The RTP Scrolls

On mountains, beliefs, and leadership

2011-03-10T08:45:00.001-05:00

“The led must not be compelled; they must be able to choose their own leader.”
Albert Einstein

This is an exploration on the meaning of leadership, which has been sitting on my writing pad for nearly an year since the events described in Guns, police, alcohol, and leadership.I don’t often say it but this is one of those postings where I must clearly emphasize that these opinions are mine and mine alone, and are not meant to reflect or contradict the opinions of my employer.

People, lots of them…

Back on December of 2009, I took on an assignment as Chief Programmer for a 9 person team. Tasked with leading the team to new levels of performance and execution, within months we had grown to a life-altering 29 people in development, verification, and information development roles. The idea of leading the technical work of dozens of people was not only a new challenge in itself, but uncomfortably at odds with the ideals I had postulated in The Commanding Heights of the Enterprise – Part 1 – The free-market workforce. This was no self-organized team, it was the product of higher-level decision to bulk up our capacity. With a handful of exceptions, everyone had been assigned to the project and had not chosen (nor objected) to work with us.

Before any meaningful progress could be made with the new scale of the team, the first order of business was of a personal nature, in how to reconcile an unwavering belief in the freedom of choice as the basis for the modern enterprise with the apparent incongruity of working in a mid-sized team formed through external factors.

…and when one person is enough

As a conflicting undercurrent, over the years, I had also progressed on a path of advocacy for quality, technique, and craft as the foundation for building successful products. During that time I was extremely fortunate to have met a few remarkable individuals who had leveraged mastery of skill and hands-on work to deliver incredibly useful components and products. The notion of a skilled developer being several times more productive than a junior developer had long been established in the industry, but these individuals had proven something new, that an extremely skilled developer could replace an entire team of people across different roles.

Back against the wall…

A few months earlier I had received the advice that the most important thing a leader could do for a team was to convince the team that it could “climb that mountain”, that as long as people believed they could achieve something meaningful, they would follow you to Earth’s end.

Around the same time, I had familiarized myself with some of the works of Peter Drucker, father of modern management, who advocated leadership as indistinguishable from management, favoring performance over charisma. Transport those principles to the mountain-climbing analogy and you are about to find out that leadership is not about inspiring people to climb mountains, it is about helping people find an interesting mountain to climb, and when they do find that mountain, helping them do it better than they could by themselves. Everything else, however important, is secondary.

In fact leadership is not even about organizational charts or mandates, any systematic and concerted action towards improving a team’s performance is an act of leadership.

In a seemingly brittleness of character, and heavily influenced by the examples set by the extremely skilled people mentioned earlier, I do not believe inordinate effort should be invested on those who are not enthusiastic about climbing mountains. Some effort yes, but not of the “I will make you my personal project” kind of effort. If someone comes that close to a mountain, they either brought the gear or came for the scenery. Not only you could be depriving the world of a fantastic surgeon, teacher or musician, but you will also be sapping the enthusiasm from those who would otherwise enjoy their climb.

…finding the right people

Along the way, we had our usual share of shuffles on the team, undergoing the whole Summer attempting to backfill two positions in our Brazil team. In that wonderfully monotone mind of mine, I chose a single focus attribute during the interviews: an unwavering love of the craft. These were software development positions, and I had one question that candidates should nail:

“Tell me about three things you absolutely loved and three things you absolutely hated in the previous technologies you have worked with.”

In a few cases we had to go for a second interview with candidates that just didn’t feel comfortable with the question or had come too “coached” with perfectly neutral and balanced answers about everything. We did the usual vetting for red flags in terms of personality and attitude, but there would be no compromise in finding people who not only had the skills we needed but were also capable of having strong reactions to the work at hand.

To put the situation in context, this was at a time where we still had a 9-person staff, so that being short on two people for three months hurt…a lot. A firm rule ensured we would not waver under the mounting pressure to rebuild our full strength as the weeks piled up without good matches for the positions. It took us a while, but even to date, our two new members surprise me with their technical quality and with how quickly they made us forget they had just joined the team.

A final moment for inner (healthy) conflict

Looking back over the past 14 months, it has been an incredible opportunity to experience the day-to-day formation of a team under the light of strongly held beliefs in the power of self-organized teams and the efficiencies of highly-skilled small teams. Though conflicting on the surface, many of these experiences have been self-reaffirming whereas others have helped partially reshape my perspectives on organized leadership.

Love of the art matters…a lot. Do not let anyone ever tell you “it is only a job” or about the “realities of the market”. People who love what they do want to be surrounded by people who share that same passion, if they don’t, they will either leave or underperform.
Self-organization matters. Letting people choose their assignments, however small of a choice given the constraints at hand, does wonders for engagement and reducing the costs of ownership transfer.
Skills have a gravitational field. An expertly executed task will earn you reputation and attract talent towards you. I call it “skill gravity”. If you are wondering how to deal with large skill gaps within the team, the answer is painfully simple: ask yourself whether each climber came for the wall or for the scenery. Prolonged attempts to remediate the situation should be very carefully balanced against point #1.
Leadership is about vision. It only makes sense to follow an idea if you believe you will be better off than threading your own path. Notice I said an idea, and not “a group of people” or “a person”. Following people is fine on the short term until you find your bearings, but understand the subtle distinction: you want to reach the same place as them, not follow them. As a “leader”, it is your job to establish that idea and ensure people can see where they are going at all times.

I look forward to next few months, which is about the time it will take me to write something this long and abstract anyway, meanwhile focusing on sharing our practices inside and outside the firewall. There was a much larger section to this posting that was left for another day, around this quote from Peter Drucker:

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

Guns, police, alcohol, and leadership

2011-01-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Back on February of 2010, I went on a business trip to Brazil. The idea was to both visit a customer and spend some time with my new team in the Sao Paulo lab.

I arrived on Sunday night, and with the customer visit scheduled for Wednesday, I had the opportunity to visit the lab during the other days of the week until my departure on Saturday morning.

My manager, Jason, arrived on site on Monday afternoon, joining me in the meet-and-greet with the local manager. Taking a couple of vacation days before the trip forced me to split my time between the team and a backlog of email chores that invaded Monday night.

Next time, put it in the trunk…

Tuesday would not be so uneventful. Now joined by Russ, our senior architect, our three-person crew managed to elbow other guests in the rather luxurious hotel lobby and secure a cab by 8AM.

This is the point where I made my worst mistake in that trip: in the rush to secure the cab, I left my briefcase containing the IBM notebook on my lap instead of insisting that it be put in the car’s trunk. Halfway through our trip to the IBM site, our cab stopped in traffic for about 30 seconds, enough time for an armed motorcycle rider to tap my window with the barrel of a small handgun. The barrel seemed fairly weathered and I obliged with my equally weathered work equipment.

Sitting in the back, Jason and Russ were not robbed, but were just as shaken. With the rest of the day somewhat taken by filling various incident reports with IBM and local police, I figured my weekly stupidity quota was over and decided to muscle through reimaging a loaner laptop from the local lab.

…after hours, the secret of leadership

That day was far from over. Before resuming my email chores in the hotel room, I joined Jason and Russ for dinner at the hotel cafe and for a post-meal discussion on motivation and leadership that would invade the late hours of the evening.

My initial point of view is public and sometimes unpopular, based on discipline and technique as the requirement for anything done right and as the foundation for anything worth doing. It turns out the abbreviated version of those tenets channeled through the enlightened perspective of two beers in the bloodstream can make you come across as a bit of a Sergeant Hartman in the making. I may or may not have shared a link to Technique, Art, and Quality” later to dispel any misunderstanding, and it may or may not have worked, not really sure, not really the point.

Russ offered the cornerstone of his leadership belief, that people needed to believe they could “climb that mountain”. Russ has led similar teams many times over in his long career, so I pinned his advice to a long list of thoughts I have been mulling over for the past year or so. I will come back to that list in a new post very soon.

