Category — management

The criteria for success early in a person’s career are always going to be more operational than strategic – if only because lower-level employees don’t get the opportunity to make large strategic decisions. Nonetheless, even if they are not primarily getting rewarded for having a vision of the future of the company or the ability to inspire people to buy into the vision and help make it a reality, they had better develop those skills along the way, because they will need them if and when they reach senior positions in their organization.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Re-inventing Management and Management Education

Management-speak deciphering tip #1457: when somebody at work says ‘unprofessional,’ substitute ‘unusual’ or ‘threatening’. See if that helps you understand better what they really mean.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional. Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional. Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It’s all right to smile, but not too often.)

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone.

Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological. In a healthier organizational culture, people are thought professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent.

Reading stuff out there on the seedy internet one gets the feeling that “20% time”, the practice of encouraging employees to work on their pet projects on company time, is some wondrous innovative idea invented by the GOOG.

People blog in hushed tones about “Google’s famed 20% time” and wonder aloud about the real benefits of such a scheme. Some even decide to try it on their own employees.

I am no innovation management expert, but even I know that 20% time is not a new concept.

Permitted bootlegging is an idea older than Google. Established companies such as 3M, Novell or HP have encouraged this work-on-your-wacky-stuff-on-company-time approach since time immemorial (i.e. from before the 80s). The term bootlegging was introduced into the innovation literature as long ago as 1967. The most famous product to come out of a permitted bootlegging effort is not GMail, but the post-it note.

Granted, Google is one of the few companies to put “innovation time off” into employee’s contracts, and they do deserve credit for that. [1] But it is not exactly like they invented the wheel of innovation management.

As for the benefits of 20% time, these are largely more indirect than the pundits would have you believe, and they are hard to measure. A 1998 Wired article explained it best:

3M’s 15 percent time is valuable simply because it “makes it OK to daydream — and I don’t think you can put that in a box and make it a two-hour slot in your day.”

[Disclaimer: As of this writing, I am a full-time employee of Google. I am also a joyful user of 20% time. The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not in any way represent those of my employer. Etcetera.]

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[1] Does anybody know if 3M ever put their 15 percent Rule on paper?

Nice reflection on Skrentablog on reducing clutter in your codebase. Code is our enemy:

Code is produced by engineers. To make more code requires more engineers. Engineers have n^2 communication costs, and all that code they add to the system, while expanding its capability, also increases a whole basket of costs.

You should do whatever possible to increase the productivity of individual programmers in terms of the expressive power of the code they write. Less code to do the same thing (and possibly better). Less programmers to hire. Less organizational communication costs.

This doesn’t apply just to code. It applies to almost everything: less clutter leads to less overhead (of various kinds) leads to improved results. See, for example, Merlin Mann’s recent post on his personal war on clutter.

[Originally posted on what used to be a separate blog 'On jobs, work and careers' and later was merged into this blog.]

Some interesting links to feed your Sunday surfing habit:

• Brazen Careerist: Book excerpt: How to turn a bad boss into a good one:
  

  Want to deal with a bad boss? First, stop complaining. Unless your boss breaks the law, you don’t have a bad boss, you have a boss you are managing poorly. Pick on your boss all you want, but if you were taking responsibility for your career, you wouldn’t let your boss’s problems bring you down.

• Seth Godin: Who should you hire?:
  

  There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown, and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)

• Micro Persuasion: The Most Essential Career Skill You Need to Succeed:
  

  So as I thought about it, the most important “tool” you can have today in business is insatiable curiosity. The minute you lose it, you’re dead.

• Web Worker Daily: The Dangerous Myth of The Dream Job (by Timothy Ferris): I am not quite sure I fully agree with the main thesis of this article, but it is nevertheless a thought-provoking read.
  

  Converting passions into “work” is the fastest way to kill those passions. Surfing two hours on a Saturday to decompress from a hard week might be heaven, but waking up at 6 am every morning to do it 40 hours per week with difficult clients is a very different animal. Mixing business and pleasure can be a psychologically toxic cocktail.

I read in Ars Technica that Most IT projects in Europe are late. According to the article,

The main reasons for delays, according to the survey, were outsourcing, changed project goals, and poor managerial coordination

The numbers listed in the original BBC article, suggest that the European country more likely to deliver on time is Sweden, where 44% percent of IT projects make or time. Spain and Russia are at the bottom of the list, with only 4% (!!) of IT projects delivered on time.

This is June 2007, more than 6 years after the Agile Manifesto was published. And we still can’t manage the volatile nature of IT requirements. Apparently we can’t really manage much in IT, anyway.

I wonder why is that? Is it really all that difficult to manage customer expectations and work in nearly-continuous-re-planning mode, adapting to changing priorities and requirements?

There are successful IT companies that hardly ever need to push a deadline, so it is definitely possible to do a good job of an IT project and to do it on time, too. So is really the majority of the IT industry so incompetent?

Kathy Sierra shares some interesting thoughts about how “Success” should not mean “Management”:

Isn’t it about time we quit measuring professional success in one dimension, vertically, and start considering how much your actual work matches your desired work?

And isn’t it about time more companies started offering multiple career tracks, where management is no more valuable or important than the highly-skilled work of an individual contributor? (Sun is a good example of a company that offers two clear paths–one for management, and one for individual contributors who’d rather bathe cats than be a boss.)

What happens when a company gives an employee no option for growth other than management? Yes, lots of individual contributors (even programmers) want the challenge of a management role, but some of the best feel forced into trading the work they love best for more “advancement opportunities”. How senseless is it to take a star programmer and make her do Gantt charts? How lame it is to take your best designer and make him run budget meetings, review TPS reports, and consolidate time sheets?

I am lucky enough to work at one of those companies that, like Sun, offer two separate tracks for individual contributors and managers. Sadly, there are whole cultures (e.g. what seems to be the predominant Spanish corporate culture) that think that only losers stay for long as individual contributors.

Hopefully with more posts like Kathy’s folks will start to wake up and make career decisions that will actually make them happier (as opposed to making them own more stuff).

Yesterday, at a lecture about project management, the lecturer introduced a simple but, he claimed, useful tool for project management. It is the ‘project management triangle’. Simply, it is a triangle with the following things at its vertices: performance, resources and duration. We must decide where on this triangle we should place ourselves for this project. Of course, the position on the triangle represents the project priorities, and the trade-offs we are assuming.

But it was not so much the tool itself which I found interesting, but the lecturer’s comments about the biases of different cultures when using this model.

‘What would US culture prioritize?’ he asked. It was clear for me and for most of the audience (very mixed European - Asian crowd, with a sizeable Swedish component) that the correct answer was ‘performance’. Clearly, that is what USians value most. ‘What about Germans, then?’ he asked next. Duration, keeping up with the plan, was the audience’s answer this time. And it got me thinking ‘What would a Spanish project manager prioritize?’ and then Irealized that I have much more difficulty answering this question than the questions about other cultures. Is it that I am so close that I am ‘blind’ to that culture? Or that it is much easier to pigeonhole alien cultures? Is it that I am not a good representative of ‘Spanish culture’? And you, do you know what are the biases of your culture?

(The lecturer, by the way, was a certain David Williamson from Wenell, a Swedish project management consultancy.)