I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
2. Abandon that path quickly.
3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

But “focus” is the willful rejection of this theory. By saying no to alternatives you increase risk disproportionally to the reward. If you have the means to maintain a portfolio it certainly seems imprudent not to do so.

So why would someone want to focus?

The answer is that too much diversification is dangerous. It’s dilutive to everything the company uses to create value: its resources, its processes and its priorities. It dulls the mind and tarnishes the brand.

“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”

Time wastes are hard to see, and even harder to fix.

Take for example, communicating an idea to someone. You could spend 30 minutes crafting what you think is a perfectly clear email, or you could just talk to them for 5 minutes and let them ask a few questions. Who knows, they may understand your idea far faster than you thought.

“We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

I think vision and strategy are important (just watch the Knowledge Navigator from Apple’s distant past to understand how they got to be where they are today), but getting the right people in the right places is far more important.  Studies have found 10-fold differences in productivity between different programmers, and I see no reason why that wouldn’t apply to other roles. New tools routinely are found to be exponentially more useful than their predecessors.

“the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.” – Jim Collins

“People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.”- Jim Collins

I’m not a fan of calling people resources, but perhaps in the sense that they are the foundation of any company, people are by far your most important asset. Get the right people on the team first, and there’s nothing you can’t do exponentially better (or 10-fold better) than your competitors.

Seth Godin, describes these people:

“Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable that they might as well be irreplaceable.”

Now that is the type of person you want filling each and every role on your team.

Video:

“A small engineering firm axed the company lunch room and eliminated over $200,000 per year in costs. That gave an immediate boost to the bottom line. [... however,] A more insidious side-effect was invisible (at least on the balance sheet) for several months.”

Read her full post to see what havoc this cost saving effort did to the company.

“Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do. The reasons are pretty obvious: If it’s someone else’s map, it’s not your fault if it doesn’t work out. If you’ve memorized the sales script I gave you and you don’t make the sale, who’s in trouble now?”

I think this sums up the #1 reason I hate procedures. They are used to deflect blame.

My second reason I hate procedures? They are a tactical admission that even though something is so complicated it has to be written down, there is no desire to make it simpler and better. My vote: incrementally make it better till you don’t need the procedure any more.

“Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.”

This seems so natural and correct when talking about design. Applied to other professions, you might see:

• Great software does not come from great processes; it comes from great developers.
• Great engineering does not come from great processes; it comes from great engineers.
• Great testing does not come from great processes; it comes from great testers.
• Great management does not come from great processes; it comes from great managers.

Yet time and time again, we lean back on the processes that in the best of situations are mediocre and brittle.

“Most of us believe in positive self-talk. “I can achieve anything,” we mouth to the mirror in the morning. “Nobody can stop me,” we tell ourselves before walking into a big meeting. We believe we’ll do better if we banish doubts about our ability or our strategy and instead muster an inner voice that affirms our awesomeness.

But not Bob [the Builder]. Instead of puffing up himself and his team, he first wonders whether they can actually achieve their goal.”

Pink then dives into some research on whether positive self-talk actually improves performance or not.

Spoiler: Having doubts improves performance.

“In my experience, most engineers with more than five years of experience are actually fairly good estimators, they just can’t estimate the amount of weekly bureaucracy they have to deal with.”

“[They] are using the tablet-style computer for tasks as varied as accessing work e-mail, approving shipping orders, and calling up on-the-spot auto-finance options.”

It takes time to change things, but now that Apple is bigger than Microsoft, one has to wonder how long corporate will continue to cling to the underdog.

Here are some of mine. Which do you disagree with? Why?

Workarounds are never a good thing. Short term workarounds are never short-term. They should be avoided. Do it right the first time, and if you can’t due to time or budget, delay the project. I hate technical debt.

Plan as you go is more appropriate to life and to projects, and returns better results, than planning everything up front (ie agile vs. waterfall). What we are talking about is predicting the future. Sure, you can be somewhat accurate, some of the time. But it’s just a guess. You’ll be more accurate if you don’t predict too far out. If you’re more accurate, you’ll be happier.

The problems of new are less than the problems of the old. On occasion you will run into a bug by upgrading software to the latest version. But I’ve found that on balance, I have far fewer compatibility & stability problems if I keep up to date. And as a bonus, new features!

Buy the well-built item once instead of the cheap thing multiple times. It’s eco-friendly, and you get to have the quality item to use every day. My wife and I had been wearing out a $10 garlic press once every 12 months or so with basic wear and tear — till we bought the Rösle Garlic Press for (at the time) $30. Five years later, it still looks good as new and works brilliantly.

Price is not correlated to the value. Just because it’s expensive doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot. Conversely, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it has no value. Open-Source Software, Wikipedia, a walk with your kids – these all have a lot of value, and they don’t cost you a dime.

Deals are rarely worth it. Everything is “on sale”. Everything is discounted. Of course, there are good deals to be had. It’s just that the effort to find and take advantage of the deal is more costly than any savings I might obtain. There is a reason why rebate forms are difficult to complete: it is in the company’s best interest that you never fill them out.

I believe in Scaling Software over Scaling People. See my blip on Techies and The Business, or the whole article here.

The most important attribute to any employee is their willingness and ability to learn. I’ve written about this one a lot. I think learning is the key to innovation, that through mistakes you get better, that Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever Learn, and that progress (and who doesn’t want progress?) is an act of discovery.

So!  What are some of your beliefs?

“Let’s face it. Our industry has had some challenges when it comes to setting expectations around estimates on software projects. It’s not that our estimates are necessarily wrong (though they almost always are). It’s more that too often people have looked to estimates for something they can never give—an accurate prediction of the future. [...] The simple fact is that accurate upfront estimates aren’t possible and we need to stop pretending that they are.“

[emphasis added]

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!

Seth Godin asks some good questions in his post SFW.

“Analysis paralysis is a phrase that describes a situation where the opportunity cost of decision analysis exceeds the benefits that could be gained by enacting some decision, or an informal or non-deterministic situation where the sheer quantity of analysis overwhelms the decision making process itself, thus preventing a decision. The phrase applies to any situation where analysis may be applied to help make a decision and may be a dysfunctional element of organizational behavior.”

I like how the see-also section refers you to Wicked problems:

“a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.”

<sigh>

“[...] What people really mean when they say “I don’t have time” is this thing is not important enough to earn my time. It’s a polite way to tell people they’re not worth your time.

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for  everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.”

“For some reason we believe that sweeping in and fixing a problem has more drama, and gains more attention, than doing the work to predict and avoid problems.”

I think the problem is also a blame game. If we acknowledged that there were ways we could avoid the fire, then we would implicitly own the problem and more so, be responsible for avoiding the next occurrence. But when the next fire comes, implicitly we’ve now failed. The goal was to avoid the fire, not react quickly. This requires strategic thinking.

So if we never acknowledge there is a change that could make things better, then when the fire comes, we just block and tackle — it is happening to us, not caused by us. No one is to blame for the fire, and thus our only measure of success is our reaction speed.

Blocking and tackling is easy. Strategic thinking is hard.

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I’d say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.

—Lido Anthony (Lee) Iacocca

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden. [...]

Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If the company trusts you with corporate secrets, company property, and access to production servers … maybe the policies on appropriate use of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are misplaced.