Reunion time

It is still Tuesday night, back in my room, an enveloped letter from the desk tells me a good Samaritan found my wallet with everything in it sans cash and brought it back to the hotel. It even had the IBM badges neatly stripped of their plastic hooks and slotted next to the (already cancelled) credit cards and hotel room card. Interesting factoid, this would *not* be the last time I was reunited to my wallet sans cash on 2010, that wallet is either as loyal as a dog or cursed, or both.

Reminiscing times…

On Wednesday we headed back to the IBM site in an inconspicuously executive cab, bulked up our party with the local customer rep and then headed back out to our scheduled customer visit. I often forget how much fun I have during customer visits and being outside the lab. Other than frequent traveling I could get used to that life.

…times to be remembered

Thursday and Fridays rounded up the visit to the lab with enough quality time with the team before my departure on Saturday morning. I cannot value enough the opportunity to have met my new colleagues face to face and I cannot value enough the realization of the 13 years separating my initial days in the Brazil lab and this visit, a mixture of time warp and role swap.

I would still be back to the lab during Summer time (which means I had two Winters during 2010, one on each hemisphere) for a longer stay spread out between working remotely from my home town and periodic visits to the lab.

On stoicism, mercenaries, and being a professional

2010-07-22T08:00:00.001-04:00

Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.
Peter Drucker

For the past few months I have witnessed a number of friends making the all important choice of continuing their careers in a different company.

These friends are highly talented in their areas, with a great sense of independence and various degrees of natural leadership.

A common factor in their decision was a deep disagreement with company policies that adversely affected their work.

A common factor amongst the companies was a level of organizational obliviousness to all signs emitted by their soon-to-be-left top talent, not to mention a depleted talent pool.

A while ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about a proposed process I particularly disliked. In this case, the process favored the convenience of the person compiling the process results over the convenience of the people doing the actual work, forcing them to manually copy various bits of their work into spreadsheets and such.

My main concern was that the built-in carelessness for people’s time would send the wrong message, to which the response was “They [the team] need to be professional and deal with these situations, it is part of their job.”

Later we found common ground in assigning someone to build a tool that could convert the production data to the process spreadsheets, a task that was interesting in itself and far more gratifying than the original activity.

With both parties happy, I mentally revisited the discussion. People often put such a strong focus on the “being paid” part of “being a professional” that they tend to ignore everything else. A professional is someone who makes a living out of his craft. Someone trampling his convictions solely for compensation is called a mercenary…or worse.

With the economic crisis in North America and Europe, that distorted view of professionalism has been escalating quickly. Companies can hire and keep people more easily. That is a fact, and it is also irrelevant to how people should be treated once they are hired. Stoicism is a trait to be explored sparsely, even dream jobs sometimes need it, but people who do not experience pleasure nor pain do not make for good employees.

When that view of professionalism becomes the majority view inside an organization, it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that the professionals leave and the stoic and the mercenaries remain.

Once the “cranky” employees leave and morale - measured in terms of complaints to management – improves, there is an illusory sense of order and accomplished leadership that is hard to break.

And it is always quiet before the storm.

On the business value of an apology

2010-02-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

The February edition of Fortune Magazine brings an article (not available online just yet) titled “Why doing good is good for business”. Amongst many examples of how businesses had profited from making ethical or charitable decisions, there was a small snippet that called my attention.

…several years ago the University of Michigan's hospital system embarked on a major revision of its medical malpractice policies. Departing from the standard industry practice of reflexively "denying and defending" most claims, doctors and hospital officials started sitting down with plaintiffs and their lawyers to discuss complaints prior to any formal litigation. In many of these meetings the doctors apologized directly to patients for any harm that their professional actions had caused.

What I found really fantastic was the positive cultural change brought about by the reintegration of ethics into the messy realm of medical lawsuits:

The results were concrete and dramatic: Between 1999 and 2006 malpractice claims against University of Michigan hospitals dropped by more than half, as did total malpractice litigation costs. …with the working atmosphere now free of retribution, doctors no longer have to duck and dodge to avoid the appearance of guilt when errors occur…The culture of transparency ... has brought error rates down throughout the hospital and measurably improved the quality of patient care."

NPR ran the story about the University of Michigan’s hospital a couple of years ago in a piece called Practice of Hospital Apologies Is Gaining Ground. Apologizing, in this case, has become the ultimate exercise of understanding customers, first as human beings, and only then as consumers.

Another point of reflection, lost amidst the numbers, is that Doctors have found the experience uplifting, replacing the fear of retribution by the relief of forgiveness. That we cannot think of a worse mistake than costing someone’s life is evidence that we should never hold back on apologizing for our own mistakes.

The Commanding Heights of the Enterprise – Part 2 – The information market

2010-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Milton Friedman

I am often troubled when I hear “it is not what you know that matters, but who you know”. It is not because it sounds overtly crass, which it does, but because it tends to make people light up that part of the brain that thinks about career progression. It rarely prompts anyone to consider the quality of the information exchanges around them.

Ensuring that people share what they know with people who should have that information is one of the most difficult challenges for the modern enterprise.

That challenge manifests itself in at least two fundamental ways, in that (1) most people are not naturally motivated to share information about their work and (2) people are often unaware about the majority of colleagues who could be interested in that information.

Corporations spend considerable resources in top-down reorganizations to get people connected in the right ways, succeeding or failing in various degrees: too little sharing and people start to either miss opportunities or duplicate someone else’s work, too much sharing and productivity crawls to a halt because people are processing gobs of information they don’t actually need.

Organizational network analysis¹ (ONA) can point areas of attention to the executive teams and also support restructuring decisions to match the “real” social networks within the company.

Whereas the benefits of such reorganizations are undeniable, and looking past the costs required to achieve these results, it is impossible to ignore that dynamic market conditions tend to constantly shift the ground beneath the newly established networks.

In the free-market workforce proposed in the first part of this series, central coordination and realignment of information flows are made obsolete. The pressure for self-organization around corporate goals requires strong information flows even to establish teams around those goals.

As described in the next section, individual contributions to the information flows are as critical to the success of the individual as they are to the success of the corporation, minimizing the dependency on top-down reorganizations to maintain the social networks aligned with business goals.

On game theory and the information market

Most corporations are a showcase for examples of game theory², mostly rooted in lack of trust.

In more benign cases you may find a collection of sub-organizations working under a Nash equilibrium occasionally unlocked by shifting market conditions. In a Nash equilibrium, each player makes decisions based on its own assumptions about the equilibrium strategies adopted by other players, often precluding a better mutual arrangement that would require each party to agree on concessions at the same time.

In the worst cases, we often see a corporate-wide tragedy of the commons, where the mutual lack of trust forces each team to work against the best interests of the company.

Either way, if participants in the system could anticipate, rather than assume, each other’s decisions, the gridlocks underpinning Nash equilibriums or tragedies of the commons would simply disappear. In the subtle difference between anticipating and assuming how a colleague will make a decision lies the difference between a successful and a failed initiative.

Documents of understanding can be an effective tool for anticipating decisions, in that parties agree on those decisions beforehand. On the other hand, these kinds of agreements can be somewhat awkward for day-to-day interactions and rather costly for more complex engagements.

Experience in dealing with another party is a far more effective mechanism for anticipating a good outcome. Case in point, while filling a job opening, companies will heavily weight recommendations from other employees over a well-written resume.

A paper trail supplements trust, it cannot replace it.

The trust factor

Over time, in dealing with multiple people inside an organization, you will get to know some people very well. You will have completed successful transactions and established trust. People get used to the comfort of dealing with people they know over dealing with people they don’t.

Over time, these rings of trust tend to become mutually exclusive, end up receiving their own mission, their own budget, and silos are born. In any given company, these closed rings of trust represent the set of Nash equilibriums I mentioned earlier on.

Creating transactions across these rings of trust is what enables the next giant productivity leap for corporations, and is a central tenet of the new organizational model proposed in this series.

When rings of trust are formed around individual business goals, such as winning an account from a key competitor, they tend to be smaller and short lived than when they are formed around broader missions, such as creating a product that can be sold across multiple accounts. NT: The ramified implications of this paragraph alone on how products are developed and marketed warrant their own posting.

