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Central Planning
The most visibly confirming event that showcased the fact that “central planning” doesn’t work was the demise of the former Soviet Union. The 5 year plans foisted down on the populace by the politburo big-wigs stifled creativity, innovation, and motivation. In spite of the impeccable planning by those “who knew better“, the country imploded.
Likewise, in corpocracies that are incapable of learning from the past (no matter how compelling the evidence), the same fate awaits. By the time the perfectly infallible strategies and plans from the corpo junta get approved, poured in concrete, and trickled down to the DICforce at rock bottom, they’re mostly useless and obsolete.
So, what’s a better way? How about generating flexible, multi-year rolling plans that are revisited often? Ricardo Semler uses that method at Semco. How about exposing the plans to the DICforce as they are being developed in real-time so that some insights from a larger pool of brains may be elicited? Got any other ideas?
Fault Finder
Byron Katie once said something like “the mind’s job is to find problems“. I don’t have many skills, but fault-finding is one of my most finely honed talents. Because of my engineering training and genetic design, I can find fault with any person, place, thing, or situation. I put myself right up there on Everest with Don Rickles.
The trouble with constant fault finding is that one spends a huge portion of one’s precious time criticizing instead of creating. It’s a real tragedy because we were all put on this earth to create. The ability to create is naturally built in to each of us right out of the box.
Creation is an intimate act of communication between the creator and the created.
Obsessive fault finders are afraid of creating and exposing their own creations for fear of being criticized themselves. No one likes to be told that their baby is ugly but, au contraire, many people love to point out flaws in other people’s fugly children.
One way to break the fault finder mind set is to take the plunge. Stop oppressing yourself, do what’s natural, start creating stuff (a blog, a song, a painting, a computer program, a book, a company, a community, a tribe), and hoist it out there for all to see. The more you create and expose of yourself, the more you dismantle the fault finder mindset and the more liberated you become. Try it, especially if you’re an incorrigible fault finder like me.
Waiting
- “I’m waiting for the requirements specification”.
- “I’m waiting for management approval”.
- “I’m waiting for the customer’s answers to my questions”.
- “I’m waiting for QA appproval”.
- “I’m waiting for management to solidify our strategy.”
- “I’m waiting to get a software (or hardware or systems or test) engineer assigned to the project”.
- “I’m waiting for the finance department to open the charge number.”
Yada, yada, yada. On goes the list of pseudo-legitimate excuses for being late and inefficient in bureaucratic corpocracies. When a system is set up so that everything is tightly coupled and each element is highly dependent on everything else, productivity sinks, end-to-end delay increases, and it takes a miracle to get any value added work done. The funny thing is that the dudes in the bozone layer demand continuously increasing productivity while simultaneously allowing their system to deteriorate into an inflexible and intertwined mess of confusion.
Loyal, Or Disloyal?
In virtually every organization comprised of a large group of human beings, one individual or sub-group always holds absolute “power over” the members who hold the “power to” get things done. Because of the innate primal human desire to retain power and remain in control, there’s a dangerous fine line that every “power to” member should be acutely aware of.
On one side of the line is “loyalty”. On the other side is “disloyalty”. Those in charge, of course, are the ultimate arbiters of where you stand in relation to line. I like to straddle the line (see below), but it’s not within my power to judge where I stand.
Note: I borrowed the “power over” and “power to” concepts from Russell Ackoff, a true management genius – that everyone in the mainstream ignores, of course.
Mardi Gras
On 2/12/10, which should be the date of this post if I queued it correctly, I will be embarking on a trip to the Big Easy to experience my third Mardi Gras. I’ll be making the sojourn with my best friend Reno and we’ll be staying directly on ground zero (that’s Bourbon Street for the uninformed) till the fat lady sings “syonara” at midnight on Fat Tuesday. One of the reasons I’m doing this is because:
The purpose of life is to fight maturity. – Dick Werthimer
The so-called “fight” is easy for me because unlike most people (you perhaps?) my age, I’m perpetually told that I’m immature by those “in the know”. OMG, keep that dude locked up behind closed doors!.
Experiencing the sights, sounds, smells (well, most of the smells), and the people at Mardi Gras is like a breath of fresh air and a respite for the weary. Excluding the religious zealots who are constantly screaming “repent or burn” in their megaphones, every person, including each state trooper on horseback, is in a festive and jovial mood. The creative costumes and innocently weird behaviors that emerge from the spontaneous state of being are sights to behold. Wish you were here!
Console And Files First, GUI And Database Last
Adding Database IO and GUI IO to a program ratchets up it’s complexity, and hence development time, immensely. In “Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++“, Bjarne Stroustrup recommends designing and writing your program to do IO over the console and filesystem first, and then adding GUI IO and database IO later. And only if you have to.
Eliminating, or at least delaying, GUI and database IO forces you to focus on getting the internal application design right early. It also helps to keep you from tangling the GUI IO and database IO code with your application code and creating an unmaintainable ball of mud. Thirdly, the practice also makes testing much simpler than trying to write and debug the whole quagmire at once. Good advice?
