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Magical Transformation
In this interview of Scott Berkun by Michael “Rands In Repose” Lopp, “Rands In Repose: Interview: Scott Berkun“, Scott was asked about his former stint at Microsoft as a program manager. Specifically, Rands asked Scott what his definition of “program manager” is. Here is Scott’s answer:
It’s a glorified term for a project leader or team lead, the person on every squad of developers who makes the tough decisions, pushes hard for progress, and does anything they can to help the team move forward. At its peak in the 80s and 90s, this was a respected role of smart, hard driving and dedicated leaders who knew how to make things happen. As the company grew, there became too many of them and they’re often (but not always) seen now as annoying and bureaucratic.
Americans have a love affair with small businesses. But due to the SCOLs, CGHs, BUTTs, and BMs that ran companies like Enron, Tyco, and Lehman Bros, big businesses are untrusted and often reviled by the public. That’s because, when a company grows, its leaders often “magically” morph into self-serving, obstacle-erecting, and progress-inhibiting bureaucrats; often without even knowing that the transformation is taking place. D’oh! I hate when that happens.
Environmental Influence
In “Engineering A Safer World“, Nancy Leveson states:
Human behavior is always influenced by the environment in which it takes place. Changing that environment will be much more effective in changing operator error than the usual behaviorist approach of using reward and punishment. Without changing the environment, human error cannot be reduced for long. We design systems in which operator error is inevitable and then blame the operator and not the system design.
So why is that? Could it be because the system designers and environment caretakers are also the same people who have the power to assign blame – and it’s much easier to blame than to change the environment?
Fish On Fridays II
By popular demand, he’s back! Who, you ask? Why, it’s guest blogger “my name is a different kind of fish every time I post a comment on BD00’s blawg“. Here’s the second installment of “Fish (Sometimes) On Friday“. Enjoy!
Surrounded by Marching Morons
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”~Bertrand Russell
I saw that quote on the back door of a tractor trailer while driving down the highway. It wasn’t scribbled by hand in the dirty road buildup – it was actually printed on the truck itself as part of the company’s on-road marketing. Don’t ask me what the company was. I don’t remember, other than it was some printing/copying company delivery truck. Not sure how that quote was relevant to their business, but it sure is relevant to mine (and maybe yours?)
Does it ever feel like you’re the only one in your org who knows what’s going on, what needs to be done, and ends up taking care of it because the clowns around you are clueless?
Ayn Rand‘s character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged has this to say:
The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.
I scraped the above from Mike LaBossiere‘s blog Talking Philosophy where he also says:
…innovations and inventions are developed by relatively few people and then used by the many who generally have little understanding of the technology, science, or theories involved.
All this started tickling the back of my head because I remember reading a short story from a Science Fiction collection back in the days of my youth and for the life of me, couldn’t remember what it was called or who wrote it.
After hours of fruitless explorations of my overloaded bookshelves (I did find an old quarter!), I sat down to an internet search where lo and behold, I uncovered the source of my memory.
Cyril M. Kornbluth published a short story in 1951 (no I don’t have the original, just a late 70’s paperback with a bunch of older recycled stories by Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, etc.) entitled The Marching Morons. I actually found the full text here, but to summarize, The story is set hundreds of years in the future: the date is 7-B-936. A man from the past, John Barlow, is reanimated in this future, where he discovers a fantastic world where people drive around in fancy souped up convertibles at hundreds of miles-per-hour with the wind blowing in their face, but very little makes sense, until he learns that due to a massive population explosion, there are only a small group of intelligent people in the world who struggle to support this ever growing population where the average IQ is around 45. (If you’re interested, you can cheat and read the ‘cliff notes’ synopsis here.) My favorite part is when he realizes why the wind is blowing in his face, even though it doesn’t feel like he’s traveling very fast.
In my work, as I’ve said before, I’m a designer (with a lower case ‘d’, for style). I went through lots of schooling to learn my trade – I even have a masters degree. As a result, I’ve received a great deal of highly specialized training in how to think, look at the world, and solve problems. Innovate. All my peers are cut of the same cloth with years of experience, training, and successful problem-solving under our collective belts. Programmers are the same–you don’t learn code from the back of a crackerjack box. (or maybe you did, which could be the root of the problem).