In the new organizational structure proposed in this series, everything comes together when Jim-the-salesperson knows that Ned-the-programmer will actually deliver a prototype of a new product for a key account within two weeks and also knowing that Ned’s manager, Bob-the-manager, will not reassign Ned to a different task during the prototyping effort. Jim knows what to expect because Ned chose to work on this prototype and because Bob’s responsibility is to coach Ned into finding his own assignments. It also helps that Ned learned about Jim through a mutual colleague and became a big fan of Jim’s winning streak in key customer accounts. Conversely, Jim had the chance to read quite a bit about Ned’s work when initially contacted.

Compare that fictitious scenario to the parallel universe were Jim drops that prospective US$2 million account and puts his efforts into a US$1 million account where a prototype is not needed and the customer only needs to see a handful of pre-recorded demos. One of the many things separating one universe from another is that in one Jim can partially anticipate Ned and Bob’s behaviors, in the other he may be negatively biased by how much time it would take to become comfortable working with them.

Could Jim-the-salesperson be introduced to Ned-the-programmer and Bob-the-manager upon learning about the US$2 million proposal? Unfortunately for Jim, reading someone’s resume and actually knowing that someone are stages of acquaintance separated by a number of years, which introduces my next assertion:

Trust, beyond an individual trait, is an organizational asset that must be formally structured and managed.

Information hubs, if you build them, will they come?

For a corporation, establishing an information hub where employees can communicate with one another is the single-most important step in spreading the reach of its social networks. Whether that hub is a web 2.0 collaboration platform or a series of bring-your-own-story live events, it is not important, as long as the hub exists and carries the aura of corporate sponsorship.

Then comes a question of motivation, of supply and demand. Why would people want to share information towards the goal of establishing trust with people they don’t know? On the other side of the chain: why would people want to absorb or trust the information provided by others?

On the supply side, looking at a traditional organizational model, where goals are set at the top of the organization charts, I will sidestep the more altruistic motivators, such as the possibility of sharing an experience that may benefit others, and go straight for self-promotion – not to be confused with the empty promotion of skills one doesn’t have³. I will also recognize that even self-promotion is a rather weak motivation when the staffing and corporate recognition happens within the boundaries of departmental and organizational charts, far from the data posted to such information hubs.

Still on the supply side, but now looking at an organization operating under the free-market workforce model, the motivation for sharing the information becomes aligned with the corporate model for organizing teams. People who do not routinely share information about their work will be relatively lesser known than others and will have less flexibility in partnering with people in more desirable projects.

Why listen?

On the demand side, I will start with benchmarking. Benchmarking is a strong motivator for people to compare their own performance against that of others in the company. Once again, a very weak proposition for traditional organizational models, where people are evaluated by their management chain within their local organization boundaries.

There is also the possibility for scouting, or knowing who you can recruit in a hurry when a certain skill or profile is needed. Then again, there is little incentive from a staffing perspective, since management is mostly restricted to staffing teams based on who is available in their own corner of the organizational charts.

Now switch to the free-market workforce model, where benchmarking and scouting are aligned with the business model, where people need to know where they stand in the overall pool of competitors for certain kinds of projects they are interested on. Looking back at staffing, scouting goes from good-practice to necessity since you may find yourself short of a person who will not only be able to contribute the right skill but also be immediately trusted by other people in the team.

A different kind of market

Somehow, the market analogy falls apart for information exchanges. It does not obey the simple laws of supply and demand. High-demand does not drive up the cost for the users, excess of supply does not drive down the value of exchange for information sources.

Behind the broken analogy is a simple matter: knowledge is not a commodity that changes hands in a transaction, it gets multiplied. The “multiplication versus exchange” concept is fairly old and heavily threaded in leadership classes, but often hard to implement, which is why I like the idea of making the information sharing a necessity for the individual rather than a necessity for the corporation.

Once that new reality sinks in, it is time to introduce the third commanding height of the enterprise:

Absent legal limitations – security regulations and privacy laws come to mind - free agents in a micro-market workforce must be able to freely share information about their work with other free agents.

The best communication strategy for any enterprise lies in setting clear standards for what *cannot* be communicated and let free agents exchange everything else. The motivator for sharing information is establishing reputation and trust, and as such must happen continuously and over time.

The greater good as a recognizable entity

While describing the supply side of an information hub, I left out the altruistic motivation of contributing information to strangers who may eventually need it.

In the free-market workforce model proposed in this series, the stronger motivation for information flow within the organization significantly lessens the “stranger” component of the equation. Soon people find themselves sharing their information not only for the acute necessity of being known, but also with the awareness that it may benefit a *recognizable* set of followers, such as people who leave comments on a blog, contribute to the same wiki page, attend a live a presentation and so on.

With the right critical mass of people in the organization, the information market initially established as a tool to connect people becomes a transformational agent.

The market enables people to understand the company through the collective eyes of their peers - based in mutual trust rooted in mutual awareness - further reinforcing the self-organizing, self-directing nature of the workforce proposed in this series.

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¹ Driving Results Through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth by Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas is an excellent technical read on the topic.

² From Wikipedia, [game theory] attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

³ Summarizing my thoughts about self-promotion in “Office politics, ethics, and the darker shades of gray”, sharing accomplishments is one part bragging rights and three parts corporate responsibility.

The Commanding Heights of the Enterprise – Part 1 – The free-market workforce

2009-10-07T09:00:00.004-04:00

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

A few months ago I took on a personal challenge, of imagining what it would take to achieve the next giant leap in productivity in the workplace. Strangely for someone used to push for improvements in requirements management processes and for the development of deep skills, this time I found myself in the philosophical land of long term vision.

As for the title of this posting, the idea started while watching the excellent documentary “Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy”. Coining from Wikipedia: “[The documentary title] takes its title from a speech by Vladimir Lenin, who used the phrase ‘commanding heights’ to refer to the segments and industries in an economy that effectively control and support the others…”

Corporations as micro-markets…

“The Battle for the World Economy” explores the role of the state in building an economic system, first under the lens of John Keynes, who believed governments could control the markets; later from the redeemed point of view of Friedrich Hayek, who advocated in favor of markets regulating themselves.

Whereas the difference between nations and corporations is not lost on me, the similarities between a central control body and a vast array of somewhat free agents interacting with each other are striking. If the micro-cosmos of the corporation is the economy, the work force is its industry.

I can project Hayek's school of thought onto corporations, of letting the workforce find its natural balance and define what the corporation can deliver, much as I can extrapolate the Keynesian school of thought through which executives can use a model to predict and control the responses of the workforce towards corporate goals.

The greatest challenge of our leadership is not how to control the readiness of the workforce, but how to make the workforce assume control of the enterprise under a clear set of rules. In other words, the challenge is how to favor direction over control.

…and employees as free agents

It has been the norm for companies to rely on human resource management to motivate the workforce, an attempt at restoring some of what is lost at the very moment a free-agent sells his time and talent in exchange for a paycheck.

The irony of human resource management is that it is premised on raising the capability of the workforce through incentives, whereas the top performers are typically the ones who can best ignore the incentive structure and focus on what they really like and know how to do.

Successful work relations involve retaining a greater share of that human drive, by signing a contract with a partner versus hiring an employee. Many will point out that smaller companies and startups already operate at that level, though there is considerable difficulty in making the principles of partnership work in the taller organization charts found in medium and large companies.

The role of meta-managers

Paul Hawken once observed that “Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.”

Under the risk of falling from the immense heights of his reputation, I wanted to build on Paul’s observation with the following: Excellent management is the art of getting everyone to understand the big picture and find the problems themselves. This brings up the first two “commanding heights” of the enterprise:

The big picture: Ensure employees understand their role in the lives of their customers.
Ownership: Ensure employees own the initiative to solve customer problems with a deep sense of accountability.

You want your people to use their awareness of the big picture to identify the problems to be solved, self-organize towards the solution of those problems, and achieve that solution under the continuous pressure of financial and social accountability for their decisions.

Ultimately, you want that level of independence and self-direction to happen not only at the executive level, but at a departmental and individual level.

