The RTP Scrolls

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

2009-10-07T09:00:00.001-04:00

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 Milton Friedman, 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 the Friedmanesque 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 in as a software engineer I witnessed a spat between two senior colleagues: The most senior engineer in the team and a very 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 team, 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 a mental 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 markets, the internal workforce market in a company 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 rescision? This is not about employment stability, it is about the “contract” between an employee and a company 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

2009-03-31T09:00:00.002-04:00

“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 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

2008-10-23T20:34:00.001-04:00

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 of 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 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?

2008-09-18T22:45:00.002-04:00

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 bonuses 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 a 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 brands]…the executives will sort this out, but the players need to understand that there are days when only wearing the Corinthians’s shirt should suffice.

Much later in his career, a couple of years past his best shape , 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 didn’t 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 executives demand a passion for the business. My first objection is rather logical, actually all of them are, in 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 executive 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 planed and well done, not for 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.

"The science of experience"

2008-03-05T09:23:00.001-05:00

Excellent article on Times Magazine, titled "The science of experience".

There is an interesting experiment with two nurses, one with 2 years of experience and the other with 25. They tend to a robotic patient in a simulated environment, the junior nurse nearly kills the patient; the senior nurse moves across the run with far more confidence and speed, actually killing the patient in a shorter period of time.

A quote to motivate you reading the article:

Ericsson's (Dr. K. Anders Ericsson) primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding.

Delegation meets inactive listening and a busy schedule

2008-02-11T21:15:00.000-05:00

In a not-so-distant future:

Employee: Remember the plague of locusts I unleashed last month?

Manager (preparing to leave his chair) : Not really, but what's up?

Employee: Our customers are very upset; they are picketing at the main entrance.

Manager (fiddling with papers on his desk) : They need to check that gate, it has been acting up...

Employee: They snatched the project manager from his car while he was swiping his badge.

Manager (joyful after finding the form he was looking for) : I need to replace my badge...

Employee: They torched his laptop...and the car.

Manager: Well, let me know how it turns out, gotta run to my next meeting.

A daily prayer for great software

2008-01-23T15:07:00.000-05:00

All you want is a click away
When that button is up
That information is too
Without swearing or pray

And that button works well
Because I tested it before
Because I always knew
What you would look for

I designed it with wisdom
And with inspired bouts
Because I knew what you wanted
And what you could do without

Through daylight and darkness
Without ever asking me why
You let me observe you
Sweat, curse and cry

As I mixed the night
With weekend and day
I never assumed
You would click anyway

Absolute responsibility, the unforgiving nature of excellence

2007-12-12T14:34:00.000-05:00

Twelve years ago, on December 17^th of 1995, Santos and Botafogo met in a historic final match to decide the Brazilian Soccer Cup.

To put the subject of this entry in perspective, these teams had not won a title of that significance for many decades.
They were not only playing for the title, but also for the reinstatement of their former glory, when their teams were often used as the basis for a national team that won three world titles.

For those who are not soccer fans, Santos used to be the team for the most famous soccer player of all times: Pelé,

Santos needed to win the final match in its home stadium. A 1-goal tie persisted almost to the end when Santos scored the winning goal. Relief lasted a few moments, shattered by the referee's inexplicable decision to invalidate the goal.

Later that day, Santos' coach, Emerson Leão, was invited to several talk-shows.

Known simply as "Leão" (lion in Brazilian Portuguese,) he had had a very successful career as a goalkeeper and was considered by many as one of the best in the sport. As a coach, he was notorious for his excessive, almost unforgiving, discipline with the players; demanding a level of professionalism that was unusual amongst Brazilian coaches.

Asked about how he felt about being 'robbed' of his victory and whether he blamed the referee for the loss of the title, his response came in a calm and composed tone:

Victory and success are in the details. It is in the day when we missed those 10 extra minutes of practice, it is in the moment we missed the chance to score another goal, or in that moment we did not pay attention and let them score theirs... In order to be successful, one cannot make excuses. I blame ourselves, I blame myself.

After passages as the coach for several other teams, including the national team, Leão would return to Santos once again, ahead of the winning campaign for the 2002 national title.

No excuses needed.

Coaching meets sensitivity and being politically correct

2007-12-10T14:22:00.000-05:00

In a not-so-distant future:

Manager: Your code module has released a plague of locusts that will engulf us all for the next thirty years. You need to be more careful.

Employee: Isn't that too harsh?

Manager: I am sorry, you are right. The code this organization has written has released the plague of locusts. Is there anything you think we should have done differently?

Employee: Not really, gotta go, the crew is gathering for lunch.