he was doing, not because he sexually harassed teenaged girls. 

Yes, a shady business.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XX

Managers Part XIX - "Good" Managers

What makes a "good" manager? That's where we started this series almost a year and a half ago. I don't think that I'd be going out on a limb to say that what makes a good manager and what makes a good person are two sets that don't completely overlap. Granted, someone who is a bully, a thief, lazy, abusive, etc...things that might describe a "bad" person, would probably also describe a "bad" manager. But the traits that make someone a good spouse or a good buddy don't necessarily translate into the traits of a good manager. A manager must inspire trust in her subordinates in order to fully leverage the abilities of her staff. One might think that being a buddy to subordinates or rolling up the managerial sleeves and pitching in, stepping back and "letting people do theirs jobs" or passing out rewards like no-questions-asked time off or ignoring the dress code makes one a good manager. This type of manager might be a popular manager, but for every employee who thinks Goodtime Charlie is the greatest, there will be one or two who resent the lack of support, the chaos, and favoritism that go along with the alleged positive traits. Other employees, seeing Charlie's willingness to do their work with them, will soon be expecting the manager to do their work for them.

A good manager is the fulcrum, balancing the needs of the company, along with upper management, with the needs of the employees. This means that the manager is responsible for maximizing the output of his employees, not by working them to death or by cutting staffing to unsustainable levels, but by training subordinates to function as independently as possible. This means retaining the best people, not by holding them down in positions where they are unhappy or they are paid less than what they need to be, but by giving them the support and resources to advance in the company...and sometimes even outside the company. As I've said before in this series, the job of a manager is not to do things, but to get things done.

If you try to do everything yourself, there's only so much you can do. Lets say that you have 40 units of work to do and you are scheduled for 40 hours. If you're not delegating and assigned, what happens if the workload increases to 50 units? You'll probably have to work 50 hours. How about 65 units? Settle in for 65-hour week. Your business's productivity is pretty much capped at 65 units. But what if you have trained two assistants to take on 20 units each. They'll be slower than you are, being trainees, but they can do 20 units each. So now you have freed up 40 hours. You can drop back to 40 hours: 25 hours to do 25 units of work and 15 hours to train your assistants and oversee the whole company. Once they are fully trained, their ability to take care of 40 units each also allows your business to expand to 80 units, with you spending 40 hours on managerial tasks. You can add additional assistants as business grows, or promote your assistants to supervisors and staff another level. Of course all of these people need to be fully trained and able to work independently or you'll be spending your 40 hours fixing substandard work or giving out assignments rather than delegating responsibility.

Management is a skill set separate from the actual work of a given industry. Just because you're a good widget-maker doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a good widget-maker's manager. In most businesses the only way for an employee to make more money is to become a manager, and in most businesses, managers are not chosen for their management ability, but for how well they performed as a subordinate. 

Do you want to be a manager? If you want to be effective as a manager, you have to be in it for more than the money. Think about it: would you apply for a job as a mechanic if you had no experience, even if it paid double what you were making now? Would you apply for any position that you had no aptitude for, just because it paid well? If you did you'd soon find yourself in over your head. If you had a goal of becoming a mechanic you'd go to school, or become an apprentice, or even go to YouTube for instructional videos. Why then, do so many people apply for management jobs when they have no experience or skill in management? Because our culture doesn't view management as a profession, but as an extension of the underlying profession.

Do you want to be a manager? Find out what it involves and educate yourself!

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XX

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians and what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very much different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but the characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. Not just labeling fringe denominations as cults, but other "regular" denominations. This a doctrinal thing, not behavior. 

I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's had definitely not completely gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping Papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential parties are sure that no real Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see much of what the other factions of Christians in the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even beyond the era when The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XVIII

One of the things that The Way drilled into us was the expectation that we would be persecuted. While the upwelling of anti-cult animus starting in 1978 following the People's Temple Massacre surely drove some people away, it also mobilized a lot of people against groups like The Way, groups which weren't as extreme as Jim Jones' bunch, but which nonetheless were enough outside the mainstream to make the mainstream nervous. The Way played up this very real opposition to its operations and framed it as equivalent to the persecution suffered by Jesus, his apostles and the early Christians. In New York I was aware of anti-Way sentiment as part of the fear about cult involvement, but in a city that large it kind of got lost in the background noise of life. In a city of 5,000 we stood out as if we had a spotlight trained upon us all day, every day. Because that where I was sent—Sidney, Nebraska, a city, if you could call it that, of around 5,000 people. 

The Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program was in its tenth year in 1980. After a decade or more of slow growth from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, Wierwille made a move that would change the course of The Way. He travelled to San Francisco and found several leaders of the nascent "Jesus People" movement that had sprung up there. He convinced some of them to follow him back to New Knoxville and learn his version of Biblical research. They became the seed from which the fast growing "Way Tree" would spring, teaching Wierwille's Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class to their followers, who tended to be young—college or even high school students mostly. Centers of Way activity sprung up mostly organically as people "witnessed" to their family and friends. Associated "ministries" were especially active in the San Francisco and Long Island areas. In addition to this type of growth several Way followers in the Wichita Kansas area participated in a test program—leaving their home areas and attempting to start Way "twig" fellowships and run PFAL classes in new areas. This pilot program  was so successful that at a Way gathering in August 1971, Wierwille asked for volunteers to participate in the new WOW outreach program. For many years this was one of the main sources of new Way members. 

The main goal of a "family" of WOWs was to "witness" to new people in their assigned city, run PFAL classes and ultimately, if there wasn't already a Way presence, to plant a brand new Way twig fellowship there. You were to arrive at your assigned city with $300, find housing and a part-time job and then get to work "witnessing", which you were to spend 8 hours a day, six days a week doing. Witnessing was, in effect, your unpaid, full-time job. As I revealed in Part XVII, the bus we were travelling on broke down in central Iowa. By the time we made our way out to Sidney, which as only 60 miles east of the Wyoming border, we were almost a week late.  We were raring to go, but what we didn't know was that Sidney knew that we were coming and they weren't happy about it. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVII - No Kool-Aid Necessary

One of the things that people misunderstand about cults is that what makes a cult cultish isn't what they believe, it's what they do. 

You want to believe that the earth was populated by aliens from the planet Xrts'dic 3 billion years ago, or that you get reincarnated as a rabbits? So what?, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting anyone.  Most Christians believe a number of things in common, despite differences in church governance and ritual. One of those things is that God exists as something called The Trinity, which oversimplified means that God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit are all God, not three separate gods and that neither is superior to or pre-existed the other. The doctrinal nuances and niceties are over most people's heads and what people actually believe would probably be considered heretical. 

The Way International didn't believe that God was a Trinity, but that Jesus was simply a man. For many mainstream Christians this was enough to label them a cult. Just as those same Christians labelled Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses as cults due to their non-mainstream view of God and Jesus. I'm not going to discuss the details of why The Way International believed that Jesus wasn't God, because I don't think it is relevant to their categorization as a cult. My own view is that the writers of the Gospels and Epistles, far from being inspired by God to put together a coherent narrative, were all fallible human beings who had different ideas about the nature of God and Jesus. Their disagreement needed to be explained somehow—early Orthodox-Catholic Christians harmonized the contradictions by coming up with The Trinity; Unitarians, ignoring or explaining away verses they didn't like, came up with their own doctrine. 

No, what makes a cult is something that has little to do with the minutia of doctrine. Is there a charismatic leader who is deferred to? Does it claim to have special knowledge that no one else has access to? Does it work to cut you off from previous ties? Does it attempt to regiment and control aspects of your life? By no means does it have to be as extreme as the People's Temple in Guyana. It doesn't have to require you to dress in yellow robes like the Hare Krishna group. You aren't necessarily locked away in a "compound" like David Koresh's Branch Davidians. Usually the signs are a lot more subtle. 

When I was first involved in The Way while living in New York the cultish nature wasn't as apparent. The Long Island fellowships had grown quickly and organically and for a long time were functionally independent. When I was in the WOW Ambassador program I rationalized the level of control being because I was in a structured program, it wasn't until I moved to Lincoln that I saw that living a normal life, i.e. job, education, relationships, etc, was going to be hampered by involvement with The Way. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XVIII - Cornhusker Twilight

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

Before I get into my final phase at the Cornhusker store, I neglected to mention an incident that took place during my first few years. One of the corporate directors took me aside one afternoon and informed me that he saw a pharmacy employee take a soda from the cooler and go into the pharmacy without paying for it. He asked me to accompany him while he confronted the individual. When she came to the pharmacy door she explained that she paid for it at the register inside the pharmacy and showed us the receipt. As I was explaining how she should pay before leaving the sales floor in order to avoid any misperceptions, Jeff, the pharmacist, started yelling at us. He maintained that pharmacy employees were "better" than the rest of the employees and how dare we accuse her! He then attempted to slam the door in our faces, but was prevented by me inserting my foot in the doorway. Jeff complained to Brian, the Store Director, not only saying that I (the corporate director was somehow absent from his complaint) accused his employee without cause, but that I kicked the door in! I gave Brian my side of the story. He didn't follow up, but I found out much later that he believed that I really did kick in the door. Ironically, the pharmacy employee in question was fired about a month later because it was discovered that she lied on her application about an arrest for drug possession. Jeff later walked out in the middle of a shift, leaving the pharmacy unlocked and unattended. It later came out that he was regularly verbally abusive to all his employees and pushed his religious views on them and on customers. 