Taking the “resource” out of HR

A few weeks ago, while informally pitching this idea, I was asked whether this new workplace would have a place for individuals happy to work with well-defined, self-contained tasks. The answer was an unapologetic and resounding “no”.

This kind of tool-like employee would siphon executive attention from strategy towards pointing the employees at the right problems and towards keeping them moving. I don’t mean to be derogatory, the reality of today’s work relations often demand that kind of behavior.

In my early years as a software engineer I witnessed a spat between two senior colleagues: The most senior engineer in the team and a hard driven project lead with a classic command and control point of view.

In one occasion, a junior employee communicated release plans and dates to another internal team. These plans were current a couple of weeks before the communication, enough for the project lead to be infuriated by the break in protocol.

The response came in the form of a fiery email directed towards the entire group, where we were required to not repeat the misdemeanor and reroute any information requests to the leadership team.

A few minutes later, to a general sense of vindication, a well written response was fired back from our senior colleague, in favor of information sharing over censorship. The email was closed with: “It is as much of an embarrassment for a colleague to misstate our current strategy as it is for him to be unaware of it.”

The ownership challenge

At this point, much of the above may sound common sense. Most people would be tempted to point at a myriad of examples of none of this being new. Abstract ideas often provoke that reaction, which brings me to a concrete challenge and excellent ice-breaker for departmental meetings. When the situation allows, ask yourself and your people:

What would you do if your next twelve paychecks depended solely on your own business decisions?”

If you get silence and you are not in a dysfunctional group, take a deep breath…actually take a deep breath anyway, you have a lot of work to do in that big picture criteria. Your people simply do not know enough about who buys your product and why. Even if they have initiative burning a hole inside them, they would not know where to point it.

In a better scenario, you will get questions about who buys the product and why. Time to introduce your production people to the sales teams before the next attempt at answering the ownership challenge.

On an average team, the first round of this challenge should reveal the need for better understanding of the customers and of the sales and pipeline chains. Peel that onion long enough and you will eventually pass through, but not stop at, the need for a better requirements management process.

If you get a number of suggestions and the team is willing to bank their livelihood on these suggestions, start implementing as many of them as fast as you can.

Bootstrapping the market-based culture…

One of the most fascinating aspects of the ownership challenge is that it is more than a question or the basis of an energizing team meeting: it is a mind set to be cultivated on a daily basis.

Cultivating this mind set is also more than asking the question every day, it is about letting the answers pervade the real business operations incrementally. Over the long term, you want not only your people to have those answers, you want your people to live by the reality of business results being driven by those answers.

Resurfacing the economy theme set at the top of this entry, you want your products and people to act as market forces. Just as an exercise, imagine an organization where people cannot rely on departmental boundaries to define their next assignment, where people are invited to work on projects based on their reputation, and where people must have demonstrable business results to back that reputation.

While you are at it, imagine executive chains attracting people on the merits of their business cases or on the ability of their managers to take on Paul Hawken’s challenge to make problems interesting and solutions constructive. Imagine people looking for their next position not on the basis of what they would like to be doing, but on the basis of where they think their next team would benefit the most from their skills.

…and regulating the markets

As with any market, the internal workforce market needs a minimal set of rules to ensure its functioning. This set of rules must answer some immediate concerns:

Stability, or terms of contract: For how long should a business interaction last and should it each party be entitled to compensation in case of rescission? This is not about employment stability, it is about the “contract” between an employee and a project. Rescinding an internal contract does not equal to separation from the company.
Flexibility: should an employee be allowed to sign contracts with multiple parties? Does dedication to a project need to be exclusive?
Logistics: What if a project cannot draw in enough participants to become viable? Is it an indictment of an inadequate business case or does it reflect insufficient marketing skills in selling the idea to prospective participants.
Trust. Would employees sign up to contribute all or part of their time to work with people they have not worked with previously? Likewise, what would it take for project owners to trust an applicant?
Cooperatives. Would employees be able to form up entire go-to-market strategies around an initiative and bank their future on it? By employees I mean anywhere from the rank-and-file to C-level executives.
Exchange of information: The dynamics of self-organization requires an unprecedented level of intercommunication, on the ability for the leaders to share plans and enlist volunteers, on the ability for the employees to connect with the leaders or become thought leaders. This topic alone warrants its own entry.

An unprecedented experiment

In this regard of institutional innovation, I find it fascinating that larger companies have a clear edge over their more nimble startup competitors. Larger companies have the critical mass of people and products to form the internal markets. They also have tolerance for coordinating projects over longer periods of time.

Part of the answer lies in how well the chaos of a self-organizing workforce could be managed in a hypothetical transition and on the feasibility to make every individual aware of the big picture, of making people sufficiently engaged in offering solutions, or even comfortable to work with an added level of uncertainty in their work relations.

I have known quite a few individuals who would work well in such environment, though I must admit to a more than usual dose of unorthodoxy in these ideas. Ultimately, I see it as a matter of vision over hard science, even if as an experiment or as an extreme point of reference for a hybrid model.

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Photos by serhio,

The Human Resource factor – Renovating Home Depot

2009-08-27T11:20:00.001-04:00

Yet another great interview (“Renovating Home Depot”) by Geoff Colvin in Fortune Magazine, this time with Carol Tome, Home Depot’s CFO.

On how the company responded to the tough economic outlook caused by a multi-year contraction in the housing market.

“First we wanted to make sure that we kept our associates, the men and women on the floor of the store, totally engaged. In an environment where a lot of companies were cutting back, we said no. We are going to invest in those associates. We're going to pay merit increases, pay bonuses, make contributions into the 401(k) plan. We're going to be singularly focused on them so they can take care of the customers.

We introduced something we call power hours inside our stores. In the hours when traffic is heaviest we stop all activity that is not customer facing -- pack-down activities, say -- and spend 100% of our time taking care of customers.”

On the possibility of unionization of its 300.000 non-union employees:

“We will do the right thing for our stores. When we talked to our store associates and said, Why would you want to join a union, you know what we learned? It is really not because of our pay. It is because of the relationship they have with their boss.”

On the differentiation to competitors:

“From a merchandising perspective, I will tell you that if you go to our hand-tools or power-tools aisle, we've got a broader assortment than anyone in town. We have great prices, and we should always win on product. But what is the stickiness? The stickiness has got to be about the human experience.”

“Best advice I ever got”

2009-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

Fortune Magazine just ran a great article titled “Best advice I ever got”, listing short stories from 22 very successful people in their fields. A few of my favorites

Jim Senegal, Co-founder and CEO, Costco Wholesale:

Some people believe that you should say something just once. But I think you get a message across by communicating it every day.

Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sach:

First, it's good to solicit your people's opinions before you give them yours. And second, your people will be very influenced by how you carry yourself under stress.

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google:

When there is [a] business conflict you tend to get rat-holed into it. [Bill's] general advice has been to rise one step higher, above the person on the other side of the table, and to take the long view. He'll say, "You're letting it bother you. Don't."

Thomas Keller, Chef, The French Laundry, Per Se:

Treat it like it's yours and someday it will be.

Learned optimism, because failure is a choice

2009-06-09T09:00:00.001-04:00

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the continuation of Layoffs, sheep, shepherds, and wolves, I wanted to write about overcoming failure and fear.

Recently I was faced with the decision to move to an easier assignment, with fewer external dependencies, no team to lead, a more forgiving range of time zones, and in a new technology field where I would have more freedom of action.

Against initial instinct, I chose to renew my commitment to a project anyone would consider far more challenging. I refused to leave it before I got all my lessons right, knowing the opportunity would most likely never materialize again.

This entry is largely reflective, but if your time is right, read on…

Optimism is a skill, not a trait

Most people are born with a fantastic gift: the gift of being able to explore and grow their potential until they decide to quit. Left unchecked, the human spirit is boundless. Yet, many people wake up one day convinced they have gone as far as they could, accepting a life of fear from losing what little they cherish.

We are born without fear, without failure, and at the same time, vulnerable to both. This fragility is one of our greatest strengths: the ability to learn from our failures and try again another day with our new experiences. Fear is the anticipation of repeat failure, and ultimately the choice to renounce our innate abilities to adapt.

