Just about this time last year, then-candidate Barack Obama repopularized the phrase “lipstick on a pig” in a campaign speech in Virginia, in what some thought was a not-so-nice slap at Sarah Palin, who had just referred to lipstick in her VP nomination acceptance speech. I’ve never been an Obama fan, but I don’t think he was guilty of that one.

And while the idiom “putting lipstick on a pig” may or may not have been a good metaphor for whatever it was Obama was talking about at the moment, the expression was coined PRECISELY for the merger of perhaps the two most dissimilar airlines in the U.S.  – Delta and Northwest.

I’ve had the occasion to fly a lot of Northwest…er, Delta (I guess…who knows anymore?) flights over the last couple of months. Within 30 seconds of boarding on the “new” Delta, one can tell whether the flight is a “real” Delta flight, or a Northwest flight with lipstick rather haphazardly applied.

Only a small part of the noticeable difference is the equipment, the food (LOL), and the on-board amenities, such as they are.

The most glaring differentiator is the people. The people! At the ticket counter, baggage check-in, gate, and most certainly onboard. In general, those who were hired as Delta employees are more helpful, more friendly, and more professional than their Northwest counterparts. It was always that way before the shotgun wedding. Little has changed.

On a real Delta flight, the pilots usually keep passengers informed about delays. On real Northwest flights, I’m not sure what they’re doing up there while we sit on the tarmac, but they’re certainly not talking to passengers.

One interesting observation – one shared by many others with whom I’ve compared notes – is that Northwest employees, in Delta uniforms, spend about 85% of their onboard time griping to each other about their jobs! That leaves only about 15% of their time to grudgingly take care of whatever annoyance the customer might be foisting on them at any given moment. If Delta employees are griping about their jobs, they’re doing it outside the line of sight of paying customers.

The lesson for us manager type people: with all that we’re doing to try to make the best of a troubled set of business conditions, many of which are caused by factors beyond our control, one area where we CAN make a substantial difference is with the people we put…and keep…on the payroll. And how we treat them once they’re there. Delta has always done a better job in that department than Northwest. It’s time the two companies merged – really merged – and quit operating with two highly disparate sets of standards.

To paraphrase another guy who’s lived in the White House, “It’s your people, stupid!”

And don’t you forget it!

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Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/rehadden) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

Today’s managers go thru life feeling as if their lips are wrapped around an information fire hose, a condition we refer to as “Data Waterboarding.”  Indeed, various sources have suggested that email volume alone has now reached a level of 100 billion messages per day worldwide, a majority of which is, guess what… spam.

Having more information than you could ever possibly use, right at your fingertips, is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that, as we approach the decade of the 1’s, there simply aren’t many secrets any more. If you really want to find something out, you can do so, quickly and relatively inexpensively. The downsides? The very second you toggle the data switch into the open position or venture near an open web portal, you experience the digital equivalent of what radio host, Erich “Mancow” Muller felt when he volunteered to be waterboarded in his unsuccessful effort to prove that it didn’t constitute torture.

Even more so than the rest of us, managers experience this at some level every day, dealing with scores (hundreds?) of data impulses that come to them in digital, paper, telephonic, and human form, and many days it indeed feels like torture. “When will I have time to do MY work?” And just like what occurs everywhere else, a lot of this is spam, too. If you’re a part of a larger organization, the “switch” gets toggled for you, as others both inside and outside the organization have virtually limitless ability to dump things into your in-box, ‘er snorkle, and dump they do. Clearly, it’s not all stuff that you need or want.

To show how far we’ve come (notice I didn’t say progressed), my parents’ generation considered it very bad form not to examine and then respond personally to each and every incoming phone call or piece of written correspondence. In fact, my dad still gets annoyed whenever he hears that I’ve “rail dumped” an entire batch of email forwards from certain of his friends. Clearly, for the better part of three decades, we’ve been moving at a velocity and with volumes of input which make that totally unthinkable. So don’t try. Here’s what you CAN do though…

Get ruthless. Realize that, not unlike the function performed by a medical triage manager, you MUST sort thru this stuff, and become proficient at separating the vital (the ones that have stopped breathing) from the merely urgent (slow bleeders) and the folks who are just seeking attention or bloviating (hypochondriacs). Fail to do this, or do it poorly and you will drown. And, consistent with good triage, be clear that a lot of your inbound, a majority perhaps, doesn’t need to be opened or read EVER!

Triage derives from the French term, triagere, meaning to “sort”. The concept was first practiced by Napoleon’s battlefield surgeon, Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, who deduced that having some process by which to best allocate the needs of casualties to limited medical resources would yield much better outcomes. Triaging seems highly applicable to the process of optimizing data flow to the modern manager, as it depends on rapid assessment of need (relevance and quality of data in our case) and rationing of care (time and attention in our case). Managers must constantly bear in mind that, while data is useful to doing their job, it is not the job itself. Moreover, in most cases, having too much data is as debilitating as not having enough. No, it’s worse.

Gen. Colin Powell, one of the truly exemplary leaders of our time has long subscribed to a decision making theory that the optimum practical point to make a decision is when you have about 60% of the available information, AND you’ve expended no more than 60% of the available time. That’s the point at which you’ve likely got sufficient data to make a reasoned decision, and can still take advantage of being an early mover. General Powell’s advice is helpful for another reason as well. It reinforces the value of having not just the right amount of information, but getting it at the right time. Stale data is about as useful as stale bread.

To be continued in our upcoming book, Rebooting Leadership…

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A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows