Recently, while renegotiatiing a contract, the customer was nickel-and-diming me over the price of one of the writers who had done a miraculous job for them under impossible deadlines. While they were busy negotiating, I had to take the writer off the job for 3 days, and put someone cheaper into the position. Oh, did I mention this was 5 days before the deadline of a 3-month contract?

Yes, that's right. I had to put in someone who didn't know the product, didn't know the people, and was an inferior writer, because they insisted on a lower price – the week of the deadline. Needless to say, by the third day they were begging for the original writer. But guess what? The day after the deadline they were back arguing about the price and number of hours needed for the next job.

The writer just laughed and told me an even better story from a former employer. The company had registered her and another person to a 2-day seminar in San Diego. They were not going to be able to return her to Israel before the Sabbath because Wednesday night in San Diego is halfway through Thursday in Israel. For an entire week, 5 VPs and C-level managers were arguing about whether they would pay her per-diem for the Friday and Saturday she would have to stay over. She wasn't even asking for a hotel; she wanted to stay with friends. After a week of arguing over $80 in per-diem, they decided to cancel her participation in the conference, which they had decided was critical for lead generation, and just send the other person who agreed to travel on the weekend. The clincher? The airline ticket would have been $500 cheaper if she stayed over the Saturday. So 10 e-mails between 5 VPs for 1 week where they unanimously agreed that saving $400 was a bad idea.

WHAT?

As the spring holiday season draws closer and folks around the world embark on mad fits of spring cleaning, I thought this would be the perfect time to talk about “clean” management and corporate policy. I’m not talking about making your workplace raw, leaven/gluten free or eco-friendly (all admittedly great things), but rather managing a clean, wholesome, honest company run on sound business practices in today’s increasing dirty business world.

With a backdrop of hundred billion dollar IPOs and hacking, scamming and cheating scandals plaguing the twittersphere (my main source for news), many of us are left to ponder whether it is even possible to run a clean business anymore. Isn’t everyone just out to get everyone else, make another dollar, and sell you another broken widget? I don’t know the answer to most of that, but I do continue to believe that it is still possible (and preferable) to run a clean business.

What was once a given about the employee/employer relationship is no longer. Gone are the days when you spend your life at a company in pursuit of the gold watch and nice retirement package. Instead, here are the days where you hop, skip and jump through a long series of short tasks for smaller companies. Everyone is challenged with being fluid and adaptable, hungering for constant change. This is the world our consumerism driven desires and needs have created, a world where product is old after just a few weeks or months and everything changes all the time.  

Sometimes I wonder if HR decisions are well thought out by business executives before they agree.

The unthinkable happened twice in the last week, so I wanted to highlight this horrible new trend and advise everyone to stop doing it.

If your company needs to hire people at any time in the future, this is NOT the way to work.

The scenario x2:  a company calls Tech-Tav and says they are in need of technical writing services. They describe the position, we agree (in written and executed contract!) to the terms and recommend some well-qualified candidates. The company then conducts a first, second and third round interviews of multiple candidates that include a grueling writing test and a grilling by HR. Job offers to specific candidates are made and start dates are set.

You can probably imagine that there are a lot of people who are feeling very good at this point. Two fabulous people received job offers that they were excited about; two doc managers are finally bringing on the staff that they need in order to meet their deadlines; and two people in my office (Karen and myself) are thrilled to once again have found amazing jobs for these two well-deserving technical writers.  Sadly enough, the good feelings did not last long. One after the other, these two companies - after completing the ENTIRE hire process - called and apologized that the budget was “suddenly frozen” and the job offers would be rescinded. Whoosh. All those good feelings just flew out the window.

The bubble has burst.

A while ago, I blogged about one of the largest technical writing teams here in Israel and my surprise at their unpreparedness for what seemed inevitable. Here’s some of what I wrote:

“I recently spoke at an Israeli company that employs 25 in-house technical writers. This company is far from Israel’s biggest by a long shot, so how do they justify maintaining the country’s largest technical writing team? The answer is that they don’t. Because they can’t.

My hour-long presentation on staying ahead of the curve in the technical writing world (one of my favorite topics) eventually touched upon the important subject of metrics. To me, it always been a given that objective measurements are of utmost importance – otherwise how do we assess and plan current and future goals? So you can imagine my shock to receive, at that point, a lot of flak from an audience that didn’t know their metrics, never had to calculate their metrics and were never asked by their finance people for metrics. They therefore contended that this portion of my presentation was not relevant to them.