Well, anyway, Bill was gone, Matt K was in. At first he seemed like another "nice guy", but a workaholic. For the first month or so he worked seven days a week, 7:00am until at least 7:00pm (half day on Sunday though). I made him mad when I asked him if everything was alright at home! I was disabused of my perception of Matt as a pushover when he fired a few people within his first few weeks. Despite his friendly demeanor, he had no patience for people not doing their jobs or thumbing their noses at company policy. However, he had such an easygoing manner that when he fired people he made it sound as if it was the best thing to ever happen to them. 

The first employee that Matt fired was the overnight doughnut fryer. We'll call him Lou. He was frying doughnuts one night when he slipped and ended up with his arm shoulder deep in the hot fryer oil, burning him pretty badly. Company policy was that every accident had to be reported, but company policy also required that everyone who was in an accident get a drug test. Lou, who knew that he would fail a drug test, didn't call the manager in charge, but called his sister to come get him and take him to the emergency room, hoping to avoid that drug test. Shay, the Night Manager happened to be walking by the Bakery when she heard someone whimpering. Lou was on the floor, in a fetal position, on the phone with his sister. Shay let Brandi, his sister, take him to the ER, but now the accident was on the record and Lou had to get a drug test. Which he failed. When he came back to the store, healed enough to go back to work, Matt called him up to his office. Lou refused. The next thing we knew Matt's extremely pale complexion turned beet red and he stormed out of the office to confront Lou. Deb, the front end manager turned to me and said "I guess that's what he looks like when he's mad". 

My only complaint about Matt was that his communication style was very indirect. I had gotten used to Bill, whose style was such that there was no mistaking what he meant in any situation. Matt was more the hinting type. In the year that I worked with him I can't recall him ever directly telling me what to do, but after a while I learned to crack the "Matt Code". Sometimes I would just decide that if he couldn't be direct I wasn't going to try to decipher his intentions. My last Christmas Eve at Cornhusker a few of us decided to play our own Christmas music, rather than the Muzak, over the stores public address system. One of the CDs was Twisted Sister's Christmas CD. Matt would repeatedly skip the CD to the next one, but would not ask us to stop playing it, so every time he turned it off, I would work my way up front and turn it back on. This went on all day and he never said anything. 

One of Matt's first changes was to give me my own office, instead of having me continue to share an office with the Grocery Manager. He had the maintenance guy convert a storage closet into my office! 

It was during this time period when the corporate office decided to change the responsibilities of the Assistant Store Directors (ASDs). Up until then the ASD position was largely undefined. We were like the Vice President of the United States with very little written down about what we were supposed to be doing other than run the store when the Store Director was absent. What an ASD actually did depended on the individual ASD, the needs of the store, and the expectations of the Store Director. Going forward the ASD was to be delegated direct authority over what the grocery business called "Center Store": the Grocery, Frozen, Dairy, Spirits and General Merchandise departments. The Store Director still was responsible for the whole store, but the ASD's responsibility for Center Store was formalized. This changed my focus somewhat, since previously I had acted as a sort of manager-without-portfolio, spending my time cruising the store, looking for problems and troubleshooting. I could still do that, but I now had to think about annual performance reviews for the Center Store Managers, and keeping an eye on gross profit and labor hours much more than previously. 

ASDs, in addition to being Center Store Managers, were also the designated Safety Coordinators at their respective stores. This involved running a Safety Committee meeting each month where we would review any accidents to determine whether there was a safety issue that could be addressed or if the employee was simply negligent. We also looked at ongoing safety concerns and made recommendations for correcting them. ASDs were also responsible, as part of being Safety Coordinator, for training employees on the use of forklifts and pallet jacks. Ironic considering my several forklift accidents over the years! 

