Archive
Cog Diss
If interested, check out Mary Jo Foley‘s hindsight blog post regarding Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer‘s screw-up on the Vista fiasco: Feedback Failure. Mary laments:
“As a result, I’m left wondering about Vista, as many are/were about the current financial crisis: Why didn’t anyone inform us sooner of the impending meltdown? Weren’t there warning signs? Where was everybody?”
Surely Mary, you’re joking, right? You’re wondering where everybody was and why nobody informed us? In short, at least some Microsoft DICS who weren’t deeply and personally invested in the Vista project either:
- knew about the impending doom but were afraid to speak up,
- did have the courage to speak up but were “ignored” or slapped down,
- “disconnected and distanced” themselves from the project because they didn’t give a chit about it (apathy)
Those who were fully ensconced in the quagmire were blinded by the light. They suffered from the common and pervasive human malady called “cognitive dissonance“. Cog Diss is where you convince yourself that you’re looking at a pile of gold when in reality you’re staring at a pile of poop. However, deep down, you sense the mismatch and experience uneasy feelings as a result.
All the dysfunctional behaviors described above are caused by living life too long within the confines of an unchanging and soul-busting CCH bureaucracy.
Stunning, But Not Surprising
Suppose you had an innately complex product to sell. Now suppose that a potential customer comes up to you and asks for a user’s starter guide to help him/her understand your product for the purpose of making a buy decision. Would you tell that customer “We’re short-handed and have schedules to meet, so write It yourself!“? WTF!
For people who work in CCH bureaucracies but don’t know it (or who do know it, but conveniently ignore it and don’t do squat to dissolve it), this behavior between internal groups is ubiquitous, systemic, and so pervasive that it’s taken for granted. It’s stunning, but not surprising.
Incremental Watts
I don’t know which name I like better, Watts Wacker or Soupy Sales, but this post is about Watts. Watts Wacker is a CEO and futurist who uttered one of my favorite quotes:
You can’t increment your way into the future – Watts Wacker
I think this quote is directed toward leaders of cushy, static, and stanky CCH companies who are so afraid of the future that they move by inches at a time in passive response to external changes. The only way to leapfrog your competitors, since they’re just as afraid as you and are inching along like molassess running up hill, is to make a disruptive leap into the future.
It takes revolutionaries to trigger disruptive leaps into the unknown. Someone (actually, two people) with an innocent but assuredly incremental mindset recently said to me: “Revolutionaries are usually lined up in front of a wall and shot“. My response was “that’s why there are so few of them“. Bummer.
My OSEE Experience
Intro
A colleague at work recently pointed out the existence of the Eclipse org’s Open System Engineering Environment (OSEE) project to me. Since I love and use the Eclipse IDE regularly for C++ software development, I decided to explore what the project has to offer and what state it is in.
The OSEE is in the “incubation” stage of development, which means that it is not very mature and it may require a lot more work before it has a chance of being accepted by a critical mass of users. On the project’s main page, the following sentences briefly describe what the OSEE is:
The Open System Engineering Environment (OSEE) project provides a tightly integrated environment supporting lean principles across a product’s full life-cycle in the context of an overall systems engineering approach. The system captures project data into a common user-defined data model providing bidirectional traceability, project health reporting, status, and metrics which seamlessly combine to form a coherent, accurate view of a project in real-time.
The feature list is as follows:
- End-to-end traceability
- Variant configuration management
- Integrated workflows and processes
- A Comprehensive issue tracking system
- Deliverable document generation
- Real-time project tracking and reporting
- Validation and verification of mission software
I don’t know about you, but the OSEE sounds more like an integrated project management tool than a system engineering toolset that facilitates requirements development and system design. Promoting the product ambiguously may be intended to draw in both system engineers and program managers?
The OSEE is not a design-by-committee, fragmented quagmire, it’s a derivation of a real system engineering environment employed for many years by Boeing during the development of a military helicopter for the US government. Like IBM was to the Eclipse framework, Boeing is to the OSEE.