If you pack whole wheat bread with natural peanut butter and an apple for your kids’ school lunch when everyone else has Fluffernutters on white, your kids are probably not going to be too happy when they open their lunchboxes. Same goes for your technical writing projects. You want people to read and use your documents. But like that sandwich, it’s going to end up in the trash if you don’t give them what they want and how they want it.

I am not advocating Fluffernutter sandwiches for lunch every day (or any day, for that matter). But you’ve got to find something that your kid will be happy to eat, just like you’ve got to find the right documentation and output that your user will be happy to use. Yes, happy to use! You thought you’d be satisfied if your users would just read the manual. I’m going a step further and suggest that they should not only read it, but read it happily.

Before you delve into any new documentation project, get to know your users. Who are they? What is their native language? Do they use laptops or desktops or tablets or smart phones? And what will they be using 6 months from now? According to a recent survey, "nearly three quarters of U.S. small and medium businesses with fewer than1000 employees have plans to purchase tablets over the next 12 months." And for larger companies, the percentage is even higher. Is your documentation going to be ready? Does your single sourcing tool support ePub outputs? Are your PDFs (if you still create them) optimized for online or tablet viewing?

If you have been reading this blog without knowing I’m in Israel, then apologies that this post might seem political. I’m not sure how I can avoid being political right now though, since I can’t work today. Schools are closed due to rocket and missile fire on southern Israel where I live and where Tech-Tav’s service office is located.

So Karen and I will be in and out of the office today, and our kids are suffering from some siren and missile anxiety.

Yesterday, thinking things were calming down and knowing that kids were still in school and would be escorted into a shelter if anything happened, I kept a meeting at a potential customer that is further north. While I was out, there were two more missile attacks near my home and the kids were ushered into safe rooms in an unbelievably organized fashion.

Thank you to the work of Israel’s Home Front Command for working so hard to keep our kids safe!

While all of that was going on, I was meeting with a customer who – for the first time in my 20+ years of sales – offered the normal water and coffee and then spiced up the offer with cookies as we arrived at his office. This guy may be the smartest VP Product I have ever met. Cookies! I know I have blogged about this is the past, but one of our writers is known to bring homemade baked goods when she is trying to hunt down specific SMEs that normally avoid her. In her experience it works every time, which is why she has been so successful at turning her SMEs into tame information sharing resource centers in one short meeting!

Driving back from Netanya yesterday (where we launched a secret technical writing project for a stealth start-up) to our top secret documentation warrior headquarters, I was struck by two thoughts:  I was ridiculously happy and I could not wait to share that happiness with the world.

What is with all the happiness? I could probably attribute it to the sudden onset of spring, the Purim frenzy or maybe’s it is simply the rush of excitement I feel whenever we start a new project. The energy, the excitement, the pursuit of excellence is not something you see a lot in big business these days. In a start-up, you normally get to see and experience it 24/7. I wanted to take this opportunity to say that we continue to be humbled and grateful to work with many of the leaders in Israeli hi-tech and to play our part in bringing great products and solutions to market.

All that said, sometimes being a technical writer or, in my case, running a technical writing company, is really funny. Have spent the last few weeks being totally off-topic and not focused enough on technical writing in this blog (or so you guys have told me), I decided in the spirit of Purim to be as technical writing focused as possible.

To that end, I am proud to present Tech-Tav’s version of “Stuff Israeli Tech Writers Say”. I don’t think I could have been more focused on technical writing if I tried.

As we approach the heavy season of corporate gifts in Israel, I thought it was a good time to talk about employee gift baskets. So what is your answer? Yes or no?  

With most things, if you ask two people you can end up with three different opinions. In this case, I think the answers you’ll get from staff if you ask them will surprise you.   

As we head into the gift package season, most chocolates and wines barely last long enough to avoid leaving a bitter or sour taste in the mouth. When the junk food or weird condiments are finished, the gift was nice, but the cash was probably misdirected. Do employees really appreciate gift packages from their companies? Is it silly in this age - when we all know better employee health is better for everyone - to be giving people junk food as a company activity? If not, what else can we do as executives to reward or gift our employees and staff without throwing good money out the window?

