Esther Derby recommends you focus on value, not on costs:
“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.
Seth Godin in Linchpin:
“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.
Fred Brooks in an interview with Wired:
“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:
Yet time and time again, we lean back on the processes that in the best of situations are mediocre and brittle.
Daniel Pink writing for the Telegraph:
“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.
Johanna Rothman in Maintaining Project Agility has a positive take on the skill of estimating:
“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.”
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