Posts Tagged: leadership

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27
Dec 11

Doing is The Work

Saw this quote a while back:

Things fail when they are not taken seriously, things work when they are respected and effort is applied to them.  - David Green, Department of Ageing, Disability and Home Care, New South Wales, Australia

And then more recently:

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. – Steve Jobs

And again:

You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. – Steve Jobs

An idea is a start. But only a start. It seems silly to say it, but the hard work – the real work – of any project is not in the concept, but in the execution. I could come up with 100 perfectly fine ideas every week. Even every hour? But you don’t know if they are any good until you carry out the idea to fruition. That could take weeks, if not years, of very hard work.

My aim for 2012: Respect ideas a little less, and respect effort and doing more.

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31
Jul 11

The Knowing Doing Gap

I recently started reading the book, The Knowing Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford) and Robert Sutton (Professor of Management science, Stanford).

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

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9
Nov 10

The Right Team

Jim Collins, in Good to Great:

“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.

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24
Oct 10

The only constant is change

Liz Keogh in Change, and keep changing:

“There is no end-state with Agile or Lean. You’ll be improving, and continue to improve, trying new things out and discarding the ones which don’t work.”

This is what appeals to me about agile. It isn’t a destination, it is a mindset of improving continuously. I look at corporate waterfall processes, and the thing that hurts the process far more than anything else is that it is considered to be a complete and well-rounded, immutable process.

The problem is that it doesn’t work well in every situation. Facts confront the reality (yet another project delivered late and over budget!), but process isn’t blamed … the people are. “You were not following the process as closely as you should.” is the common explanation you hear. “We need better documentation!” is another. But these strike me as a rather inhumane approach. Do you really want to blame your own people (of whom you would like to remain productive, and have been added to the staff at considerable cost) when the evidence suggests that it is the process that is broken?

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6
Oct 10

Great People

@rands posted a link to this picture.

My thoughts, line by line as I read this:

Line 1: Yes! I agree. This is my ideal. I talk about ideas a bunch, right?
Line 2: Yea, I know. I do that some, mostly about Apple products. But that isn’t all bad, is it?
Line 3: Oh. I do that. Darn it. I need to stop. <sigh, and then with some grumbling> Thanks for the reminder.

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