As people go through the cycle of trying, failing, learning, and trying again, they develop a sense of what I call “learned optimism”. Learned optimism is a state of mind where you don’t just intuitively believe things will be all right, it is when you consciously *know* they will be all right because you know you were born with the tools to try until you succeed.

Some people are born optimistic, some are born brave, but learned optimism always carries the day. Learned optimism is a skill rooted in reason and practice, it gives you the certainty you cannot fail until you allow yourself to fail.

Wandering through life and the two questions

Encouraging a friend through a rough patch is an act of kindness, but encouragement alone cannot make up for a life lived as a succession of moments. As a true friend, I prefer to always ask:

Do you really want to do this?”.

If the answer is “yes”, then your friend is in the more serious ground of commitment to choice, by which time you can offer the second question:

Is it important enough that you will keep trying and improving at it until you succeed?”

You would be surprised at how few of our goals can be answered with the double “yes” to these questions. Some people find their true goals early in life; some stumble for longer; most never find what they never bothered to look for, living what Thoreau described as a life of quiet desperation.

Before we get into the long road of finding our life goals, the smaller tasks and projects at hand are good practice and should always pass the test of these two questions.

Deadlines are tools, not constraints

The certainty of success is premised on abundant time for repeat attempts at trial and error. Human lifespan is generally long enough to develop learned optimism, projects in our career are generally not.

Whereas we can try and complete a project within a deadline, fail, improve our planning skills, and try again, we must keep in mind the larger point of whether meeting deadlines is merely a skill – albeit a useful one - or a goal in life.

Skill or goal, practicing delivery within a deadline is a great exercise. There are few things that can accelerate the development of learned optimism as much as the whirlwind of impending deadlines and the knowledge that our effort will be either used by a paying customer or abandoned by the wayside for lack of interest.

I also have to keep reminding myself to practice keeping my serenity over time, though it may take a few iterations to deliver a task on time and with poise. Although careers and companies are man-made and alien to our nature, I would never dismiss them as learning tools: causality and time are also part of the universe for a reason, one that transcends the theme of this posting.

The road to certainty

For younger generations, my first advice is to become extremely good at something and watch your reactions to the learning process.

No matter how small a goal, developing certainty has a transformational effect that can affect other aspects of our lives. Once you excel at something and develop a sense of assured success, you can excel at anything you choose to.

The second unsolicited bit of advice is that until you find your goals, stay close to people who have found theirs.

People who have found their true goals are committed to their choices, knowledgeable, and invariably passionate. At some point in their lives, they chose to make the right choices, they chose to not give in to failure, they chose to learn from it and to keep on trying.

Learning and practice need good mentors and you cannot ask for better role models.

Layoffs, sheep, shepherds, and wolves

2009-03-31T09:00:00.003-04:00

“And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.”

Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Russ Cribb

Choice over fear

I started writing this entry months ago, under the crushing pressure of emails from friends and colleagues telling me about their layoffs.

In the spirit of true empathy, I assessed the what-if possibilities of not having a regular paying job, and each scenario felt more overwhelming than the previous. I also felt depressed for not being able to offer any material help to my fellow colleagues, not owning a company that employs people, not holding a position where I could influence the creation of a job.

Along the way, I benefited from inspiring emails from others looking ahead with optimism and hope. Not the least, I was inspired by my brother’s recent choice to abandon a cushy management job at a large construction firm to start his own successful business.

Once the jumble of thoughts settled down a few days ago, the imagined experiences of my what-if assessment sunk in too deep.

Starting last week, I chose to see the world in a different way, a world where either we live waiting in fear or we live acting on the basis of technique and choice.

I chose to see how much control I have over finding a less vulnerable position in the world, over how much control I have over my reaction to negative events, and how much personal investment these choices will take.

Clarity displaced fear.

A world of sheep, wolves, and shepherds

I now see our world as a collective of sheep, wolves, and shepherds. Once you fully realize that separation, you can never accept facing the world as a sheep.

Behaving like a sheep is about making as few choices as possible, settling into a stable situation and hoping things will not change. Sheep intentionally put their fates at hand of shepherds and unknowingly at the mercy of wolves. Time after time, sheep seek seemingly safe settings and stay there until the inexorable dangers of political and economical instability surround them again. Sheep regard being outside a wolf’s stomach to be a good life, and being inside the wolf’s stomach the result of random and cruel chance.

A shepherd lives a life of making choices for himself and for others, a life of little rest and great responsibility. Shepherds are far fewer in number than sheep and looked upon when the smell of danger spreads in the air. A shepherd may falter under impossible odds, watching a wolf snatch the stray sheep while protecting the main group from a larger pack of wolves, but a good shepherd never looks back. A great shepherd never blames the odds.

Wolves also thrive in making choices, but about making choices about their own lives, not taking great interest on shepherd and sheep other than for the occasional feeding.

Choice…

At the root of sheepish thought is the belief that we cannot influence the events around us. That is partly true, but we do have control over our preparedness to face those events.

The correct thought is “I refuse to be eaten helpless in the middle of the night. I will take charge of my immediate surroundings to reduce the influence of negative events in my life.”

You see two clear choices in the corrected thought: the refusal to stay helpless and the choice to take charge of the surroundings. What you may miss is that they are both empty in absence of technique; it is easy to shake a fist towards the sky, it is much harder to raise the rest of the body out of shifting sand.

There is also the deep realization that it is a whole different world to keep an entire flock out of shifting sand. Each person who oversees a business, whether a line manager, an executive, or a small business owner, is a shepherd. It is easy to ignore the crushing pressure these times bring upon the shepherds, more so amidst the carefully chosen “golden-parachute” sound bytes picked by what passes for mass news nowadays. The exception is not the rule.

…and technique

Choice is at reach for all of us, but it does not happen overnight. The power of choice is multiplied by the choices at hand. If we wait until disaster hits to start making choices, we may find out that there are only bad and worse choices. When all alternatives look bad, we are likely to feel paralyzed. Depending on how despairing the situation, we may even wish for the wolf to come out of the woods and end our misery.

In my mind, these are the most important choices any person can make today:

Identify the one thing most likely to affect them the most. One can always get struck by lightning while running from his car to the mall entrance, but that is the realm of wills and life insurance. The point here is “most likely”.
Determine how many plausible alternatives you want to have if that event occurs. For instance, do you want to have a network of hundreds of followers on Twitter, have a standing invitation to join a consultancy company, be an expert on a hot technology and have standing job offers on your email inbox, become a big-circuit motivational speaker? These are all things that take lot of investment and happen on their own time. The point here is “plausible”.
Start working on developing those alternatives ahead of time. Many of them may take years to materialize, and here is a plug from this believer in the power of web 2.0 social networks: developing any kind of meaningful network takes at least two or three years.

I have seen many a people losing important time in the period after receiving their job loss notice polishing resumes, reestablishing their network of contacts, assessing the possibility of seeking a new job or starting a consultancy, and pondering over many other important decisions. At best, the unpreparedness force uninformed choices, at worst it translates into months without a source of income.

The silver-lining: a renewed sense of urgency

Amidst all crisis and sense of doom, the one positive aspect I see is an opening for a renewed sense of urgency. It used to be that a botched project was followed by the opportunity to try it anew with the next big project. “It is only a job” was the theme song for lax execution and the launch of shoddy products.

My favorite example is the GM of the 90s and early 2000s, where the widespread lack of care with production could be seen in the news and at the dealership lots: union workers making three times the salary of peers working for competitors, dated pushrod engines, Pontiac Aztecs, misaligned body panels, visible mold lines in the interior plastics, you name it. It was not until Bob Lutz came aboard in 2002 that serious improvement started to be seen, to the point where I even put some of their cars on my window-shopping list. The tragedy was that all those years of carelessness and inaction took their toll and made GM’s position untenable when the recession hit.

I think that that kind of example and the lessons that go with it are about to permeate corporate America: A botched project will not be followed by another chance, but by a round of layoffs.