“Standardization without experience is abhorrent.” – Bjarne Stroustrup
Download, Install, Use
The figure below shows a simple model of the OSEE architecture. The first thing I did was download and install the (19) Eclipse OSEE plugins and I had no problem with that. Next, I tried to install and configure the required PostgresQL database and OSEE application and OSEE arbitration servers. After multiple frustrating tries, and several re-reads of the crappy install documentation, I said WTF! and gave up. I did however, open and explore various OSEE related Eclipse perspectives and views to try and get a better feel for what the product can do.
As shown in the figure below, the OSEE currently renders four user-selectable Eclipse perspectives and thirteen views. Of course, whenever I opened a perspective (or a view within a perspective) I was greeted with all kinds of errors because the OSEE back end kludge was not installed correctly. Thus, I couldn’t create or manipulate any hypothetical “system engineering” artifacts to store in the project database.
Conclusion
As you’ve probably deduced, I didn’t get much out of my experience of trying to play around with the OSEE. Since it’s still in the “incubation” stage of development and it’s free, I shouldn’t be too harsh on it. I may revisit it in the future, but after looking at the OSEE perspective/view names above and speculating about their purposes, I’ve pre-judged the OSEE to be a heavyweight bureaucrat’s dream and not really useful to a team of engineers. Bummer.
Surprise! GM Is Still Hosed
In a followup to my first post on GM’s initial BS attempt to dismantle their horrendous do-nothing-but-line-management’s-pocket-with-dough Command And Control Hierarchy (CCH), I submit this freshly minted AP article. It describes yet another management shake up at post-bankruptcy, taxpayer-money-sucking GM. The “new” (LOL!) leadership continues to pray that the feeble and well worn tradition of sloganeering and cajoling will stave off annihilation. Geeze, these elite hierarchs are really doing quite a job earning their seven figure paychecks, dontcha think?
In announcing a sudden management overhaul yesterday, GM chairman and acting CEO Ed Whitacre Jr. was speaking Lutz’s words when he told employees that the bureaucracy needs to end and they can take reasonable risks without fear of being fired.
“We want you to step up. We don’t want any bureaucracy,’’ Whitacre said to about 800 GM workers. “We’re not going to make it if you won’t take a risk,’’ he said in the address, which was broadcast to employees worldwide on the Internet.
Uh, yes massa CEO, we’ll do whatever you say, dear leader. We sincerely believe that you’re a man of high integrity and impeccable credentials who speaks the truth and will lead us to the promised land. We’ll gladly storm the machine gun nests that guard the status quo for you. Blech.
Whitacre, 68, who has been frustrated with the pace of change, appointed the 77-year-old Lutz as a top adviser, creating an alliance of hard-charging veteran executives to lead the troubled company.
Yeah, that’ll do it. A 145 year duo of machine age, assembly line thinkers who probably don’t know WTF “WTF” means. Social intra-networking? Corpo-wide sharing of accessible and findable information? Sincere collaboration within and between layers of rank and status? Transparency, Authenticity, and Openness? Sorry to be so negative, but not a chance.
Sadly, I await the next big GM makeover and press release.
“Overburdened”
Are any words needed to elaborate on the blasphemous message that I’m trying to convey in the dorky graphic below? If so, gimme a shout out.
Committee Performance Metrics
A favorite and frequent activity undertaken by corpocrats everywhere is the formation of committees and special task forces to “aggressively” tackle and solve pressing org problems that are negatively affecting the performance of the corpocracy’s DICforce. The typical cycle of events is as follows:
- 1) The committee of elites is formed to “help” the DICforce do their jobs better.
- 2) After: a) several months of meetings with half-assed attendance, b) infinite BS sessions where nothin’ of substance is produced or propagated downward, c) there’s no detectable performance improvement from those dwelling in the cellar, and d) gobs of money have been consumed, the committee sponsor (a.k.a. the money supplier) asks for measures of performance to judge whether his/her investment is paying off.
- 3) The committee conjures up some BS “camouflage” metrics that feign problem solving prowess and progress (see the figure below for examples).
- 4) The sponsor buys into the BS set of metrics and the resource drain continues.
- 5) Go to step 2).
