That's My Son-In-Law Who's Doing That!

Three years ago this June, I posted "Hiring Relatives and the Chinese Business Model." It was a sort of good news/bad news look at the potentials and perils of working with relatives.

In America, nepotism has a bad reputation - it's something that many companies specifically forbid. For good reason, I think: too many nitwit brothers-in-law and incompetent cousins can ruin morale and wreck a company.

On the other hand, having relatives work in the family business works pretty well among people with a Chinese cultural background - and in my family.

My oldest daughter and I have cooperated on a few projects - successfully, I think - and now I'm doing a little work for my son-in-law. He's the Executive Producer of Oasis Productions: and is managing production of "Art of Serenity: A Journey of Faith." (anoasisproduction, YouTube (February 23, 2010), video 4:13.)

We touched base earlier today: work on the documentary is on schedule. It's coming out by the end of August, 2010. Barring something like a Haiti-level disaster here in central North America.

He also set me up with an email service that'll allow us to exchange decent-size files. As a sort of test of the system, he sent me photos of the new office and workroom of Oasis Productions. These are scaled-down copies:


Video editing - the computer's doing the work at this point. April, 2010.

I'll want to ask - but I suspect the lighting is a little contrived in this photo. The lighting isn't quite that dramatic.


Production / editing area, Oasis Productions. April, 2010.

That's my daughter, at the editing station. There'd been discussion of my doing at least some of that work: but she's got transferable skills - and she's on-site, so it's her job now.

Like I said, family businesses can work well or fail spectacularly. It depends on the family. I think we'll do okay.

Boxelder Bugs!

So, there I am, day before yesterday, minding my own business, getting some work done on my laptop.

I notice something on the screen. One of those clever-annoying ads that puts a crawling bug over the web page you're trying to read.

Nope. Not unless those things can crawl off the screen. Which this one just then had done.

That got my attention.

Seen clearly, without backlighting from the screen, it was a boxelder bug. We've had a lot of those inside this winter.

That thing calmly crawled across the keyboard, seemingly unaware of the huge organic pistons overhead, threatening to make it bug mash.




It could be worse: I once had to share a work space with bats and a small colony of bees.

Telecommuting: Good News,Bad News

This really shouldn't be a surprise. Here's a post, copied from "Apathetic Lemming of the North," including the links:

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"Study Calls Telecommuting a Mixed Bag"

"PC World" magazine posted an article that says that "... those who do not telecommute are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job and leave the company, " which shouldn't surprise too many people.

On the other hand, the study takes that conclusion from opinion to informed opinion: with a moderately adequate study. (A study of "240 professional employees from a medium-sized company" doesn't involve a big enough set of data to give reliable results, in my opinion.)

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Back to "Starting a Small Business:" There are a few lessons here, pretty obvious ones for the most part.

• Read more than a study's conclusion - find out how they got the data, and what they did with it
• Employers whose staff includes people who haven't gotten used to contemporary information technology have to consider options:
  • Replace the skill-challenged employees with people who can use contemporary technology
    (Difficult on a personal level, and means losing their training and experience)
  • Provide training so that all employees are 'Internet-ready'
    (Training costs time and money, and the odds are that someone is going to quit, rather than learn new skills - or, worse, stay on the staff and drain everyone's productivity)
  • Ignore the issue, and hope that the Internet and other information technology proves to be a fad
    (This makes as much sense as the old-fashioned employer, a few generations back, who is supposed to explained that he wouldn't allow employees to have telephones, because if he did, "they'd be on the telephone all day, instead of doing business")

Enough of that.

As a the owner, manager, creative staff, clerical staff, and technical staff of my company, I don't have those kinds of problems. I'm fairly tech-savvy, and if I start getting out of my depth, I can always ask my eleven-year-old son for help.

Working From Home: Short Commute, Low Overhead, and Office Sharing

My second-oldest daughter just now told me that I can use the computer. That's the family's term for the main computer, in my office.