There is a clear opportunity for those who really care about their customers, and ultimately their jobs and businesses, to carry that flag and instill that sense of urgency in the workplace pushing for better requirement definitions, better market validation, better execution, better customer support, and that extra mile on end-user satisfaction.

Economies may stall or even shrink, but executives who manage to reshape their workforce and employees who embrace the new mindset will learn quickly that the size of the slice matters more than the size of the pie.

As sheep and shepherd have always known, collective preparedness is the ultimate safeguard.

Barack Obama, on management

2009-01-15T21:02:00.001-05:00

Political opinions aside, Barack Obama and his team ran one of the most efficient, most successful, large scale political campaigns in recent history. An accomplished manager himself, he offered his views on management in a recent interview on Time Magazine:

"I don't think there's some magic trick here. I think I've got a good nose for talent, so I hire really good people. And I've got a pretty healthy ego, so I'm not scared of hiring the smartest people, even when they're smarter than me. And I have a low tolerance of nonsense and turf battles and game-playing, and I send that message very clearly. And so over time, I think, people start trusting each other, and they stay focused on mission, as opposed to personal ambition or grievance. If you've got really smart people who are all focused on the same mission, then usually you can get some things done."

Two 19th century truths about selling your ideas

2008-12-28T21:29:00.001-05:00

From two Frenchmen who lived in the 19^th century comes

"...everything has to come in its own time in order to win its way. A solution given lightly, prior to the complete elucidation of the question, would be a retarding force, rather than a means to advancement."

Allan Kardec (1804-1869)

and

"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

Treating Test-Driven Development as a matter of technique

2008-10-23T20:34:00.002-04:00

At the heart of good development is good programming and at the heart of good programming is the ability to think through how things are being done and what needs to be achieved.
Thinking through how things are done is a lower-level concern, involving the nuts and bolts offw how the function integrates with the surrounding code, mostly around the area of exception handling, mapping of functional domain to the programming language, and usage of the correct system calls.
Thinking through what needs to be achieved is a higher-level concern, presumably starting from some sort of requirements specification, which governs the test inputs and result expectations from those tests.
Once the “what” and the “how” are combined with a certain skill, one should have a product that does what a user expects without exploding while at it.
Test-driven development (TDD) is an ideal solution to the “what” and a significant help to the “how”. Writing tests first inevitably forces you to understand what needs to be achieved, model it in terms of method calls, and to define the test inputs and outputs. Less churn in the definition of what methods are supposed to do is translated in less churn modifying the code implementation to match the method definitions.
Technique versus choice
Despite significant literature on the subject, TDD is often approached as a matter of personal choice. The argument invariably lands on the ditch of unproven results and how teams have succeeded in developing products using a write-first-test-later approach. For TDD supporters, here are a couple of arguments that should help tow the discussion out of the ditch and give it a second chance.
The cost argument against TDD is rooted at the difficulty to move fast while coding volatile areas of the system, invariably surrounded by statements such “this code will change next week, and it will cost us more to fix the tests”. The problem is, while this argument is perfectly valid at discrete points in time, it is prone to misinterpret the cause of volatility as intrinsic to the system rather than to the phase of development. Absent a formal understanding of the software development phases, technique is replaced by individual judgment as to whether TDD is right for the project, rather than as to whether it is right for the phase of the project.
IRUP to the rescue
In general, we all acknowledge that a product under development matures over its course, with the nature of changes being smaller and smaller over time. A quick glance at the IRUP map of disciplines and phases moves the discussion from general acknowledgement to specifics, shining a revealing light – more like a hand-draw red rectangle - on where TDD is harmful and where it is necessary:

Elaboration, when coding helps design…
During the elaboration phase, while the analysis and design work is reaching its peak, it is counterproductive to try and write tests first. During this phase, the entire team is after the “unknowns”, such as whether a design choice can scale or whether a new technology supports certain features. There is little point in hardening the quality of the code used for these exercises while concepts are being vetted.
Think of most of the code built during this phase as the prototype that should be thrown away once the key design concepts are validated or proven.
Construction, when coding follows design…
During the construction phase, on the other hand, the bigger decisions were already made and the design will be moved from high-level to actual code. Not doing TDD has the more obvious effect of risking miscalculating the time required to automate the unit tests, often followed by the schedule-constrained decision of skipping test automation altogether.
The less obvious, and far more nefarious, consequence of writing the code before tests is that it inverts the flow of design from the “business modeling”, “requirements”, “analysis & design” chain. Up to that point, the system design is being driven from end-user needs to final product, but when developers skip TDD during the construction phase, the flow goes from code to end-user, premised on the assumption that the developer can short-circuit his own design decisions to match the original design direction.
For a skilled developer, the result is just additional work in the form of “sculpting” the results, iterating over what should be done (the original design) and the output of what is being coded. For a less skilled developer, the results is often a mismatch between the code and the original design.
There are are individuals who can do this in a single iteration, but usually this happens when the developer is both designer and programmer for the system.
As with any framework, IRUP is not a golden rule, but its matrix of phases and disciplines offers a temporal and conceptual separation that supports better decisions as to when and where TDD should be followed. In the end, it should still be a matter of choice, but not a philosophical one.

Unionized product development

2008-09-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

This is not what you are thinking, I don’t want to form a union. In fact I wouldn’t want to join an union even if someone bothered to form one.

However, in a large organization, whatever power is not lost to organized labor is often lost to disorganized operations, diluted through excessive, and often unnecessary, divisions of power through the ranks.

Separating function by excellence and capacity

I think specialization is a wonderful thing. Focusing on a particular skill can transform a merely competent engineer into a good engineer, if not a great one. If someone is excellent at, let’s say, database development, and I mean walking-over-the-water excellent, it is counter-productive to try and make that person spend part of his time dragging himself through product planning meetings. Assigning database development to him just makes sense. That is the “excellence” criteria.

I also have no problem with delegation of responsibility spawning from an overworked function, where a single person clearly cannot execute both tasks. While separating the function, I tend to prefer *delegating* the function from the overworked person, rather than *separating” the function, unless the receiver of the new function is clearly excellent at it and can operate virtually independently. That is my “capacity” criteria.

Favoring delegation over separation tends to favor a democratic decision process over a distributed one. In a democratic process, one or few people make decisions after consulting subject matter specialists. In a distributed process, there are endless meetings because no one has the skills to know what should be done, but plenty of other ‘deciders’ to scatter the blame when the inevitable failure ensues. There should be no confusion between a centralized decision process that is transparent to many with a distributed process carried out by many.

Arbitrary separation, or “the unionization”

A distributed (or diluted) decision power is often the result of arbitrary division of responsibilities, where the functions are separated without meeting either the “excellence” or the “capacity” criteria. It is interesting to observe how otherwise wilful colleagues suddenly fall in “union” mode when placed in a team setting like this, avoiding making a decision they are clearly capable of because the responsibility owner is the one who is assigned to make it. Let it fester, and a team can be thrown back to the hellish days of GM assembly lines being shut down for a day because the guy who screwed the lugs of the left-front wheel called in sick.

When you need a better player, not a new one

If you ever watched a rally race (highly entertaining,) you observed an optimal separation of function: one person drives, the other navigates. Navigation says “hard left”, driver turns left…hard.

Now imagine that sometimes the driver misses a shift or two. Is it better to assign extra practice to the driver or move the navigator to the backseat, install a clutch pedal on the passenger side, and introduce a secondary driver that can focus only on shifting gears? It shouldn’t take more than a rollover or two before someone can answer that question.

What if I have many players, but not excellent ones?

In my experience, a team leader should make a point of making each of them excellent at something. If you have someone inexperienced, choose something small and make him excellent at it. And by “make him” excellent, I don’t mean assigning the responsibility for something and hoping experience will make up for it. What I really mean is “train, orient, and demand results”, which implies you mastered the skill yourself or have someone onboard who has. Don’t think “coaching” here, coaching is but a technique and a wrong one depending on the occasion. As a colleague and great team leader once wrote: “don’t be a team hugger, be a team leader”.