You’d think that a meaningful metric could be obtained by periodically polling the people that the elite committee is supposed to be helping – the DICforce. Do you think many committees, councils, task forces, centers of excellence, yada-yada-yada, do this? If not, why do you think that is the case?
Almost Anything Can Work, BUT….
Almost any well known management technique/process for improving corpo performance (e.g. six-sigma, BPR, MBO, task forces, brainstorming, core competencies, SWOT analysis, etc) that was mildly successful in a handful of cases can work. BUT, it takes real leadership to make them work; and that’s why they don’t work.
So WTF is real leadership? I make stuff up and I’m not fit to lead anyone or anything, so don’t ask me :^)
Exploring Processor Loading
Assume that we have a data-centric, real-time product that: sucks in N raw samples/sec, does some fancy proprietary processing on the input stream, and outputs N value-added measurements/sec. Also assume that for N, the processor is 100% loaded and the load is equally consumed (33.3%) by three interconnected pipeline processes that crunch the data stream.
Next, assume that a new, emerging market demands a system that can handle 3*N input samples per second. The obvious solution is to employ a processor that is 3 times as fast as the legacy processor. Alternatively, (if the nature of the application allows it to be done) the input data stream can be split into thirds , the pipeline can be cloned into three parallel channels allocated to 3 processors, and the output streams can be aggregated together before final output. Both the distributor and the aggregator can be allocated to a fourth system processor or their own processors. The hardware costs would roughly quadruple, the system configuration and control logic would increase in complexity, but the product would theoretically solve the market’s problem and produce a new revenue stream for the org. Instead of four separate processor boxes, a single multi-core (>= 4 CPUs) box may do the trick.
We’re not done yet. Now assume that in the current system, process #1 consumes 80% of the processor load and, because of input sample interdependence, the input stream cannot be split into 3 parallel streams. D’oh! What do we do now?
One approach is to dive into the algorithmic details of the P1 CPU hog and explore parallelization options for the beast. Assume that we are lucky and we discover that we are able to divide and conquer the P1 oinker into 5 equi-hungry sub-algorithms as shown below. In this case, assuming that we can allocate each process to its own CPU (multi-core or separate boxes), then we may be done solving the problem at the application layer. No? 
Do you detect any major conceptual holes in this blarticle?
Stuck In The Middle
With the goal of bringing more peace into my life and the lives of others, I’ve studied the work of quite a few spiritual teachers over the years. Adyashanti is one of those sages whose teachings resonate with me. In this interview, Adya states:
“Simply because you’ve had an awakening, however, does not mean you stay awake. Enlightenment, in simple terms, is when you stay awake. If the awakening is abiding, that’s enlightenment. And most awakenings are not abiding — at least, not initially.”
Before those words, I always thought that enlightenment and awakening were the same concept, but Adya’s words make sense to me. I haven’t experienced either of those two states of being, but I hope to someday. The problem with this wishful thinking is that…. it’s wishful thinking:
“One of the best ways to avoid awakening is to let the idea of awakening be co-opted by the mind and then projected onto a future event: something that’s going to happen outside of this moment. This looking to the future isn’t really the fault of the spiritual practices themselves; it’s the attitude with which the mind engages in the practices — an attitude that is seeking a future end and seeing that end as somehow inherently different from what already exists here and now.”
Freakin’ Bummer. Since I’m a slave to my mind, I may be a lost cause. It’s time to change strategies, but wait, the mind devises strategies! According to Adya (and the vast majority of other teachers) using the mind to attain enlightenment is fruitless. Double bummer.
Many spiritual teachers profess that tragedy can be a doorway into awakening and Adya is no different:
Reality is not operating on any moral principle. It’s looking for a moment when the seeker is exhausted. It can be prompted by some tragic event: an illness, or the death of a loved one, or a divorce. Reality rushes into the crack and presents itself.
Triple bummer. I’ve experienced several deeply tragic events but reality hasn’t found any crack to infiltrate my being yet. The lead sarcophagus that encases me is still too impenetrable.
Oh well. With no clue on how to go about awakening out of the dream of separation and experiencing the reality of universal connectedness, I’m, as Stealers Wheel would sing, “Stuck In The Middle“.
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
My BTC Address
Bulldozer00's Blog 