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.

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

“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.

“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?

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.

]]> http://www.edstrom.net/blog/archive/great-people/feed/ 1 http://www.edstrom.net/blog/archive/another-procedure/ http://www.edstrom.net/blog/archive/another-procedure/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:46:14 +0000 Peter Edstrom http://www.edstrom.net/blog/?p=1256 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.

But how would the corollary go? If you want someone else to do it right, do you: a) exhaustively document how to do it -or- b) have an open, honest, and regular conversation with them?

My next question: if your practices do not line up with your answer, why not?

“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.

Here’s what I think would happen:

• The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
• New talents would form.
• Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
• Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
• The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
• Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
• And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
• And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
• And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

“if you want to foster innovation, [let] people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about”

He’s talking about Dan Pink’s video, the surprising truth about what motivates us:

“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]

“Don’t call your defects ‘bugs’. Call them ‘time bombs’ instead.”
- Watts S. Humphrey

From Wikipedia: “Watts S. Humphrey (born 1927) is an American software engineer, key thinker in the discipline of software engineering, and is often called the father of software quality.”

He has a recent book out that looks like it could be good, Reflections on Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss, and Yourself.  Has anyone read it?

[via @jurgenappelo]

Instead of looking for the bad stuff, measuring it, and finding ways to do less — look for the good stuff and do more! What an excellent idea.

“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.

“Are most innovations born in environments of control or inspiration? Easy question.”

“[...] 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.”

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.