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Add Managers And Hope
The figure below shows the result of two attempts to increase the productivity of a hypothetical DICteam. In this totally concocted and fictional example, the nervous dudes in the penthouse (not shown in the figure) keep adding specialized managers to the team to fill voids that they perceive are keeping performance from improving. However, since the SCOLs never baseline the TEAM_VALUE_ADDED metric before each brilliant move, or track its increase or decrease with time, they have no idea whether they have achieved their goal. Because SCOLsters think they’re infallible, they just auto-assume that their brilliant moves work out as expected.
Of course, it often turns out that SCOLster decisions and actions do more harm than good. As the graph in the figure for this bogus example shows, not only did the team operating cost increase by the addition of two new manager salaries to the total, the team productivity decreased because of the additional communication and coordination delays inserted into the system. Add an additional “hidden” operating cost due to the high likelihood of jockeying and infighting between the three BMs (to gain favor from the penthouse dudes), and the system performance deteriorates further. Bummer.
So how can SCOLs increase team performance without throwing more useless overhead BM bodies at the problem? For starters, they can clearly communicate the gaps they “see” to the single team coordinator and help him/her rise to the challenge by providing mentorship and advice. They also can replace the BM with a competent, non-BM (fat chance). They can also (heaven forbid) invest in better tools, infrastructure, and training for the one coordinator and team of DICmates – instead of investing that money in more BM specialists. Got any more performance increasing alternatives to the standard “add managers and hope” tactic?
Pyramid Conversion
In this Inc. blog post, Joie de Vivre hotel chain founder Chip Conley says:
The most contagious emotion in most companies is fear. Most companies do such a poor job communicating that most employees get stuck in a place of survival and don’t have a lot of room for creativity, innovation, or ingenuity.
Every survey that’s been done in the U.S. tends to show money is not the primary, secondary, or third; It’s fourth place on why people leave their jobs.
We took the Maslow pyramid and turned it into an employee pyramid with three basic themes: survival the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it’s money, recognition, and meaning.
Once people are satisfied with how much money they are making, the next human desire they need fulfilled at work is recognition. According to Conley: “What really is meaningful to people is genuine appreciation shown in real time“. The key words are “genuine” and “real time“. I interpret this to mean; not months after a significant accomplishment has been achieved or once a year at an all hands meeting where a boring and generic “atta boy” is delivered from on-high down to the DICforce.
If you just sit in the control tower and solely monitor the numbers that result from the effort without recognizing the effort itself in the moment, then you’re behaving just like the herd and you deserve what you get – mediocrity. Mooooooooooo.
Esther Tweets
I’m passionate about all aspects of software development, including, uh, project management (I really am). Since Esther Derby is an insightful and pragmatic thinker filled with valuable tips, techniques, and methods for successfully executing hairball software projects, I follow her on Twitter. Check out this trio of sequential tweets.
My answer to Esther’s last question is: “It would be great!“. Alas, most managers don’t, or aren’t allowed to, think in terms of systems. Systems thinking isn’t valued in siloed, CCH corpricracies, so managers have no incentive to learn or apply it’s principles and techniques for continuous improvement. In really badly run orgs, it’s too dangerous for one’s career to think or act horizontally in silo-city. It’s too bad, because orgs of people are richly interactive dynamic systems of systems that require constant shepherding to keep every person and every group and every unit aligned and connected.
To Call, Or To Be Called. THAT Is The Question.
Except for GUIs, I prefer not to use frameworks for application software development. I simply don’t like to be the controllee. I like to be the controller; to be on top so to speak. I don’t like to be called; I’d rather call.
The UML figure below shows a simple class diagram and sequence diagram pair that illustrate how a typical framework and an application interact. On initialization, your code has to install a bunch of CallBack (CB) functions or objects into the framework. After initialization, your code then waits to be called by the framework with information on Events (E) that you’re interested in processing. You’re code is subservient to the Framework Gods.
After object oriented inheritance and programming by difference, frameworks were supposed to be the next silver bullet in software reuse. Well crafted, niche-based frameworks have their place of course, but they’re not the rage they once were in the 90s. A problem with frameworks, especially homegrown ones, is that in order to be all things to all people, they are often bloated beyond recognition and require steep learning curves. They also often place too much constraint on application developers while at the same time not providing necessary low level functionality that the application developer ends up having to write him/herself. Finding out what you can and can’t do under the “inverted control” structure of a framework is often an exercise in frustration. On the other hand, a framework imposes order and consistency across the set of applications written to conform to it’s operating rules; a boon to keeping maintenance costs down.
The alternative to a framework is a set of interrelated, but not too closely coupled, application domain libraries that the programmer (that’s you and me) can choose from. The UML class and sequence diagram pair below shows how application code interacts with a set of needed and wanted support libraries. Notice who’s on top.
How about you? Do you like to be on top? What has been your experience working with non-GUI application frameworks? How about system-wide frameworks like CORBA or J2EE?
Get Back To Work, Slackers
Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain, states in her blog:
We’ve made a terrific change this year to our vacation policy – which is basically not to have one…. We have a very intense culture today. People work hard, they work long hours inside and outside “normal business hours”, from home, from airplanes, and we don’t clock or watch the hours they work. So if we don’t clock the hours they are here, why should we clock the hours they are not? Why should we be tracking paperwork and forms when an employee takes the day off but we don’t do the same for when they work over a weekend.
She’s joking right? Trusting your employees and giving them total responsibility for managing their time? No way bro. That’s just not how it’s done! Poor FirstRain. Productivity is going to plummet and a trip to bankruptcy court is forthcoming, no?
Zappos Rocks Again
As a huge, huge, huge, (did I say youuuuuuuge-uh?), fan of Tony Hsieh and Zappos.com, I blabber about them often. Zappos latest action to make the whole world, yes, the whole world, a better place is to offer up a free, yes free, download of the audio version of the best seller, yes best seller, book “Tribal Leadership“. The link is here, yes here.
Even though I’ve stalked Zappos.com for years, until recently I’ve never bought anything from them because I’m not a shoe or clothes dude. Hell, I’m an old and unredeemable person of questionable integrity and questionable character and questionable morality and questionable <<add your own trait here if you know me>>, so I renew these things about every 10 years or when they fall apart; whichever comes first. However, even with zero revenue from me, they upgraded me to VIP status. This means that with every order I place, they’ll guarantee free overnight shipping. WTF, you say? Uh, the only answer that I can give to you is: They’re fuckin’ Zappos.com dude, that”s why! Oops, I hope the F-bomb didn’t make you mad and send you to the altar to pray for me. If it did, then maybe you shouldn’t be wasting your time reading this blasphemous blog 🙂
Lopp-Sided
Michael Lopp is an engineer’s kind of manager. Besides having a great last name (can you say Lopp-sided?) and an even better pen name (“Rands In Repose“), the guy still understands and relates to down-in-the-trenches engineering work. He even drops an occasional F-bomb in his writing for dramatic effect. The dude is a rare bird and I pay attention to what he says.
Although I think the name of his latest book, “Being Geek“, is meh, there’s a lot of great stuff in there for both managers and DICs. Here’s a sampling of “culled” passages:
The story we tell ourselves when someone we like chooses to leave the group or the company is, “Everyone is replaceable.” This is true, but this is a rationalization designed to lessen the blow that, crap, someone we really like is leaving. We are losing part of the team. Professional damage is done when a team member leaves, and while they are eventually replaceable, productivity and morale take a hit.
A manager’s job is to forget. That’s what they do. They get promoted and begin the long processes of forgetting everything that got them promoted in the first place. I’m not joking. Manager amnesia will be the source of much professional consternation throughout your career.
My management strategy is to assume those closest to the problem can make the best decisions. That’s how I scale.
In defense of my brethren managers, we don’t forget everything, and during all that forgetting, we’re learning other useful things like organization politics, meeting etiquette, and the art of talking for 10 minutes without saying a thing.
The list of words that define management are revealing: direct, in charge, handle, control, and force. Looking at this list, it’s not a surprise that the term “management” has a distasteful Orwellian air.