Full Redundancy
2 lungs, 2 kidneys, 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 ears, 2 eyes, 2 nose holes. 1 brain, 1 heart, 1 liver, 1 pancreas, 1 output-only port (mostly). Why didn’t nature provide us with full redundancy for all vital body parts? Why create a semi fault-tolerant system with multiple single points of failure?
SAS Still Rocks
Everyone loves to be number one. According to Fortune mag, SAS is the Best Company to Work For in 2010. This rare gem of a company has been on my list of faves for many years and it amazingly continues to thrive in a rapidly moving industry that’s under constant pressure from competitors like Google, IBM, Microsoft, and open source software organizations.
SAS (pronounced sass) has been on Fortune’s list of Best Companies to Work For every one of the 13 years we’ve been keeping score. But this is the first time SAS is in the No. 1 slot.
CEO Jim Goodnight’s motives aren’t charitable but entirely utilitarian, even a bit Machiavellian. The average tenure at SAS is 10 years; 300 employees have worked 25 or more. Annual turnover was 2% in 2009, compared with the average in the software industry of about 22%. Women make up 45% of its U.S. workforce, which has an average age of 45.
Goodnight says the “wonder” isn’t that his company is so generous, but why other presumably rational corporations are not. Academicians confirm that his policies augment creativity, reduce distraction, and foster intense loyalty — even though SAS isn’t known for paying the highest salaries in its field and even though there are no stock options.
The notion of easy living frustrates those on the inside. “Some may think that because SAS is family-friendly and has great benefits that we don’t work hard,” says Bev Brown, who’s in external communications. “But people do work hard here, because they’re motivated to take care of a company that takes care of them.”
With a “billion dollars in the bank” and another big building going up on campus, Goodnight is continuing to invest. In a company of elite quantitative analysts, he devotes more than a fifth of revenue to R&D. For 33 straight years, SAS’s revenues have gone up — reaching $2.3 billion in 2009, nearly doubling in seven years.
The company that I work for, Sensis Inc., is pretty damn good to its employees too. Just because I’m on a diet doesn’t mean I can’t look at the menu.
Make Vs Create
After overcoming the religious specificity in which “A Course In Miracles” is written, I’m finding that it is a deeply moving piece of spiritual work. One of the profound and simple (being a simpleton, I love profound and simple) insights communicated to me is the difference ‘tween making and creating. According to the ACIM authors, human beings “make” out of necessity (to get paid, to solve a problem, etc) but “create” out of love (art, music, children, etc). Before this discovery, I thought that “making” and “creating” were cut from the same cloth.
The story behind the making of ACIM is remarkable:
A Course in Miracles began with the sudden decision of two people to join in a common goal. Their names were Helen Schucman and William Thetford, Professors of Medical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. They were anything but spiritual. Their relationship with each other was difficult and often strained, and they were concerned with personal and professional acceptance and status. In general, they had considerable investment in the values of the world. Their lives were hardly in accord with anything that the Course advocates.
Schucman writes:
The head of my department unexpectedly announced that he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings our attitudes reflected, and concluded that, ‘there must be another way.’ As if on cue I agreed to help him find it. Apparently this Course is the other way.
I was still very surprised when I wrote, “This is a course in miracles.” That was my introduction to the Voice. It made no sound, but seemed to be giving me a kind of rapid, inner dictation which I took down in a shorthand notebook. The writing was never automatic. It could be interrupted at any time and later picked up again. It made me very uncomfortable, but it never seriously occurred to me to stop. It seemed to be a special assignment I had somehow, somewhere agreed to complete.
I remember hearing Eckhart Tolle elaborate on how “The Power Of Now” came into existence. A former PhD student himself, Eckhart described the content as “coming through” him and not “from” him. Michael Jackson, when asked in an interview how he created his best work, stated that the music “came through” him.
I’d love for some creation that’s beneficial to mankind to “come through” me. How about you?
Troubleshooter
Assume that your company is cruising along and creating high quality products, happy customers, and making money. The drawing below shows this situational bliss – a well oiled machine.
Now assume that something in your previously flawless system has gone bad. Your product quality has tanked, your customers are angry, and your profitability has shrunk. The lightning bolts in the figure below show places of potential dysfunction that are causing and contributing to the mess.
So, how do you figure out what’s gone wrong so that you can fix the stank? Of course, if you’re in the management group, you’ll automatically discard yourself and your brethren as a source of the problem(s). Since you have an agenda to look good and an unshakable self-image of infallibility, you’ll go poking around in all areas and cross-group interfaces except your own.
Since almost all corpo performance problems are the result of bozo management actions and a lack of leadership, one effective way of diagnosing and fixing what ails you is to bring in an objective outside troubleshooter who will tell you the unabashed truth. Alas, since you’ll be sourcing the income for any outside troubleshooter, he/she will most likely milk the job and tell you what you want to hear: you’re not the problem.
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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