Think drill sergeant minus the cursing. Once your team members start to fall in one area of excellence or another, you should need less team members, be able to cut down on your communication matrix, and focus on delivering results versus keeping the illusion of collaboration through communication chatter. The team members you must lose will have marketable skills to bank on, not to mention that while learning to be excellent at something they will also have learned how to become excellent at anything they choose.

I used to be upset about training someone just to see him taken away to work on another project, but come to think of it, after shipping a successful product, the next best, and more frequent, accomplishment in my career has been the ~~drilling~~ training of green new hires that were later disputed by multiple teams.

For managers, I think this means approaching task assignment with a tighter grip on the deep technical skills available on the team and the skills required to complete the project, focusing on keeping the team as small as possible. Someone with excellent social skills may not always be the better choice over that zOS-expert-perennial-jerk in “B” isle; a jerk can always be told to be less like himself for three months, the smiley face cannot be urged to absorb years of experience before the project begins. The alternative? Forming a little “team-union” of two.

Passion for the business or for the craft?

2008-09-18T22:45:00.004-04:00

I used to be an avid soccer fan many years ago, an affection punctuated by the rivalry between two local teams in my home state. That rivalry extended in a good-natured way to the relationship between my father and I, each siding with one of the opposing teams.

His team, the Corinthians Sports Club - for some obscure reason I must cheerfully point out to be in terrible shape nowadays - used to have this goalkeeper, Ronaldo, which only his team fans could stand. They adored the guy, a young kid who progressed through the junior divisions all the way to the professional team.

He was not only good, but very passionate about the club, as we call the privately owned companies that control the soccer teams in Brazil; in the field, he would angrily chastise anyone who did not carry their weight during practice or, even worse, during official games, when he often verbally assaulted whoever he perceived as a slacker.

At one time, with the bonus payments lagging a couple of months and the team owners starting to talk about renegotiating some of the salaries, many players started to publicly complain and threaten to strike. The news organizations, ever eager to capitalize on controversy and knowing that Ronaldo would not mince words, asked him about the situation during an interview, to which the answer came in a mixture of reason and his characteristic zealotry:

People are complaining about late bonuses and giving interviews on how they also have to make a living like anyone else. Now you walk to the parking lot and see what they are driving [mentions of expensive car brands]…the executives will sort this out, but the players need to understand that there are days wearing the Corinthians’s shirt should suffice.

Much later in his career, a couple of years past his best years, Ronaldo, who vowed to retire playing for the team of his youth, was replaced by a younger goal keeper. With a few more years in him - and with the bills still coming – Ronaldo took on less glamorous stints on smaller teams, ending his career on a melancholic note: wherever he went people knew he was playing for the money and not for his team of choice.

Passion for the business

Ronaldo has proven with his history and rhetoric that performance, passion and compensation are tightly interwoven, if not as cause-and-effect variables, at least as expressions of each other. A high-performer is bound to draw better compensation and develop the kind of passion expressed by Ronaldo, an almost divorced view of work and compensation, not because they are actually divorced, but because after a certain limit compensation alone cannot motivate a high-performer.

I can appreciate Ronaldo, professional player, demanding performance from colleagues in the field, but I did not like Ronaldo, loyal shill, exhorting people to wear the team’s shirt as a form of compensation.

I use the above story as a counterpoint to situations where leaders demand a passion for the business. My first objection is that boundless enthusiasm cannot be demanded; maybe fostered, but not demanded. It follows that people who demand a passion for anything often do not understand what it means to be passionate about it.

Too much to love

When the business is just too big to be understood, it is difficult to love it. It doesn’t help matters when the bottom layers are broken down into other layers, further increasing the distance.

And when it is not the distance, it is the confidentiality, and when it is not the confidentiality, it is the business being used to justify practices that even the business’s own mother couldn’t love. But enough of my argument, the business is what is; and that is how I started to define the business: as the part of it I can actually influence.

I tend to focus more on the mission of the two or three layers above me, which narrows it down to people I actually work with and see it in the flesh every other day. To me they are like temporary family: I do as much as I can for them and give them a hard time now and then when I don’t think they are at the top of their game.

With the right alignment of the planets, a mixture of clear speak from line management and working very close to the people who will actually use my work to help their business, I am very enthusiastic about it.

Passion for the craft

Compensation? I like to see it as a form of sponsorship, where I am freed to do what I really like on a regular basis without being distracted by checks bouncing at the end of the month. My colleagues tend to appreciate how I do things and the things I can still do for them, not caring much for the teams I have joined in the past. The difference is subtle: I follow a tangent on Ronaldo’s model, letting the work be my own compensation with the caveat that *actual* compensation must stay above a level where I do not have to worry excessively about it.

This would be my unsolicited bit of advice to any leadership team: promote a passion for the craft rather than demanding a passion for the business. That is empowerment over chastisement. People who understand their craft are more likely to be enthusiastic about it, when people discover they can learn something new and become good at it, they are inspired; with any luck, even passionate.

When people are enthusiastic about what they do, and that boundless enthusiasm is backed by technique rather than unchecked madness, customers tend to love it too. And when that feeling of elation comes out of succeeding at a task or beating a competitor, chalk one up to a job well planned and executed, not to passion for the business.

Ronaldo, for all his good intentions, mistook sponsorship for loyalty and betrayed what should have been love for the sport, not for his employer.

Bill Gates: Let the engineers rule

2008-07-21T12:14:00.001-04:00

Quote from Fortune Magazine on the four traits Microsoft took from Bill Gates.

Let the engineers rule

Microsoft employs about 30,000 programmers among its 90,000 people. In operating groups engineers are involved in every major decision. Not only that. engineers typically get paid more than businesspeople. The geeks also get lots of toys: Microsoft's $8 billion computer science R&D lab is the world's largest. At a recent executive retreat. Gates said he thought every great businessperson at Microsoft should cultivate at least five close relationships with engineers.

I like him better already :-)

Compensate me not

2008-06-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

Interesting side note on the latest edition of Fortune Magazine:

Did you know that a little financial compensation can actually make a person less motivated? Researchers at an Israeli university compared the standardized test results between students who were paid 2 1/2 cents for every right answer and students who were paid nothing. The latter group scored higher. The reason? Your brain approaches altruistic tasks with only the desire to feel as though you’ve helped, whereas 2 1/2 cents isn’t enough to satisfy someone’s self-interest. Likewise, you’re more likely to convince friends to help you move if you don’t pay them – unless you pay them at least the equivalent of a professional mover. (Pizza and beer, though, are fine.)

Jia Lynn Yang

Your career, death valleys, and ... nonlinear programming

2008-06-18T21:24:00.002-04:00

On the trail of science and corporate analogies started with "Using magnets to understand the corporate culture", I wanted to explore the similarity between mathematic optimization and corporate culture.

Traditional non-linear algorithms can end up in local minimums, or "death valleys", like the ones highlighted in "white".

In nonlinear programming, the objective is to determine the minimum value for an object function within a set of constraints. Some of the most popular techniques (at least back in the early 90's when I studied them) involved a starting point on the surface of the constrained solution space and, from those coordinates, a slight step towards a new set of variables that resulted in a lower function value.

There is a bit more to it, but when the solution space is convex, you can repeat the series of small steps continuously, achieving ever lowering function values until you reach the variables that result in the minimum value for the function.

A convex space is a solution space where you can connect all points within the space using a direct line that never leaves the space. In simpler terms, the interior of a sphere is a convex space; the interior of a U-shaped pipe is not.

Finding a solution within a non-convex space is quite more difficult because the algorithms that lead to the next set of variables favor immediate decreases in the value of the target function. When applied to a non-convex space, the conventional solutions may lead to a "local optima" point from where there is no escape. In other words, the algorithm "cannot see" a better solution because all the immediate alternatives look worse than the current one. In the illustration, the variables of "Quality" and "Execution" time on a hypothetical "Cost" function have "local optima" points highlighted in white, whereas the global minimum is highlighted in yellow.

What it means to you

This analogy works for an entire company or for a single individual, but think of how many times in life we settle for a "local optima" situation where we feel lost and without direction, with each step pointing to a potentially worse situation.