As anyone who shops in a grocery store knows, periodically "everything gets moved around". Not really, but the goal of a store reset is to optimize product placement, which does include moving a lot of things around. Sometimes it's spurred by a remodel, sometimes an attempt to change the shopping flow. When I first started with the company each Store Director was asked to send a couple of people to the store being reset. Usually it was someone who no one would miss for the day—a grocery clerk or a janitor. Around this time a new corporate position had been created: Category Management Director. The Category Management Director's responsibility was, among other things, to plan and oversee resets. Scott, the new Director, got permission to make all the ASDs the permanent reset crew. Although none of really wanted to be out of the store for a week doing manual labor, it made sense. The ASDs were familiar with all aspects of center store, and were experienced enough to require little direct supervision. You could give any of us a planogram (a visual representation of what a section should look like) and we would get the job done without further explanation. I lost track of how many of these I did over the years; it was hard work, but a camaraderie developed among all the ASDs (especially the "ASD meetings" that took place in a nearby pub after the day was done). I can't move on from this section about resets without talking about the "gondola train". For some reason a row of shelving in a grocery store is called a gondola. Sometime a whole row has to be moved. Rather than disassembling and subsequently reassembling them, the gondola train was utilized. This handy tool consisted of a device that was similar to a jack on wheels. We'd place it under the load-bearing part of a section and jack it up slightly. Jacks were placed every 4 to 8 feet. Once all the jacks were in place we would simply push the whole aisle into position, one person every 8 feet. It's grocery poetry in motion!

Despite mandating a no nepotism policy, nepotism was tolerated when you were high enough in the organization. After all, it was a family-owned company! Jane Raybould, the Vice President of Buildings and Facilities, on paper answered to Tom Schulte, the Vice President of Operations, when in reality she reported to her brother Pat, the CEO. Tom also brought in his brother Tim to run the Floral and Front End Departments. There was a story about Tim, which I long thought apocryphal—supposedly Tim didn't understand the concept of nesting folders, or even folders on a desktop computer. Every file was saved right on his desktop screen until he ran out of room and called IT because he thought he couldn't save any more files. A few years later I met the one who was his administrative assistant at the time and was assured that it was true. Tim also overdid forwarding of emails. In general everyone at the corporate office was email crazy. A corporate office director would be in the store and notice an issue with the Floral department and send an email to the Floral Manager and copy the Store Director and Tim. Tim would then forward the email that he was copied on, that clearly shows that the Floral manager and Store Director were copied on it, to the Floral manager and Store Director. As a bonus, he'd copy the forward to the company president and operations VP, who both would forward it to me. As a prank I set up an email rule whereby every email that I received, including automated alerts about our orders, was forwarded to Tim. I could definitely be a jerk sometimes. 

As Floral Director Tim set pricing and merchandising for the Floral departments. What he didn't understand was that Cornhusker, located as it was in a lower income neighborhood, didn't have many customers who were willing to pay a high price for flowers or plants. He would not allow us to mark them down, but directed us to throw them out after a certain date. In order to make a point, Dorothee, the Floral Manager and I bought a grow lamp and put it in my office and started putting all the plants that we "threw away" in there. By the time I left it was like a jungle!  

One of the responsibilities that I took upon myself was doing the sales projections. Since the amount of money that each department, and the whole store, could spend on labor was based on a percentage of sales, this was a critical task. I suspect that many of the stores' projections were based on guesswork, but they definitely weren't in the stores I worked in. I created an Excel spreadsheet where I would create a store sales projection based partly on the sales from the same week the previous year. I would then adjust that number based on the percentage up or down that the store was trending over the previous four weeks. To project the sales for each individual department I would look at what percentage of total store sales the department sales represented the previous year and multiply the total store sales by that percentage; I would adjust those numbers up or down based on a four week trend. I would further take into account things like weather, ads, or changes in competition to come up with my final figures. All of this was embedded in various interlocking formulas.

Determining the amount of hours each department could schedule required some additional math. I would start with the already projected sales and multiply by the budgeted labor percentage—this would give me the dollars that could be spent. I would subtract the manager's salary and then divide the remainder by the average wage in that department, giving me the number of hours that could be scheduled in order to come in under budget. During holiday weeks I went a step further and projected sales for each day. Most of the time these projections were spot on. I remember one year a department manager was excusing his excessive number of "outs", claiming that he didn't know how busy it would be. When we compared the projected sales to the actual sales, they were almost exactly the same. I guess he did know how busy it would be! 

