The Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner is one of the great small-company innovations, right up there with the Blackberry and anti-gravity boots. In a recent post on the New York Times blog Freakonomics, Justin Wolfers reflects on why Roombas, from the company iRobot, aren’t used in hotels. He takes a few jabs at hotel hygiene (personally I’ve found almost all the hotels I’ve stayed in pleasantly tidy, although living with children may have dulled my sensitivity to squalor) and ultimately settles on time scarcity as the most likely culprit. In general, Roombas take longer than human beings to complete their tasks, although they are also more thorough.

I can think of a few more reasons Roombas haven’t been adopted by the hospitality industry:

Cleaning staff might step on or trip over the devices while dusting bureaus and changing sheets, so the Roombas would have to be set in operation after they were gone, requiring staff to return and pick them up later. Fare thee well convenience.

If the maid accidentally left a Roomba in the middle of the floor a guest might trip over it. Hello lawsuit.

The potential for theft. What guest who peeks into an empty room and sees a slick metal soft-shell crab scuttling over the carpet won’t be tempted to snatch it up and stuff it into his suitcase along with the thick terrycloth robe and 400-thread-count sheets?

I do think robots in hotels are a swell idea, however, and would like to suggest two applications that could have more impact on guests’ experience than carpet cleaning.

First, I would vastly prefer to have my luggage carted up to my room by a robot than a human being. One could avoid the uncomfortable elevator conversation (“So, where are you folks from? Phoenix, huh? Well, that’s nice. Good trip in? Well, that’s nice.) Also the obligatory tour of the room. (“Here’s your bathroom. Here’s your coffee maker. Here’s your thermostat. It turns the heat up and down.”) Also, of course, the tip.

You could also avoid a tip if a robot delivered your room service. And of course you wouldn’t have to get dressed again: the robot bearing your tray wouldn’t notice that you answered the door in sweats and no underwear. Nor would it judge you for ordering shrimp cocktail, a banana split, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark.

For some of us, hospitality and anonymity go hand and hand. A robot could deliver just the impersonal service we crave.

I recently received a letter from a young woman who had just landed her first real job and sought advice on being a good employee. Specifically, she worried about how to express her enthusiasm and eagerness to take on challenges without coming off as "overzealous" or "aggressive."

I wrote back that enthusiasm ranks up there with wealth and svelte-ness as qualities impossible to possess in overabundance. Bosses love go-get-'em types, so long as they don't assume tasks that exceed their capacities. Even if your manager suggests you're overdoing it, I assured her, your sincere passion for the enterprise will warm his heart.

But something sat wrong. The woman's anxiety seemed odd, like concern about appearing too cerebral for Harvard or too hot for Match.com. When I pressed her for details, she explained that her new colleagues would include many mid-career employees who felt no urgency to excel. "I don't want to come in as the new guy and have them feel like I'm trying to outshine them, which I am," she wrote. "I'd just like to be aggressive about my career, in a diplomatic way."

Add "emotional intelligence" to the qualifications on your resume. CEOs boast about hiring people who are smarter and more talented than themselves, but employees are less sanguine when a potential superstar joins the constellation. Companies with little turnover, in particular, may breed fat-'n'-happy cultures in which workers have stopped trying to prove themselves and don't want anyone raising the bar. Such status-quo huggers often greet can-do hires with hostility and regard their eagerness to help as "All About Eve"-esque machinations. Leaders, who don't always pay close attention to the intra-office vibe, may assume the whole staff is being revitalized by fresh blood when in fact it is intent on organ rejection.

Widespread grumbling about a new hire may indicate she's a jerk or incompetent; or it may mean staff members find her threatening. Furthermore, if someone who is ardent and ambitious during interviews becomes subdued and hesitant on the job, her colleagues may be pressuring her to tone it down. Leaders must be alert to creeping complacency on staff and make sure they're not tossing bright, flaming matches into cold, dark pools that will extinguish them.

That said, it is possible for new employees to come on so strong they alienate their colleagues, making office life less pleasant for everyone. So I offered my eager correspondent these suggestons:

1. Don't always volunteer for everything, and don't always volunteer first. Let one or two tenured colleagues raise their hands and then raise your own.
2. Don't suggest changing anything fundamental, such as a process, until you have been there at least a few months and understand why it works the way it does and who has a stake in it.
3. Don't hesitate to ask your colleagues substantive questions. Such curiosity is flattering and inclines people to like you. You solicited my advice and I think you're aces.

And a final note to bosses: Most job candidates are anxious to be the best accountant or systems analyst or communications specialist possible. Only a few -- like my correspondent -- are determined to be the best employee possible. You'd be nuts not to give them that chance.

It's a favorite warning of safe-sex campaigners: "Anytime you go to bed with someone, you're sleeping with all his former romantic partners." The business corollary: anytime you hire someone, you're getting the wisdom of all his former employers into the bargain.

Everyone knows that companies have their own individual DNA and that that DNA -- for good or ill -- is inherited by people who work there. Headhunters stalk the executive suites of iconic corporations to satisfy clients hankering for a little of that G.E. or P&G magic. But stars from starry companies aren't the only ones who transfer ideas from old to new employers. With the exception of tabula rasa recent grads, everyone you hire is a product of lessons learned elsewhere. Myopic companies snuff that stuff at the door to hasten cultural acclimation. Smart companies mine it.