Think of how many times choosing the best short-term direction can lead you to a comfort zone from where it is difficult to escape. I call those zones "death valleys". Think of it: not leaving a dead-end job because your next evaluation may get hurt or because that long awaited promotion may take an extra couple of years; not taking that class because you can get one more assignment done and improve your chances of a better evaluation.

I know we are not points searching for a point of "local optima" in a 3D chart. The solution spaces are far from convex. Even worse, they are not static and are affected by our presence.

Whereas finding a better "local optima" or the elusive "global optima" in the realm of nonlinear programming requires exhaustive search, in real life it requires curiosity and friends who can tell you about what different parts of the chart look like.

Better solutions require different starting points

Knowing about the work of others gives you access to different starting points from where you can reach a better solution. Whether a "better solution" means a more fulfilling career or an improved work life balance, the choice is yours.

Of course, just knowing about a better solution is not sufficient, as the effort required to get there may not be worth the benefits. As an example, knowing that an SAP consultant makes twice your salary may not be a sufficient motivator to make you divert time from your family to study SAP skills in the wee hours of the night. Once again, the choice is yours.

Having others knowing your work is equally important as your peers can use their own vantage points to tip you into a better solution. Good mentors are great assets there.

A pretty chart (it is pretty, isn't it, took me a while to convince MS-Excel to play along) and some words cannot motivate anyone, but they can plant a seed. Whether you take on an off-chance skunkwork project, take in a couple of mentees, start that hobby, there are always ways to start leaving an uncomfortable situation in work and life.

Declared exploiters, your best ally in the workplace?

2008-06-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

Robert J. Ringer, in his award-winning book "Winning through intimidation" divided people in his business life in three main categories:

The ones that openly manifested their intentions of exploiting those around them under all circumstances, but would continue helping him for as long as he was still an asset to their agenda
The ones who claimed to be his friends, but would exploit him on every turn.
The ones who declared themselves his friends and genuinely didn’t want to harm him, but would do so when forced by the circumstances.

Robert purged the book from mentions about his personal life, reason why he probably didn’t list a fourth group of people would not take advantage of others under any circumstance, such as family members and close friends.

Through the book, Robert was quick to point type #1 as his favorite kind of business associate and boss, because being successful with their no-nonsense philosophy usually meant they were very competent and also objective in rewarding those who could help them be even more successful.

Although he had no kind words for type #2, it was people in the last group (“the type #3s”, as he called them) that received his harshest criticism, in that their initially genuine intentions disarmed him of his natural defenses and invariably led him to some sort of financial loss.

Democracy meets Survivor meets kindergarten

2008-05-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

On the bright side, at least for an incident involving the state of Florida and ~~kindergarden~~ students, no one was tasered:

Kindergartner Voted Out By Students

Fantastic attitude by the 2 kids who voted against the extreme poor judgement of their teacher in calling the makeshift referendum.

At five years old, and under the extreme circumstances of peer and leadership pressure, they have shown courage and judgement that many people will not muster in their whole lives.

Clean restrooms, Quality and "good enough"

2008-05-19T10:22:00.002-04:00

by A Touch of Glass

My parents were visiting us a few weeks ago. As a result I ate at restaurants more than usual. In between waits for meals, I had the chance to visit many restrooms in various degrees of cleanliness, ranging from "I could live here" to "I'll use a paper towel to touch anything".

It is curious how my behavior while washing hands changed based on that state of cleanliness. Facing a spotless sink and, on occasion, listening to ambient Italian music, I did pick an extra towel after washing my hands, but to dry up the faucet before I left. In the absence of anyone in the room, it was not a case of peer pressure. I suspected early stages of obsessive compulsive disorder and left.

Later it came to me: Quality breeds Art and Art is very personal. When I witness a job excellently done, I immediately trace it to a rare individual; while I stand in front of the object, I am trying to imagine the number of countless expert decisions made by someone with skills developed over the years.

Don't think I am crazy - restroom analogy notwithstanding - but I believe Quality is absolute; it has the same power in a restroom, in a book, or on a painting.

Now I have an anonymous janitor to thank for reminding me that our work can be more than something attached to an e-mail or placed on a shelf. It reminded me that we cannot be perfect at everything we do, but that we must pursue perfection in at least some of the things we choose to.

"Good enough?"

With enough Quality, part of our daily work becomes Art, and Art speaks through time and space on our behalf. It inspires, it educates, it gives meaning. It can even motivate strangers to do unexpected good.

Facing the endless assault of the "good enough" message promoted by our hurried western culture, I think more of us should take upon ourselves to make an impractical stand against it every now and then. In the same way people tell us we should exercise at least 3 times a week, shouldn't we pursue perfection while executing a mundane task at least once a day?

Even sworn pragmatists should appreciate that, on Monday morning, the delivery person drops a package at his door with enough good in that "good enough" box hammered shut before the weekend.

Water, air, Porsches and servers

2008-04-28T10:29:00.002-04:00

Just read today about IBM releasing a new series of water-cooled Web 2.0 servers.

Over 30-years separate these two technologies, one rooted in the main-frame dominated 70's and the other sparsely tied to a collection of technologies representing everything that is modern in the late 2000s.

by pvera

Ironically, a parallel story started at about the same time, in 1973, when the iconic Porsche 911 came out with an air-cooled engine, an anachronism when all major manufacturers had long turned to the more efficient water-cooled engines.

Later, in 1995, the pressure from ever more powerful competitors forced Porsche to abandon the air-cooled engines to the dismay and anger of its fans.

I found it interesting to observe the power of peer-pressure on the way both industries dealt with cooling capacity, one trying to abandon water for fear of being labeled obsolete and the other clinging to air - and obsolescence - for fear of losing its customers.

Passion, apples, and vision

2008-03-25T15:44:00.001-04:00

Fortune Magazine broke cover on its list of most admired companies for 2008. Apple took top honors on both US and World rankings. Some excerpts from an interview with Steve Jobs:

"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is."

It was certainly the most inspired point of the interview, if only slightly more than his views on downturns:

"We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."

The Anthill, collective wisdom, and survival

2008-03-19T20:45:00.004-04:00

By DavidDennis

In a typical anthill, foraging follows a pattern where the ants walk at random, stumble upon food, and return whatever they can carry back to the anthill. On their way back, they leave behind a trail of pheromones to attract other ants. Soon, a somewhat ordered line of ants can be found hard at work between the food source and the anthill.

Ants know a thing or two about cooperating with each other.

Now just imagine what would happen if ants stumbling upon food did not leave a trail of pheromones behind, or if the other ants were not to follow the trail.

That is the predicament of many large companies who have not embraced the internal deployment of social software within their firewalls.

Just the other day I read a thread where web 2.0 on the enterprise was described as the latest fad in the corporate world. I responded with a long argument about the benefits observed in the deployments within our company.

I should have talked about anthills.

My employee's opinions are his own; the GM spat

2008-03-13T16:24:00.001-04:00

I always wondered about how effective are blog disclaimers along the lines of "These opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent my employer's point of view".

It is easy to dismiss one lone voice inside the walls of a cube farm, but look at what happens when the press makes a piñata out of GM CEO Rick Wagoner over a comment made by GM chairman-turned-blogger on the topic of global warming:

GM to Lutz: Global warming is no crock

General Motors Chairman Bob Lutz may think that global warming is "a crock," but GM CEO Rick Wagoner made it clear at a press event Tuesday that GM doesn't share Lutz's views. Instead, Wagoner believes that global warming is a very real issue facing the planet and that automakers must take action.
"The comments weren't coming out of our company," Wagoner told The Detroit News at the event.

Wagoner continued by saying that average temperatures around the world are on the rise, and while there is no definitive evidence linking cars to global warming, it's GM's goal to reduce its vehicles' CO2 emissions.

Lutz defended his stance on global warming on GM's corporate blog last month, saying "My beliefs are mine and I have a right to them." However, Lutz insists that he shares GM's stance on "the removal of cars and trucks from the environmental equation."

Take note, Bob Lutz used his blog to address the negative media buzz.