If it’s been six months, you’ve been actively looking, and no one has told you a great story about how engineering shaped the fortunes of your company, there’s a chance that engineering doesn’t have a seat at the culture table in your company.
There’s the been-here-forever network, the I-survived-the-layoff people, and the untouchable did-something-great-once crew.
It pains me to write this, but my first question about your boss is this: is he taking the time to talk with you in a private setting? A 1:1 is a frequent, regularly scheduled meeting between you and your boss, and if it’s not happening, I, uh, don’t really know where to start. The absence of a 1:1 is the absence of mentorship, and that means your need to gather your experience in the trenches. And while there is nothing to replace “real-world experience,” I’m wondering what the value add of your boss is.
My impression is that the presence of status reports is an indication that your boss doesn’t trust the flow of information in your organization.
We’re knowledge workers, which is an awkwardly lame way of stating that we don’t actually build physical things with our hands.
Asking for the impossible is an advanced management technique, and it’s one that is particularly abhorrent to engineers. Frequent impossible requests result in an erosion of respect and a decaying of credibility.
You’re not going to engage if you don’t respect the person who is asking you to do something.
Management by crisis is exhilarating, but it values velocity over completeness; it sacrifices creativity for the illusion of progress.
Everyone is an adjustment. When you’re interacting with anyone, you leave the core you and become slightly them.
Busy Doing Nothing
The British created a civil service job in 1803 calling for a man to stand on the Cliffs of Dover. The man was supposed to ring a bell if he saw Napolean coming….. The job was abolished in 1945. – Robert Townsend.
The battle of Waterloo, in which Napolean’s army was routed, was fought in 1815. Thus, the series of dudes who stood guard for 130 years after the fall of the egotistical French emperor were busy doing nothing but pissing and pooping off the cliffs every few hours – and gettin’ paid for it.
In “Ackoff’s Best: His Classic Writings On Management“, uber systems thinker Russell Ackoff rails against bureaucracies:
A bureaucracy is an organization whose principle objective is to keep people busy doing nothing. They are preoccupied with what we call make-work…. The problem created by people who are busy doing nothing is that they frequently obstruct others who have real work to do. They impose unproductive requirements on others…. Bureaucracies obstruct development. They retard improvement of quality of life…. Bureaucrats want all parts of an organization to conform to one set of rules and regulations…. Conformity is treated as good in itself, an ultimate good. – Russell Ackoff
Mr. Ackoff not only rages against the machine, he advises on how to beat the system with a bevy of hilarious real-life examples in which individuals successfully “fought city hall” and won. He follows each ditty with a moral. Buy the book and read it for the delicious details of every battle.
From Wanted To Unwanted
You can have a product without a business, but you can’t have a business without a product. If you build a product that people want, a business will be born either from your loins or from some copycat’s. There’s no chicken and egg dilemma here. It’s simply, product-first and business-second. Ka-ching!
But wait, that’s not all! Let’s say you do get lucky and start a biniss around a “wanted” product that you built. To sustain your business, you gotta sustain your product. That means continuously maintaining it via the addition of new value-added features and the correction of customer-annoying defects.
Upon observing the deterioration of his original ArsDigita product under the so-called leadership of “new management”, Philip Greenspun said:
Once you have a product that nobody wants, it doesn’t matter how good your management team is. – Phil Greenspun (Founders At Work, Jessica Livingston)
So, how does a “wanted” product morph into an “unwanted” product? Via neglect and indifference. That’s what happened to Phil’s baby when the vulture capitalists he hooked up with installed an incompetent “professional management team” to run ArsDigita (into the ground). By focusing on the superficial instead of the substance, the promotion instead of the maintenance, the company’s product, and then the company itself, went down hill fast:
ArsDigita grew out of the software that Greenspun wrote for managing photo.net, a popular photography site. He released the software under an open source license and was soon deluged by requests from big companies for custom features. He and some friends founded ArsDigita in 1997 to take on such consulting projects. In 2000, ArsDigita took $38 million from venture capitalists. Within weeks of the deal closing, conflict arose between the new investors and the founders. They marginalized and then fired most of the founders, who responded by retaking control of the company using a loophole the VCs had overlooked. The legal battle culminated in Greenspun’s being bought out, and a few months later the company crashed. ArsDigita was dissolved in 2002. – (Founders At Work, Jessica Livingston)
No Spin From Greenspun
Jessica Livingston interviews a boatload of founders (32 to be exact) of startup companies in her book “Founders At Work“. The most fascinating interview that I’ve read to date is with Phil Greenspun. It’s especially fascinating because it strongly reinforces “my belief system” that most corpo SCOLs are incompetent and most venture capitalists are obsessed with greed. You know how it is, relentlessly seeking out and amassing stories and evidence that irrefutably “prove” that you’re right while ignoring any and all disconfirming evidence to the contrary.