Concrete matters like processes (not trade secrets, of course) are relatively easy to extract. If cross-pollination doesn’t occur naturally, you can force it with a few questions. "Any quality metrics you ran across at Allied Alliances that we could use here?" "You started at Sorghum Systems as an intern, right? What specifically did you like about that program?" Often, however, the most valuable insights are more amorphous: philosophies of work or management that transplants have absorbed from former peers and bosses. These leak out slowly, as a natural part of collaboration, mentoring, and casual conversation about the job. My own guidelines for writing are probably 80% cribbed from talented editors I have worked with over the years. I generously share those ideas with any poor schlubs who ask, and they, in turn, benefit from the wisdom of people they've never met.

Releasing the embedded knowledge and experience of employees is an obvious best practice. What some leaders forget, however, is that knowledge they themselves embed is part of their legacy. Every so often a CEO will tell me that he’s thinking of committing his management philosophy to a book, the better to enlighten and inspire emerging leaders. I gently discourage this, chiefly because I’m afraid he's going to send me the manuscript for comment. The argument I make, however, is genuine. A book is probably unnecessary because every day you live out that philosophy -- every worker that you touch with it -- spreads your message more powerfully than any other medium.

Say you are acutely aware of the value of others' time, and so pledge in word and deed to keep meetings short and communications efficient. Say you believe everyone is proud of different things, and so customize your praise to maximize individuals' gratification. Say you feel people work best using systems of their own devising, and so keep company-imposed rules and procedures to a minimum. Many of your employees will appreciate these things, and some will internalize them. That latter group -- issuing out to become bosses in their own right -- will seed their new environments with your ideas, enhanced or modified by their own. You don't have to articulate why you do what you do, although it often aids dissemination.

Of course you won’t get credit for much of that exported wisdom. But surely that's not the point. In your own modest way you are improving not just the practices of your own business, but the practice of business. And you can always imagine that somewhere a former underling, being honored for a grand accomplishment, is accepting the accolades with these words: "Everything I know I learned from Trevor."

I recently attended a staff meeting at a company intent on green-ifying its day-to-day operations. One employee suggested substituting metal cutlery for the plastic forks and spoons used in the kitchenette, provoking outcries about "some people" leaving food-encrusted dishes in the sink. "I understand the concern," the CEO intervened, clearly anxious to move on. "But I think this conversation is getting a bit too dorm-ish."

That word -- "dorm-ish" -- neatly captures the housekeeping trivia that bedevils any group of unrelated adults who occupy a common space for long periods. Even surpassingly professional employees muster extraordinary irritation over such malefactions as purloining yogurt from the refrigerator, leaving printouts to accumulate by the printer, and failing to dump grounds from the coffee machine. Bathrooms are a particularly tetchy subject. Among the most heinous crimes is carrying office magazines or newspapers into the restroom--a practice laudable for its dedication to the job but questionable in terms of hygiene.

Discussion of these issues often arises at the end of staff meetings when the CEO looks around and says, "Anything else before we break?" Or it's touched off by persnickety e-mails. No matter the forum, transgressors are invariably alluded to as "some people." ("Some people, apparently, don't mind working in a rubbish tip, but please be considerate of your colleagues.") Sometimes these messages are pretty entertaining. A few months ago the Office Services group here at Inc. asked employees to remove all food from the refrigerators in preparation for cleaning. The memo's author made one exception: condiments could remain, but only those listed in the "condiment" entry on Wikipedia, to which he helpfully included a link.

Such matters aren't wholly unimportant. A few years ago business author Michael Levine published the book "Broken Windows, Broken Businesses: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards," which argued persuasively that seemingly trivial things - burned-out light bulbs, a perennially broken soda machine - take their toll on employee morale. And of course CEOs want the office looking nice for outsiders. During visits to various companies I've been offered coffee mugs with everything from lipstick stains on their rims to desiccated flies inside.

I also understand the temptation to occasionally join these discussions. Leaders who express interest in the concerns -- even the petty concerns -- of employees appear caring and democratic. Not acting haughty is especially important in companies rich with the trappings of hierarchy, where bosses frequent their own washrooms and sally out to pricey bistros for lunch. Still, you should resist getting involved. Dorm-ish matters are a time sap: once you've weighed in on what kinds of sodas to stock employees will assume you want to be consulted on everything. And there's something undignified about what often amount to protocols surrounding human detritus. Ask your executive assistant or office manager to represent you in housekeeping discussions, by all means. But when someone starts a sentence with: "We've been having a situation with the refrigerator," excuse thyself and get thee hence.

You might also consider buying an additional subscription to the daily newspaper and other key publications and leaving the duplicates in a basket in the bathroom. Some people are bound to appreciate it.

Pierre Bayard's How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read is garnering considerable attention for two reasons. First, the clever thesis. Bayard argues that skimming a book, hearing about if from others, and reading it and then forgetting it are equally valid ways to experience the text as perusing it line by line. (Sorry, English-graduate-student manqué writing here.) Second, commentators consider it an excellent joke to suggest they are talking about How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read without having read it. Most are too careful of their reputations to let the punch line stand.