"My office" is a desk and several square yards of what we call the "north room." It's also the room where music gets practiced and made, and has other uses.

This morning, it was used as a sort of impromptu conference room for my wife and our second-oldest daughter. I walked in on a very serious discussion they were having.

Thankfully, I had the sense to ask if I'd be interrupting anything. I'm pretty sure that they were having a mother-daughter talk about a transition this family is going through. There's a little more about that, over at another blog, "Through One Dad's Eye."

Working from home is fine, but sometimes the "office" can't be used exclusively for business. And, that's inconvenient.

Hiring Relatives and the Chinese Business Model

Even though I'm a Norwegian-Irish American, there isn't much about ethnicity in this post. There is, however, a bit about the up- and down-sides of working with close kin.

Westerners think of nepotism as a vice, east Asians purportedly regard hiring relatives as a virtue. There's this academic look at the topic, and many more, online: I've no idea how valid any of them are.

Living on the edge of "Chinatown" in San Francisco, and working in an ESL program, gave me an outsider's look at how folks in that part of the city ran their businesses. I was impressed at how efficiently and effectively my neighbors kept expenses down and productivity up by keeping jobs in the family.

Of course, that sort of system requires kids who give a rip about their parents, parents who are willing to sacrifice their own immediate impulses to what's good for the next generation, and a work ethic that hasn't been stylish in the more refined and cultured circles in the USA for decades. That last point might be changing.

My own enterprise has relied a great deal on the expertise in CSS that my oldest daughter developed, together with her artistic abilities. She and I have very similar personalities: neither one of which are particularly notable for diplomacy. That makes our cooperative venture exciting, as well as productive.

We make it work, thanks in large part to this family's tight bonds and our mutual willingness to to trade labor for benefits like reciprocal links and room and board.

The working relationship my oldest daughter and I have illustrates the advantages and one of the problems of working with family.

The advantages:

* Dealing with people you know: Communication is easier, and you have a clear idea of your colleague's skills and training

* Low- or no-cost labor: Many families can trade labor for food and housing, and the prospect of advancement in the enterprise

* High productivity and loyalty: Members of a close-knit family are highly motivated to make their business successful, for their own profit and the good of the family

The disadvantages:

* Dealing with people you know: Communication is complicated by years of close association, during which time both parties have had ample time to acquire peeves and grudges and mutually irritating habits

* Unsatisfactory compensation: Relatives may expect more money than you can offer, and take offense when you don't live up to their expectations

* Low productivity and loyalty: Family members don't necessarily have the best interests of your enterprise in mind, and may believe that they can loaf because you'd never fire a relative

Most how-to-run-your-business books say that hiring relatives is risky at best, and I'd say they're right. It's working in my case: but this is an unusual family.

Tales From the Geek Side: The Return

Amazing. In fewer than ten hours, I've deleted a directory tree, with its contents, messed up quite a bit of perfectly simple CSS code, and scrambled the navigation system that I spent part of last Friday and Saturday assembling.

Not only that, but I completed a local newsletter, printing out a press-ready copy with an egregious error. No time to fix the error with software: I hastily inked in a corrected set of dates. My story is that I was trying to make the dates in question stand out: and I'm sticking with that.

I really should get some sort of award: the Spindled, Bent, and Mutilated Hollerith Card, perhaps? Or the Fried Flash Card? Try saying that last one fast, five times.

Happily, I was able to get back a critical part of what was in that deleted directory tree. And, my latest Web effort is close enough to being ready so that I'll risk posting a link to Minnesota for Web-Wise Travelers.

There are only two pages ready for viewing: the home page and one dealing with Minnesota's bluff region. My hope is that, most of the formatting issues being more-or-less resolved, pouring content into the rest of the pages will be fairly quick and straightforward.

Somehow, though, I don't think things will work out that way.

Later: up- and down-sides of working with close kin.