Archive
A Blessing And A Curse
The figure below depicts a UML class diagram model of the static structure of a typical Wiki system. A Wiki may be comprised of many personally controlled and/or global workspaces. Each logical workspace is composed of user created work pages and news items (a.k.a. blog posts). Lastly, a Wiki contains many user accounts that are either created by the users themselves or, in a more controlled environment, created by a gatekeeper system administrator. Without an account, a user cannot contribute content to the Wiki database.
Org Wikis are both a blessing and a curse. They’re a blessing for the DICforce in that they allow for close collaboration and rapid, real-time information exchange between and across teams. They also serve as an easily searchable and publicly visible record of org history.
In malevolent and stovepiped CCHs where SCOLs and BOOGLs rarely communicate horizontally and, even more rarely, downward to the DICforce, Wikis are a curse because….
Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit. – Michael Schrage
BOOGLs and SCOLs that preside over malevolent CCHs don’t like having their day-to-day operational behavior exposed to the light of day. If a malevolent CCH org is liberal enough to “approve” of Wiki usage, chances are that none of the BOOGLs or SCOLs will contribute to its content. In the worse case, a Wiki police force may be established to enforce posting rules designed to keep politics and positioning behavior secret. Hell, without censorship, the DICforce might form the opinion that they are being led by a gang of thugs who are out for themselves instead of the lasting well being of the org.
Are you here to build a career or to build an organization? – Peter Block
Death By A Thousand Cuts
Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh has a new book out titled “Delivering Happiness“. Early in this heartwarming and wonderful little tome, he tells the story of the first real company he co-founded – LinkExchange. As LinkExchange grew and became more successful, he turned down offers of $1M (from BigFoot) and then $20M (from Yahoo!) to sell the company. He ended up selling out later for $265M to Microsoft. Tony’s personal take from the sale was a whopping $40M, of which $8M would be forfeited if he didn’t stay on for 1 year after the sale.
Before the sale of LinkExchange, he woke up one day wondering what happened to the company culture. Tony pondered how the day-to-day culture transformed from a joyous “one for all, and all for one” working environment into one that was dominated by “politics, positioning, and rumors“. He couldn’t put a finger on any one specific event or person(s) as the cause of the deterioration in culture, it was more like “death by a thousand cuts“; an insidious and undetectable rise in malady sustained by some unknown force.
After the sale of LinkExchange, Tony walked away from the company before his contracted year was up, leaving $8M on the table. His reasoning was that he already had plenty of money and his happiness was worth more than the extra $8M. The end of LinkExchange was the start of Zappos.com…..
I had decided to stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion – Tony Hsieh
Crucial Skills: Choking Up
I’ve talked about the Vital Smarts dudes before, and they continue to impress. In this post, Crucial Skills: Choking Up, Vital Smarts principal Al Switzler gives some sound advice to a client regarding the phenomenon of unexpected and unwanted emotional seizure during a Crucial Conversation (CC).
When a conversation flips from”normal” to crucial, either or both participants will experience one or more of these symptoms:
1 Some people’s faces turn red.
2 Some people can feel their pulse—often in their temples.
3 Some people’s breathing changes—it speeds up, or lengthens.
4 People’s voices can increase or decrease in volume.
5 There may be churning in the gut or butterflies in the stomach.
In my case, numbers 3 and 4 rear their ugly heads when I find myself in the midst of an unexpected CC (how about you?). When the 3-4 duo instantaneously appears, I’ve learned to detect the change immediately. However, since I think “control” is overrated, over sought, and often an excuse to obscure truth, I often choose to let the truth, as I see it, fly via an unacceptable emotional rant 🙂 .
“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” – Benjamin Disraeli
On the flip side, Al makes a lot of sense when he recommends switching over to proven CC skills upon detection of your changed physical state. When one succeeds at this, it defuses the situation and facilitates an exchange of understanding ‘tween the CC participants. First, he advises you to “step out of the content and rebuild safety” by calling a time out. Then, when the symptoms dissipate, re-enter the content and have a frank exchange of views. You do this by “starting with heart”, of course, to establish a collaborative and nurturing environment for progressing forward.
A Change In Funding Source
The figure below shows a dorkily simplistic UML sequence diagram example of the provision of service from a support group (e.g. purchasing, quality assurance, configuration management) to a product development group within a CCH patriarchy. During product development, the team aperiodically requires and requests help from one or more corpo groups who’s raison d’etre is to provide timely support to those who need it. 
Depending on who’s leading the support group, the service it provides can be highly responsive and of high quality. However, since the standard “system” setup in all CCH corpocracies is as shown in the sequence diagram below, the likelihood of that being true is low. That’s because in centralized patriarchies, all budgets, salaries, and token rewards are doled out by the sugar daddys perched at the top of the pyramid. On the way down, the middlemen in the path take a cut out of the booty for, uh, the added-value “leadership” they provide to those on the next lower rung in the ladder.