Now I generally read all the words in a book, often in the order the author wrote them. That's because most books I read fall under the rubric of lit-ra-toor. The reward is in the reading, not in the knowing what was written. And because I'm obsessive-compulsive, I tend to approach business books the same way. What a monumental waste of time. With some exceptions, business books can be skimmed or simply read about - in reviews, articles, etc. - without losing much of the argument or any of the art (where art exists). Many consist of a central idea that a clear and concise writer could lay out in ten or fewer pages. That is interspersed with examples of uneven quality and relevance, the best of which could be culled and significantly edited. Throw in a list of tips or best practices for the action-oriented, and you're good to go.

Certainly there are exceptions. There are rich, insightful--even groundbreaking-business books: books where the originality of thought, the weight of evidence collected and the compelling quality and freshness of the cases studied can change the lives of business leaders and their companies. I'm certainly not suggesting anyone skim the seminal works of Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis, Jim Collins and their ilk. In addition, there are business books so entertaining and zeitgeisty that people-and not just businesspeople-actually want to read them. (Malcolm Gladwell is the master of this oeuvre. Authors such as Chip Heath, Steven Levitt, and James Suroweicki also fall under this category.) A few business thinkers, such as Charles Handy, are excellent writers. My favorite business book is Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein. An enthralling and meticulously researched history, it offers readers something new on every page.

My criticism of most business books is that they are too repetitive - the authors spend chapter after chapter restating their ideas in slightly different ways or from slightly different perspectives, or else applying those ideas to everything under the sun. ("In Chapter 8 you'll discover how customer-based customization relates to strategy; in Chapter 9 you'll learn about its effects on globalization; and in Chapter 10 you'll see its potential to revolutionize health care.") I assume I'm not alone in this opinion of the genre. Yet publishers continue to produce scads of titles: so people must be reading them. I wonder: are they reading them line-by-line, or in the Bayard-ian sense? If the latter, perhaps business books should be redesigned to facilitate how business people actually consume them, the way so many other goods and services have been designed with an eye to the busy executive's lifestyle.

I don't know whether business book publishers have conducted usability studies to see how customers approach their products. Maybe we can help them out. How do you read business books? Line by line? Or do you skim them? Do you scan the index for relevant or provocative subjects and flip to those pages? Do you look chiefly at the chapter summaries or lists of tips and action points? Do you ask your executive assistant to read them for you and prepare an executive digest? Or do you simply find an interview with the author online and pick up the basics in a few paragraphs? How do you decide what books to read? Which do you consider worth reading line by line?

I'd be interested to know more about the habits of business readers. That is, if any have bothered to read to the bottom of this post.

The habits of highly successful bosses.

National Boss Day, which is celebrated by someone, somewhere on October 16, honors "superiors for being kind and fair throughout the year," according to our doughty friends at Wikipedia. "Kind and fair" are good and nice--but most bosses aspire to more than that. Most bosses want to be great.

As a business journalist and perpetual underling, I have been fortunate to observe some truly top-notch bossing in my career. And I've been thinking about what qualities--in addition to the usual skills of motivation, communication, and organization--distinguish my own personal exemplars of the discipline. Here is my list of the universal habits of great bosses.

Continue reading "Good to Great"

It hurts a little when employees move on.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a resigning employee.

Some bosses hate being surprised, but I think it's worse to see it coming. Danielle seems distracted. She's taken a few mornings off with feeble explanations. She and her close office friends are constantly conversing behind closed doors. Last week you offered her a challenging assignment with a distant deadline and she hesitated, as though uncomfortable about committing. She might as well be wearing a nametag: Hello: I'm History.

Depending on Danielle's status in the business the effect of her departure will vary. But even if you're pleased to see the back of her, there's usually a twinge of regret when someone resigns. Maybe you can do better, sure. But maybe you failed her in some way. When it's a valued employee leaving--even for an opportunity you can't provide--resentment naturally mixes with regret. Company leaders want to be bigger and better things, not mere steppingstones to them.

Continue reading "The Departed"

It's enlightened of you to have your employees interview potential hires. Nonetheless, it's driving everyone batty.

When I interview job candidates I always ask: If we had a party, what would you bring? Some people come up with fun answers (one woman who was married to a radio personality offered to supply the DJ). Some offer panegyrics to their acclaimed artichoke purée with garlic pita crisps. Some say, "The napkins." And some look annoyed and ask me what I'm getting at.

I've always justified the party question as one that provides insight into a candidate's personality. And it does--a little. Mostly though, I ask it when I still have 10 minutes to kill before shuffling the poor applicant off to his or her next meeting. That's after I've dutifully reeled off the same six or seven unimaginative questions ("What kinds of things would you like to work on?" "What accomplishments are you most proud of?") that everyone before me has already asked and everyone after me will ask again. As the candidate trots out an answer that probably felt fresh when he sat down with the CEO three hours ago, I wonder what exactly I'm supposed to be adding here.

Continue reading "No Further Questions"