After reading the Livingston-Greenspun dialog, I was so giddy with ego-inflating joy that I wanted to copy and paste the entire interview into this post. However, I thought that would be too extravagant and probably a copyright law violation to boot. Here are some jucilicious fragments that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m absolutely right and anyone who disagrees with me is absolutely wrong. Hah Hah! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!
We talked to a headhunting firm, and the guy was candid with me and said, “Look, we can’t recruit a COO for you because anybody who is capable of doing that job for a company at your level would demand to be the CEO.” And I thought, “That’s kind of crazy. How could they be the CEO? They don’t know the business or the customers. How could we just plunk them down?” In retrospect, that was pretty good thinking; look at Microsoft: it took them 20 years to hand off from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer. He needed 20 years of training to take that job. Jack Welch was at GE for 20 years before he became CEO. Sometimes it does work, but I think for these fragile little companies, just putting a generic manager at the top is oftentimes disastrous.
The guys on my Board had been employees all of their lives. You can’t turn an employee into a businessman. The employee only cares about making his boss happy. The customer might be unhappy and the shareholders are taking a beating, but if the boss is happy, the employee gets a raise.
Some of my cofounders and more experienced folks were also stretched pretty thin because of the growth. I thought, “We just need the insta-manager solution.” Which, in retrospect, is ridiculous. How could someone who didn’t know anything about the company, the customers, and the software be the CEO?
A lot of the traditional skills of a manager were kind of irrelevant when you only have two or three-person teams building something. So it was almost more like you were better off hiring a process control person or factory quality expert instead of a big executive type.
The CEO was a guy who had never been a CEO of any organization before, and he brought in his friend to be CFO. His buddy didn’t have an accounting degree and he was really bad with numbers. He couldn’t think with numbers, he couldn’t do a spreadsheet model accurately. That generated a lot of acrimony at the board meetings. I would say, “Things are going badly.” And he’d say, “Look at this beautiful spreadsheet. Look at these numbers; it’s going great.” In 5 minutes I had found ten fundamental errors in the assumptions of this spreadsheet, so I didn’t think it would be wise to use it to make business decisions. But they couldn’t see it. None of the other people on the board were engineers, so they thought, “Well, he’s the CFO, so let’s rely on his numbers.” Having inaccurate numbers kept people from making good decisions. They just thought I was a nasty and unpleasant person, criticizing this guy’s numbers, because they couldn’t see the errors. From an MIT School of Engineering standpoint, they were all innumerate.
Meanwhile, because these people didn’t know anything about the business, they were continuing to lose a lot of money. They hired a vice president of marketing who would come in at 10 a.m., leave at 3 p.m. to play basketball, and had no ideas. He wanted to change the company’s name. This was a product that was in use in 10,000 sites worldwide—so at least 10,000 programmers knew it as the ArsDigita Community System. There were thousands and thousands of people who had come to our face-to-face seminars. There were probably 100,000 people worldwide who knew of us, because it was all free. And he said, “We should change the company name because, when we hire these sales-people and they’re cold-calling customers, it will be hard for the customer to write down the name; they’ll have to spell it out.” And they did hire these professional salespeople to go around and harass potential customers, but they never really sold anything.
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