In exchange for their yearly/quarterly investments in the lower layers of the caste system, the dudes in the penthouse require periodic status reports (which they can’t understand and which are usually cleverly disguised camouflage) that show progress toward wealth creation from the DICs below.
Since their bread is buttered from the top and not their direct customers, the natural tendency of support groups is to blow off their customers’ needs and concentrate on maximizing their compensation from the top. They do this, either consciously or unconsciously, by adding complexity to the system in the form of Byzantinian procedural labyrinths for customers to follow to show how indispensable they are to the b’ness. As a result, their responsiveness decreases and their customers experience an increase in frustration from shoddily late service.
So how does one fix the standard, dysfunctional, centralized, CCH setup? Check out and ponder the sequence diagram below for a possible attempt at undoing the dysfunctional mess. Can it work? Why, or why not?
By definition, if everyone is doing industry best practice, it’s not best practice. It’s average practice.
Bureaucracy Reinforcement
In the “Bureaucracy Formation” post, I hypothesized about how orgs can undetectably transform from vibrant and flexible citizens into rigid and slovenly slow, bullies. As a refresher, the figure below carries over the pre- and post-transformation “system” states from that post. Sadly, after the t=Bureaucracy time threshold is passed, the situation gets worse than the picture implies.
In order to survive, thrive, and indisputably “show” their importance to the well being of the whole, each support group continuously adds more and more time sucking and money hogging work of questionable added-value to the system. However, the work they add is not for them to do. Incredulously, it’s red tape work they impose on their clients (a.k.a. customers), which are the product group and “other” support groups that are forced to use their service.
Early on in the stages of org development, it’s relatively easy to get support. You ask a person for help and you get it in a timely fashion. If you have to supply input along with your request, like a piece of software, or hardware, or a document, you don’t have to meet any arcane content, formatting, or packaging requirements. Over time, however, everything changes. First, a simple form is required. Then, a more detailed form. Then, more than one form. Then multiple forms and multiple signatures are required. Then you are required to follow a detailed step by step procedure that is so arcane and unmemorable that you have to look it up every time you need service. Then, if you do something wrong, you’re scolded for not knowing the process. On and on it goes. You get the picture, no?
Bureaucracy Formation
Since I’m not a big fan of bureaucracies, let’s have some fun and see how these resource sucking and dehumanizing orgs are naturally formed right under the noses of the high paid corpo dudes who are ironically “responsible” for keeping costs down. As you’ll see, it may even be worse than you think. The infallible, know-it-all, multi-titled CGHs in charge not only allow their bureaucracy to flourish, they feed and water it as a result of the unconscious and self-centered need for ego expansion.
Check the figure below out for a hypothetical example of the formation of a bureaucracy over time. As usual, I’ve made the example up (cuz I’m a L’artiste) and I’ve simplistically decomposed a complex org into two group archetypes; product and support. In my obviously wrong dream-world, the otherwise highly esteemed management class is a support group sub-type, of course.
At t=Start, when a vibrant and competent startup org is initialized, there are no “support” groups: nada, zilch. There’s only a product development (or service provider) group that does everything needed to sustain and grow a business around the wealth-creating product (or service).
As time tics by and the fledgling enterprise grows, one support group after another is added as another ring of fat around the product development group core. At the beginning, the support groups are few, and they’re subordinate both in stature and compensation to the wealth creation group because everyone knows that the product and/or service brings home the bacon.
As the org matures, an incredulous flip in the stature structure snaps into place (t=T3 in the example above) because, well, because that’s the way it is. The first of many subsequent support groups to rise in stature is the executive level management cadre. As even more corpo maturation accrues, all emotional enthusiasm and passion is expelled from the org because the same-old, same-old, mechanistic, B-school and Wall Street psychology usurps the childlike and immature “let’s change the world” mindset which birthed the org in the first place. The so-called management leadership cabal catalyzes and accelerates the move to bureaucracy by; treating wealth creators as easily replaceable DICs, punishing any publicly expressed passion and enthusiasm, cloning themselves in newly added middle management layers, and growing their personal empires in order to inflate their pocketbooks and sense of importance at the expense of the org as a whole. Bummer.
“Are you here to build a career or to build an organization?” – Peter Block
Herman Miller’s Design for Growth
Herman Miller Inc, of Aeron chair fame, is a rare breed. They consistently morph with the times and remain profitable in turbulent waters. This article, Herman Miller’s Design for Growth, tells the compelling story of the genesis of a new suite of products named Convia that spawned a brand new subsidiary business.
