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Big Thinking is kicking off a series about How To Communicate Bad News because we see too many partners, clients and friends often miss the mark and make bad situations worse.

There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops
There are apparently not enough distractions here so Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole jumped on their laptops

The first guideline we’ll share is straight out of today’s headlines:  

Be Honest About The Rules.  

There is an incalculable multiplier if you break the rules, your actions cause problems and you are not immediately forthright with every possible stakeholder fast. Lightning fast.  Greased lightning fast.   So fast that you may not have a solution yet, but you’ve already assured people you are resolving the matter right now.

The problem may be as basic as a spreadsheet error that only becomes a broken rule if you cover up the mistake.  Or the problem could be as specific as flying a jet with more than 100 passengers for more than an hour past your destination.  The comments the cockpit crew made puzzled everyone.   The federal government announced today that the flight crew claimed they were using laptop computers in the cockpit, were distracted and ignored radio calls and other signals. If their story is true and they were looking at new schedules resulting from their merger, they have hopefully handed over their untampered with computers and will face whatever disciplinary action occurs when you don’t do your job and fly 160,000 pounds of plane on top of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.  

But Timothy Chaney and Richard Cole blew their chances for problems by releasing cagey statements since Thursday.  Only today, on the fifth day, have federal investigators released a statement about the events that caused Chaney and Cole to operate their plane in the way they did. Imagine two headlines. One reads, “Pilots Reprimanded, Suspended for Using PC In Flight“ The other reads, “Government Investigators Uncover Truth About Stray Jet.“

Your responsibility is to tell the truth when things go bad and own up if you were breaking the rules.  Coverups don’t work, and the fallout is always worse.  These pilots may have thought they were protecting themselves, but they were really causing massive brand damage to Delta and Northwest who are already balancing the intricacies of their merger.  That ripple effect directly impacts tens of thousands of employees and millions of individuals who own retirement funds that have invested in the company whose stock price might suffer in the short run. Communicating Bad News is not hard, but there are standards to which you must adhere.  Be Honest About Breaking The Rules is the first standard.

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Most people working in the online marketing world have known the truth about Google‘s infamous PageRank scoring for several years:  it didn’t work, it wasn’t terribly accurate and attempting to classify the billions of pages on the web into 10 clusters was just plain silly.

PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the two Google co-founders.  The company included the score on its web toolbar so that someone surfing from one site to another could see that they had moved from a PageRank (PR) 4 location to a PR 3 location. That meant nothing to anyone, of course, and PageRank grew more meaningless over time.  It grew so meaningless that Google removed the metric from its Webmaster Tools section this week. Googler Susan Moskwa posted about PageRank in an official Google forum Wednesday:

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

What Susan didn’t unfortunately comment on was that Google’s toolbar that many non-marketing users have access to still includes PageRank.   Those numbers haven’t matched up with “real” PageRank in years, and the marketing community has differentiated between the two for years by referring to the latter as “toolbar PR”.

PageRank is not a meaningful metric, and you should immediately stop using it in any context.  If your marketing agency refers to PageRank as a metric, you should fire them just for being dunderheads who are out of touch with the marketplace.

This underscores a big issue.   Just because you know a piece of data doesn’t mean that you have the context, training or skills to interpret that data.  My doctor sent me an electronic medical record on CD with all my tests from my last physical.  Not having gone to medical school (sorry, Mom), I have no idea what the numbers mean, but I’m sure that some web site somewhere will convince me I can read the chart.  For my sanity, I think I’ll let the medical folks worry about that data while I explain to them that they can stop worrying about PageRank. Now if only Amazon would admit that Alexa’s data is easily manipulated garbage, we would could really start cleaning up.

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Image representing RescueTime as depicted in C...
Image via CrunchBase

Ready to learn more about how you spend your time than you may really want to know? Welcome to RescueTime. This program is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to monitor productivity.

Installing a simple program keeps track of the websites I visit and the programs I run.  Simple configuration allows me to train the system to know that some sites are work related. Google, in my case, is more often “Business:Operations” rather than “Research”.    And when Rescue Time doesn’t recognize a site or program, you get to categorize the time.

The result is a series of regularly updated reports that show how much productive time I’m spending.  I knew, for example, that the sites I visit each morning took some time.   I was surprised to learn the time some mornings was more than double.  I also set the system to alert me when I spent an hour each day on “very distracting” applications or sites. Those site visits mount up fast.   (cough) Eventually I found myself with dozens of hours in the database.

Like many businesspeople, I spent far too much time in email.  There was also a lot of time in Excel.  The real findings were the 5 and 10 minute visits to other sites.  During a week, that time added up too. I remember reading a Bill Gates quote that he and Steve Ballmer would exchange calendars and critique each others time.  Since Ballmer is apparently busy, I used Rescue Time.    The program runs quietly in the background, doesn’t seem to use too many resources and is a good bargain at $64/year or only $8/month. Try it for a month or two and see what time you can rescue.

Note: Joe & the RescueTime team just wrote and suggested we share with everyone there is a referral program.  I had seen that and promptly forgot all about it.  So the link was here changed to a referral link.  If you decide to install RescueTime, you get 2 weeks free for others you refer and 4 weeks if they get a paid account.