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Would YOU Join My Group?
I’m recently toyed with the idea of starting a LinkedIn.com group named “Frontal Assault Idiots“. This would be the group’s logo:
Alas, I rejected the idea because the only members who would join are me & my buddy, Chetan Dhruve – and no one would post any discussions. D’oh!
Rare Sighting
A friend and colleague sent me this terrific link: “The Wall Says It’s Time To Go“. He asked me for my highly esteemed, expert opinion on the manager described in the “You’re On Your Own” story. I told him that the manager’s behavior was a great example of the rarely-seen-in-nature, PHOR species. Here are a coupla snippets from which I formulated my unassailable opinion:
While his staff worked away, he sat with his feet resting on his desk reading the newspaper. The only time he got up was when an employee came in to ask for help. Then the manager dropped his paper and embraced whatever problem the employee was grappling with.
…a manager’s job is to be a mentor, and although the manager spends most of the day with his feet up, his role is more important than any work being done in the office. His job is to enable his employees to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure their continuing value to the company.
OK, so there’s no context for this example – we don’t know what the nature of the work is, or what products/services the enterprise creates and delivers. Nevertheless, in any setting, I’d prefer to have managers sit around doing mostly nothing until they’re needed instead of jetting around to one useless half-hour meeting after another feigning business and importance. But that’s me, and maybe only me. What about you?
The Future Is Already Here…..
….for those people who are lucky enough to work in truly enlightened orgs that really walk the talk.
Check out this case study: “How Microsoft Netherlands Reinvented the Way of Work”. Yes, you read that right. It’s a division of that polarizing behemoth, Microsoft.
Just in case you don’t have the time, but you’d like the cliff-dozer00 notes version of the article’s highlights, here they are:
- There are no assigned desks as well as no private offices for managers (not even the General Manager).
- There are no physical “Departments”, each of the 900 employees of MS Netherlands can work anywhere in the office building by using a laptop, headset, webcam, or Windows based Smartphone and connecting to the network either wirelessly or by plugging in at a desk.
- People are encouraged to work from home more often, whenever it is appropriate and are allowed to work whatever times they wish to work. The only requirement is that they “get the job done”.
- If you wish to work until late at night on a project and take the morning to see your son’s school play, you can do that too – and you don’t have to ask your manager for the time off.
So, how can one judge whether these Theory Y policies have worked out? Managers love metrics (cuz metrics give them the illusion that they’re in control), so here are a few:
Of course, managers who who are dead set on clinging to their FOSTMA thinking UCBs (regardless of what they espouse) won’t believe the results; or they’ll play ostrich and ignore their existence – because it would take too much courage and “work” to effect a similar, massively positive change in their CCFs.
Truckin’
Truckin’ got my chips cashed in. Keep truckin’, like the do-dah man. – Grateful Dead
One of the funny concepts that someone concocted a while back is called the “truck number“. The truck number is the number of critical people on a project that would need to get hit by a truck (and die) before the project is guaranteed to get completely hosed.
A couple of ways to increase your truck number is to minimize specialization of roles and to effect job rotations in areas of expertise that aren’t orthogonal from each other. However, if you think of, and treat all of, the people on your project as quickly replaceable cogs, then you erroneously and naively assume that the truck number is equal to the number of people on your project. Thus, the bigger the project, the better. Whoo Hoo!
kkk
The Ideal Quadrant
Zappos.com operates on the simple principle that happy people make productive workers and productive workers make a successful enterprise. Thus, the policies and cultural accoutrements instituted at Zappos.com are thoughtfully and proactively designed to foster happiness without totally abdicating control. For Zappos.com, it’s not enough to have a “competitive” benefits and pay package – everyone (still in business) has to have one.
With that in mind, let’s explore the four quadrants in the simplistic table below. Right off the bat, we can ditch the two quadrants in the second row. After all, no org can remain viable for very long with an unproductive workforce – regardless of whether the emps are happy. No?