Ron S was a Store Director who was getting close to retirement. They "promoted" him to a corporate office position to make room for someone that had been recruited from outside the company. He had various tasks that he conducted on behalf of the various corporate directors. One week his mission was to come around and teach all the ASDs how to do sales projections. Years before some long forgotten programmer had created a feature to our primitive database that was supposed facilitate coming up with projections. The total store sales projection had to be hand entered every week. The budgeted percentage of sales for each department as well as their labor budget was entered at the beginning of each quarter. From this scant information the budgeted hours per department was calculated. It was definitely a blunt instrument and did not take into account what my Excel sheet did. On the afternoon when it was my turn for Ron to "teach" me, he walked me through the process as if it were software that could launch NASA rockets. I was already aware of this program and very aware of its shortcomings, especially the fact that not all departments were included and you couldn't add any, not to mention no way to adjust average wage. So I thanked Ron, told him that I was aware of how it worked and that I had a better method that I was using. Ron looked at me as if I had drowned his puppy and told me that he used it for years, and that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. Rather than argue with him further I simply went in and changed the total sales prediction each week, since I knew he'd be checking, and continued to use my spreadsheet for the actual projections. I had similar interactions with Ron over the years, I'll be revisiting him in the next article. But it's now time to move on. 

After six years at the 27th and Cornhusker Super Saver I was being transferred to the 27th and Pine Lake Super Saver. 

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XIX

Managers Part XVIII - Leverage

When I first wrote this series in 2018 I realized that I had titled this post, but never wrote it. Since I initially numbered it 15 and subsequently numbered another post as 15, I called it 15a. Well, in the reposts, I did it again and didn't insert it after XV! I'm going to insert it now and call it Part XVIII and renumber subsequent articles accordingly. 

What is leverage? Basically it's the ability that you have as a manager to influence your employees. It's how you get them to do things. It's also the amount of work that you can accomplish by convincing multiple employees to do things in quantities that you could not do if working by yourself. Let's look at the how first.

Way back in Part II - Sources of Power I discussed the sources of power that a manager had. "Authority" would probably be a better word, instead of power. They are:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

The blunt instrument, the source of authority that usually goes unsaid, but is a huge part of #3—the ability to influence others through punishment—is always in any manager's tool box. 

Most amateur managers know that they have the power to fire their employees. This is the most basic, crude and rudimentary leverage that you have. Most employees understand this instinctively and will follow a manager's direction, even when they don't want to, they disagree with it, or they just think it's stupid, because they know that refusal to obey the boss's will can result in an opportunity to find a new job. The problem with this, from a manager's point of view, is that even though you will get compliance, you won't get enthusiasm and you certainly won't get independent action or innovation. 

To refer back to an another article in this series, Part X, you will have employees forever stuck at Levels 1 and 2. Some managers are satisfied with this, and are happy with just basic, mindless obedience. They'll never get their people to Level 3, let alone 4 or 5, and may have to settle for Level 1 (Wait until being told before doing anything).

I got my real-life lesson in leverage when I was an Assistant Store Manager. I had been schooled in the wisdom of the Five Levels, of monkeys and left- and right-leaning trapezoids, but hadn't really learned how to properly leverage my employees. As an Assistant Store Manager, I had a lot of responsibility. I often describe the unofficial job description as "All the stuff that doesn't fall into anyone else's job responsibility". All that responsibility, however, didn't come with any matching authority, not any official authority anyway. I threw my weight around, waved my title in people's faces, (Source of Power #1) but no one was impressed. I wasn't making any serious attempt to gain leverage by winning these people over, and I lacked the foundational piece of leverage: the ability to fire someone, and everyone knew it. (I also lacked #2, Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.; and #4 Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills and #5, Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire; I was squandering due to my heavy-handed approach). 

I hadn't made an effort to convince people to do what I wanted them to do, and they knew I had no real authority (my Store Manager at the time was a "nice guy" who undermined me quite often, so I had no reflected authority from his support). It was after a few incidents where run-ins with employees that resulted in a reprimand from my boss that I began to employ the lessons that I had learned years before and little by little began to gain leverage, not from blunt force, but from precision use of tried and tested management techniques. I have to admit that I was given a new lease on management life when my nice guy boss was replaced by a guy who more of a bull in a China shop than I was. This enabled me to start fresh and stop my attempt to bludgeon people into obedience.

I remember an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzi was attempting to school Ritchie on how to be a tough guy. Fonzi was showing him how he, Fonzi, never actually had to fight because people were afraid of him. Ritchie tried to apply these lessons, but he was perplexed that no one was afraid of him. This caused Fonzi to amend his lessons with the observation that he (Ritchie) would have had to actually been in a fight and won for people to think he was a tough guy. It's similar to this in the management world. In order for employees to believe that you will fire them if necessary, you have to actually fire someone when necessary. 

Later on in this series I address the changes that took place post Covid. Managers' unwillingness to hold employees to company standards, including firing bad employees has had many repercussions. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX