In Full Bloom

M&A Observations: Whither Goest Genesys?

Late-breaking news. Genesys’ buyer is PeopleStrategy, the current owner of Integral Systems (which was Dave Duffield’s predecessor company to PeopleSoft, so we’re going back here to the mid-80’s for it’s heyday). PeopleStrategy is led by Randy Cooper, who also led the buy of Genesys for Salary.com. Randy is very experienced with that generation of HRMS, having previously acquired Tesseract for Empagio, and it may well be that his latest of the late adopter installed base will be well-served by this aggregation of older HRMS brands. Never a dull moment at the intersection of HRM and IT.

Run For The Exits

It was announced yesterday that Salary.com had completed the divestiture of the Genesys business for $2.5 million. They had bought this business at the tail end of 2008 for a damn sight more at what were then considered fire sale prices from the former owners of Genesys, primarily Larry Munini, who was also the founder and CEO of that Snowdon of Yesteryear.

Many of us thought Kent Plunkett had made a strange tactical move when he bought the former Genesys, but his strategic vision of delivering an entirely integrated system of record and talent management suite wasn’t at all strange. As you all know, that’s a part of the HCM product strategy of everyone from Workday (from the SaaS ERP community) to SuccessFactors/Softscape/SilkRoad (from the talent management community) to Lawson/Oracle/PeopleSoft/SAP (from the legacy ERP community).

The most interesting aspect of this second fire sale of a long-since depreciated asset is that the buyer has insisted upon anonymity. Since every customer will learn at some point who their new vendor is, and then we’ll all know, one has to wonder at what type of buyer would need such secrecy. Is it Larry Munini coming out of retirement under cover of darkness? Is it Vista Partners buying this thing to fold quietly into their well-run Accero/Cyborg? Is it some Indian firm hoping they can reverse engineer the beast over the weekend and make it part of their US middle market BPO platform?

Genesys is so traditional a US payroll, and not a payroll engine, that it’s hard to see its buyer thinking otherwise, but then there’s one born every minute. And clearly the folks at Salary.com who did the deal to buy Genesys underestimated mightily what it would take to derive value from this asset while overestimating their ability to do so.

If I were a Genesys customer, I’d be running for the exits. But then these folks should have done so years ago. If I were Lawson, I’d be doing a targeted campaign if Genesys is still serving any healthcare customers as they once did many. Can’t wait for the next chapter to the Genesys saga.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” — Let’s Change That In Chicago

The more things change, the more they remain the same doesn’t sound as romantic as the French, but it’s a reasonable translation. So it is in many aspects of life, and so it is especially in my little corner of the professional world, at that intersection of HRM and IT where I’ve been camped out since the flower power van broke down there in the 60’s. Here’s some of what hasn’t changed:

Many HR leaders are still trying to find a “seat at the table” when they should have long since owned the table;
Much of IT (formerly DP) is still trying to make the business case for investments that are as fundamental as fixing a leaking roof when they should be replacing their own roof with ones that integrate solar-collection technology that generates more energy than they can use (yes, that’s just one of the things going on in true cloud data centers);
Far too many HR systems implementation projects are still running over budget and schedule in spite of PMOs, project management software, methodology consultants, change management consultants, because the HR folks doing them are almost always doing them for the first time and/or working part-time on these projects while still doing their “day” jobs;
The majority of HR professionals still haven’t implemented systemic approaches to competency-centric HRM regardless of how much talent management software they’ve bought;
Most CFOs are still insisting on “hard” savings (that means headcount and cutting already budgeted line items like hardware or outsourcing fees) when what’s really needed are the very business outcomes that come under the heading of “soft” benefits because they’re what should happen in the future rather than cutting out a cost that we know happened in the past;
Oligopolistic software, hardware, consulting, etc. vendors have still got many customers by a body part not appropriately mentioned in a blog post written for mixed company; and
Analysts/influencers/people in the know continue to wring their hands — see, I’m wringing my hands — over all the progress we must still achieve.

To be fair, I’ve seen enormous progress in the course of my career, both in the practice of human resource management (HRM) and information technology (IT). My neighborhood has been electrified, given phones, then mainframes, then minicomputers, then PCs, then networked servers, then networked everything, then virtualized servers operating somewhere “over the rainbow,” now smart phones with the power of those early mainframes. Tons of technology, oodles of HRM thought leadership, and going on five decades of hand wringing by most everyone involved (except for vendor sales and marketing folks) about why we’re not making even more progress.

But now something really monumental has happened. Something really has changed, for good and forever. Now there are no projects failing quietly or vendors behaving badly in secret. Now there are no missed business outcomes going undiscussed nor HR leaders failing to lead without anyone noticing. Now every employee, every worker of whatever flavor, is able to contribute to the conversation. They can tweet, blog, flickr, youtube, etc. about what’s right, what’s wrong, what works and what doesn’t, and how to improve things — and they’re doing it in droves. Social tech has given everyone a voice, and I for one think that, amids the noise, great ideas will spread like wild fire.

And those former hand wringers? Those industry folks, like me, who’ve wished for more progress in making HRM the driving force behind achieving business outcomes? We’re now at the front of the social tech pack, blogging for action. Whether all these voices telling the tale and advocating for change are smart and insightful or just ill-informed and loud, only time will tell. But now you get to decide because you too can take to the social tech speakers’ box at the corner at HRM and IT.

My hope is that the noise will be overtaken by the collective intelligence and that, before I’m too old to care, real urban renewal will take place at the corner of HRM and IT. I like this neighborhood, always have, and I see the promise and the progress. If you’d like to join me at our next neighborhood block party, perhaps take to the speakers’ box at what’s otherwise known as the 2010 HR Technology Conference, I’d love to see you there. It’s my 65th birthday celebration, but this time you get the present. If you’re one of the three people who haven’t yet received it, you can download the conference brochure here. When you register, use the promotion code INFULLBLOOM (in ALL CAPS), and you’ll get a $550 discount. Not a bad birthday gift in these tough times.

M&A Observations: StepStone Solutions Acquires MrTed — Who’s Next

Just in this morning was the announcement that StepStone Solutions is acquiring MrTed in what appears to be a very congenial coming together of two prominent European players in the talent management software market. In the interests of full disclosure, StepStone is a client with whom I’ve been working actively as this deal was getting finalized.

MrTed has been focused exclusively on talent acquisition, and founder/CEO Jerome Ternynck, a valued colleague, has long championed the position, with which I never agreed, that talent acquisition should be a separate, not integrated talent-related application. There are some aspects of talent acquisition that do argue for a more external focus and connect points when these applications are viewed narrowly as recruiting. However, my own view is that there is also a critical internal focus and far too many internal touch points between talent acquisition and the rest of talent management, not to mention between talent acquisition and the system of record, to enable a quite separate talent acquisition solution to be connected properly without a lot of expensive to maintain and quite fragile interfaces.

From sharing KSAOC profiles of the relevant jobs, positions and work units you’re trying to fill, to sharing the relevant assessment techniques for determining and measuring those KSAOCs as they appear or don’t in external and internal position seekers, to drawing upon the system of record’s organizational structures for knowing who may do what to whom during the talent acquisition processes, the list of shared data and processes is quite long and growing as organizations get serious about integrating their talent management processes for maximum impact on their business outcomes. While it’s certainly possible to manage talent acquisition as a silo, I have never thought that was a durable or even desireable approach. One important outcome of this acquisition could be a more integrated set of global talent management capabilities from a financially strong vendor presented to MrTed’s and StepStone’s customers.

MrTed has also been built, from the ground up, to be multi-tenant SaaS from an architectural, deployment and business model perspective. Such a true SaaS focus and experience base continues to be a rarity in the HCM software industr, in spite of the fact that most of our vendors now claim to be SaaS when they are really hosted, subscribed and largely single tenant. True SaaS has been a major differentiator for MrTed on several levels, but the firm lacked the scale and resources to leverage fully these assets at a time when scale is critical to maintaining momentum in a very competitive neighborhood.

These true SaaS capbilities, and MrTed’s very desireable customer base of about 100 large, global enterprises, may well explain StepStone’s interest in MrTed. It may also explain, when combined with MrTed’s commitment not to stray into the broader talent management space that it claims as its own, why Workday had chosen to partner so publicly with Mr Ted. One must wonder if Workday will view a partnership with StepStone Solutions as positively, with MrTed now in the hands of a much more broadly focused, globally established and financially robust StepStone.

StepStone Solutions, which also had its origins in talent acquisition, has offered a complete talent management suite for some time but hasn’t been viewed as having the same degree of true SaaS “chops” as some of its competitors. Furthermore, StepStone hasn’t had the same degree of brand awareness in the US, especially among the larger, more complex organizations which form the bulk of MrTed’s customers. Where MrTed’s Jerome Ternynck is well-known in HCM industry circles within the US, Matthew Parker, StepStone’s CEO, and his company are much less so, a level of brand awareness we should expect StepStone to raise pretty sharply over the coming months. And with one of their major European competitors, perhaps their most successful such, now in the StepStone Solutions set, StepStone now faces a much less challenging European talent management landscape. It also picks up considerable new competitive strength against it’s US-centric talent management suite competitors as well as the opportunity to sell its broader talent management applications to MrTed’s customers.

This increase in competitive strength and product offering should also serve them well in the emerging markets, like China and India, which are so important to all of the major talent management vendors. With the legacy ERP/HRMS vendors delivering ever more talent management functionality and doing so without requiring full suite upgrades in order to consume that newer functionality, the developed economy markets that are saturated with these ERP/HRMS implementations can be a more difficult sell for integrated talent management suites.

Because I’m under deep NDA as regards StepStone’s product strategy, I’ll defer any comments until released from that NDA. But true SaaS platforms, like MrTed, are the present of HCM software, and SaaS InFullBloom is the future. Enough said.

I think this is a very good and strategic acquisition for StepStone Solutions, always assuming that the price is right and that no nasty gremlins are lurking in the acquired assets. With Jerome staying onboard as an advisor and the reportedly positive reactions of both firms’ employees, there’s a much better than average chance that the combined company will be able to retain both talented workforces and customers, to include those customers running on StepStone’s own talent acquisition solutions even as they see the power of true SaaS in MrTed’s.

If you’re a current customer of MrTed or StepStone Solutions, you can be pleased that you’ll now be supported by a larger, more powerful vendor with big plans for the future. If you’re an end-user on the look-out for talent management software, StepStone Solutions becomes a more global, more SaaSy, more US-visible possibility for you. If you’re a competing vendor that hasn’t achieved sufficient critical mass at a time when $100 million in annual recurring revenue may be table stakes for a talent management suite vendor trying to compete for complex mid-market to global enterprise deals, this new StepStone Solutions is just one more example of your own need to bulk up. And if you’re an end-user depending on one to many smaller talent management vendors to round out your HCM software platform, you may want to revisit the viability of your smaller vendors in this consolidating landscape.

It wasn’t the first, and this is by no means the last consolidation we’re going to see in the HCM software/services market. I expect to hear (and not because of any direct knowledge or involvement with them in this area) that Salary.com’s substantial embedded intelligence and quite good talent management applications have found a new home, probably separate from their old Genesys-based, latest possible adopter business. We’re all waiting to hear what Mr. Icahn has in mind for Lawson. TriNet has hired a corporate development executive out of their PE firm, General Atlantic, whom we can guess will be on the lookout, among other possibilities, for roll-up opportunities among the PEOs. And I think that Sonar6 would make an attractive acquisition. I could speculate further, but I’ll leave that for your comments.

In Search Of HRM/HRMDS/HR Tech “Best” Practices: France/Spain

The Glory Of Carcassone At Night

Ron and I will be traveling again from 6/25 through 7/17 (life is short!) mostly in the Languedoc and Dordogne in France and on the Med coast of Spain between Valencia and Barcelona. We’ll be soaking up “best” practices in HRM, the HRM delivery system and HR technology every step of the way, to include during visits with Row Henson, the Oracle Fellow who has been a leader with the PeopleSoft HCM product since she was its first head of product strategy back in the day, and Graham Barnes, who was the founder/CTO of BMS, Ltd. (later sold to ADP) when he was the first licensee of B&W’s HRM domain model “starter kit.” Many thanks in advance to our friends for their hospitality, not to mention formal briefings on the listed topics.

I’ll be doing some tweeting from “the road,” @InFullBloomUS, but I may not have time to blog for a while. When I return, I’ll try to do at least two blog posts about our wanderings, one that’s a travelogue and one that’s a portrait of some good to great professional practices that we’ve observed. On this trip I hope we’ll be moving slowly enough for me to do a little sketching/watercolors along the way, so perhaps I’ll have something with which to illustrate these trip posts. I have absolutely no artistic talent, and I’ve only had a very few hours of instruction, but I would love to be able to do the type of travel journals published by widely-collected artist and personal friend Diana Gessler, http://www.dianagessler.com/newbooks.html in her wonderfully illustrated books and articles. Perhaps that’s something I can work on if there are no major industry developments while we’re traveling.

By the way, to all the 2nd story men who are reading this blog, our life sitter will be in residence while we’re on the road, as always. And you don’t want to mess with her fella.

The Future Of HRM Software: Embedded Intelligence

Hi, I'm Naomi, your friendly HRM consultant

There’s an easy way to describe what I mean by embedded intelligence. Conjure up a memory of the best, most knowledgeable, most effectively consultative and strategic thinking HR leader you’ve ever known. Now conjure up a memory of that master of regulatory options and obligations, that HR administrator who really knows the innermost details of all your organization’s HRM policies, practices and plans and how to make them work for you. Now imagine these two wondrous beings living inside your HRM software and bringing all of their KSAOCs to bear on whatever you’re trying to do or should be trying to do in the people management business. That’s the spirit of embedded intelligence. We could call her Naomi, your friendly and very knowledgeable HRM/HRMDS consultant “in a box.”

If you’re an employee making what appears to be a simple change to your home address, Naomi would tell you, from inside the person indicative data processes of your HRMDS software platform, that:

The new home address you’ve just input is simply incorrect (e.g. you’ve got a typo in your zip code or there’s no such street address) — and here’s how to fix it;
There are income tax withholding changes as a result of your new home address — and here’s what they are;
The HMO in which you’re enrolled doesn’t have jurisdiction at your location — and here’s what you need to do to select and enroll in a new HRO or other health care plan for which you’re eligible;
You’re no longer going to receive the mass transit subsidy to which you’ve been entitled because it doesn’t apply to your new location — and here’s the amount by which your gross and net pay will be affected.

Naomi doesn’t just tell you what the issue/problem/error is, she takes you by the hand (really routing you through workflow) to the appropriate next steps in completing your business event, to include addressing all of the related ripple effects.

If you’re a manager getting ready to interview a high profile candidate for a tough to fill position on your next generation software architecture team, then Naomi would tell you, from inside the staffing processes of your HRMDS software platform:

All that’s known about this candidate — and what more you may want to know as a part of your evaluation of her;
Why the position in question is tough to fill, the efforts already made and the filling experience-to-date — and how you might adjust either the position attributes or the related total compensation entitlements of compete more effectively for these scarce KSAOCs (if they are indeed scarce);
What the KSAOC profile is of those working successfully in this type of position and what the desired KSAOC profile is for this particular position — and how you might adjust those profiles in light of available developmental resources within the organization;
What questions are best for getting at the specific KSAOCs which you’re seeking when used in an interview format — and what other interviewers have already asked and their notes on those responses;
What your own track record has been in making hire decisions in terms of the downstream performance and retention of those hires — and what you might consider changing in order to improve your hire decisions; and
What you may and may not ask subject to the regulations of the relevant geographic jurisdiction — and the list goes on.

Embedded intelligence, AKA Naomi, replaces, in highly automated HRM delivery systems, the human intelligence that was inserted in much more manual HRM processes when you were lucky enough to have only the very best HR professionals at your disposal, when and where you needed them.

There are many different types of intelligence that can be embedded, to include static and dynamic content, personalized and context-sensitive content, business rules and process knowledge, alerts and triggers, actionable analytics and benchmarks. When considering how best to organize, prioritize, make investment decisions and then implement embedded intelligence, it helps to have some type of a taxonomy. The one I use starts with the easy to do and gets progressively more difficult to accomplish as their impact on achieving business outcomes becomes more direct. My embedded intelligence taxonomy is:

User inquiries to standard text;
User-initiated standalone data changes (with attribute, event and context edits) with generated inquiries to standard text;
User inquiries to personalized text;
User-initiated standalone data changes (with attribute, event and context edits) with generated inquiries to personalized text;
System-initiated distribution of standard text;
System-initiated distribution of personalized text;
Personal life, work life, or organizational life event initiated chain of event data forecasts and/or changes (with attribute, event and context edits) with generated inquiries to standard text;
Personal life, work life, or organizational life event initiated chain of event data forecasts and/or changes (with attribute, event and context edits) with generated inquiries to personalized text; and
External events with generated inquiries to standard or personalized text.

Then repeat all of the above, adding a strong advisory component, along with the relevant analytics, to each.

What’s desired is intelligent (as to content, context, business rules, analytics and advisory), pro-active, organizational role (e.g. employee or position seeker or beneficiary) and work role-based self service (e.g. manager of a specific team regardless of the team manager’s home position or generic call center representative position). It’s via embedded intelligence that we take self service from data entry to self sufficiency.

Embedded intelligence replaces what we lost when we removed the best HR professionals from most interactions with individuals and managers/leaders (or removed them altogether) — their knowledge of business rules, good practice, context, agreed upon corporate culture, regulations, labor contracts, management preferences, business unit-specific considerations, etc. It improves upon human embedded intelligence by also removing human inconsistencies, errors, misinterpretations, incomplete answers, dated information, biases, lack of availability, institutional knowledge lost through terminations or retirements, etc. Automated embedded intelligence reduces greatly the organization’s exposure in all situations where evidence of having trained/told/confirmed the relevant rules/policies/regulations at “point of sale” is an important element in preventing and/or defending against unacceptable behavior by a member of the workforce. Today, embedded intelligence is expected in any self service environment with those expectations set by commercial Web sites like Landsend.com, Amazon.com, and social Web sites like Wikipedia rather than by enterprise applications software.

The business case for embedded intelligence includes:

Further administrative cost savings, reduced compliance exposure and reduced cycle times — and this can make or break a shared services of BPO provider;
Improved “customer satisfaction”;
Increased business literacy for better decision-making;
Improved business outcomes from total compensation expenditures;
More effective deployment of KSAOC-rich non-employees;
Improved career-management decisions and outcomes;
Improved productivity of individuals and groups;
Improved selection and retention decisions and outcomes;
Improved HRM performance metrics and actions;
Better definition and organization of work;
Better definition and organization of work roles;
Improved forecasting, modeling and development of needed KSAOCs;
Improved generation, selection, deployment and retention of KSAOC-rich persons;
Improved generation, collection and deployment of organizational knowledge and social networks;
Greater motivation of the workforce toward desired behaviors and KSAOC growth via targeted total compensation plans and work environment programs;
Creation of a work environment that removes barriers to and encourages effective performance;
More effective labor organization relations; and
Better day-to-day coaching, mentoring, assignment, development planning and performance appraisal.

If this sounds like embedded intelligence goes to the heart not only of improving the total cost and quality of service delivery but also of improving strategic HRM, which is critical to achieving organizational business outcomes, you’ve got it in one!

So which HRM software/HRM BPO vendors are doing this well? Great question. Several of the benefits administration providers have embedded quite a lot of content within their benefits enrollment processes which can be passed through the HRM delivery system of their clients. Several of the most established HRM BPO providers, in an effort to reduce the volume, time to resolve, exposure to errors, and cost to support call center traffic have also made a dent at the basics of transactional edits and some embedded content. A few talent management software vendors have worked hard in this area, but most have neither the resources nor the expertise to get as far as they might like. We are starting to see partnerships between major HCM consultancies and talent management software vendors whose purpose it is to embed the consultant’s intelligence within the TM software, at least for clients who sign up and pay for the enhanced capabilities. And there’s a lot more coming if what I see cooking in the backrooms is a predictor. With more and more similarities among the features/functions of the TM software vendors (although their actual capabilities, in terms of their applications architectures and foundational object models remain VERY different, and there are also big differences in their strategies/progress toward SOR/TM/social tech convergence as well as their process and global footprints), I believe that the push for embedded intelligence will be a source of considerable differentiation over the next many years. Without Naomi “in the box,” HRM software has a long way to go to catch up with Amazon.

Father’s Day Thoughts: Remembering Jack Samuel Bloom

Yahrzeit Candle

From my Dad I inherited:

his ability to tell a good story, to make a point while making you laugh;
his commitment to active friendship, the kind of friendship that does what you need even when you don’t know you need it;
his belief that any day on which you wake up is already a good day, that the gift of life is too precious to waste; and
his habits of meticulous book-keeping, calendar-keeping, and commitment-keeping.

From my Dad I inherited his love of reading and the sheer joy of opening a new book. Later I discovered that for me, being rich would mean being able to buy any book I wanted to read and never having to browse in second-hand bookshops unless I was looking for treasure. Jewish families like ours, in the early 50’s, bought their children a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, one volume at a time on a payment plan that they could scarcely afford, so that their children would be better educated than they were. I remember my Dad reading that encyclopedia cover to cover, Aardvark to Zebra, even the boring bits (and there were many such), and perhaps that’s where I also learned that reading some books was about more than having the pleasure of meeting their words.

My Dad taught me to swim almost before I could walk by carrying me on his back as he swam from the gentle shores of White Sands Beach, CT to the floating dock in the waters of Long Island Sound. I’ve loved swiming and being in/around the water ever since. I have no fear of the ocean’s waves and can still feel his support whenever I’m over my head.

We buried my Dad on my 50th birthday. He spent just a few days in hospital, having not been ill before his unexpected collapse just as I was about to deliver a presentation at that year’s SAPPHIRE conference in Phoenix. My Dad was a perfectly ordinary man to whose funeral came hundreds of people we didn’t know who had been helped by him, quietly, without ever asking. In his retirement, it appeared that he had “adopted” older members of our schul who needed rides to doctors’ appointments, help paying their bills, or just an hour’s companionship. Without the means of major philanthopy, he found the means for active philanthropy.

By the time I launched my own business in 1987, the cost of long distance calls, so daunting when I first left home, were much more affordable, and I called him most days in the late afternoon. Those calls always started with:

Dad: How’s business?
Naomi: Business is great.
Dad: Are your clients paying their bills on time?
Naomi: Yes, they sure are.
Dad: Are their checks clearing the bank?
Naomi: Absolutely.

When you know that those early clients were firms like Bank of America, Hewlett Packard and International Paper, something my Dad certainly knew, this ritual opening to our calls goes from being merely odd to very odd, unless you also know that being a small retailer all his life shaped forever my Dad’s view of Accounts Receivable. From there we’d go on to the events of his and my day, and to what was happening across the Bloom family and the larger Jewish community in which I grew up. I don’t remember my Dad ever calling me — long distance calls were for emergencies only — but I know he loved my calls because he reported on them to the group of men with whom he ate breakfast every day at a local deli.

I’ve always said yahrzeit for my Dad at the appropriate times in our Jewish calendar, but I’m missing him very much on this Father’s Day. If you’re lucky enough to still have your Dad, don’t wait for Father’s Day to call him.

In Search Of HRM/HRMDS/HR Tech “Best” Practices: Istanbul To Venice — Field Report Part II

Regent Seven Seas Mariner Underway

The first part of this post was a personal report on our recent travels. In this second part, I want to share what I learned about our industry’s “best” practices along the way. More specifically, I want to describe some of the HRM practices that Regent Seven Seas uses to deliver a consistently high quality customer experience on board their cruise ships. We took this cruise because of the great itinerary, heavily discounted and all-inclusive pricing (to include airfare, tipping, open bar etc.), but Ron and I aren’t likely to sail on one of these largish ships (700 guests on the Mariner) any time soon because of our dislike of mass market travel that so affects the experience of seeing new places. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Regent and the lovely Mariner to anyone for whom this type of cruising — upscale, gracious accommodations, fantastic service, wonderful food, country club ambience and crowd, and well-organized but larger group tours without benefit of any onboard cultural/educational programs — would be just the thing.

The first thing we noticed when our taxi arrived at the Mariner’s dock in Istanbul was the speed and graciousness with which we were greeted — and the complete lack of tipping. Porters appeared to handle our luggage, a ship’s officer appeared to welcome us aboard, and we were greeted with champagne flutes as we joined a well-organized flow of boarding passengers in the theater for “on-boarding.” As soon as we had been “processed,” in what was a very efficient and again gracious manner, we set out, ship’s deck plans in hand, to find our suite. Yes, suite. All the cabins on this ship are suite-like in their size and amenities, to include our own balcony, walk-in closet, full size head (bathroom to you landlubbers), seating area, desk, etc. Great first impression.

Within minutes, our luggage arrived, our cabin stewardess had introduced herself and asked what else we might need to settle in, and someone else appeared to let us know that luncheon was being served at our convenience. By then we had interacted with a dozen or more staff members of various responsibilities, and everyone had a smile — a real smile — and seemed genuinely happy to see us. And because there’s no tipping, we felt entirely comfortable interacting with everyone without the eternal barrier of having each such interaction be a financial transaction. With tipping removed from the equation, staff become colleagues very quickly as we collectively get ready to sail. As our trip progressed, I couldn’t help but notice that the excellent level of service NEVER failed. From line handler to maitre d’s, from cruise director to the laundry person into whom I nearly bumped, no one on the Mariner team ever seemed overly tired, frustrated, distracted, ill-trained or wishing they were somewhere else. And I was never fobbed off on someone else when I asked for something. Whoever was the recipient of my request, even when they were obviously not the right person to resolve it, saw the matter through to closure, calling on their colleagues as necessary. Wow!

This was a level of customer service the likes of which I’ve rarely seen, and the fact that it was consistent for ten days and shared by every other passenger with whom I spoke, was almost too good to be believed. So, with Bill Kutik as my spirit guide for skepticism, I began asking a lot of questions about Regent’s HRM practices, believing that the magic began and ended with HRM — and I was right. Here’s what I learned about the HRM practices of Regent Seven Seas, to include from many crew members who had worked on a wide range of other cruise lines with quite different practices:

Crew are well-compensated compared to other cruise lines, to include what crew would get via their tips on these other lines.
Crew greatly prefer the no tipping policy because it removes a barrier to their interactions with customers, making them guests rather than customers, so there’s much less awkwardness not only about requesting service but also about delivering it.
Crew accommodations on a Regent Seven Seas ship are about twice the size of those on more mass market cruise ships in space per crew member and house fewer crew members per cabin with even the lowest level (in terms of the type of work and compensation) being housed comfortably.
Crew meals are also superior on Regent Seven Seas ships and are eaten in more comfortable surroundings and on better schedules.
When in port, many to most (depending on the port, weather conditions, length of stay in port, the nature of a crew member’s assignment, and many other factors), crew members do get enough time off to explore, and there appeared to be low-cost or no-cost transportation provided in several of the ports where local circumstances required the ship to be at anchor or docked some distance from the town.
Regent schedules crew leaves, where possible, with an eye on the distances from home their crews must travel and what time of year might be best for a visit to those home countries.
Promotion from within is very common, e.g. our housekeeper/cabin steward was training (and boy was she talented) to become a member of the evening entertainment troupe (there was a special evening show that showcased the talents of the non-entertainment crew called “Crew Capers,” and it was wonderful), one of our waiters in the very elegant French restaurant on board had been promoted recently from wait service in the main buffet restaurant, and the bios provided on senior crew all spoke of their promotion through prior roles with Regent Seven Seas.
Cross-training is also very common, e.g. the crew person who served drinks one afternoon on the upper sun deck appeared later that afternoon as wait staff for early diners, the deck hands piloted the ship’s tenders when we anchored out, and the reception desk staff handled everything from financial matters to emergency preparedness.
With dozens of countries and even more languages represented among the crew (which is common in the cruise ship industry) and English the required lingua franca, language lessons are not only provided but also scheduled to fit the many different shifts needed to achieve the 24/7 service levels needed on a cruise ship.

Regent Seven Seas is considered by all the crew with whom I spoke — and Ron will tell you that I was “interviewing” everyone I met — to be a “best place to work” if you love the cruising life. Reflecting on what I learned about their organizational design, staffing strategy and execution, total compensation approach, opportunities for advancement, work environment programs, crew development and many other aspects of HRM, there’s such an obvious connection between the wonderful cruising experience they deliver to their customers and their engaged, high quality and satisfied workforce. What employer could hope for or use HRM to achieve more?

Legacy HRMS/Legacy Marriage: Sunk Costs Versus Innovation

From The Terrific Web Site http://www.erpgraveyard.com/

: Al and Tipper Gore by Steve Mack/FilmMagic

Two completely unrelated conversations over the last week caused that ding ding thing in my brain that happens when the dots connect themselves and I have an aha moment. One of those discussions took place on a radio talk show I heard while driving to a meeting. The other was a courtesy call with the HR and IT heads of HR systems at a firm we’ll call LargeFinancialOrg. The aha is that there’s a great deal in common between the breakup of a long-standing marriage and that of a long-standing ERP/HRMS implementation, to include weighing the sunk costs and comfort with the known against the urgent need to innovate and the discomfort of the unknown.

Legacy Marital Breakups

The first conversation was part of an NPR program on which various experts were discussing their own, the media’s and the public’s reactions to the announced separation of Tipper and Al Gore. They were talking about the characteristics, back story, and broader impacts when long-standing marriages dissolve, and whether or not “till death do us part” is even an appropriate goal at a time when we’re living so much longer than when those words were first spoken. Putting aside all of the religious beliefs and moral sensitivities around marriage, not out of any lack of respect for them but just for the sake of this blog post, I was struck first by this weighing of:

sunk costs (e.g. all the shared experiences, the established financial/relationship/lifestyle interconnections); and
comfort with the known (e.g. with the known behavioral strengths/weaknesses, standard of living, perceived value and status); against the
desire for innovation (e.g. to find oneself beyond the established roles of parent/spouse/helpmate/etc. to follow a long-held lifestyle dream, to eliminate long-standing problems in the marriage which were papered over by shared responsibilities and commitments, not to mention familiarity); and
discomfort with the unknown (e.g. where will I live? how will I support myself? will my friends stick by me? what will the children think? etc.).

I was also struck by the two themes cited consistently as the major contributors to long and continually satisfying marriages. There may well have been many other points raised, but as I look forward to Ron’s and my 38th wedding anniversary later this month (you’ll have to ask him whether he’s also looking forward to this milestone), these two major themes really resonated:

enjoying learning/doing new things together, and actually learning/doing a lot of them; and
communicating frequently and effectively, even if one of the parties is more often the initiator/facilitator (and here all the female experts on this program said — big surprise — that the female party takes on this role more often than the male).

There was also a lot of discussion about how hard it is to unravel a marriage of forty years, e.g. figuring out how to distribute and/or continue to share the joint friendships and family relationships not to mention the financial and property assets, personal momentoes and even pets. There are so many personal, financial, real property and other connections developed over a long marital lifetime that just thinking about how Ron and I would ever deal with unscrambling all those interfaces and replacing them in a new context gives me a headache. And the experts said that this burden of unscrambling, this dealing with the sunk costs, is often enough, especially in the face of great discomfort with the unknown and absent the urgent desire to innovation, to motivate long-married partners to try a little harder to reconnect, rejuvenate, and recommit to their marriage before tackling all the unscrambling and knowns that come with divorce.

But the concensus of the experts on this program was that there really does come a point in even many successful marriages where the needs of one of the partners, again often the woman (and here they pointed to hard data), for new experiences, a new sense of herself, a fuller expression of who she is apart from daughter/mother/wife roles and, yes, a little more spice in her life, makes unraveling all those connections and facing those unknowns well worth the effort. Even Sally Quinn, one of the experts on this program, who is a long-standing friend of the Gores and is herself in a long-standing marriage, couldn’t explain what lay behind the Gore separation, but she was convinced that the breakup was a good thing in spite of the heavy lifting that divorce would bring. While some were saddened by the news and saw these changes as fraught with peril, Sally was full of hope that the separation would unleash a new period of vitality, of personal fulfillment for both Al and Tipper, but especially for Tipper.

Deciding if and when to end a long-standing marriage, a legacy marriage, is not a casually made or easily implemented decision. It’s a much easier decision (and easier for everyone around the couple to understand) to end an abusive marriage, one in which one of the partners is addicted to something unpleasant, or a marriage which was doomed from the start by immaturity, a complete lack of common values or purpose, poverty, etc. But when a marriage has been a positive experience for both parties, has reaped many of the benefits of such a marriage, and has been woven over many years into the fabric of each other’s lives, many people made of lesser stuff than the Gores just continue to lead lives of quiet desperation, of agonizing unfulfillment, of mild to severe unhappiness rather than do the heavy lifting — and we’re talking HEAVY lifting — of working their way out of this unsatisfactory but well-known situation and taking a leap forward but into the great unknown. How many have the courage to make that leap? How many are able to reinvent themselves along with the disolution of their long-standing marriage? It’s still early days for the post-marital breakup evaluation of Al and Tipper Gore, but I for one admire the courage and grace they’ve shown in moving forward without forgetting the good times or devaluing their long-standing, successful marriage just because it’s not the best fit for them now.

Legacy ERP/HRMS Breakups

The second discussion was a courtesy call I did with the former client of a colleague who’s retired. The firm, which we’ll call LargeFinancialOrg, like so many mid-market and larger organizations, has a huge sunk cost in a highly customized implementation of one of the major ERP/HRMSs. They’re now running on a no longer supported release and have been growing, over many years, one-off add-ons, manual workarounds, inadequate outsourcing arrangements and who knows how many shadow systems to handle all the business needs not met by their core HRMS. Let’s not talk about the costs of all this nor about the risks they’re taking that they’ll be able to handle the effects of regulatory activism on all things HRM, but at least the ongoing costs are high enough that there’s a push underway to DO SOMETHING! It’s also worth noting that they haven’t got, by their own admission, anything like the talent management or analytics capabilities that might move the dial on their business outcomes nor have they followed the Yellow Brick Road to create a strategic HRMDS plan that would give them a leg to stand on in deciding on the right direction under the mandate to DO SOMETHING!

IT at LargeFinancialOrg thinks it’s a no brainer, low risk, low cost move to simply upgrade their ERP/HRMS to the current release, bring payroll back in house (after all, if you’ve outsourced to someone who can’t handle a firm your size/complexity, then of course outsourcing is the wrong move!), and just get on with it. The two terrific HR/IT leaders with whom I spoke want very much to do something else because they see the huge costs/pain/risks of the proposed upgrade as just getting them to the current release of a legacy, no longer leading ERP/HRMS, not to mention all the unknowns around future vendor investment in that legacy ERP/HRMS as the vendor shifts focus to their shiny new next gen ERP/HRMS. Instead, the HR/IT leaders would like to move to a next gen SaaS InFullBloom HRMS from a much younger/smaller vendor, but one of impecable pedigree and a growing number of glowing client references. They’re very clear that their ongoing but legacy ERP/HRMS “marriage” has served them well over many years but that this isn’t the desired software platform for their future. They’re also painfully aware that doing anything other than an upgrade in place means unscrambling years of interfaces, interconnections, learned customization habits and the skills to implement them, sunk hardware costs and ongoing production expenses that would now be spread across fewer applications thus raising those costs for other legacy application users. The list of things to unscramble is long and terrifying when looked at without an understanding of the business outcomes that you’re trying to optimize, and they loom much larger in many HR/IT folks than do the potential business outcome-producing benefits of making a major leap forward. But without a strategic HRMDS plan that builds the business case for innovation and accepting some discomfort with the unknown in order to achieve that innovation, the obvious and very large sunk costs and comfort with the known are really compelling reasons to just stay on the legacy ERP/HRMS upgrade path.

Making a long-standing ERP/HRMS “marriage” continue to be successful requires, among many other factors, two of the themes that the NPR experts said contribute to the ongoing success of long-standing human marriages:

enjoying learning/doing new things together, and actually learning/doing a lot of them: in the case of the ERP/HRMS marriage, this means that the vendor provides very frequent updates that can be consumed easily and cost-effectively, with functionality opt-in and few barriers to learning/using the new capabilities, so the exact opposite of the massive, costly, every several years upgrade of our legacy licensed/on-premise ERP/HRMSs; and
communicating frequently and effectively, even if one of the parties is more often the initiator/facilitator: in the case of the ERP/HRMS marriage, this means that the vendor lays out their product roadmap several releases into the future with enough specificity that their customers can plan for the frequent releases and avoid making near-term investments in alternative solutions when they can see clearly when those capabilities will be available from their primary platform vendor, so again the exact opposite of the legacy ERP/HRMS vendors’ vague roadmaps and unwillingness to commit to specifics except when the big Kahuna upgrade release is ready.

Just as with the unraveling of a long-standing and previously successful marriage, the decision to end a long-standing ERP/HRMS “marriage” isn’t an easy one — nor should it be. And it also shouldn’t involve castigating the vendor or software that has served us well over many years. But there does come a time in many long-standing human and software marriages when the case for innovation is so strong that the discomfort of the unknown, accepting the sunk costs, and the challenges of unraveling that marriage are more than offset by the anticipated and much-needed benefits of taking the leap. With ERP/HRMS marriages, the business case for making such a dramatic leap must be grounded in achieving the business outcomes of the organization, not just in administrative cost reductions or the desire for something shiny, buzzy and new.

I obviously believe that many human marriages can be successful over the long term, but then I married The Wallace. If our legacy ERP/HRMSs and their vendors had adapted over the last forty years as well, as quickly, and with such grace to the changes in technology and human resource management, to our changing expectations of what software should do and should cost, as The Wallace has adapted to the changes in our lives, then there would be no need to take the innovation leap with a new software partner.

In the interests of full disclosure, I don’t know Al or Tipper Gore although I did support him for President; we are major donors (major at least without our budget) to WGCU public radio and television, which is the local home of National Public Radio (NPR); many of the current and legacy HRMS vendors, ERP or otherwise, have been and/or are our clients; Ron and I really will be married 38 years on 6/30/2010, and he would say that boredom has NOT featured in our relationship although he might crave the odd moment of peace and quiet; and my recent Twitter exchanges with valued colleague Jim Holincheck made clear why this post was important to write ASAP.

The Middle Market Is Bipolar!

Metaphor For Complexity

We often do things in human resource management not because they’re important but because they’re needed and easy to do. A glaring example is the way in which HRM software vendors and outsourcing providers describe their target markets — and the way, by reflection, in which those same organizations describe themselves. The presumed similarity in HRM needs across organizations, including the need for HRM software and outsourcing, is most often defined in terms of employee headcount or organizational revenue ranges. Depending on who’s doing the defining, what I like to call “the vast middle market” is variously described as between a feww hundred and a 1,000 FTEs/employees/headcount (often without further definition) at the lower end and between a few thousand up to 10-20,000 at the upper end. There are no clear and consistent, industry-wide ranges, let alone definitions of which heads to count, but widely-used market research data forces software vendor attention to the particular ranges use by those firms while outsourcing providers, especially the larger ones, segment the market to reflect their own histories and service offerings.

For very small (a hundred or less) or very large/global organizations (25,000 or more), almost any definition of headcount or revenue ranges can be a good way to group organizations in terms of their useful HRM similarities. At the low end of the range, there are very few dimensions of complexity simply because there isn’t enough going on to create complexity. And for large organizations and/or extensively global organizations, there’s so much going on that almost all the relevant dimensions of complexity put in an appearance. But market segmentation/sizing by headcount or revenue ranges is a far less accurate predictor of similarities across organizations when you’re dealing with the vast majority of organizations in the middle ranges.

For “the vast middle market,” useful similarities are more dependent on specific organizational complexity factors than on size, and to miss this distinction creates many misunderstandings about customer needs, buying behaviors, risk tolerances, and influences. So, whether you’re an end-user doing some benchmarking and looking for a meaningful sample of similar organizations, or you’re an HRM software or outsourcing vendor trying to focus your efforts on the best target markets for your products or services, target market complexity analysis is a far more powerful and accurate approach than making simplistic assumptions about organizational HRM similarities on the basis of headcount or revenue.

But what are these complexity factors? I’ve been developing my working list of same over the last 20+ years, and they and their definitions really haven’t changed very much. What has changed quite dramatically are the implications of these factors for how we segment markets, derive business requirements, design marketing and sales programs, design HRM software and outsourcing offerings, and really every aspect of our businesses. Here’s a good chunk of my list to get you started thinking about how you might apply complexity analysis in your organization:

Size (not to be ignored, but not to be overused) — in terms of key entity occurrences (e.g. number of employees) and event volumes (e.g. number of yearly new hires, terminations), etc.;
Industry — where specific industries, e.g. higher education, agriculture, construction or financial services, have common needs because of common regulation, similar workforce demographics, similar HRM practices, etc.;
Diversity of business operations — in terms of the number of truly different businesses operating under a corporate umbrella;
Complexity of business operations — where the number of different products, sales channels, supply chains, R&D requirements, raw material scarcity, and many other factors produce HRM complexity;
Diversity of business context — with respect to value chain, labor market factors, importance of branding, importance of capital, etc;
Organizational model — e.g. cohesive or conglomerate, centralized or decentralized, matrixed or hierarchical or team-based;
Methods of organizational growth — e.g. organic, M&A, regulated, legislated, and/or ramping up;
Rate of organizational growth — in revenues, profits, new product introduction, geographic expansion, and partnering — and in related head counts;
HR operating model and governance — including roles and reporting relationships of generalists and specialists, use of shared services and/or call centers, degree and integration of outsourcing, approach to “customer” inquiries, how budgeted and/or charged back, degree of strategic HRM really practiced, etc.;
IT operating model and governance — including roles and reporting relationships of generalists and specialists, use of common vs. local IT products/services, degree and integration of outsourcing, approach to “customer” relationship management, how budgeted and/or charged back, degree of strategic IT really practiced, etc.;
Geographic/geopolitical dispersion — extent to which the organization is highly centralized or dispersed geographically and/or geopolitically, as well as the specific geographies in which the organization conducts “business”;
IT dependence — extent to which the underlying business depends on IT for product creation, distribution, etc., e.g. financial services is heavily dependent while mining may be less so;
Regulatory complexity — extent to which the organization is affected by legislation, regulation, labor contracts and other external constraints on its HRM activities;
HRMDS’ IT maturity — degree of maturity in the understanding and use of IT within the HRM business, including its breadth of automated functionality, logical integration, user involvement, and leverage achieved;
Nature of the work — e.g. heavy industry, low-skilled services, production line, individual contribution, health care model, etc.;
Nature of the workforce — e.g. full-time regular, part-time regular or term, contingent, unionized, transient, highly mobile and educated, long service, etc.;
Value of HRM and IT — the value top management puts on HRM and IT, and how central they view these disciplines to the success of the organization;
Strategic HRM — degree to which the HRM business as well as the HRMDS have a strategic focus and capabilities versus a predominately administrative focus and capabilities;
HR/IT partnership — the quality of the partnership among HR and IT management and professionals with respect to the HRMDS; and
HRMDS pain — the level of need/pain and other incentives within the overall organization as well as within the HR community to warrant substantial attention to the HRMDS.

Just consider two, several thousand person organizations, one of which, what I call a “big little”, is a landscape maintenance firm covering several counties in Florida, with thousands of new immigrant hourly landscape workers. The other is a “little big”, a benefits consultancy cum benefits administration outsourcing provider with a couple of thousand mostly salaried professionals in offices across eighteen countries and the rest of their workforce, mostly CSRs, in service centers located to span the globe as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. If you think about the HRM policy/practices/plan needs of these two firms, they are quite obviously different. If you think about the HRM delivery system, HRM software and outsourcing requirements that they might have, again the differences are substantial and obvious. But with roughy the same size workforce, both firms would be caught up in the same market segment in much of what passes for market research in our industry.

These complexity factors and the cross-organizational similarities they reveal can be exploited by end-users for benchmarking, for understanding industry-specific requirements in HRM and the HRM delivery system, for determining which “best” practices can/should be adopted, and for considering which software vendors and/or outsourcing providers are really focused on them. They can also be used by HRM software vendors and HRO providers to define their target market, design software/delivery systems which can work well across their target market, and focus their business development and sales activities. When applied to the vast middle market, it becomes very obvious just how bipolar is this very large group of organizations. Using complexity analysis, we can quickly determine which organizations are really big littles, i.e. not very complex, and which are little bigs, i.e. quite complex in spite of modest volumes. And once you see these differences clearly, many relevant research, analyses, and business decision-making efforts become much easier and more likely to be successful.

Note: The wonderful graphic above was found at http://www.1000topics.com/metaphor-for-complexity/ whose author freely admits that he too just came across it but gives no citation, nor could I find one one my own.

In Search Of HRM/HRMDS/HR Tech “Best” Practices: Istanbul To Venice — Field Report Part I

Istanbul was Constantinople, now it’s Istanbul.