As I was thinking about team motivation over the last few days, my 4-year-old daughter came to me with really sticky fingers and started a long treatise on why “sticky” is so hard to deal with. Suddenly, I realized that there was a brilliant management lesson right in front of me. Management and communication are usually a lot more like marshmallow fluff than we want them to be. Communication between team members, and especially between managers and employees, is normally sticky, tricky and hard to fix once broken. Looking back over relationships and projects that have not gone the way I wanted, the problems could usually be boiled down to the communication side of things.

In response to my Fixing Stupid blogs, many people have been writing to tell me that their managers don’t know how to communicate with them and wondering how to improve the situation. They claim their managers don’t appreciate, don’t understand and don’t express themselves well. But as technical communication leaders, the thing we should be really good at is communication. How and why can so many of us be failing so badly at our professional calling of being professional communicators with management responsibilities?

I think the easy answer is that explaining a process or a procedure on paper is a lot different than dealing with an employee, their work habits or the communication that surrounds employee management. That might all be true, but frankly that’s not the whole story.

I was just about to dive into my normal Saturday night routine with the kids, when suddenly my husband appeared with tears in his eyes. He choked on the words as he told me that our totally healthy, beautiful 3-month-old nephew, Shilo Eliezer of blessed memory, had died in his sleep that morning. The funeral would be in a few hours.

This weekend, as the rockets from Gaza began landing in Southern Israel again and my family experienced this tremendous loss, I felt the need to express my sadness and anger at death. This weeks’ blog was supposed to be about things I would tell my 25-year-old entrepreneurial self. I finished it already in my mind, just had not typed it out (one handed typing on a smart phone with a sick kid sleeping on me was not happening). After thinking about the things I wanted to tell my entrepreneurial self, I thought again about the things I needed to tell my regular old self. The things I forget as I hurry through life. The things we all could use a reminder about every now and again.

A post related to technical documentation/management will fill this space next week, but in the meantime, thanks for reading and allowing me to grieve and express in such a public way. 

These are the 10 life lessons I especially need to tell myself tonight. I hope you also find them useful.

1. There is actually no such thing as a deadline. Well, there is, and it is called DEATH. Otherwise, the date is an arbitrary line in the sand that someone - somewhere - drew for something. There is always a little bit more time or someone else in the project, thing, event, occasion, episode, document, deliverable or whatever it is that can or will be moved. Do not run your life on DEADlines, rather on LIFElines. If you are a boss, make sure the people who work for you can enjoy life around the schedules you give them. If not, be prepared to rearrange. People have lives to live in addition to their jobs.

Are you stuck with a stupid boss or a boss that makes stupid decisions? Maybe I can help.

In Israel, where there seems to still be a tremendous lack of professional management experience, technical writers are often managed by self-made managers or R&D people with no formal management experience and little or no experience managing technical writers or technical writing teams. What that means is that they might know how to program in X or Y language, or run an Agile process, but they know next to nothing about managing people and even less about how to control their own tempers. There’s no excuse for managers who blow their top and take out their misguided anger on undeserving employees.  But unfortunately, it happens all too often.  Let me give you some insights that might help the next time this situation arises.

Yesterday started out like any other Monday, or at least I thought it did. I had a few urgent emails from technical writers and customers, a sick daughter, and another kid who requested a gourmet packed lunch that included macadamia nuts, and to wear purple shoes which we don’t have…you know, a typical Monday morning. And of course, Sunday night I was up until way past midnight closing a contract with a new customer (start-up nation Israel never sleeps).

But at about 9:30, everything suddenly fell apart. Our weekly staff meeting was interrupted by my sick daughter asking a million questions ranging from how we could be talking into the computer without seeing each other, to wanting to know where the glue was for her art project. I am pretty good at multi-tasking and switching from mommy to manager, but when my team started to discuss a project that was not heading in the right direction, all of a sudden I realized that I said the wrong thing. Crash, bang, boom. I blew the whole thing up.

It happens. People say really stupid things that are regretted as soon as they come out of our mouths. Having been on both sides (I’ve been the hurt employee as well as the stupid manager), I could immediately relate to the hurt that my employee must have felt at that moment.

2011 was a year of change. At least that's what LinkedIn announced to me, informing me that 204 of my colleagues had changed jobs.

204? That sounded like a lot of people changing jobs. Then I looked up my contact list, did a bit of simple math, and figured out it was just over 21%. Now it looks low, because I can't think of anyone I know who's been in a job for more than 5 years. In my industry, a normal number might be 30%. OK, I know a few teachers. I know quite a few attorneys, freelancers and people who own their own businesses. They never change jobs, though if they're good marketers, they make sure to update something on their profiles now and again. And if they're great business people, they open a new business every few years or are asked to be a board member, or something that LinkedIn might consider a job change.

So 21%. Hardly a year of change.

What is the change, though? I think it's a gradual change, and it's a change away from corporate. There are fewer "big company" jobs, generally speaking. More and more people have their own businesses. You hear all these empowerment coaches talking about having your own business as the only way to achieve wealth. There's no question about that. But there's also no question that people need to realize that most of us aren't going to "have a job" for most of our career anymore.

Much has been said already about how great it is to work “in the cloud.” I don’t think there’s anyone left who hasn’t experienced the greatness of Dropbox or a shared Google Doc.

So where does that leave the technical writer? We technical writers and documentation managers are long used to our love affair and possessive tendencies towards our “files” and our proprietary authoring software. A huge part of what gave us value was the relative obscurity of what we do. Transforming huge swaths of knowledge and information into books, with endless links and ToCs that update and indexes that contain links. One customer even went so far as to call what we do, “knowledge geek magic.”

What will happen if we take all of that away and author in simple tools that were built for everyone to use easily in the cloud? If anyone can log into our software, collaborate, review, comment and critique, will our processes fall apart? Will the magic be revealed as a fake? Will we be replaced by knowledge engineering robots?

I don’t think so.

Companies spend so much time, money and effort trying to understand and quantify what their users are saying and thinking about their products. In software development, UI design receives hyperfocus and in hardware or devices, testing and usability receive a good portion of time and budget (not to mention focus) during the development stage.

Much to my dismay, documentation is still perceived as a separate entity from the product. R&D budgets for the project rarely include documentation. Instead, it gets tacked on at the end as an afterthought, a necessary evil. I keep rallying against this because I continue to believe that this is a critical product, project and R&D failure. We may call it documentation, but it’s actually part of the product. If you use the product wrong, it's a bad product. If you have to spend time looking for instructions, rather than having some integrated knowledge base or easy to find button, the product is not as good as a product that is easy to use.

Thought of differently, it's not documentation. It's knowledge. Separating it from product development or from R&D either mentally or in real terms is a critical mistake, and one which has a direct and negative user experience impact.  

My friend Doug Levy just co-authored a brilliant piece (which I encourage you to read) in Advertising Age Magazine. Doug points out that brand and advertising are part of the actual product; if you make a brand claim that isn't part of your product, you damage your reputation and in fact, damage the product. It's the same for product documentation or product knowledge.

We'd planned to get back to business in today's post, but the response from yesterday's post was so overwhelming that our server even crashed for a few minutes. In light of the huge response and the huge outpouring of support last night at the Beit Shemesh rally, we felt we should briefly follow up.

Firstly, we want to say thank you. Thank you for your readership, for your responses here and in the social media. Thank you for re-posting and spreading the word. Thank you for coming to the rally, for voicing your own opinions and experiences, and thank you for your ongoing commitment to a great nation and a world of tolerance and caring for one another.

Our appeal to you is to continue to practice what you preach. Make your company one who hires pregnant women, seniors, and people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. Treat everyone with respect, pay them fairly and on time, and honor your word. Allow yourself to contribute to their professional development and allow them to contribute to your company's progress. Social change can happen if you make it happen. Let's make it happen together.

There comes a time when even in a professional blog like this, it is our responsibility to take a stand on public issues.

Our country's headlines over the last few weeks have been filled with stories of ultra-Orthodox men speaking harshly and striking out against women who, in their eyes, are dressed or acting in ways they feel are not in keeping with Judaism. We see stories of women being relegated to the back of the bus, of advertising posters being censored or self-censored by organizations who do not want to offend this minority.

As a company run by an Orthodox female CEO, we feel it is important for us to state our opinion in no uncertain terms. As a company with many orthodox and ultra-Orthodox employees, we have until now steered clear of speaking about politics, and we've encouraged our employees to keep their political views to themselves.

However, this is a clear-cut case where everyone on the Tech-Tav staff adheres to the same view: this violent behavior is an abomination. It is simply wrong to spit at schoolchildren, throw rocks at people on the street, forcefully stop buses, and punch elderly men and TV cameramen. We're even going to take a chance and go beyond that. Although it is perfectly legal, it is wrong to curse people and call them derogatory names; it is wrong to denigrate others' religious observance (or non-observance).