Did You Reboot It?

I think most people understand the idea of rebooting a computer if it freezes or starts doing weird things. However, rebooting is no longer just about computers. Smart devices are everywhere, and most of them are just small computers: phones, microwaves, cars, TVs, refrigerators, toys, clocks, and many others. They all share one characteristic—from time to time, they need to be rebooted. Whenever a device is not working correctly, before I call support, I try to remember to reboot it first. Unfortunately I don’t reboot certain devices because I forget that they are computers.

The entertainment center in my new car had been working fine, but one day it completely locked up. It would not respond to any button. I called GMC support, and they told me to take it to the dealer, which would be a real pain. I searched the internet and tried various solutions, including pressing different combinations of buttons. I read the manual. Then I remembered my “reboot it” rule. It was a computer, so there had to be a way to reboot it. After a little more research, I discovered that the only way to completely reboot it was to disconnect the car battery for fifteen minutes. I did, and when I reconnected the battery, everything worked perfectly. It just needed a reboot.

I wasted several hours because I forgot to ask myself, “Hey, have you rebooted it yet?” No, I had not. GMC did not tell me to reboot it; they wanted me to drive one hundred miles to the dealer. The AI tools I consulted suggested all sorts of possible solutions, but not a reboot. The car manual did not contain the word “reboot” anywhere in its 256 pages. I found fifteen internet articles about frozen entertainment systems, and none of them said, “Reboot the damn thing.”

I ran a software company for forty years. Hundreds of times, a support person asked me to help solve a technical problem with our software that they had already worked on for a long time. Sometimes I would start digging into the problem until I remembered to ask, “Hey, did you reboot their data server yet?” The answer was frequently no, and rebooting often fixed it. It became almost comical how often we had to say, “I forgot to reboot it.”

For whatever reason, a reboot often fixes the problem. Almost everybody knows it, but we all frequently forget to do it.

If You Can’t Figure It Out, Check Your Assumptions

One of my favorite phrases is, “If you can’t figure it out, check your assumptions—one of them may be wrong.” I have discovered that more often than I would think, there is a faulty assumption.

In my 20s I was a negative, critical, unhappy person. I worked extensively with Lee Shulman, a therapist, and learned a great many life lessons. However, I wasn’t making progress as fast as I would have liked. I couldn’t figure it out—Lee was brilliant and we had fantastic sessions. I remembered “check your assumptions.” I believed that if I learned enough about how to become a happier person, the knowledge would get the job done. Nope, not true. One has to convert the knowledge to action. The assumption that knowledge alone was enough was wrong.

My wife and I went to a wedding in Hawaii. I had a customer who rented condos in the area, and I traded some software for a week in a luxury condo. We arrived on Maui about 11:00 p.m. and made our way to the condo by 12:30 a.m. It was a 20-story building, and the condo was on the 14th floor. When we walked in the door it was very hot, almost like a furnace. The sun had been beating into the unit all day and the air conditioning must have been off. We looked around—no A/C. It was still warm outside and opening the windows didn’t help. I had assumed a luxury condo in Hawaii would have A/C. I didn’t even bother to ask. We ended up in a nice hotel nearby and the wedding was great.

I couldn’t find my dog at my ranch. He always stuck close to the house, but he was nowhere to be found. My wife and I and others looked everywhere, even on the neighbor’s property where he likes to visit. Six hours passed, it was dark, and we were very worried. Had somebody kidnapped our dog? Then my neighbor called. “I found your dog. He was sleeping in the henhouse with the chickens.”

I had walked by that henhouse three or four times, and the door was tightly closed and appeared locked. I didn’t look inside because I assumed there was no way a dog could close a door. I had also assumed that my silly dog would respond to me calling his name as loudly as I could from about ten feet away. Apparently sleeping with his newfound chicken friends was more important.

Follow the Electrons

I often find myself trying to solve a problem but not coming up with a solution. After a while, I noticed that I was trying solutions as they came to mind, in random order, with no logical pattern.

A customer called support. The problem appeared simple: They were trying to print a bill for a guest at checkout, and nothing was printing. I tried the usual solutions—rebooted the computer, rebooted the printer, etc. I asked myself, “Is there a better way to solve this problem than randomly trying stuff?”

To print a bill, there was a chain of events. The data existed on the main computer at the hotel—the data server. This data had to get from the server to the printer through a number of steps. I thought of the data as “a bunch of electrons,” and to solve the problem I had to “follow the electrons” from where they originated—on the data server—to where they were supposed to end up—on the printer paper. This gave me a systematic way to go about solving the problem. Somewhere along the line, those electrons were being stopped, and I had to find out where.

The first troubleshooting step was to verify that the server was working. Next, the electrons had to travel through the cable from the server. Was that cable connected? Then they had to go to the router. Was it turned on? Going step by step and following the electrons quickly led me to the problem.

We had a company meeting every Wednesday afternoon to go over support problems and solutions. I presented “Follow the Electrons” at one of those meetings. My message was: “Try the obvious stuff first—reboot it, see if it’s plugged in, etc. But if that doesn’t work, organize the problem-solving by following the electrons from where they started to where you want them to go. Troubleshoot step by step.”

For me, “Follow the Electrons” is much more than a computer software troubleshooting technique. It reminds me:

1. There is a way to solve or improve most life problems.
2. The solution isn’t randomly trying self-help books, research, therapy, black magic, or any other technique that comes to mind.
3. Most life problems can be solved or improved by thinking in terms of: “Where am I now? Where do I want to get to? What are the steps along the way?” There is a path, and my job is to discover and follow it.

In my 20s, I was very negative, and I wanted to become positive. I wanted to get from A to B, and there were steps involved, just as those electrons had to get from the data server to the printer. I didn’t know how to start that journey. Eventually I was able to discover what steps were required along the path to becoming the person I wanted to be, and start doing those things.

I have become a very positive person by following the electrons.

If Your Life Depended on It, What Would You Do?

Some problems just do not seem to have a solution. I may think about a problem many times over a long period, and no solution comes to mind. Then I remember something someone told me a long time ago: When confronted with a problem you cannot solve, ask yourself, “If your life depended on solving this problem, what would you do?” I find that a solution often comes quickly to mind, but I had not previously considered it because it was unconventional, violated social norms, or whatever.

When I was running my software company, I noticed that my employees and I were constantly bombarded with email. I would come to work with an action plan for the day, but then I would open my email and dig in. I could easily get lost responding to messages or just deleting them. As I worked on email, more came in. The next thing I knew, the day was gone and none of my original action items had been completed.

I once had a meeting with my sales team. We had lost our personal relationships with many customers, and it was hurting sales. At the end of the meeting, we agreed that immediately upon leaving, each salesperson would call their three most important customers and arrange an on-site visit. A few hours later, I stopped by one salesperson’s office and found him busy answering email. I asked which three customers he had called, and he said, “Oh, I haven’t done that yet because I got some email.” I said, “But we agreed that you would immediately call three customers.” His response was, “But I got email.” It was like a trump card in bridge. It did not matter what I, the boss, wanted—email was more important. It seemed impossible to get control of email despite many meetings and conversations about priorities. Email always won.

I could not solve the problem until I asked myself, “What would I do if my life depended on it?” The answer came immediately: I would turn off general email for all employees. Every message would be directed to one person, who would delete all the crap and forward only critical emails that matched my priorities. If the immediate priority was for everyone to call important customers, the central email clearinghouse would forward no emails until the calls were completed.

There were many reasons this idea had not occurred to me. It was unconventional. It treated employees like babies. It would not be well received. But when I asked, “What would I do if my life depended on it?” a solution came to me quickly. There was a way to solve the problem. The question now was whether I really wanted to implement it.

I do not blindly follow the solutions I come up with when I ask, “What would I do if my life depended on it?” The point is that I now have one or more solutions to consider rather than none.

Don’t Try to Solve Complex Problems with Text and Email

I’m 73 and grew up long before cell phones, texting, and email, but I’m not a dinosaur by any means. I spent forty years in the computer business and became very good with technology. Used properly, technology can greatly increase productivity. Used incorrectly, it can delay problem-solving in two different ways. First, people may use email to pass responsibility to someone else. Second, they may try to explain and solve a complicated problem through a long email when a conversation would be much faster and clearer.

I remember when our biggest and most important customer had a major problem. Our hotel software system was completely down, and the customer’s business came to a halt. Employees could not check guests in or out, make reservations, or perform many other essential functions.

The problem had begun more than twenty-four hours earlier with a call from the customer to our technical support department. The first support person could not figure it out, so he sent an email to a senior technical person. Unfortunately, that person was home sick, so the email sat in his inbox and nobody was working on it. The first support person had passed the problem along, and in his mind, his responsibility ended when he sent the email. If he had really been focused on solving it, he would have called the senior person, discovered that he was sick, and escalated it to someone else. The email merely gave him a good excuse: “I emailed a senior technical person. I did my job.”

Since the first phone call had ended with an email to a sick person who was not reading email, the customer called back four hours later. Another support person took the call and worked hard on the problem but could not solve it. His solution was to spend an hour composing an eight-page email to me. This person was not using email to pass the buck. He was being responsible and genuinely trying to help, but that was the wrong approach for such a complicated problem.

When I started reading the email, I found it confusing and immediately had many questions. I read only a few paragraphs and then noticed that the author was sitting twenty feet away from me. I never finished the email. Instead, we talked about the problem and brainstormed. In about fifteen minutes we solved the problem and got the customer back in business. I had an open-door policy. He could have simply walked over.

Imagine if it had been 1990, when we did not have email at our company. The first support person would have walked into my office and said, “Our most important customer has a critical problem.” I would have dropped everything, gathered the right people, and solved the problem in fifteen minutes instead of twenty-four hours.

I have been able to integrate this concept into my own problem-solving. When I find myself writing a long text or email about a complex issue, I stop. I go see the person or call. Unfortunately, I was never able to implement this concept very well throughout my company. I held many meetings harping on the subject, yet employees continued to send emails that did little to solve the problem. The temptation to send an email rather than hold a meeting or make a phone call was simply too powerful for me to overcome consistently throughout the company. The lesson was easy to understand and very difficult to implement.

Sometimes You Just Have to Wait

I like to solve problems, and I am good at it. However, there are times when I have done everything I can and the next step is to wait for something to happen.

I remember working on a very large deal for my software company. I had been pursuing it for months. I had given multiple demonstrations and talked to virtually everyone at the prospect’s company. We finally reached price negotiations, and the prospect asked me to make my best offer. I prepared a final contract containing the price and other important terms and sent it to the decision-maker. I had done everything I could. The ball was now in his court.

The best thing I could do was wait for his response. However, waiting feels like doing nothing, and doing nothing is very difficult for me. I kept thinking, “Maybe I should call him and sweeten the deal, remind him of the important features, or try something else.” But any of those actions would have amounted to negotiating with myself. I had already made my best offer. Calling again could only weaken my position.

Jack Reacher is one of my favorite fictional characters. In one of Lee Child’s books, Reacher is waiting until three in the morning to attack the bad guys. His thought is essentially, “Waiting is a skill, like any other skill, and I’m good at it.” So he takes a nap. I had never thought about waiting that way, but the idea resonated with me. I began to think of waiting as a skill I could develop, just like making a good PowerPoint presentation. When I find myself thinking, “This is an important deal. I can’t just sit around doing nothing,” I now remind myself, “That isn’t true. I am doing something. I am waiting.”

Learning to wait when the ball is in the other person’s court has proven to be a valuable negotiation technique. I also use this idea when I am trying to convince someone to do something and have become angry. When I am angry, I tend to become aggressive and say or do things that are unlikely to help—and may come back to haunt me. Even when it is my turn to respond, the best response may be to wait until I have calmed down.

Waiting is still hard for me. I often have to remind myself that waiting is not the absence of action. Sometimes waiting is the best action I can take.

Send a FedEx Letter

In many situations, I am competing with a lot of other people for something I want. I may be pursuing a great job opportunity along with one hundred other candidates. Or perhaps an important product I just bought is not working correctly, and I cannot get it fixed.

Consider a job application. The world has changed. People apply electronically, résumés are AI-generated, and interviews happen over video. How do I stand out in this environment? One way is to send a FedEx letter to several key people at the company.

Although it is very old school, I have always found that a FedEx letter is a powerful tool. As the owner of a company, whenever FedEx delivered an overnight letter, somebody would bring it straight to me. There was something almost magical about it. It reached my desk quickly, and I almost always opened it immediately.

If I really wanted the job, I would find the decision-maker—not just someone in Human Resources—and send a FedEx letter with a simple message such as, “I want to work for your company and believe I could be a great employee. If possible, please help me get an interview.” The exact wording is not important, but it has to be short. When I opened a FedEx envelope, I probably would not read more than twenty words. If the first letter did not work, I would find four other people at the company and send each of them one. I still might not get an interview, but I would no longer be just one of the hundred people applying for the job.

My company was having serious problems with a new phone system. It kept crashing, and the vendor’s support department could not fix it. I sent a FedEx letter to the president of the company. There was no anger or threat in the letter, just a simple and reasonable request for help: “I know you are busy, but we just bought your product and cannot get it to work correctly. I know somebody who works for you can fix it. Can you help us?” Someone placed that letter on the president’s desk the next morning, and he opened it with his coffee. By 11:00 a.m., the head of the support department had called me. We finally received the attention we needed, and the problem was fixed by 2:00 p.m.

Many People Are Bad at Their Job. Find One Who Isn’t

I have discovered that many people are bad at their job, and I can waste a lot of time dealing with them. The key is to find someone who is smart enough to solve my problem rather than continue working with someone who cannot. This applies to technical support personnel, teachers, repairmen, doctors, lawyers, and almost everyone else.

I recently wanted to upgrade my iPhone through AT&T. I tried to do it on their website, but the site would not accept my shipping address even though it was valid. I was forced to call support. After spending too much time on hold, I reached an agent and spent twenty minutes getting nowhere. It was clear that this person was incompetent and would not be able to help me. I asked for a supervisor and was told no, so I hung up and called back. The next agent was obviously not very smart either, so I quickly hung up again. The third time, I reached an agent who I could immediately tell was smart. She solved the problem quickly.

I wasted twenty minutes with the first agent because I forgot that many people are bad at their job and continued working with someone who was obviously incompetent. I could have worked with the first person forever and never gotten a phone.

Most companies now use artificial intelligence to handle customer-service problems. AI is good at the basic ones and is getting better at the harder ones. However, when the problem is complicated and important, I have learned that my time is often best spent finding a human being at the company who can actually help. The more difficult the problem, the less likely it is that the first person I contact will be able to solve it.

I have seen this technical-support problem both as a caller and as a provider of support. I founded and ran a software company for forty years. In the beginning, I handled all the support problems, and our customers received great service. As the company grew, I could no longer deal with every problem, so I hired support personnel. I implemented a good training program, but some employees were simply much better at support than others. The quality of the service began to depend on who answered the phone. I hated that fact because I wanted to provide great support to everyone, but facts are facts.

If an issue is very important to me, I try to get the attention of the company’s founder, president, or whoever the top dog is. That person usually cares and either knows how to solve the problem or can direct me to someone who does. Sometimes I can find out who the top dog is, call, and have that person actually answer the phone. If that does not work, I may send a FedEx overnight letter that says, “Hey, I know you are busy, but can you help me?” Top dogs usually open overnight letters, and in my experience, most will help. I know I always did. If a customer managed to reach me and treated me with respect, I always got the problem solved.