Ron and I were traveling from from 4/30 through 5/17/10 from Istanbul to Venice, soaking up “best” practices in HRM, the HRM delivery system and HR technology every step of the way. I did some live tweeting from “the road” and sent frequent travel bulletins to friends and family. I had planned to write a field report on the return flight and then get it posted right away, but as so often happens to me, life got in the way of my blogging. First, a rotten head/chest cold picked up from Typhoid Mary, who coughed her way through the flight from Venice to Miami and should never have been allowed on aboard the Swiss Air flight, not only killed the return flight in terms of anything productive but then laid me low the entire first week after my return. I’m still chuggy so hope attendees of the Knowledge Infusion Webinar I’m doing this week will excuse my dying frog voice. Piles of client work, trying to follow way too many excellent vendor user conferences being live tweeted by colleagues (more on some of what was not too heavily dissected by others in later posts), and a very tough diagnosis for a very close friend greeted my return even as I was only operating on a few cylinders. Now, with the passage of time, I realize that I must do two field reports, Part I on the travel itself, which was amazing, and Part II on the more serious professional observations. And even with that, I’m going to have to do an update to Part I when the Wallace has finished annotating the complete photographic record of our travels on SmugMug. So on with Part I, in beta.

Our Istanbul hotel, the Sirkeci Konak, in the old city, was fabulous. Very well-located, their own hamman, complimentary apple tea (the only tea I’ve ever found that I wanted to drink, so we brought back pounds), modest but very comfortable rooms, and an amazing included breakfast. Sipping apple tea in the afternoons to the music of the Elbonian flute player, you knew you weren’t in Fort Myers.

First impressions of Istanbul were very positive — the skyline is all minarets, one more beautiful than the next, there are loads of young people strolling the parks that line the coast (Sea of Mamara and then the Bosporus), some women wearing traditional headscarves and long dresses, but many did not, and a wonderful looking fish market that’s a little like Pike Place in Seattle but with real flying Karamazovs.

Our tour guide Anka (Society of Travel — an award-winning local tour company) was terrific. Smart, funny, and a great representative of her multi-cultural, secular, rapidly-evolving Istanbul. We learned a lot about the history of the Turks, how every great innovation/invention originated with the Turks or their mishpochim, and how even the Navaho Indians are considered mishpochim. Turkey is a cultural/religious melting pot, over a couple of millenium rather than just a few hundred years like the US, where you can tell a family’s social and financial status by their rugs. They have a strict separation of church and state, and they are also like us in terms of their fervent commitment to democracy and to that separation. Interestingly, their traditionally secular government has been taken over by a more religious-leaning party, and they’re quite afraid of the possibilities. Turkish food is wonderful with lots of vegetables. Unlike Spain, where they sneak ham into every dish, there is no pig meat on offer here because it’s forbidden in the Muslim faith. Great for a Jewish girl from Florida.

Our first full day in Istanbul was nonstop. First up an early morning, get ahead of the crowds visit to the Domabahce Palace. It has the largest Baccarat crystal chandelier in the world, and there’s also a Baccarat staircase not to mention tons of other Baccarat chandeliers, sconces, standing lamps, you name it. We climbed up/down/all around until even Ron’s legs from flat Florida were aching. Then on to the Haghia Sofia, a giant church turned into a mosque (we’re talking way back when), the Hippodrome and a quick run at the Blue Mosque. When we saw how many stairs were involved for the tour of the Blue Mosque, we took a pass on the full experience and headed for the Turkish Museum.

You’ve never seen antique rugs like these. At the Museum, we studied rugs and rug-making through the centuries, learning what to covet. Planning for our second day, I was told that there would be rugs to buy that Ron could carry home strapped to his back. They also ship, but I always love returning from a trip with Ron doing his sherpa routine. I think I could have been quite happy as a Sultaness.

We drove along the Golden Horn, which is a wonderful bay that’s lined with parks. Everyone was out on Sunday, and it’s a pretty religious area so many of the locals were in the most orthodox interpretation of their dress codes. Designer headscarves look really wierd with frumpy, trenchcoat-looking schmattas that go to the ankles. But who am I to say? We learned that this whole burka business isn’t in the Koran at all but is centuries of interpretation of one pretty vague phrase. No offense to any religion, but that extensive interpretation is a little reminscent of how the laws of Kashruth in Judaism have been extrapolated from a few modest suggestions in the Torah. One other impression. When the calls to prayer are chanted, it’s so like davening. I found myself wanting to join in.

Monday 5/3 we spent another day touring in Istanbul, having really lucked out with our guide. We hit two synagogues for which we had made previous arrangements with the chief Rabbi of Istanbul, one of which is a museum showing the truly amazing and very long history of Jewish life in Istanbul. I didn’t know that, when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, along with the Muslims, the Ottoman Turks sent an armada to rescue those being driven out, welcoming as many Jews as chose to come. And at the still operational synagogue, we ran into a group of college students with their professor so got a lot more Jewish Turkish history than we otherwise would, not to mention some fantastic davening. Those prayers came back to me as the voices of the young people filled the shul, so I joined right it. My sister Marsha was glad to know that I left money for both of us in each synagogue, something we do everywhere we go.

On Monday we also visited the Spice Market, where Ron bought enough spices mixed to his orders (what would be good on grilled vegetables? what about pan roasted fish? another for roast chicken? do you like this one? is it too hot? after an hour of which my tongue could no longer taste itself!) to last us a lifetime. Even vacumn sealed, their smells pervade everything within 200 feet. Then on to the Grand Covered Bazaar, and it was overwhelming. 8,000+ shops. We had lunch at Hamdi, famous among the locals for its food and views over the Golden Horn and Bosporus. All we could eat for three, with uniformed waiters, linen everything, for just 50 Turkish Lira (1.5 TL per 1 USD). Can’t wait to return because there were so many things that we never got to try.

The highlight of Monday was meeting a Jewish rug merchant (don’t start laughing yet) whose firm is working with the government to ensure that the weavers, otherwise a dying breed, can stay in their villages by providing schools, health care, and great wages. Yes, we bought a rug, but to call it a rug is to miss the point. This is all silk, traditional zillion knots per inch, and colors and pattern to die for. We restrained ourselves on size, so bought top quality but in quite a small rug that we’ll hang on the wall. It’s museum quality, but I’m still going to walk barefoot on it before it gets hung. Or maybe we’ll just use it and to hell with posterity.

On Monday night, we wandered alone through the old town last night near our hotel and had another wonderful meal on the roof of some hotel into which we just wandered. There was a large group of Aussie tourists, all decked out in harem outfits, who had been to see Gallipoli. They were from Sing Australia, and boy did they ever. Aussies are party animals first class, which we remember fondly from our cruise on the Murray River, and we always enjoy running into them.

Have I mentioned the calls to prayer? We rose with them and went to sleep with them, and it took me back to schul with my Dad so many years ago. I loved the sound of the men’s voices davening, and the muezzins must study at the same yeshiva.

On Tuesday, 5/4, we boarded the Seven Seas Mariner, landed in the lap of luxury and were a little overwhelmed. There’s nothing you can imagine wanting that doesn’t show up even before you’ve thought of it. The ship is gorgeous and huge compared to our experience with sailing charters and very small ship cruises. Food — fantastic. Cabin — beyond expectations (even has a real walk-in closet). Since the dinner menu in the main restaurant included Empire kosher chicken with carrot tzimmes, not to mention potato pancakes, I think the Borsht Belt crowd’s children and grandchildren have simply relocated. Again for Marsha’s benefit, all the right labels are on prominent display, none of which are in our closet. And off we sailed to Mykonos.

It didn’t take us a full day with the Mariner crowd to realize that Ron and I are NOT mass market tourists. We enjoy the gentle poking around that lets us develop a sense of place and people in our travels, and that’s something you simply cannot achieve when accompanied by busloads of total strangers descending on each place you want to see.

First up was Mykonos, where we anchored out and were tendered ashore. Everyone has to report to the theater to get their tender assignments, which involves a lot of lining up and waiting with hundreds of people. Since we hadn’t signed up for a tour, we were in the group of independents who were allowed to take the tenders only after all the organized tours had been tendered ashore. You can imagine my reaction. I hate crowds and lines, and all I could think of was that my brother-in-law Irwin hates that stuff as much as I do. Bloom Tours does not subject its very select clientele to such inconveniences. But we finally got ashore and were able to walk into the town without benefit of a tour guide. Excellent! Tacky tourist everything, and tavernas that were trying hard to be what you expect in a taverna from having seen the movie Shirley Valentine. But Mykonos has a truly spectacular setting. We walked and walked, around and around, through narrow cobbled lanes with houses built so close together that their bourgainvilla bushes were nearly intertwined. The design of the town is defensive, dating from the pirate raids of old, and it works. There’s no getting out until you’ve passed every shop about four times. It’s a beautiful and peaceful place, if you can get past the shop people calling to you at every turn (although the Greek shop people are MUCH less aggressive than their Turkish colleages) until the cruise ship hordes descended. I know I’m a snob (Ron, of course isn’t), but I couldn’t get any sense of place with all those people barging around looking for tourist plunder.

Next up Kusadasi for Ephesus, and I let Ron go on his own to visit the ruins because all the ship’s tours sounded far more challenging than I can manage — and Ron reported that I made the right decision. He had a very good guide and was able to visit the newly excavated Terrace Houses, so he had a great day. Meanwhile, I did my favorite thing, wandering around Kusadasi, talking to strangers in languages I don’t know, learning what life is like somewhere else.

On to Santorini, which is so spectacular that not even our pretty disinterested guide (a beautiful young man who knew it and took for granted that he could just go through the motions), the stop for an included Greek snack at a bus tour restaurant that we wouldn’t go to otherwise on a bet, or the rushed time in Ia (the most beautiful village on the island, not to mention the home of some really great jewelry shops for which there wasn’t enough time) could detract from the experience. I did slip away in Purgos, a town on Santorini, to wander on my own (I took the flat road while the guide took everyone up, up, up), wandering into a bakery none of whose products I recognized, and then talking with a local woman who was kind enough to show me the inside of her typical cube home. These are the moments I cherish in travel, as well as visiting the major sights with a little quiet in which to absorb them. And while Ron is less vocal on the subject, he is no less enamored of mass travel than am I. The return to the ship — clambering up, up, up until we reached the cable car station — made us painfully aware that we really didn’t want to be part of such large groups. But Santorini is truly worth another visit, maybe a long visit. No wonder Shirley Valentine never left.

Katakalon is the gateway to ancient Olympia, Greece the chief sanctuary of Zeus. This is where the ancient athletic competitions that we know as the Olympics were born in 776 AD, but only after nearly 1600 years of less formal competitions. These ruins contain the Temple of Zeus, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Strolling past the training grounds, gymnasiums, baths, and all the infrastructure needed to support these competitions, I could almost hear the voices of those athletes from so long ago. They weren’t just competiting for the love of sport; this was the way in which the ancient Greeks avoided war among their neighbors. Every four years, the best of the best came to duke it out on the playing fields, with great honors going to the winners. How I wish that our modern Olympics could have replaced all other forms of combat.

Corfu was wonderful. We bagged the planned tour and just wandered into the old town on our own, walking up and down the narrow alleyways which are very Venetian in atmosphere. It’s a tourist town for sure, with tons of shops carrying all the usual: honey, olive oil, everything conceivable made from olive oil (like soaps) and everything conceivable made from olive wood (like the coasters we bought for our new boat). But it’s a truly lovely town on a lovely island. From our stateroom balcony, we could see the mountains, some of which were snow-capped and all of which were covered in evergreens, which make up much of Corfu and cover the surrounding islands. They are dotted with villas, and we learned that many Europeans, especially those from northern countries seeking the sun, have second homes here. Just to get calibrated, in these parts, the so-called New Fort dates from the 1600’s.

As we were steaming past the shores of Albania, we saw wierd battlements and other modern reminders of recent conflicts that took place here or simply the remains of paranoia. Lots of gun emplacements and bunkers. There were also partially finished developments and soviet-style apartment buildings that were really depressing, even from afar. But the waters were very clean, and the surrounding mountains impressive. No stops planned for Albania, which gets very few tourists. Passing Serande, Albania, a large city climbing uphill from the harbor which consisted of zillions of identical 8-story apartment blocks, we saw a lot more gun emplacements. Has anyone every attacked Albania?

And so the cruise part of our trip continued. Without stopping in Albania, we were next in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It’s a medieval walled city, very small but perfectly preserved. It’s right on the sea, with spectacular views from the top of its walls. After Dubrovnik came Korcula, also in Croatia, where we toured the entire island and loved the small harbors. Then came Koper, Slovenia, a very small and rarely visited port which was dominated by its university. Lots of walking in all of these places, not to mention steps/hills, and I kept wishing that my arthritis would just go away — but it won’t. I did better than expected, but I always hate that I can’t do more. My limitations limited Ron’s explorations, but we still saw a lot of wonderful places and tasted local wines everywhere — and the Wallace never complained, not even once.

When we booked this cruise, we got a bunch of onboard credits, $800 in total. I was determined not to leave a single dollar of credit balance, but I ended up leaving $15 behind. After using most of the $$ for internet access (surprise!), I bought two t-shirts (lots of sparkles, so perfect for Florida) and a wonderful pocketbook in the duty free shop on board. Add that to the things we’ve been buying along the way, and we were in trouble before we even got to Venice, the best shopping city in the world.

Leaving the ship the morning of 5/14, taking the water taxi to our hotel, and then following the hotel porter through the back alleys from the landing dock to the Hotel Flora, it felt like coming home. Sure, the Gritti Palace or the Danieli have much larger and more luxurious rooms, and they’re the places to see and be seen, but for 5 to 10x what we’re spending on the Hotel Flora, they should have to be. Our room was smaller, much smaller, than our suite on the ship, but it made up in character and location what it lacked in space. Our hotel was right off the main shopping street, just remember to turn right at the Bulgari store. Unfortunately, since our last visit to Venice, the Hotel Flora’s service had slipped considerably along with its included breakfast, so we won’t make that our Venetian base in future.

In Venice, we walked until we dropped, literally. Venice is a mass of winding alleyways that get narrower and narrower until you’re snuggling with the person coming the other way. We found Ron a terrific sweater, a real masterpiece of the knitters art, all in blues and beiges to go with his standard jeans and khakis. Marsha will love it. And I bought a made only in Venice brooch and earrings from an accessories shop where I could have bought everything. I plan to wear my new brooch with business suits, and it’s a stunner, a real Madeline Albright-style to keep the focus off my hips and on my face. Venice has more fabulous shoes, scarves, handbags, jewelry, accessories of all kinds, much of which is made locally and only available in Venice.

What did we like best about this trip? Wandering the streets of new democracies, seeing the young people who are the future of these new countries — and of some very old ones that are newly democratic — you can’t help but feel a little more hopeful for our collective futures. And then it’s all about the smells, the sounds, the tastes of new places. Perhaps it’s the wandering Jew in my DNA, but I never tire of new places, new people, and new experiences. I really do believe that living large is the best antidote to aging.

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