Quote:
Originally Posted by AKQJ10
Isn't that like saying, I don't care whether you won or lost a ton of Sklansky bucks.
Maybe, although I think I meant it in the context of the 90%+ of jobs where outcome isn't primarily dictated by chance. It'd be like saying to a poker horse, "It sucks that you ran bad, now you're going to have to put in extra hours next month to make it up."
Definitely not a nice thing to say and overused it's going to sap morale. But a nonzero amount of time it needs to be said, and people who don't say it when it needs to be said won't succeed.
I forgot to keep the bottom part about Costco/Starbucks but I agree. I think "fair" and "nice" are different, though. I'm mostly pointing out that there are times where being "not nice" is required.
I'll give an example. I'm a chemist, and recently we requested that an external vendor do some chemistry for us. They quoted 8 weeks and we agreed that was reasonable. We sent them procedures we had worked out, but they thought they had a better plan. They worked on it for 4 weeks and got nowhere, I politely asked them to reconsider the procedure we sent, another 2 weeks passed and they were still nowhere, I straight up told them to use our procedure, another 2 weeks passed, and I just told them rather impolitely to deliver the compounds in 4 weeks or we were going to cancel the contract and give it to another vendor.
It was doubly mean because at the end of those 4 weeks was a big national holiday where everyone would get two weeks off, the equivalent of someone saying to an American in December, "get this done by Christmas or else you're fired."
Fair? I think so. Nice? I freely admit it was not.