Most of the other supporting cast in our company, on the other hand, lack this specialized focus – many have simply fallen into their current management and executive positions by luck, in-the-right-place opportunity, or because they fit the suit. These are the people who set the parameters of a project, provide the starting information, eventually critique the solution, and the approach to that solution even though they themselves lack the knowledge to effectively ‘drive the bus‘. And as Adam Bellows says, “… the more incompetent someone is in a particular area, the less qualified that person is to assess anyone’s skill in that space, including their own.” As BD00’s post on interdisciplinary team effort complexity shows, as a business grows, the seemingly disconnected groups that influence the project direction also lack many of the skills to even complete it, so their own inputs add little relative value to the result other than increasing the size of the output pile – and it’s relative stench.
Complementary Views
One classic definition of a system is “a set of interacting parts that exhibits emergent behavior not attributable solely to one part“. An alternative, complementary definition of a system served up by Russell Ackoff is “a whole that is defined by its function in a larger system of which it is a part“.
The figure below models the first definition on the left and the second definition on the right. Neither is “righter” than the other. They, and I love saying this because it’s frustratingly neutral, “just are“.
Viewing a system of interest from multiple viewpoints provides the viewer with a more holistic understanding of the system’s what, how, and why. Problem diagnosis and improvement ideas are vastly increased when time is taken to diligently look at a system from multiple viewpoints. Sadly, due to how we are educated, the inculcated tendency of most people is to look at a system from a single, parochial viewpoint: “what’s in it for me?“.
Dramatic Difference
I’ve been an investor in Whole Foods Markets for about 10 years because I like CEO John Mackey‘s “Conscious Business” approach to capitalism. In this Fast Company post, “How Whole Foods Became The Luxury Brand Of Millennials”, Michael Pavone dramatically illustrates the difference between today’s winners and yesterday’s winners with this chart:
Maybe Eckhart Tolle is right when he says that a transformation to a “New Earth” is slowly but surely taking place. But then again, since Mackey-like approaches and businesses like Whole Foods Markets are still extreme outliers, maybe he’s wrong.
What do you think? Putting your company’s BS press clippings and self proclamations of greatness aside for a brief moment, how is your business really different from your moo-herd peers?
Cracked Up
One of the reasons why I love Russell Ackoff is that he cracks me up even while he writes about depressingly serious matters. Here’s just one example from his bottomless well of wisdom:
Business schools do not teach students how to manage. What they do teach are (1) vocabularies that enable students to speak with authority about subjects they do not understand, and (2) to use principles of management that have demonstrated their ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence. – Russell Ackoff
Want another example? OK, OK, here it is:
“Walk the talk” is futile advice to executives because for them walking and talking are incompatible activities. They can do only one at a time. Therefore, they choose to talk. It takes less effort and thought. – – Russell Ackoff
Interdisciplinary Team Effort
Where are the clowns? Send in the clowns. – Shirley Bassey
The Berkun Process
Scott Berkun’s brilliance never ceases to amaze me. In the video below, which runs at 30X real-time, we see a 1000 word essay that took 3 hours to write being created in 5 freakin’ minutes. While the footage whizzes by, Scott explains what he was doing and thinking during the creative act.
Like Gerry Weinberg does in his “Fieldstone Method“, Scott carries a notebook around wherever he goes and jots down notes/ideas as they appear in his head out of the ether. This crucial practice prevents the dreaded “blank page” syndrome from manifesting when it’s time to sit down and write.
BD00 collects “fieldstones” in much the same way. He also sketches out dorky pictures for future enhancement and refinement in Microsoft Visio.
Standard, Portable C++ Concurrency
Recently, I downloaded the Microsoft Visual Studio 11 IDE Beta in order to start experimenting with some C++11 features. Lo and behold, standard and portable concurrency is now supported:
At least on Windows, there’s no need to use the Win API, Boost.Thread or ACE or any other third party library in the future to write multi-core friendly, multi-threaded C++ apps. I don’t know when GCC and/or CLANG will ship with the standard C++11 concurrency libs. Do you?
By the way, a series of quick tests verified that lambdas, strictly typed enums, auto, nullptr, std::array, std::regex, and std::atomic work. Initializer lists, raw string literals, “using” as typedef, and range-based for loops don’t work yet.
Customer Suffering
For some context, assume that your software-intensive system can actually be modeled in terms of “identifiable C”s:
Given this decomposition of structure, the ideal but pragmatically unattainable test plan that “may” lead to success is given by:
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the test plan that virtually guarantees downstream failure is given by:
In practice, no program/project/product/software leader in their right mind skips testing at all the “C” levels of granularity. Instead, many are forced (by the ubiquitous “system” they’re ensconced in) to “fake it” because by the time the project progresses to the “Start Formal Testing” point, the schedule and budget have been blown to bits and punting the quagmire out the door becomes the top priority.
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