So that leaves us with the two quadrants in the first row. One would think that the holy grail for excellence-seeking orgs is the Productive-And-Happy (PAH) quadrant. However, a multitude of circumstantial evidence leads me to believe that most orgs are either consciously or unconsciously incompetent at catalyzing the development of a PAH workforce – regardless of what is espoused in the annual report. The legions of enterprises that fall into the CLORGs and DYSCOs category don’t even make an effort to develop “happy” employees. The SCOLs that run the show are too macho and they delude themselves into thinking that happiness doesn’t matter or it’s “not in their job description“. Should it be?
What comes first, productivity or happiness? Is one attribute a pre-requisite for attaining the other?
Wax On, Wax Off
Hands on, hands off. I was trying to contemplate the reasons why some managers operate with “hands off” and here are three that I scribbled down at the gym…
Got any others?
Snap Judgments And Ineffective Decisions
In the software industry, virtually all people agree that Winston Royce‘s classic paper titled “Managing The Development Of Large Software Systems” was the first widely publicized work to describe the linear, sequential, “waterfall” method of building big systems. He didn’t coin the term “waterfall“, he called it a “grandiose process“.
Here’s one of the pics from Mr. Royce’s paper (note that he shows stage N to stage N-1 feedback loops in the diagram and note the “hopefully” word in the figure’s title):
What seems strange to me is that most professional’s that I’ve conversed with think that Mr. Royce was an advocate of this “grandiose process“. However, if you read his 11 page paper, he wasn’t:
The problem is…. The testing phase which occurs at the end of the (waterfall) development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage, input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed. They are not precisely analyzable. They are not the solutions to the standard partial differential equations of mathematical physics for instance. – W. W. Royce
This lack of due diligence to dig deeper into Mr. Royce’s stance reminds me of bad managers who make snap judgments and ineffective decisions. They do this because, in hierarchical command & control CLORG cultures, they’re “supposed to look like” they know and understand what’s going on at all times. After all, the unquestioned assumption in hierarchies is that the best and brightest bubble up to the top. But, as Rudy sez…..
“You have to know a lot to be of help. It’s slow and tedious. You don’t have to know much to cause harm. It’s fast and instinctive.” – Rudolph Starkermann
Of course, all human beings suffer from the same “snap judgments and ineffective decisions” malady to some extent, but the guild of management-by-hierarchy, fueled by its ADHD obsession to jam fit as much attention/planning/work into as little time as possible, seems to have taken it to an extreme.
Secret Salaries
Joel Spolsky is the CEO of Fog Creek Software. In this Inc. magazine article, “Why I Never Let Employees Negotiate a Raise”, Joel spews hearsay on the topic of salaries:
The trouble with keeping salaries a secret is that it’s usually used as a way to avoid paying people fairly. And that’s not good for employees — or the company. – Joel Spolsky
I wanted Fog Creek to have a salary scale that was as objective as possible. A manager would have absolutely no leeway when it came to setting a salary. And there would be only one salary per level. – Joel Spolsky
In this blog post, Joel lays out the details of his compensation system: “Fog Creek Professional Ladder“.
Your career level at Fog Creek is determined as a function of three things: experience (number of years), the scope of your job (what your current job entails), and your skills (your skill level, regardless of actual responsibility). – Joel Spolsky
In the post, Joel further defines what experience, scope (there are 7 levels), and skills (there are 7 levels) mean. Of course, the criteria are not 100% objective, but at least Mr. Spolsky valiantly tries to remove as much subjectivity and insert as much objective fairness as he can.
How about your org? Is its compensation system still based on the 1920’s FOSTMA, employee-in-a-box, carrot-and-stick mindset? You know, the one where your salary is totally based on how much your anointed “supervisor” likes you?
Fudge Factors
This graphic from Steve McConnell‘s “Software Estimation” shows some of the fudge factors that should be included in project cost estimates. Of course, they never are included, right?
Holy cow, what a coincidence! I happened to stumble upon this mangled version of Mr. McConnell’s graphic somewhere online. D’oh!
New Icon
The new icon‘s here! The new icon’s here! – Bulldozer00 (from the upcoming movie “The Jerk 2″)
Whoo Hoo! I’ve stumbled upon an icon that I’ll be using in future childish posts to represent female BMs, BOOGLs, BUTTs, and/or RAPPERs. It complements the venerable, male version nicely, dontcha think?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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