The terrific strategy + business article not only recounts the technical story behind the convia product line, it tells the story of the innovative management practices employed by the company’s leadership over the lifetime of the company:
The creation of Convia might sound like a tale of pure product innovation, or even of technology adoption, but it is actually a story about management — and only the most recent of several similar stories at Herman Miller. Over many decades, the company has made itself a laboratory for testing new management ideas and turning them into effective practice.
First, the hard evidence that the company is highly successful despite its repeated forays into the unknown:
Herman Miller competes in an industry slammed by arguably the worst commercial real-estate crisis in a generation. Still, despite a 19 percent plunge in sales for fiscal 2009 (ending in May), the US$1.6 billion company reported a $68 million profit, albeit down from $152 million in fiscal 2008. Over the last 10 years, its stock has consistently outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.
Next, the snippets that yield insights into the off-the-beaten-path management mindset of the company’s leaders:
…two key principles that continue to inform the company’s management approach. One was a commitment to participative management; the other, a problem-solving approach to design.
Max De Pree, CEO from 1980 to 1987, drew broad attention to the culture at Herman Miller by writing the bestselling Leadership Is an Art (Dell, 1990). Of participative management, he wrote: “Each of us, no matter what our rank in the hierarchy may be, has the same rights: to be needed, to be involved, to have a covenantal relationship, to understand the corporation, to affect our destiny, to be accountable, to appeal, to make a commitment.”
He (Brian Walker, the company’s former chief financial officer, who took over as CEO in 2004) wanted everyone at the company to calculate the financial effect of decisions big and small. It didn’t matter if they were involved in buying, selling, building, designing, billing, paying, or financing. Or whether they were charged with controlling quality, reliability, inventory, waste, energy use, scrap, or the kinds of staples people used.
As Long (now director of the corporate HMPS team) toured the file cabinet plant recently, a visitor paused by a welding robot and asked, “Why don’t you use more robots?” “Robots,” Long said, “can’t make themselves better.”
The objective was to have top decision makers invest themselves in the work — to be companions on the journey, not simply judges of it. “The idea,” Miller says, “was to change the dynamic from traditional review-and-approve to advocacy.”
But Walker argued that in the feeble economy, the main goal was to keep the business sustainable, not to increase profitability at the expense of employees.
Walker says he has no regrets about paying people for time not worked, as the program generated a lot of goodwill and credibility for top management.
So, what do you think? Is the image of Herman Miller Inc. different from the stale corpo model entrenched in your brain?
Ignore The Messenger
The more civilized, modern day equivalent of “shoot the messenger” is “ignore the messenger“. In (so-called) enlightened organizations, couriers of bad news aren’t physically eviscerated like in the old days, they’re simply ignored – at first.
If the bearers of blasphemy don’t get the hint and continue to badger the dudes in the upper layers of the corpo cake, a stronger feedback signal is emitted in the form of cleverly disguised words. Well, they’re cleverly disguised most of the time?
DIC In A Box
I’ll wager $0 cents that 99% of corpo America institutes some kind of (yawn) standard DIC-in-a-box compensation system as shown in the figure below. Why? Because that’s what the Sloan, Wharton, and other “elite” B-schools say is the “optimum” motivational system, of course. Plus, it’s the safest and easiest way to reward the DICforce. What box are you in, fellow DICster? If you’re a BM, you’re unboxed at the mysterious and unrecorded level N+1, where there is no $Max, right?
Check out the two radical, but non-theoretical, compensation systems in place at these two real and deviant orgs:
According to “normal” business criteria, which are profit and revenue growth, Fog Creek Software and Semco must be considered successful companies, no?
What kind of innovative compensation system does your company use?
The Art Of Rationalization
A major defense mechanism that all human beings develop over time is the art of rationalization. A perpetrator (like me and you?) of “bad” behavior who doesn’t want to be held accountable for his/her behavior always uses the skill of rationalization to disconnect and distance him/herself from personal feelings of guilt and to convince others that the manifest behavior was “noble and just”. Street smart politicians, corpo managers, so-called leaders, and over-educated experts are extremely clever and highly skilled rationalizers. They’re at the top of Everest.
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They do not mean to do harm… They are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” – T. S. Eliot
Hitler is perhaps the ultimate example of a supremely skilled rationalizer. He not only convinced himself that the atrocities he committed against mankind were noble and just, this dude convinced an entire nation so effectively that “his” people deified him. Ominously, in many orgs around the globe, millions of little Hitlers operate unfettered. They perpetrate their “bad” behavior on their fellow human beings while (astonishingly) being rewarded for it. Blech!
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
My BTC Address
Bulldozer00's Blog 